The Blind Man of Seville

by Robert Wilson

  ‘You must talk to Paco,’ she said, ignoring him. ‘He’s very stressed, you know.’

  ‘The Feria’s his busiest time of year.’

  ‘No, no, not that,’ she whispered. ‘It’s the vacas locas. He’s worried his herd has been infected with BSE. I’m testing the whole lot for him, off the record.’

  Falcón sipped his beer, ate a slice of sweet and melting jamón ibérico de bellota.

  ‘If they bring in official testing,’ she continued, ‘and they find one animal with the disease, he has to slaughter the whole herd, even the ones with 120-year-old bloodlines.’

  ‘That’s stressful.’

  ‘His leg’s bad. It always is when he’s stressed. He can hardly walk some days.’

  Alejandro put a plate of cheese in front of them and Javier instinctively turned his face away.

  ‘He doesn’t like cheese,’ explained Manuela, and the plate was removed.

  ‘Your name came up today at work,’ said Falcón.

  ‘That can’t be good.’

  ‘You vaccinated a dog for someone. It was a bill.’

  ‘Whose dog?’

  ‘I hope he paid you.’

  ‘You wouldn’t have found a signed receipt if he hadn’t.’

  ‘Raúl Jiménez.’

  ‘Yes, a very nice Weimeraner. It was a present for his kids … they’re moving to a new house. He was due to collect today.’

  Falcón stared at her. Manuela blinked at her beer, put it down. This happened rarely, that real murder slipped into a social situation. Normally he would entertain, if asked, with tales of detection, his idiosyncratic approach, his attention to detail. He never told how it really was — always laborious, at times very tedious and interspersed with moments of horror.

  ‘I worry about you, little brother,’ she said.

  ‘I’m in no danger.’

  ‘I mean … this work. It does things to you.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t know, I suppose you have to be callous to survive.’

  ‘Callous?’ he said. ‘Me? I investigate murder. I investigate the reasons why these moments of aberration occur. Why, in the heart of such reasonable times, such heights of civilization, we can still break down and fail as human beings. It’s not like I’m putting down pets or slaughtering whole herds of cattle.’

  ‘I didn’t know you were so sensitive about it.’

  They were so close he could smell the menthol from the cigarettes on her breath, even over the sweat and perfume in the bar. This was how it was with Manuela. She was provocative and it was why her boyfriends, selected for looks and wallet, never lasted. She couldn’t keep up the fluttering femininity.

  ‘Hija,’ he said, not wanting this, ‘I’ve had a long day.’

  ‘Wasn’t that what you said was one of Inés’s accusations?’

  ‘You said the forbidden word, not me.’

  Manuela looked up, smiled, shrugged.

  ‘You hoped I’d been paid for vaccinating that poor man’s dog. It struck me as hard-hearted, that’s all. But perhaps you were just being … phlegmatic.’

  ‘It was a small joke in bad taste,’ he said, and then surprised himself by lying. ‘I didn’t know the dog was a present for the kids.’

  Alejandro stuck his magnificent jaw line in between them. Manuela laughed for no reason at all, other than it was early days and she was still keen to make her man feel good about himself.

  They talked about los toros, the only topic they had in common. Manuela enthused over her favourite torero, José Tomás, who was, unusually for her, not one of the great beauties of the plaza but a man she admired for always being able to bring some tranquillity to the faena. He never rushed, he never shuffled his feet, he would always bring the bull on with the face of the muleta, never the corner, so the bull would always pass as dangerously close to him as possible. Inevitably he would be hit and when this happened he always picked himself up and walked slowly back to the bull.

  ‘I saw him on television in Mexico once. He was hit by the bull and it tore his trouser leg open. The blood was running down his calf. He looked pale and sick, but he stood up, got his balance, waved his men away and went back to the bull. And, the camera showed it, there was so much blood running down his leg that it was filling his shoe and squirting out with every step. He lined the bull up and put the sword in to the hilt. They carried him straight out to the infirmary. ¡Que torero!’

  ‘Your cousin, Pepe,’ said Alejandro, who’d heard that story too many times, ‘Pepe Leal. Will he get a chance in the Feria?’

