The Blind Man of Seville (51 page)

The metal wine racks were divided into two. French and Spanish. He never touched the French, which was all expensive stuff bought by his father. But this time he felt celebratory. Those final paragraphs he’d read in his father’s journals last night had sent him to sleep weeping and he felt like toasting the generosity of his dead parent. Their intimacy had been reaffirmed and he found traces of forgiveness for all his father’s depravity and infidelity. He pulled out bottles of Château Duhart-Milon, Château Giscours, Montrachet, Pommard, Clos-des-Ursules. He took them up to the dining room and laid them on the dresser. On coming up from the cellar for the second time he saw an urn, which he’d never noticed before, in a niche above the door.

The urn was no more than fifteen centimetres high, too small to contain human remains. He put down the bottles and took it to the developing table, turned on the overhead light. The stopper was a simple clay cone that had been sealed with wax. There were no marks on the urn, which was of unglazed terracotta. He cracked open the wax and removed the stopper. He poured some of the contents on to the table. It was yellowish-white and grainy. Some of the larger pieces were quite sharp. He moved them around with his finger. There were some brown pieces in there too and the grounds suddenly struck him as macabre, something like crushed bone. He left it on the table, repelled by it.

Paco and his family arrived first. While the women went upstairs and the children careered about the gallery, Paco
brought in a whole
jamón,
which he’d brought down from Jabugo in the Sierra de Aracena. They found a stand in the dresser and locked the jamón into position. Paco sharpened a long, thin carving knife and began slicing off paper-thin sheets of dark-red, sweet jamón while Javier filled glasses with fino.

Juanita set up a table on the patio and put out olives and other
pinchos.
Paco added a platter of sliced jamón. Manuela arrived with her party and they all stood on the patio, drinking fino and shouting at the children to stop running. The only adult who didn’t tell Javier he was looking thin was Alejandro’s sister, who was no fatter than a praying mantis herself.

Paco was happy and animated about his bulls, which had all been discharged in perfect condition that morning for tomorrow’s bullfight. The horn wound was still visible in the retinto but he was very strong. He called him ‘Biensolo’ and the only warning he issued to Javier was that the horn tips were unusually upturned and the space between them quite narrow. Going in for the kill was always going to be difficult, even if the head was down low.

They sat down to eat the roast lamb at four o’clock. Manuela noticed the quality of the wine immediately and asked how many more bottles ‘little brother’ was hiding. Javier told her about the urn to divert her attention. She asked to see it and, when the meal was over and Paco was lighting up his first Montecristo, Javier brought it up from the cellar. She recognized it straight away.

‘That’s odd,’ she said. ‘I don’t know how Papá lost Mamá’s jewellery and yet
this
made it all the way here from Tangier.’

‘Ach! Manuela, he never threw anything away,’ said Paco.

‘But this is Mamá’s. I remember it. It was on her dressing
table for two or three days … about a month before she died. I asked her what it was, because it was different to anything else she had on her dressing table. I thought it might be a potion from that Riffian woman, who was her maid. She said it contained the spirit of pure genius and must never be opened — strange, no?’

‘She was just playing with you, Manuela,’ said Paco.

‘I see you’ve opened it,’ she said. ‘Any genie?’

‘No,’ said Javier. ‘It looked like crushed bone or teeth.’

‘That doesn’t sound very spiritual,’ said Paco.

‘More macabre,’ said Javier.

‘I’d have thought after all the blood you’ve seen
you
could stomach some dry old bones, little brother,’ said Manuela.

‘But crushed?’ he said. ‘That seemed violent to me.’

‘How do you know it’s human? It could be old cow bone or something.’

‘But why the “spirit of pure genius”?’ asked Javier.

‘You know who gave her that, don’t you?’ said Paco. ‘Papá … a long time ago. There were some strange things happening in the house at the time. Don’t you remember? Mamá started a fire on the patio. We came back from school and there was a black patch by the fig tree.’

‘He was too young,’ said Manuela. ‘But you’re right, he gave her the urn the next day. And the other odd thing — that wonderful sculpture he gave Mamá for her birthday the year before … that disappeared. She had it next to her mirror. She really loved that thing. I asked her what had happened to it and she just said, “God gives and God takes away.”’

