The Blind Man of Seville

by Robert Wilson

  ‘Unless he didn’t send it.’

  ‘Look — Sight Lesson number one: Raúl Jiménez with his eyelids cut off. Who else could it be? It’s too knowledgeable.’

  Ramírez walked across the room, wagging his ring finger.

  ‘You said it was designed to confuse, yes?’ he said. ‘Sra Jiménez is under pressure. You’ve spoken to her at length almost every day since the murder.’

  ‘You think she sent it herself or had it sent?’

  ‘Look at our reaction. We cannot believe that she would be prepared to expose herself to that extent. But think about it. She appeared in a pornographic movie twenty years ago. Big deal. She probably had her reasons. Cash shortage being the most likely. I mean, what do you want to do? Work as a chambermaid for a decade or suck a few cocks? The only way this movie would have an impact on her life is if we sent it to her friends in Seville with a red circle around her head and “Consuelo Jiménez” flashing on the screen, and if you haven’t got a budget for surveillance, then you certainly haven’t got a budget for that.’

  Ramírez couldn’t help himself. That crude, irrepressible pugnacity always found a way out.

  ‘Maybe there’s another level to this sight lesson,’ said Falcón. ‘I thought this was the sketch that was playing when the killer filmed Raúl Jiménez with Eloisa Gómez. What does that say about Raúl Jiménez … if he knew who he was watching?’

  ‘He’s very strange.’

  Falcón contemplated the binary tracks of the human brain, the endless choices. This way or that? What was driving the instinct to always choose the wrong way, so that instead of lying in bed with your wife, reflecting on the joy of marriage and children, you find yourself screwing a whore in your study while looking at your wife performing on the screen? Raúl Jiménez had an instinct for worthlessness.

  ‘If you take into consideration the likeness of Consuelo Jiménez to the dead wife … it’s almost impossible to imagine what was going on in the man’s head,’ said Falcón.

  ‘Guilt,’ said Ramírez.

  ‘Guilt requires perception.’

  ‘Beats me,’ said Ramírez, easily bored. ‘What are we going to do with this?’

  ‘Confront Consuelo Jiménez with it … see how she reacts.’

  ‘I’m game for that.’

  ‘We’re also due to meet Juez Calderón before lunch,’ said Falcón. ‘I don’t think two policemen leaning on Consuelo Jiménez about her unfortunate past is going to be productive. I want you to prepare the material for the meeting with Juez Calderón. You could also tell Baena, if he’s still down at Mudanzas Triana, to see if they’ll let him have a look at Raúl Jiménez’s stuff or at least give him an inventory.’

  Ramírez’s colour darkened with some tight internal rage. He didn’t like having his machinations turned on him and he didn’t want to be excluded from the humiliation of Consuelo Jiménez. Falcón called her. She agreed to see him and asked him to come before lunch was served in the restaurants.

  He took another Orfidal in the toilet, amazed at how effective the first had been, tempted to spend the rest of his life on them. He drove through the subdued city and thought that his doctor might be right, that this was just stress. We live in an age of constant mild anxiety. Because there are no longer any defining events of world upheaval we focus our concentration on the minutiae of everyday life, engross ourselves in work and activity to suppress the anxiety that goes with relative peace. Yes, that’s it, he thought, I’ll take these pills for a few more weeks, crack this case and take a holiday.

  There were a couple of spaces at the back of the Edificio de los Juzgados. He parked up and set off through the Jardines de Murillo into the barrio de Santa Cruz. He slowed down as the doctor’s words came back to him … the most beautiful city in Spain … and he looked around himself as if for the first time. The sky overhead beyond the clear, rinsed air and the high palms was nothing short of cerulean. The Andalucian sun shone above the green leaves of the plane trees casting patterns of light and shade on the smooth cobbles below. Towers of magenta bou-gainvillea, spectacular after the rains, tumbled down the white and ochre buildings. The bright blood-red of geraniums nodded through the black balustrades of the wrought-iron balconies. The smell of coffee and baking bread loafed in the quiet streets. The cavernous cool of narrow alleyways broke out into the warmth of open squares where the golden stone of ancient churches settled in silence.

