The Blind Man of Seville

by Robert Wilson

  ‘We can’t even tell what sex “he” is,’ said Falcón.

  ‘I can clean these images up for you,’ said the operator. ‘It’ll take me the weekend, but I can do it for you.’

  They took a print-out of the frame and went back to Falcón’s office.

  ‘So, what was he doing there?’ said Falcón, sitting at his desk. ‘Was he filming someone in particular or just the scene in general?’

  ‘The end of his work,’ said Ramírez. ‘The bastard dead and buried. That’s my guess.’

  ‘Would he take that sort of a risk just for personal satisfaction?’

  ‘Not such a risk. We don’t normally film mourners at a victim’s funeral,’ said Ramírez.

  ‘It could be the end of that piece of work and the start of the next,’ said Falcón.

  ‘Wasn’t that what you were implying before we went to the cemetery?’

  ‘I don’t remember implying anything.’

  ‘You said that undisturbed minds can become disturbed. Isn’t that the same thing?’

  ‘A madman with a malignant motive,’ said Falcón. ‘Or a motiveless madman who’s malign.’

  Ramírez looked behind him to see if someone more intelligent had just entered the room.

  ‘It’s the point, though, isn’t it?’ said Falcón. ‘We still don’t know enough to break off any line of inquiry.’

  He stuck the print-out up on the wall.

  ‘It’s like that game in kids’ magazines,’ said Ramírez, slumping back in his chair. ‘You have to guess the identity of a pop star from an eye or a nose or a mouth. My kids think that I should be good at it because I’m a policeman, but they don’t seem to understand that I don’t know who any of these people are. Who the hell is Ricky Martín?’

  ‘Son of Dean?’ said Falcón, with no idea.

  ‘Who the fuck is Dean Martín?’

  It set Falcón off. Hysteria broke. Maybe it was the disturbed nights with strange dreams. He laughed madly and silently. Tears brimmed and he dashed them away. He writhed in his seat as wave after wave engulfed him. Ramírez looked at him like a lawyer with an unreliable client who has to take the stand.

  Ramírez called the men in the field, listened to their reports. Nothing. He left for lunch. Falcón pulled himself together and went home still stunned by his outburst, the fact that it had happened to him, that loss of self-control. He ate something Encarnación had left on the cooker without registering what it was. He went to bed, hoping for an hour’s sleep. He woke at 9 p.m. in the pitch black of his bedroom. He jerked out of sleep as if someone had tugged at a knot in his stomach. He’d seen drunks do the same, coming to in the cells as if plugged straight back into the mains of life. He was groggy and his tongue was coated with something nasty. His limbs were stiff and his joints creaking.

  He stood under the shower and let the water pummel the mess out of him. His head and insides were like a blender with cutlery fed into it, all smashed and mangled. He went to his dressing room and put on a pair of grey trousers and a white shirt that crackled as he shrugged it over his shoulders. When he looked at himself in the mirror he couldn’t stand the sight of himself. His shirt. He hated the whiteness of it. He couldn’t bear the … non-colour. He tore it off, shuddered at his loathing of it, hurled it across the room. He went up close to the mirror, inspected his face, pressed the soft skin beneath the eyes, saw it wrinkle but not return to its former smoothness. Age. Is the inside wrinkling like the outside? Are small creases forming in the brain so that I go to bed liking white shirts and wake up hating them?

  He put on a green shirt.

  Back in the bedroom he had a sudden memory flash as he looked at the rucked-up dark-blue sheets of the bed. Inés had always wanted white, but he couldn’t sleep in white sheets. There it was again, that anti-white tendency. They’d settled on light blue. Falcón had a curious perception of himself as an eccentric, as his father had described some of the English collectors he’d known. No, that was a neat lie slipped in there by his ego. He saw himself as Inés must have seen him — an old man with ways and habits, except forty-five was not old. When he was fifteen, forty-year-olds were old. They all wore suits and hats and moustaches. Now that he was thinking about it, he realized that he wore suits all the time; even at weekends he wore a jacket and tie. Inés had tried to get him into light sweaters, jeans, those long-sleeved knit shirts done up to the neck, even collarless shirts which were impossible for him to wear. The lack of structure. He liked a shirt and tie because it held him together, made him feel enclosed. He hated looseness and bagginess. He liked made-to-measure suits. He liked the sensation of a shell that a good suit gave him. He enjoyed its protection.