  ‘He’s not our cousin,’ said Manuela, forgetting her role for a moment. ‘He’s the son of our sister-in-law’s brother.’

  Alejandro shrugged. He was ingratiating himself with Javier. He knew that Javier was Pepe’s confidant and that, when work permitted, he would go to the plaza on the morning of the corrida to make the bull selection for the young torero.

  ‘Not this year,’ said Javier. ‘He did very well up in Olivenza in March. They gave him an ear from each of his bulls and they’ll invite him back for the Feria de San Juan in Badajoz, but they still don’t think he’s big enough for the Feria de Abril. He can only sit around and hope for someone to drop out.’

  He felt sorry for the boy, Pepe, just nineteen years old, a great talent, whose manager could never quite get him into the first category plazas. It was nothing to do with ability, only style.

  ‘Fashion will change,’ said Manuela, who knew that Javier felt responsible for the boy.

  ‘He’s convinced he’s too old to get anywhere now,’ said Javier. ‘He looks at El Juli, who seems to have been with us for decades and who’s only a couple of years older than him and he loses heart.’

  Alejandro ordered three more beers from the barman. Manuela was giving Javier her raised eyebrow.

  ‘What?’ he asked.

  ‘You,’ she said. ‘You and Pepe.’

  ‘Forget it.’

  ‘Remember what the guy wrote in 6 Toros last year.’

  ‘He was an idiot.’

  ‘You’re closer to Pepe than his own father. All that business he does in South America and he won’t even go and see his son when he’s performing in Mexico.’

  ‘You’re being sentimental, like that journalist was,’ said Javier. ‘I only ever help Pepe with his bulls.’

  ‘You’re proud of him in a way that his father isn’t.’

  ‘You’re not being fair,’ he said, and then to change the subject: ‘I came across a photograph of Papá today … ‘

  ‘You need to find yourself a woman, Javier,’ she said. ‘It won’t do, you going through all the old albums.’

  ‘This was a shot I found in Raúl Jiménez’s study. He was in Tangier around the same time. Papá didn’t know he was being photographed.’

  ‘Was he doing something unforgivable?’

  ‘It was dated August 1958 and he was kissing a woman …’

  ‘Don’t tell me … she wasn’t Mamá?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘And you were shocked?’

  ‘Yes, I was,’ he said. ‘It was Mercedes.’

  ‘Papá was no angel, Javier.’

  ‘Wasn’t Mercedes still married then?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Manuela, waving it all away with her cigarette. ‘That was Tangier in those days. Everybody was as high as a kite and fucking everybody else.’

  ‘Can you try and remember? You were older. I wasn’t even four years old.’

  ‘What does it matter?’

  ‘I just think it might help.’

  ‘With Raúl Jiménez’s murder?’

  ‘No, no, I don’t think so. It’s personal. I just want to sort it out, that’s all.’

  ‘You know, Javier,’ she said, ‘maybe you shouldn’t be living in that big house all on your own.’

  ‘I did try to live there with somebody else, who we can’t mention.’

  ‘That’s the point. Old houses are crowded and wo
men don’t like sharing their living space unless they choose to.’

  ‘I like it there. I feel in the centre of things.’

  ‘You don’t go out into “the centre of things” though, do you? You don’t know anywhere that isn’t between Calle Bailén and the Jefatura. And the house is far too big for you.’

  ‘As it was for Papá?’

  ‘You should get yourself an apartment like mine … with air conditioning.’

  ‘Air conditioning?’ said Javier. ‘Yes, maybe that would help. Clear the air. Don’t the latest models have a button on the side that says “past reconditioned”?’

  ‘You always were a strange little boy,’ she said. ‘Maybe Papá should have let you become an artist.’

  ‘That would have solved everything, because I’d have been so broke I’d have had to sell the place as soon as he died.’

  The rest of Manuela and Alejandro’s friends arrived and Javier drained his beer. He excused himself from dinner through a barrage of fake protest. Work, he said, over and over again, which few of them understood as they were well cushioned from the hard edges of daily toil.