  He walked under the high plane trees of the Plaza Alfalfa and regretted the business that he was on — the pain and the embarrassment at odds with the full flush of the day. The secretary showed him in to Consuelo Jiménez’s office. She sat right up to the desk, with her hands flat on the leather inlay, padded shoulders braced. Falcón sank into a chair, his stomach still fluttering with gaiety. These pills. Like a man listening to his favourite music under headphones he had to stop himself from roaring it out.

  He handed her the video cassette in a plastic evidence bag. She turned it over and flinched at the title. He told her he’d received it in the post that morning and about the sight lesson card.

  ‘This is one of my husband’s dirty movies, isn’t it?’

  ‘It was playing while the killer filmed your husband having sex with the prostitute in his study. The card accompanying it told us to look at sections four and six very closely.’

  ‘Very good, Inspector Jefe, and what happened?’

  ‘You have no idea of the contents of this video?’

  ‘I’m not interested in pornography. I abhor it.’

  ‘From the clothes of the actors and actresses in this film we estimate it to be about twenty years old.’

  ‘Clothes in a dirty movie … that’s novel.’

  ‘Only initially.’

  ‘Come on, Inspector Jefe, if there’s been a development then let’s have it out and talk it over.’

  ‘The two sections we were instructed to view by the sight lesson card feature you, Sra Jiménez, as a young woman.’

  Silence. Long enough for a new ice age to have formed.

  ‘Why do you think …?’ started Falcón.

  ‘What are you talking about, Inspector Jefe?’

  The vicious edge to her voice shredded his confidence and the possibility loomed in his mind that they had been mistaken, that Ramírez had misjudged, that it hadn’t been her and the furniture in the office was rushing past him as he crashed headlong into the most embarrassing moment of his professional career.

  ‘I was wondering,’ he said, steadying himself, ‘why anybody would want to send us this film.’

  ‘Why do you think you can come into my office with this disgusting notion …?’

  ‘Do you have a video player?’

  ‘Come with me,’ she said, snatching up the bag.

  They left the office and went down the corridor to a small room with a two-seater sofa, a chair and a TV/Video. Falcón struggled into a latex glove with his hands now running with sweat. The film was preset to start at the fourth section. He decided to avoid maximum embarrassment by just playing the first moments where the four people are let into the apartment. He froze the frame on her as she came in the door. She scoffed at it, holding her blonde hair out to him. He let the video play on until the camera closed in on her unmistakable face. He tried to freeze the frame but the video would not obey. The young Consuelo unzipped the man’s trousers and fished out his penis and that was when Consuelo Jiménez, puce in the face, barged him out of the way, stopped the video, and tore it out of the player.

  ‘That is evidence,’ said Falcón.

  She smashed the cassette to the ground, impaled it with her heel. The plastic casing cracked and she tried to shake it off but it was as tenacious as dog shit. She kicked her shoe off, ripped the cassette off the heel and dashed it against the wall where it splintered and fell into pieces. Falcón rushed at it with the evidence bag and shovelled in the remains. She was on him, hitting him about the head and back, screaming and livid, the language worse than he’d h
eard even in the drug dens of the Polígono San Pablo. He turned on her, grabbed her by the shoulders, shouted into her face and she broke down on his shoulder and wept into the material of his suit.

  He sat her down on the sofa. She buried her face in the arm. Falcón’s mind split into two worlds; was this pretence or real? She came round slowly, face destroyed. He sat in the chair to distance himself.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘that was me.’

  ‘A hard time?’

  ‘A very bad moment,’ she said, reducing the hours it must have taken to a flashing fraction.

  ‘Money problems?’

  ‘Everything problems,’ she said, staring into the abyss of the inevitability of intrusion. ‘I volunteered the details of my second abortion, paid for by my lover. This was the prelude to my first abortion, financed by me. Return flight to London, hotel and hospital. It was a lot of money to raise in two months without any help.’

  She shuddered, put her hand to her mouth as if she might be sick.

