The Blind Man of Seville

by Robert Wilson

  ‘You wanted to know why Gumersinda killed herself,’ she said.

  ‘I was interested in your husband’s abject misery, as you called it, which must have been Gumersinda’s state, too, when she died. I wanted to know what could have caused such devastation.’

  ‘Are all policemen like you?’

  ‘We’re like people … each one of us is different,’ said Falcón.

  ‘Did you find out?’

  Throughout the account of his conversation with José Manuel, Consuelo Jiménez’s jaunty sexiness disappeared. The shoe, which had been so close to his knee, was withdrawn and joined its partner on the marble flagstones of the patio floor. Only the padded shoulders of her jacket had any shape by the time he’d finished. Falcón poured more whisky.

  ‘Los Niños de la Calle,’ he said.

  ‘I was thinking that, too,’ she said.

  ‘His obsession with security.’

  ‘I would have had to have found out what Raúl had done. I wouldn’t have been able to leave it. I’d have to know that to understand him … his motives.’

  ‘What if you had to give up your entire life to the task?’

  She lit another cigarette.

  ‘Do you think this has any bearing on the murder?’

  ‘I asked him whether he thought Arturo might still be alive,’ said Falcón.

  ‘And had returned to take his revenge?’ said Sra Jiménez. ‘That’s absurd. I’m sure they killed the poor boy.’

  ‘Why? I’m just as sure they would make use of him … knotting carpets or whatever.’

  ‘Like a slave?’ she said. ‘And what if he escaped?’

  ‘Have you ever been to somewhere like Fez?’ he asked. ‘Think of Seville, with most of its major buildings removed, all its squares and greenery torn out, and then compress it all so that the streets are narrower, the houses almost touching overhead and finally stew it, so that everything is falling apart. Multiply that by a hundred, subtract a thousand years from today’s date and that is Fez. You could go into the Medina as a child and come out an old man without having walked each street. If he ever managed to escape and found his way out of the Medina without being caught, where could he go? Who is he? Where are his papers? He belongs nowhere and to nobody.’

  Consuelo shrank from that terrible possibility.

  ‘So is that who you’re looking for now?’

  ‘Senior policemen, I mean people with budgets to run a police force, have an aversion to fantasy. I would have to do a lot better than produce a record of my conversation with José Manuel to persuade them to start that kind of a manhunt,’ said Falcón. ‘We have to be more plodding, less inventive, because everything we do ends up going before a judge and they loathe fiction in their courts.’

  ‘So what are you going to do?’

  ‘Look through your husband’s life and see what comes up,’ he said. ‘You could help.’

  ‘Would that get me off the suspects list?’

  ‘Not until we find the murderer,’ he said. ‘But it might save me a lot of time trying to find my way around a seventy-eight-year life.’

  ‘I can only help with the last ten.’

  ‘Well, that includes a time when he was in the public eye … Expo ‘92.’

  ‘The building committee,’ she said.

  ‘There’s also that interesting phenomenon of “black” pesetas wanting to become “white” euros.’

  ‘I’m sure you already know about the restaurant business.’

  ‘I’m not interested in a little tax fraud, Doña Consuelo. That’s not my department. I have to look at things with more dramatic possibilities. Stuff, for instance, that would require a great deal of trust and where perhaps trust was broken and fortunes lost, lives ruined, leaving powerful motives for revenge.’

  ‘Is that why you’re a homicide cop?’ she asked, getting to her feet.

  He didn’t answer, walked her to the door, tried not to listen to her kitten heels tapping out Morse code for S-E-X on the marble.

  ‘Who introduced you to my father?’ he asked; a diversionary tactic.

  ‘Raúl was given an invitation so he sent me. I’d worked in a gallery and he assumed I knew what I was doing.’

  ‘Is that how you met Ramón Salgado?’

  She missed a beat.

  ‘His gallery sent out the invitations. It was Ramón who opened the door, made the introductions.’

  ‘Was it Ramón Salgado who told you of your remarkable resemblance to Gumersinda?’

  She blinked as if she hadn’t remembered that drop of information leaking out of her. Falcón opened the door, which led out into the short cobbled access street lined with orange trees that led down to Calle Bailén.