  At home he ate some mussels in tomato sauce, cold. Something left for him by Encarnación, who knew that he couldn’t be eating properly without a woman in the house. He drank a glass of cheap white wine and mopped the sauce up with some hard white bread. He wasn’t thinking and yet his head seemed to be full of a sense of rushing. He thought it was his mind unwinding after the day, until he realized it was more of a rewind, like a tape, a fast rewind. Inés. Divorce. Separation. ‘You have no heart.’ Moving to this house. His father dying …

  He stopped it. There was an audible thump in his head. He went to bed with too much happening in his body. He slammed into a wall of sleep and had his first dream, that he could remember, for some considerable time. It was simple. He was a fish. He thought he was a big fish, but he could not see himself. He was fish; aware only of the water rushing past him and a scintilla in his eye, which he closed on, which instinct told him he should close on. He was fast. So fast that he never saw what he instinctively pursued. He just took it in and moved on. Only … after a moment he felt a tug, felt the first rip of his insides, and he burst to the surface.

  Awake, he looked around himself, astonished to find that he was in bed. He pressed his abdomen. Those mussels, had they been all right?

  9

  Friday, 13th April 2001, Javier Falcón’s house, Calle Bailén, Seville

  He was up early; the jitteriness in his stomach had gone. He spent an hour on the exercise bike, setting himself some arduous terrain on the computer. The concentration required to break through the pain barrier helped him map out his day. This was no holiday for him.

  He took a taxi to the Estación de Santa Justa, and drank a café solo in the station café. The AVE, the high-speed train to Madrid, left at 9.30 a.m. He waited until 9.00 a.m. and called José Manuel Jiménez, who answered the phone as if poised for it to ring.

  ‘Diga.’

  Falcón introduced himself again and asked for an appointment.

  ‘I’ve got nothing to tell you, Inspector Jefe. Nothing that would help. My father and I haven’t spoken for well over thirty years.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Very little has passed between us.’

  ‘I’d like to talk to you about that but not over the phone,’ he said, and Jiménez didn’t respond. ‘I can be with you by one o’clock and be finished before lunch.’

  ‘It’s really not convenient.’

  Falcón found himself surprisingly desperate to talk to this man, but it had to be out of police time. He went in harder.

  ‘I’m conducting a murder investigation, Sr Jiménez. Murder is always inconvenient.’

  ‘I cannot shed any light on your case, Inspector Jefe.’

  ‘I have to know his background.’

  ‘Ask his wife.’

  ‘What does she know about his life before 1989?’

  ‘Why do you have to go back so far?’

  This was ludicrous, this battle to speak to the man. It made him more determined.

  ‘I have a curious but successful way of working, Sr Jiménez,’ he said, just to keep him on the phone. ‘What about your sister … do you ever see her?’

  The ether hissed for an eternity.

  ‘Call me back in ten minutes,’ he said, and hung up.

  Falcón paced the station concourse thinking of a new strategy for ten minutes’ time. When he called him back he had a chain of questions lined up like a cartridge belt.

  ‘I’ll expect you at one o’clock,’ said Jiménez, and hung up.

  He bought a ticket and boarded the train. By midday the AVE had delivered him to the Estación de Atocha in central Madrid. He took the metro to Esperanza, which seemed auspicious, and it was a short walk to the Jiménez apartment from there.

  José Manuel Jiménez let him into the hall. He was shorter than Falcón but more powerfully built. He held his head as if ducking under a beam or carrying a load on his shoulders. As he spoke his eyes darted about under cover of some heavy, dark eyebrows, which his wife was not keeping under control. The effect, rather than being furtive, was deferential. He took Falcón’s coat and led him down a parquet-floored corridor, away from the kitchen and voices of family, to his study. He walked leaning forwards, as if dragging a sled.

  The study had several overlaid Moroccan rugs that covered the parquet floor up to an English-style walnut desk. Lining the walls to the window were the bound books of a lawyer’s workplace. Coffee was offered and accepted. In the minutes he was left alone, Falcón inspected the family photographs sitting on top of a glass-fronted cupboard. He recognized Gumersinda with her two young children. There were none of Raúl. There were none of the daughter beyond twelve years old. The other photographs were of José Manuel Jiménez’s family through the ages culminating in two graduation photographs of a boy and a girl.

