The Blind Man of Seville

by Robert Wilson

  ‘And that’s your explanation of the kind of reality we’re talking about?’ he said.

  ‘Slivers of glass can enter the mind, too,’ she said, and just the concept nauseated him. ‘Sometimes these slivers of glass are too painful to deal with. We push them to the back of our mind. We think we can forget them. Our mind even protects itself from them by scarfing these slivers in layers … I mean, lies. And so we distance ourselves from the sliver until one day something happens and, for no reason at all, it heads for the surface of our conscious mind. The difference between the mental and the physical is that we can’t apply magnesium sulphate to draw the sliver of glass into consciousness.’

  He stood and paced the room. Those tiny slivers of glass rising to the surface had triggered some minor terror. It was as if he could feel them crackling in his head like … like an ice field. Was that another physical analogy?

  ‘You’re frightened,’ she said, ‘which is normal. None of this is easy. It demands great courage. But the rewards are enormous. The reward is eventually a real peace of mind and the restarting of all possibilities.’

  He walked down the stairwell, away from the light of Alicia’s door and into the dark of the street, turning over that last line, coming to terms with the fact that she was thinking that he’d reached the point at which the end of possibilities would become a probability.

  He hit the street and walked quickly alongside a group of young people heading into the centre of town. Most of the streets were empty, still hung over after the ecstasy and excess of Semana Santa. The bars were still shut, not opening until tomorrow when the Sevillanos would finally get back into the stride of their normal living pace. Falcón found himself in squares which would normally be full of people, even in mid week, but which were nearly silent and dark, with only disjointed voices, as if it was much later, and the street cleaners were out discussing last night’s football. His mind was empty of the usual crush of everyday life, where nothing is thought about and each action begets the next.

  The disjointed voices fell silent. He had no desire to go home. He would tramp about like this for some hours. He compared the Jiménez family to his own. Yes, his family had been torn apart, too. No, torn apart was too strong. His mother’s sudden death had not broken them up, but it had damaged them, like the hairline cracks on pottery glaze. He remembered his father’s stricken face, as he’d looked from Paco, to Manuela, to Javier. And he somehow saw his own gaping and fragmented face, as he gasped at the theft of his whole world. The thoughts started up a terrible welling of black ghastliness, so that he quickened his pace over the satin cobbles.

  Better times came to mind. The sunny return of Mercedes. The woman who would become his father’s second wife. Javier had instantly fallen for her. And now this memory was tarnished by that photograph he’d found in Raúl Jiménez’s apartment: his father consorting with Mercedes before his mother was dead. That rucked up something worse and he jogged across the Plaza Nueva, the trunks and branches of the trees gloved in fairy lights. Christmas every day now. He stared blankly into the spot-lit perfection of MaxMara, the pristine clothes on the eternally perfect mannequins. He prayed for a less complicated life, where he didn’t have these thoughts and emotions that flayed his insides, leaving him looking almost the same from the outside, but raw and internally bleeding like a bomb-blast victim.

  Sweat popped out of his forehead as he walked, half trotted, down Calle Zaragoza, and something like hunger opened out in his stomach, so he thought about going to El Cairo and having a tapa of merluza rellena de gambas. He preferred the sangre encebollada, but blood and onions on a night like this required a stronger stomach. He passed Ramón Salgado’s gallery with only a single lit piece of sculpture in the window. Further on was a classic Sevillano house, which had been converted into a café with an expensive restaurant above, peopled by businessmen and lawyers with their wives and girlfriends.

  Back-lit, standing in the doorway on the top step, being helped into her coat, was Inés. Her hair was up and she only wore it like that when she wanted to be attractive and sexy, never for work. He didn’t see the man she was with as they stepped into the darkness of the street, joined arms and headed towards Reyes Católicos. There was no one else. This was a dinner for two. He stopped dead as Inés glanced behind her and then her high heels tickled the cobbles as she broke into a momentary skipping run to catch up. He followed them from across the street. The earlier hunger and the beginnings of exhaustion were forgotten now as the mind fell on new fuel.

  They crossed Reyes Católicos and walked past the bar, La Tienda, which was closed. They cut across Calle Bailén and went behind the museum and out on to the Plaza del Museo, so that he had to hang back until they disappeared down Calle San Vicente. He waited and then followed, but by then the street was empty. He walked up and down the first hundred metres wondering if he’d imagined it all or that maybe the man had an apartment here, in this street, barely a kilometre from his own house.

  He retreated home, broken as an entire army; the hunger was gone and the exhaustion of defeat had taken over. He showered, but only the day’s grime left him. He took a sleeping pill and crept under the covers. He stared at the endlessly receding ceiling, mesmerized as he could be by the white flashes in the middle of the road unrolling in the flare of the headlights. He thought he should resist, that it was dangerous to fall asleep at the wheel. Confusion distorted his sense of place. He reached forward with a hand, expecting everything to career out of control, for the frame of his vision to suddenly include a barrier, a bank and a life-ending tree to crash into. He flew into sleep as if through an empty windscreen, into the night.

  Extracts from the Journals of Francisco Falcón

  12th October 1943, Triana, Seville

  An army truck gave me a lift from Toledo all the way to Seville, which was lucky. The country is on its knees, with no petrol and little food. There’s not much on the roads, apart from occasional carts drawn by emaciated horses or mules.