  ‘It’s not the kind of thing anybody would want to have to remember,’ she said. ‘That a pregnant woman had to do that sort of thing to earn the money to terminate a foetus. It’s just completely disgusting to me.’

  This was a big lesson, this Sight Lesson No.1. Perhaps it would have been good for Ramírez to have seen this, because this fits with the profile of the killer. He knows things. He finds the shame or the horror in people’s pasts and shows it to them, forces them to relive it.

  ‘How would anybody know about this?’ asked Falcón. ‘Did anybody know about it?’

  ‘I’d already edited it out of my own life. I can’t remember a thing about it. I did something that had to be done and when it was over I dispatched it to the deepest abyss. I can barely remember who I knew at that time. I came back from London and set about changing everything.’

  ‘The father?’

  ‘You mean the man who did not become a father,’ she said. ‘He was a mechanic at a garage my father managed. When I told him, he ran. I never saw him again.’

  ‘How would anybody know about this?’

  ‘They wouldn’t,’ she said. ‘It was the first time in my life I’d encountered true loneliness. I did everything on my own. I didn’t even tell my sister.’

  ‘How did you find the clinic in London?’ he asked, the sordid checking of the facts inevitable.

  ‘My doctor gave me an address in Madrid of a woman who had all the details.’

  ‘And raising the money … how did you find yourself in that world?’

  ‘They were people who knew about that address, too,’ she said. ‘It was no coincidence that I should meet a girl in a café on the same afternoon, who made a proposal to me that would supply precisely the right amount of money.’

  ‘Did you see her again?’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘And the other performers?’ he asked, and she shook her head.

  ‘You know, given the racket they were involved in, they were surprisingly good people. What we were doing was depraved and the atmosphere on the set should have been horrible, but we smoked a few joints and it was all very friendly. They were humane and sympathetic. I was probably lucky. I’ve met more abusive people in the restaurant business. And the sex … the sex was really nothing. The most difficult thing was for the men to maintain an erection because it was all so uncharged … unsexy.’

  Falcón squirmed as the question he didn’t want to ask formed in his head. He shelved it. Too distasteful.

  ‘You said you changed everything when you came back to Spain.’

  ‘The night before the operation I was staying in a cheap hotel in Victoria. I went walking to take my mind off the next day. I wanted to lose myself. I went up to Hyde Park Corner, down Piccadilly into Shepherd’s Market and Berkeley Square. I drifted into Albemarle Street and found myself outside an art gallery. There was an opening of an exhibition. I watched the people as they came and left. They were beautifully dressed, sophisticated and completely urbane. None of those women would have got themselves pregnant by a garage mechanic. I decided that they were my people and I would consort with them and become them.

  ‘When I got back to Madrid I worked hard and bought some nice clothes and went to see a gallery owner who said I was unsuitable, that I didn’t know the first thing about art. He humiliated me. He took me around the paintings and let me reveal my ignorance. Then he asked me about the frames. Frames? What did I care about frames? He told me to learn how to type and threw me out.’

  She was mesmerizing Falcón, fixing him with a look of pure grit. Her fist was balled on the arm of the chair, just as it had been in the film.

  ‘I studied art history. Not formally — I couldn’t afford that. I worked at it in my spare time. I went to meet frame makers. I met artists, unknowns, but ones who knew what they were talking about. I worked in a shop selling art materials. I learnt everything. I met more established artists … and that was how I got the job in the gallery. And when I got it I went back to the guy who turned me down. He didn’t remember me. While we were talking Manolo Rivera came in … do you know him?’

  ‘Not personally.’

  ‘Well, he came in and kissed me and said hola and the gallery owner offered me a job on the spot. It gave me great pleasure to turn him down.’

  ‘Did your husband know any of this?’

  ‘Only you, Inspector Jefe,’ she said. ‘Intimacy is easier with those that don’t share your bed. And … I think we recognize each other, don’t we, Don Javier?’

  Falcón blinked at her, not sure where she was leading him.

  ‘We look as if we’re on the inside,’ she said, ‘but we’re not. We’re on the outside looking in, just like your father.’

  ‘But not your husband,’ he said, to change the subject.