  Protection from what?

  There was that hurtling sensation again. This time, rather than shudder out of it, he tried to examine it. It was like film fast-forward, but that wasn’t quite right because there was no progress — quite the opposite. Not regression, but stasis. Yes, that was it. He was standing still while his past caught up with him. The idea there and then gone like debris flashing past a window. And where did that come from? Debris flashing past … The dream came back to him from the sleep that he’d thought had been dreamless, which was why he’d woken with a start. He knew where the dream had come from. He’d read an account of the aftermath of the PanAm flight 103 crash over Lockerbie in Scotland. A man had woken up in his house to find a row of passengers, still in their seats, in his garden and … they all had their fingers crossed. That pitiful detail had driven the horror of the bombed plane into Falcón’s mind; it had stayed with him and now the memory had resurfaced. The noise. The vital, vital debris flying past the window — bits of turbine, wing trim — and then thrown out into the yawning night, hurtling through the thin blackness, the mind incapable, only instinct fighting back to less dangerous times, the roller coaster, Magic Mountain, Oh, we’ll be all right, fingers crossed. The unseen ground rushing to meet them. The blacker black. The unstarred kind. Oh God, the whole world upside down. We were never meant for this. What use ‘Brace! Brace!’ now? This really is economy class. And we’ll be so late. All those thoughts — wild philosophizing, persuasive little jokes, the craving for normality — as we’re rushing towards it, dying to meet it.

  But he hadn’t. He’d woken up. There’d been no impact. His mother had told him — his first mother or his second mother? — one of them had told him that as long as you didn’t hit the ground in a dream you’d be all right. Ridiculous. You’re in bed. The things you’ll believe.

  He knelt down and tied up his shoelaces, knotted them tight, enclasped his feet so that they were sure and steady, reliable. This was not a time for stumbling about, slopping around in the yellow leather babouches he’d bought because they reminded him of his father, which was what he’d worn as he worked — barefoot or babouches, never anything else.

  It was exasperating, this constant resurfacing.

  He went out of the room into the arched gallery overlooking the patio. It was warm. The air breathing around the pillars was as soft as a young girl come to kiss him. He sucked in the exotic air that suddenly filled his head with the scent of possibility. The black pupil of the still water in the fountain in the patio looked up at the night. He shivered. All these houses look in on themselves, he thought. I’m walled in. The sides encroach. I have to get out. I have to get out of myself.

  He started down the stairs but turned back to the gallery, to his father’s studio. The drawer of keys had gone. Encarnación. Strange, he thought, with a name like that and I so rarely see her. Here she is, supposedly endlessly assuming bodily form, but she never appears. I only see evidence of her activity. He walked to the gate because he could see now that a key had been left in the lock and hanging from a piece of string, another key. He stroked his palms with the tips of his fingers. Damp. His hands had always been dry and cool. Inés had remarked on it. When they were lovers he used to be able to just run his hands down her hot back and it would make her press her stoma
ch into the bed, push her bottom up to him, offer her sex to him. Those cool, dry hands on her skin. By the end of their marriage she was calling him the fishmonger. ‘Don’t touch me with those blocks of ice!’

  He turned the key. One, two and a half. The latch clicked open. The door swung noiselessly. Who had oiled those hinges? The fantastic Encarnación? His heart pounded as if he knew something was about to happen. He took the key from the lock, closed the wrought-iron gate.

  At this end of the gallery his father had put bars over the openings of the arches, obsessed with security as he always was. Falcón walked the length of it, the flat black water of the fountain rippling in his vision. He paced back to the door in the middle, the heavy mahogany door with its prominent panels jutting out, saying ‘Do not enter’ or perhaps even more demanding: ‘Do not enter unprepared’.