  ‘Yes, it was,’ she said. ‘Coming here tonight brought it all back. I rang the bell and heard him talking to the people he’d just let in so that he was turned away from me when he opened the door. When our eyes connected I could tell he was completely floored. I think he might have even started to call me Gumersinda, but that might be my memory exaggerating the moment. Still, by the time we got to the drinks he’d told me, which meant that I drank too much whisky and blabbed away like an idiot to your father, whom I’d spent half my life dying to meet.’

  ‘So Ramón and your husband knew each other from the Tangier days?’

  Another thing she hadn’t remembered saying.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ she said.

  They shook hands. He looked at her legs as she walked down to Calle Bailén. He shut the door and went straight up to the studio.

  Extracts from the Journals of Francisco Falcón

  20th March 1932, Dar Riffen, Morocco

  Oscar (I don’t know if this is his real name, but it’s the one he uses) is not only my NCO but my teacher, too. He was a teacher in ‘real life’ as he calls it. That is all I know about him. Los brutos (my comrades), tell me that Oscar is here because he’s a child molester. They cannot know this for certain because it is one of the precepts of the Legion that you don’t have to reveal your past. Los brutos, of course, take great delight in revealing their past to me. Most are murderers, some are rapists and murderers. Oscar says they are flesh, blood and bone with some primitive strings attached inside, which allow them to walk upright, communicate, defecate and kill people. Los brutos are suspicious of Oscar only because they fear and distrust even the rudiments of intelligence. (I hide to write in this book or Oscar lets me use his room.) But los brutos respect him too. He’s beaten every one of them at some time or another.

  Oscar took me on as his pupil and charge when he caught me drawing in the barracks. He had a couple of los brutos hold me and tore the paper from my hands and found that he was looking at himself in all his brutal intelligence. I was paralysed with fear. He grabbed me by the collar and hauled me off to his room, followed by shouts from los brutos egging him on. He threw me against the wall so that I collapsed winded. He looked at the drawing again, got down on his haunches, put his face up to mine and looked into my head with his steel-blue eyes. ‘Who are you?’ he asked, which was strange. I knew better than to answer with my name and shut up. He told me the drawing was good and that he would be my teacher but that he had a reputation to maintain. So I still got beaten.

  17th October 1932, Dar Riffen

  I admitted to Oscar that I’ve only made two entries in this book since he gave it to me. He is furious. I tell him I have nothing to report. All we do is go on endless exercises followed by bouts of drinking and fighting. He reminds me that this journal should not just be an account of the external but an examination of the internal. I have no idea how to approach this internal thing he is talking about. ‘You have to write about who you are,’ he says. I show him my first entry. He says, ‘Because you have no family does not mean you have ceased to exist. They are only a reference, now you must find your own context.’ I write this down with no idea of its meaning. He tells me that a French philosopher said: ‘I think therefore I am.’ I ask: ‘What is thinking?�
�� There is a long pause in which for some reason I imagine a train moving through a vast landscape. I tell him this and he says, ‘Well, it’s a start.’

  23rd March 1933, Dar Riffen

  I have just completed my first major work, which is the entire company individually caricatured riding their own camel, which has taken on some of their characteristics. I mount them on boards and hang them in the barracks so that they all seem to be in a caravan heading for the Dar Riffen arch, which instead of the usual legionnaire’s motto reads: legionarios a beber, legionarios a joder. All the officers come in and ask to see it. Oscar tears down my cartoon arch, saying: ‘You don’t want to be court-martialled and shot for a silly drawing.’ Now I am never short of cigarettes.

  12th November 1934, Dar Riffen

  We have just welcomed back Colonel Yagüe and the Legion, who have been in Asturias to put down the miners’ rebellion … Oscar is grim. There was no resistance and, having relieved Oviedo and Gijón, los brutos ‘demonstrated a lack of discipline and were not restrained by command’. This means that they killed, raped and mutilated without fear of punishment. Somehow in this conversation Oscar reveals that he is German and bores me by saying how German soldiers would never have behaved like this. His empty boots seem to be screaming in the corner of the room. ‘This is the beginning of a catastrophe,’ he says. I don’t see it like that and can only get excited by the gory stories told and retold. Apparently I still haven’t learnt how to think. I’ve noticed, in all the history I’ve read, under Oscar’s pointing finger, just how many times the thinkers are taken away and shot, hanged or beheaded.