‘She started going to Mass almost every day around that time, too,’ said Paco.

‘Yes, she only ever went once a week before,’ said
Manuela. ‘And she stopped wearing her rings, too. She only ever wore that cheap agate cube that Papá had given her for her birthday. You remember that, surely, little brother?’

‘No, I don’t.’

‘Papá gave you her present to take to her at her birthday dinner. She undid the box and the lid sprang open and hit you on the nose as this paper flower burst out. Inside the flower was the ring. It was very romantic. Mamá was touched. I remember the look on her face.’

‘She must have known something was going to happen to her,’ said Paco. ‘Going to Mass all the time, only wearing that one ring Papá had given to her. It was the same with me when I got gored in La Maestranza.’

‘What was the same?’ asked Javier, fascinated by these old memories, even touching his nose to try to remember the box hitting it.

‘I knew something was going to happen.’

‘How?’ asked Paco’s father-in-law, one of life’s great sceptics.

‘I just knew it,’ said Paco. ‘I knew I was coming to a big moment and being young and arrogant I assumed it was going to be greatness.’

‘But what did you know?’ asked his father-in-law.

‘I don’t know,’ said Paco, hands all over the place, ‘a sense of things coming together.’

‘Convergence,’ said Javier.

‘Toreros have always been very superstitious,’ said the father-in-law.

‘Yes, well, when you risk your life like that … everything has meaning,’ said Paco. ‘Stars, planets … all that stuff.’

‘Aligning themselves over
you?’
scoffed his father-in-law.

‘I’m exaggerating,’ said Paco. ‘Maybe it was just a sixth
sense. Perhaps it’s only in retrospect that I attach greater significance to an event which, in a matter of seconds, ruined my youth.’

‘Sorry, Paco,’ said his father-in-law. ‘I wasn’t diminishing …’

‘But
that
was why I wanted to be a torero,’ said Paco. ‘I loved the clarity of danger. It was like living life squared at that level of awareness. All that happened was that I misinterpreted the signs. Nobody could have predicted that disaster. Throughout my entire
faena
the bull hadn’t hooked right and then … when I’m right over the horns, he hooks right. Anyway, I was lucky to survive. It’s as Mamá said to Manuela: God gives and God takes away. There is no reason.’

The lunch broke up after that and Manuela left with her party. Paco’s family and in-laws went up to bed for a siesta. Javier and Paco sat with a bottle of brandy between them. Paco was on the edge of drunkenness.

‘Maybe you were too intelligent to be a torero,’ said Javier.

‘I was always terrible at school.’

‘Then perhaps you were
thinking
too much to be a good torero.’

‘Never,’ said Paco. ‘The thinking came afterwards. Once the leg was wrecked I had to clear my head out. All those reports and footage of my glorious moments, which never happened and never would happen, had to go in the bin. It left me completely empty. I had nightmares and everybody thought I was reliving the terrible moment, but as far as I was concerned that was in the past. My nightmares were about the future.’

Paco poured himself some more brandy and slid the bottle to Javier, who shook his head. Paco rolled a cigar cylinder across and Javier rolled it back to him.

‘Always the man in control,’ he said.

‘Is that what you think?’ asked Javier, nearly blurting out laughter.

‘Oh, yes, nothing ever gets through to you and disturbs your inner calm. Not like me. I was in a turmoil. My leg like a rag and no future. Papá saved me, you know. He installed me in the finca. He bought me my first livestock. He sorted me out … gave me direction.’

‘Well, he was a soldier. He understood things about men,’ he said, conscious of himself skewing things in his father’s favour for Paco’s benefit.

‘Are you still reading those journals?’

‘Most nights.’

‘Does it make any difference to how you think about him?’

‘Well, he’s completely and terrifyingly honest in his writing. I admire him for that, but his revelations …’ said Javier, shaking his head.

‘From when he was in the Legion?’ asked Paco. ‘They were the hardest men of all, the legionnaires, you know that.’

‘He was involved in some brutal actions in the Civil War and in Russia during the Second World War. Some of the brutality he experienced in those wars stayed with him when he went to Tangier.’

‘We never saw any of it,’ said Paco.