  ‘Raúl? Raúl was lost,’ she said. ‘If that was what he was watching when he was with his puta, what does that tell you about him?’

  ‘Ramírez said it was guilt.’

  ‘Ramírez isn’t as stupid as he looks,’ she said, ‘… just macho.’

  ‘You don’t think your husband knew it was you?’ said Falcón.

  ‘I can’t believe he did. I didn’t get a credit.’

  ‘He saw the likeness, though.’

  She nodded.

  ‘Do you think that, for Raúl, to see someone who looked like his first wife …’

  ‘… behaving like a puta,’ she added for him.

  ‘… somehow assuaged his feelings of guilt?’

  She shrugged, stood up, smoothed her skirt, said she had to go for lunch.

  He walked back to the Edificio de los Juzgados, the day gone grey again, the leaves of the palm trees clacking in the breeze as the clouds reasserted themselves. Ramírez was waiting for him outside the Edificio de los Juzgados with a thick file under his arm. They went through security. He pulled a sheet of paper from the file: an inventory of Raúl Jiménez’s possessions in the Mudanzas Triana warehouse.

  On the way up to Juez Calderón’s office he read through the inventory, which included a complete home movie kit, an 8mm camera, film canisters, projector and screen. The Juez was waiting for them, standing at his desk, hands planted as if he was thinking about bulldozing them straight back out into the hall.

  18

  Tuesday, 17th April 2001, Edificio de los Juzgados, Seville

  Falcón and Ramírez turned off their mobiles and sat down in front of Calderón, who maintained his businesslike stance until they were comfortable. He lowered himself into his seat as if he was making a tremendous effort to contain his anger.

  ‘Proceed,’ he said, and steepled his fingers. ‘Let’s start with the latest on the prime suspect.’

  ‘We have had a major development in that respect,’ said Falcón, and Ramírez on cue slid the two ‘cleaned’ blow-ups of the suspected killer out of the file and handed them to Calderón. ‘We believe that this is our murderer.’

  Calderón’s eyes widened as the two sheets came
across the desk but regained their grimness when he saw that neither shot was conclusive. Falcón kept up a running commentary on how they’d come across the sighting. His voice seemed disembodied to him, as if he’d become non-human, a robotic word-generator. The bone-deep tiredness was separating him from himself. More phrases toppled from his mouth: ‘ … believed to be male in the age range twenty to forty years old …’ ‘… a further development …’ ‘… a pornographic video …’ ‘… confused our perception of the prime suspect …’ He stopped only when Calderón put his hand up and read the report on the blue movie. The hand dropped. Falcón’s tape started up again, and he wondered how many words a human uttered in a lifetime. ‘The prostitute Eloisa Gómez …’ ‘… missing since last Friday night …’ ‘… contact has been made …’ ‘… stolen mobile …’ ‘… feared murdered …’ All this so long ago and yet so recent, he thought. And the investigation into Raúl Jiménez’s private life — the abduction of the boy, the wife’s suicide, the daughter’s madness, the son’s neurosis — a different century, which of course it was. Everything is from a different century now. A great tranche of history has been set adrift, so that we can begin a new accumulation of wrongs without reference …

  ‘Inspector Jefe,’ said Calderón, ‘your speculation on history is not germane to this investigation.’

  ‘It isn’t?’ he said, and from his sudden fear that he’d been caught leaking came what he hoped was inspiration. ‘Motive is always historical, unless it’s psychotic. The only question is: how far back do we have to go? Last month, when Raúl Jiménez tried to sell his restaurant business to Joaquín López? The last decade, when he was presiding over the Expo ‘92 Building Committee? Or thirty-six years ago, when his son was abducted.’

  ‘Let’s concentrate on what we have before us,’ said Calderón. ‘You are an Inspector Jefe with five men under you; there’s a limit to what you can achieve with those resources. You have pursued the available leads. You have achieved things — this sighting, for instance. But the most important thing is the apparent audacity of the killer and his inclination to communicate with you. As you have said, in being bold he is making mistakes, which in the case of the funeral was nearly fatal for him. He is sending things to you. He is talking to you.’