  17th April 1935, Dar Riffen

  My second major work — Colonel Yagüe wants me to paint his portrait. Oscar gives me some advice: ‘Nobody likes the truth unless it happens to coincide with their own version of it.’ It’s only when I have Colónel Yagüe sitting in front of me that I realize the real nature of the task. He’s a bull of a man, with thick round spectacles, grey receding hair, heavy jowls and a half-smile that’s nearly friendly until you see the cruelty in it. I sit him so that none of the damaging profile is showing. I ask if he wants to retain the glasses and he tells me that if he doesn’t he will look like a newly born puppy. I see a coat on a chair with a fur collar. I ask him to wear it and tell him it will frame his face and give him an adventurous, heroic look. He puts it on. We are going to like each other.

  1st May 1935, Dar Riffen, Morocco

  The portrait is a triumph. There is a small private unveiling ceremony with a select band of officers. Colonel Yagüe is delighted by the reaction. The fur collar was inspired. I thinned his face down and gave him a jutting chin so that he looked defiant, resilient, dependable but bold and enterprising, too. In the background I have the massed ranks of legionnaires marching through the arch, which reads as it should: Legionarios a luchar, legionarios a morir. Oscar tells me: ‘I see we have had a convergence of delusion.’ Colonel Yagüe does not hang the painting. He could not be seen to be more grand or ambitious than his superiors.

  14th July 1936, Dar Riffen

  Summer manoeuvres finish with a parade taken by General Romerales and General Gómez Morato, our two most senior commanders of the Army of Africa. Oscar, who has a nose for these things, says that something is going to happen. His evidence is that during the banquet after the parade, even before the dessert course was served, there were shouts of ‘Café!’ which was clearly not a demand for coffee. It stands for Camaradas! Arriba! Falange Española! and is evidence of Colonel Yagüe at work. He’s a falangist, who Oscar believes loathes General Gómez Morato. I don’t know how he informs himself of this and he says that all I had to do was look at the officers who came to the private unveiling ceremony of my portrait of Colonel Yagüe.

  We are locked away in our barracks with no knowledge of what is going on across the straits. Oscar finds a newspaper, El Sol, in which there’s an article about the shooting of an officer called Lt José Castillo outside his home in Madrid only a month after the man was married. ‘The Falange did that,’ says Oscar. I am puzzled. I don’t know where we stand. I ask Oscar who we should support and he tells me: ‘Our commanding officer, unless you want to get shot.’ At least there are no difficult decisions to be made on that score, although Oscar alarms me by adding: ‘Whoever that might be.’

  Later in the evening he calls me in. He’s very excited. He’s been listening to the radio. Spain is in a state of shock. Calvo Sotelo has been shot. I couldn’t care less, having never heard the name before. Oscar cuffs me round the head. Sotelo is the monarchist leader and a prominent figure on the right. His murder will have terrible consequences. I ask who killed him and Oscar bats an imaginary ball from hand to hand saying: ‘Tit-tat, tit-tat.

  ‘Except that the left have gone too far this time,’ he says. ‘This will not be seen as personal because of Calvo Sotelo’s position. This is a political killing and now, I can guarantee it, there will be civil war.’ I ask him where he stands in all of this and he holds out his hands, the palms criss-crossed with a thousand creases so that I think I must draw them. ‘Before you,’ he says and I leave him none the wiser.

  19th July 1936, Ceuta

  Colonel Yagüe marched us out of the barracks at 9 p.m. and by midnight we had control of the port of Ceuta. Not a shot was fired at us or by us. We were disappointed to meet no resistance as on the march we’d all been spoiling for a fight. By morning we were told that Melilla, Tetuán, Ceuta and Larache were all under military control and that General Franco was on his way to take over command.