  The second key slid into the lock, turned easily. It was all encouraging. He pushed on the heavy door, the first resistance. It opened on an absurd creak, like a vampire’s coffin. He giggled. Nervous as Leda when she saw that swan bracing its wings. One of his father’s little jokes about women who trembled under the surge of his charisma. He fumbled for the switch.

  A huge empty wall spattered with paint came up under the halogen glare of the lights. The end where his father used to work. Five metres by four metres of worked-on wall. The vestiges of four canvas squares seemed to float under the dribbles and slashes of paint. One end of the wall closest to the window was almost totally black, thick with paint as if he’d worked there on ideas crowded with pending doom. There was a predominance of red over the rest of the wall, which was not a colour that had featured much in any of his work since the Tangier nudes — voluptuous lines laid over blocks of Moroccan colour — touareg blue, desert ochre, raw sienna, terracotta and then the reds, the whole range of blood reds from capillary crimson, to vein vermilion, to deep arterial amaranthine. They all said it was in the reds. The life flow. But he hadn’t used red since Tangier. The paintings he made of details of Seville rarely used red. The abstract landscapes were green and grey, brown and black and always suffused with a mysterious light from an unknown source. Light which the ABC critic called ‘numinous’ and El País, ‘Disney’. ‘You can’t teach people to see,’ his father had said. ‘They will only see what they want to. The mind is always interfering with vision. You should know that, Javier, in your job. Witnesses who’ve seen things so clearly, but once put under cross-examination are found hardly to have been there. You’d learn more from a blind man. Remember Twelve Angry Men? Yes. But why “angry”? Because people believe deeply in the veracity of their own vision. If you can’t rely on your own eyes, whose can you?’

  In remembering these words Falcón had stopped in mid stride, as ridiculous as those mime artists down Calle Sierpes. His mind turned and spun around the crux, a truth that would enable him to see into the mind of Raúl Jiménez’s killer. The one who would make his victim see, who would force him through the mind’s interference, to see an unacceptable truth. But he didn’t reach it and came round as surprised as an anaesthetized patient given time out from the world.

  He circled the notched tables covered with jars and clay pots stuffed with sheaves of brushes all dried hard, crisp with encrusted paint. Underneath the tables there were cardboard boxes and piles of books, catalogues and magazines, obscure art periodicals and reams of paper, rolls of canvas, sheets of hardboard. It would take him half a day just to carry the stuff downstairs, let alone look through it all. But that was the point. He was not supposed to look through it. It was to be taken away and incinerated. Not dumped but destroyed beyond recognition.

  Falcón ran his hands through his hair again and again, maddened by what he was about to embark on, aware that the reason he’d come in here was specifically to disobey his father’s wishes. He’d been avoiding this moment since his father’s death, needing to get further from the end of that era so that he could start on his own. His own era? Did ordinary men like him even have their own era?

  He crouched down and pulled out a single magazine from a pile. It was a New Yorker, his father a great fan of the cartoons, the more surreal the better. He’d particularly enjoyed a drawing of a chess pawn standing next to a desert cactus with the caption: ‘Queen’s pawn to Albuquerque, New Mexico.’ The dazzling brilliance of its meaninglessness — he’d thought it such a perfect attitude to life, perhaps because his own had been brought close to meaninglessness by the loss of his dazzling genius.

  The memories crowded, jostled for a ticket.

  A row about Hemingway. Why Hemingway had shot himself in 1961, the year that his mother had died. A man who had achieved so much and had killed himself because he couldn’t stand not being able to do it any more. Javier had been sixteen when they talked about it.

  Javier: ‘Why couldn’t he just retire? The guy was over sixty. Why didn’t he just hang up his pencil case, settle himself into a lounger in the Cuban sunshine and drink a few mojitos?’

  Father: ‘Because he was sure that what he’d lost could be refound. Should be refound.’

  Javier: ‘Well, that alone should have kept him occupied. Hunt the treasure … that’s a game everybody enjoys.’