  Jiménez came back with the coffee. They manoeuvred around each other as Falcón found his way back to his seat and Jiménez got behind his desk. He clasped his hands; his biceps and shoulders swelled under his green tweed jacket.

  ‘Amongst some old shots of your father’s I came across one of my own father,’ said Falcón, going for the tangential approach.

  ‘My father was a restaurateur, I’m sure he had lots of photographs of his customers.’

  So he knew that much about his father.

  ‘This was not amongst the celebrity photographs …’

  ‘Is your father a celebrity?’

  It was a chink he had not wanted opened, but maybe, as Consuelo Jiménez had shown, revealing something of oneself could lead to surprising revelations from others.

  ‘My father was the painter Francisco Falcón, but that was not why —’

  ‘Then I’m not surprised he wasn’t on my father’s wall,’ Jiménez cut in. ‘My father had the cultural awareness of a peasant, which was what he was.’

  ‘I noticed he smoked Celtas with the filters broken off.’

  ‘He used to smoke Celtas cortas, which were unfiltered but better than the dry dung he told us he had to smoke after the Civil War.’

  ‘Where was he a peasant?’

  ‘His parents had land near Almería, which they worked. They were killed in the Civil War and lost it all. After their deaths my father drifted. That’s all I know. It’s probably why money was always important to him.’

  ‘Didn’t your mother …?’

  ‘I doubt she knew. If she did, she didn’t tell us. I really don’t think she knew anything about his life before she met him and my father wasn’t going tell her parents until he’d got her.’

  ‘They met in Tangier?’

  ‘Yes, her family moved there in the early forties. Her father was a lawyer. He was there, like everybody else, to make money after the Civil War had left Spain in ruins. She was just a girl, eight years old maybe. My father appeared on the scene a bit later … some time in 1945, I think. He
fell for her the moment he first saw her.’

  ‘She was still young wasn’t she? Thirteen years old?’

  ‘And my father was twenty-two. It was a curious relationship, which her parents were not happy about. They made her wait until she was seventeen before they let her get married.’

  ‘Was it just the age difference?’

  ‘She was their only child,’ said Jiménez. ‘And I doubt they were impressed by his lack of family background. They must have seen what base metal he was. He was flashy, too.’

  ‘He was rich by then?’

  ‘He made a lot of money over there and he enjoyed spending it.’

  ‘How did he make his money?’

  ‘Smuggling, probably. Whatever it was, I’m sure it wasn’t legal. Later he got into currency dealing. He even had his own bank at one stage — not that it meant anything. He got into property and construction, too.’

  ‘How do you know all this?’ asked Falcón. ‘You were barely ten by the time you left and I doubt he told you very much.’

  ‘I pieced it all together, Inspector Jefe. That’s the way my mind works. It was my way of making sense of what happened.’

  Silence came into the room like news of a death. Falcón was willing him to continue, but Jiménez had his lips drawn tight over his teeth, steeling himself.

  ‘You were born in 1950,’ said Falcón, nudging him on.

  ‘Nine months to the day after they were married.’

  ‘And your sister?’

  ‘Two years later. There were some complications in her birth. I know they nearly lost her and it left my mother very weak. They wanted to have lots of children, but my mother wasn’t capable after that. It affected my sister, too.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘She was a very sweet-natured girl. She was always caring for things … animals, especially stray cats, of which there were plenty in Tangier. There wasn’t anything you could … she was just … ‘ he faltered, his hands kneaded the air, forcing the words out. ‘She was just simple, that’s all. Not stupid … just uncomplicated. Not like other children.’

  ‘Did your mother ever recover her strength?’

  ‘Yes, yes, she did, she recovered her strength completely, She …’ Jiménez trailed off, stared up at the ceiling. ‘She even became pregnant again. It was a very difficult time. My father had to leave Tangier, but my mother could not be moved.’