  We march back to the barracks at Dar Riffen in the early morning. General Franco arrives at the barracks in the afternoon and we are all on parade to meet him. We surprise ourselves by going mad without knowing why. Colonel Yagüe makes a speech which starts with the words: ‘Here they are, just as you left them … ‘ and we see that the general is very moved. We roar, ‘Franco! Franco!’ and he announces a pay rise of one peseta a day. We all erupt again.

  6th August 1936, Seville

  My first time on Spanish soil. We were one of the first detachments across the straits by boat and were disappointed not to be airlifted. They put us on trucks and we drove straight up the middle of completely empty roads to Seville. Our orders are to head north under Colonel Yagüe to Mérida. We’ve been told that anyone who resists us is a communist and, as such, against Spain, and that they are to be dealt with in the most severe manner and shown no mercy. The word is that the opposition is ‘shitting in its pants’ at the thought of the Army of Africa. Our reputation from the Asturias miners’ rising travels before us. The effect of these orders, shot through with their bloodthirsty emotion, is like electricity through our ranks. We were already fired up and now we are invincible and righteous, too.

  10th August 1936, near Mérida

  The advance has been relentless (300 km in four days) and we have quickly learnt that the news of the terror we inspire travels at the speed of sound. We call it castigo, punishment. When we have quelled any resistance, we move through the towns and villages with knives and machetes. It is the cold steel that terrifies. It is not impersonal like bullets.

  At El Real de la Jara the people fled into the hills only to be rounded up by the Moors of the Regulares who did such terrible things to them that we met no resistance until we reached Almendralejo. There a madness seized us and we killed everybody left in the town. Hundreds of corpses, men and women, littered the streets. The stench in the heat was soon unbearable and we left the stunned houses, lifeless under a pall of smoke from the burning roofs. Oscar presses me ‘to write it all down’, but I am too exhausted for anything after the demands of the day.

  11th August 1936, Mérida

  Officers joke that they are giving the peasants ‘agrarian reform’.

  One of the Moors from the Regulares shows us his flyblown and stinking collection of men’s testicles. They castrate victims as a rite of battle. This is too much for Oscar, who puts it in a report to our Captain and th
e practice is soon banned.

  15th August 1936, Badajoz

  The 4th Bandera stormed the Puerta Trinidad. They went in singing and took heavy machine-gun fire full in the face, which drove them back for a moment. They breached the gates at the second attempt and we went in after them, stumbling over their dead bodies. Once inside it was street-to-street fighting all the way to the centre. In the afternoon anybody suspected of resistance was herded into the bullring near the cathedral. There was a lot of weeping and wailing, but we were savage after our losses in the initial assault. Shots rang out until nightfall. The Regulares searched the town, house to house, looking for anybody with a weapon or even a recoil bruise on their shoulder. After the indiscipline of Asturias, Oscar is determined that we will not lose control and go on an orgy of looting and raping like the other companies in the bandera and the Regulares. The men are disgruntled until Oscar brings in some cases of drink, mixed bottles stolen from a bar. We pour aguardiente, anís and red wine into the same glass and this drink becomes known to us as the Earthquake.

  22nd September 1936, Maqueda

  I know now what it is to be battle-hardened. Before they were just words attached to veterans. Now I realize that it is a mental state which endures. It comes from making multiple decisions under extreme pressure, from the complete suppression of fear, from seeing men die around you daily, from the conquering of exhaustion, from the acceptance of the inevitability of battle.

  29th September 1936, Toledo

  The attack was launched at midday on 27th September. Before the assault we were marched past the mutilated corpses of two executed nationalists a couple of kilometres outside town. The order came down from the colonels: ‘You know what to do.’ The fighting was fierce and the Regulares took a beating in the initial storming of the town. Just as we were expecting to have to pull back and regroup the leftists gave up and ran for it. There was some street fighting. The Moors were particularly savage that afternoon, hacking away at prisoners with their machetes until the steep cobbled streets of the town were literally running with blood. Grenades were thrown into the San Juan Hospital and as the Regulares approached a seminary, in which a group of anarchists were holed up, it burst into flames.