‘He was pretty ruthless in some of his business operations,’ said Javier. ‘He used the same techniques he’d employed in the war … terror. And that only stopped when he dedicated himself to painting full time.’

‘Do you think the painting helped him?’

‘I think he put a lot of violence into his painting,’ said Javier. ‘He’s famous for the Falcón nudes, but a lot of his abstract work is infused with emptiness, violence, darkness, decadence and depravity.’

‘Depravity?’

‘Reading these journals is like working a criminal investigation,’ said Javier. ‘Everything gradually comes to the surface. The secret life. Society — and we, too — only saw what was acceptable, but I don’t think he ever rid himself of the brutality. It came out in other ways. You know how he used to sell those paintings of his and then go straight upstairs and paint the same picture he’d just sold? I think that was a kind of brutality. He always had the last laugh.’

‘You’re making him sound as if he wasn’t such a nice guy.’

‘Nice? Who’s
nice
these days? We’re all complicated and difficult,’ said Javier. ‘It’s just that Papá had some peculiar difficulties in a brutal time.’

‘Does he ever say why he joined the Legion?’

‘It’s the only thing he doesn’t talk about. He only refers to it as “the incident”. And, given that he talks about everything else, it must have been terrible. Something that altered his life which he never came to terms with.’

‘He was only a kid,’ said Paco. ‘What the hell can happen to you when you’re sixteen?’

‘Enough.’

The doorbell rang.

‘That’s Pepe,’ said Javier.

Pepe Leal was reed-thin and tall. Standing in the street he held himself erect, feet together, head raised as if in constant expectation. He always looked serious and wore a jacket and tie on all occasions. He’d never been known to wear jeans, even. He looked like a boy returning from a private school and not somebody who would enter a ring with a 500-kilo bull and kill it with grace and poise.

The two men embraced. Javier escorted Pepe to the dining room with an arm around his shoulder. Paco embraced him, too. They sat down at one end of the table
although, and Javier had always noticed this, the torero was always apart from ordinary people. It wasn’t anything to do with the fact that he was in perfect physical condition, only drank water and sat some inches back from the table. His difference was that he was a man who regularly faced fear and overcame it. And it wasn’t as if he’d attained a permanent state of fearlessness. He was that human. Every time he entered the
plaza
to risk his life he would still have to overcome more fear.

Javier had seen him trembling and ashen in the hours before a corrida, sitting in his hotel room, never praying because he wasn’t one of the religious toreros, and never looking to anyone to calm his nerves. He was just a petrified human being who could not bring his terror under control. Then he would get dressed and that would start the process. As he was slowly bound into his
traje de luces,
the uniform of his profession, the fear was contained. It no longer drained off him, flooding the room with an invisible contagion. The ‘suit of lights’ did something to him, reminded him of the brilliant afternoon when he’d taken his
alternativa
and become a fully-fledged torero, or perhaps it just encapsulated the nobility of his profession and the wearer could only behave with the dignity it demanded. It did not, however, get rid of the fear, it just pushed it inside. Some toreros never even managed that level of containment and Javier had seen them in the
plaza
white and sweating, waiting for their moment and praying to be out on the other side of it.

‘You look in good shape, Pepe,’ said Paco. ‘How do you feel?’

‘The usual,’ he said, cheerfully. ‘And how are the bulls?’

‘Javier has told you about my retinto — Biensolo?’

Pepe nodded.

‘If you get him, I promise you, you’ll never have to sit
on your hands waiting for a contract again. Madrid, Seville and Barcelona will be yours.’

Pepe nodded again, his nerves too close to the surface to articulate. Paco gave him a rundown of the other bulls and, sensing that Pepe wanted to be alone with Javier, made his excuses and went for a siesta. Pepe relaxed about two millimetres into his chair.

‘You look as if you’re working too hard, Javier,’ said Pepe.

‘Yes, I’m losing weight.’

‘Will you be able to come to the hotel before the corrida?’

‘I’ll try, of course. I am sure my investigation can do without me for a few hours.’

‘You always help me,’ he said.

‘You don’t need me any more,’ said Javier.

‘I do. It’s important to me.’

‘And how
is
the fear?’