  Father: ‘It’s not a game, Javier. This is not a game.’

  Javier: ‘His place in literature was assured. He had the Nobel Prize. With The Old Man and the Sea his work was done. There was nothing more to be said. Why try to say more if there’s …?’

  Father: ‘Because he had it and he lost it. It’s like losing a child … you never get over what could have been.’

  Javier: ‘And look at you, Papá. You’re no different and yet …’

  Father: ‘Let’s not talk about me.’

  Falcón threw down the magazine at his crassness remembered. He pulled out a box, flipped open its flaps. All this stuff. The accumulation of a lifetime’s rubbish, even more so with an artist who would hold on to anything that might precipitate a new idea. He walked the book-lined walls at the side and back of the room. ‘Should I burn these, too?’ he asked himself. ‘Is that what you want me to be — a book burner? Throw them all from the gallery into the patio and have a bonfire of words and pictures? You cannot have meant me to do this.’ The persuasiveness of the guilty mind that was about to transgress.

  The wall on the street side had four floor-to-ceiling windows, which his father had installed to maximize natural light. Each window was encased in a steel lattice that could be slid back. The room no less than a fortress.

  He arrived back in front of his father’s work wall and went through a door in the corner, which was windowless and lit by a single unshaded bulb. Four racks of vertical slots had been built along one wall. Stretched canvases and other material leaned in them. A plans chest occupied most of the opposite wall. It was piled high with boxes, almost to the ceiling. It smelt musty, stale and, after the long winter, damp. He went to the racks and pulled out a sheet of paper at random. It was a charcoal outline of one of the Tangier nudes. He pulled out another sheet. A pencil drawing of the same nude. Another and another sheet, each one a reworking of the same nude, a development of a detail, an examination of an angle. He went to the canvasses. The same Tangier nude painted again and again, sometimes big, sometimes small but always the same nude. Falcón searched the other racks and found that the four racks in which his father had arranged the work corresponded to each of the four Falcón nudes. Each rack contained hundreds of drawings and charcoals, oils and acrylics.

  A tremendous sadness suddenly overwhelmed him. This work, the wall of racks in this dimly lit room, was what was left of his father’s attempt to refind his genius, to get it down right, even once more, even if it was just a tiny detail, to have it again. There was pain on the back of that surge of sadness, because Falcón could see, even in the pathetic light from the cheap bulb, that not one of these pieces contained anything of the exceptional qualities of the originals. Everything was in its place, but there was no life, no leap, no surge, no flow. Th
is was mediocre. His abstract landscapes were better than this. His cupolas and windows, doors and buttresses, even they were better than this. He would burn these; he would burn them without a second thought.

  He climbed up on a stool and lifted down one of the boxes from the plans chest. Heavy. More books. He flipped open the box, rooted through them, some leather-bound, others cloth, some by writers from the sixties and seventies, others classics. He opened a cover and found the personal dedication. They were gifts from admirers: aristocrats, ministers, theatre directors, poets. He tore open another box of carefully packed porcelain. Another box contained silverware. Cigars — unsmoked. Cigarette cases. Wood carvings. Figurines. His father loathed china figurines. Three boxes full of them. The early ones in newspaper from the seventies, the later stuff in bubblewrap. He realized what he was looking at. This was homage paid to his father. These were the small gifts bestowed on him when he attended public occasions. They were small expressions of gratitude for his genius.

  More memories. Going away with his father. He rarely paid for a meal or a hotel room, which were always festooned with flowers. If they stayed in a private house the locals would silently leave offerings of fruit and vegetables to show their appreciation of a visit from the great man.

  ‘This is how it is,’ his father would say. ‘Greatness is constantly rewarded. If I were a footballer or a torero it would be no different. Genius is the thing — with foot, cape, pen or brush, it doesn’t matter, and yet … what is it? Great artists paint lacklustre paintings, brilliant toreros make terrible messes of great bulls, magnificent authors write bad books, sublime footballers can play like shit. So what is this … this fickle genius?’