  I’ve taken a room run by a fat Moorish-looking woman with long black hair down to the small of her back, which she winds up into a bun. She has black eyes as dull as charcoal and she sweats constantly, as if on the brink of collapse. Her breasts have parted company and live in isolation on either side of her ribcage. She has a belly as big as a drinker’s, which sways under her black skirts as she walks. Her ankles are purple and swollen and she catches her breath in pain as she moves from room to room. I would like to draw and paint her, preferably naked, but she has a male companion, who is as thin as a village dog and carries a knife, which I hear him whetting lovingly every morning before he goes out. The room has a chest of drawers, none of which opens, and a bed with a picture of the Virgin above it. I take it because it has a patio outside, which only the landlady uses to dry her washing. I dump my bags and go out to buy materials and drink.

  25th October 1943, Triana, Seville

  It must be the soldier in me but I’ve settled into a routine although I do not get up early any more. Nothing happens in this city until after 10 a.m. I walk to the Bodega Salinas on the Calle San Jacinto, drink a coffee and smoke a cigarette. I use this bar because the owner, Manolo, keeps the best barrels of tinto from which he fills my five-litre bottles. He also sells me a homemade aguardiente, which I buy by the litre. I go back to my room and work until 3 in the afternoon. The only interruption is by the water seller. At 3 I eat lunch in the bar with a jug of tinto, refill my bottle and return to my room to sleep until 6 p.m. I work again until 10, have dinner and stay on at Manolo’s, drinking with the crooks and idiots who gather there.

  29th October 1943, Triana, Seville

  In the Bodega Salinas yesterday one of the other customers known only by the name of Tarzan (after the film Tarzan the Ape Man) comes to sit at my table. He has a tremendous belly and a face like a cluster of potatoes (Johnny Weismuller would be appalled). His eyes are closed up and puffy. He sits down and everybody is listening.

  ‘So,’
he says, putting a meaty forearm on the table, ‘where do you get that look from?’

  ‘What look is that?’ I ask, puzzled by the question.

  There’s nothing aggressive about Tarzan, despite his pummelled face. He wears a black hat that he never removes but slips to the back of his head occasionally in order to scratch the front.

  ‘A look that says you don’t belong here,’ he replies calmly, but I sense those puffy eyes looking through their slits as if down a rifle barrel.

  ‘I’m not sure what you mean.’

  ‘You’re not from Seville. You are not Andaluz.’

  ‘I come from Morocco, Tetuán and Ceuta,’ I say, but this doesn’t satisfy.

  ‘You look at us and make notes. You have old eyes in a young head.’

  ‘I am an artist,’ I say. ‘I make notes to remind myself of things that I have seen.’

  ‘What have you seen?’ he asks.

  I realize now that these people do not think I am who I say I am. They think I’m Guardia Civil (who are always from out of town) or worse.

  ‘I was a soldier,’ I say, avoiding the word Legion. ‘I’ve been in Russia with the División Azul.’

  ‘Where?’ asks a bandy-legged guy, who is a picador of some repute.

  ‘Dubrovka, Teremets and Krasni Bor,’ I say.

  ‘I was in Shevelevo,’ he says, and we shake hands.

  Everybody is relieved. Why they should think a member of the secret police would sit openly in a bar making notes on them (the densest group of dullards in Southern Spain) I have no idea.

  15th December 1943, Triana, Seville

  A young man, perhaps twenty years old, comes into the bar. He calls himself Raúl and they all know him and like him. He’s been in Madrid working, but all he can talk about that first night is going to Tangier, where there is real money to be made. They humour him and tell him he should talk to El Marroquí, which is my new name. R. sits at my table and tells me of the fortunes to be made from smuggling out of Tangier. I tell him I have plenty of money and that I’m only interested in becoming an artist. He tells me that there’s lots to be made out of American cigarettes, but there’s money in everything because of the American blockade of Spanish ports. His only worry is that now that the Blue Division has been pulled out of Russia this might relax the American attitude to Franco and they’ll lift the blockade. I sit up at this because I realize that he is not just an idiot with pesetas on his mind but someone who understands the real situation. I offer him a drink; his company is more lively than the usual Bodega Salinas customer. I learn that the free port status of Tangier means that all these goods can come in and be freely traded, with no duty or tax. The companies who buy and sell these goods also don’t have to pay any taxes. Everything is very cheap. All you have to do is buy it, ship it across the straits and you can sell it at a premium. This all sounds fine except he has no money to buy and no ship to transport the goods. This he waves away as uninteresting detail. ‘You start by working for others,’ he says. ‘You see how the business operates and then you fit yourself in.

  ‘Where there’s money,’ he says, fixing me with his young inexperienced eyes, ‘there’s danger.’

  I wonder why he addresses this to me and he just says that danger means that premiums are always paid.

  R. went to Madrid to work in construction but the owner of the building ran out of money. He then bought his way into a shoeshine syndicate. Only rich people have their shoes shined. He realized that rich people are rich only because they have superior knowledge. He listened to them and their talk was of Tangier, where the administration is both Spanish and corrupt and will stay that way for the foreseeable future. R. has it all worked out. I have to remind him that I don’t need money. He disagrees vehemently and tells me just how little even well-known artists make from their work. At the end of the evening we are quite drunk and he asks if he may sleep on my floor. He is cheerful and lively so I agree on the condition that he leaves before I start work.

  21st December 1943

  I’ve been robbed. R. and I came back from the Bodega Salinas, unlocked my room and found that someone had got in via the patio and stolen everything except my notebooks, drawings and paintings. My clothes, paints and even the Virgin above the bed have gone. The last is the worse loss because all my money was in the backing. I have only what is in my pocket. I tell the landlady what has happened. I am angry and I imply something about the only other user of the patio. She flies at me and between us we put our relationship beyond repair. Later we find broken pots in the patio and R. points to where somebody must have got in over the wall and used the pots, which were nailed into the stucco, to climb in and out.

  22nd December 1943

  The fat Moorish bitch is unforgiving and has appeared with her whipped cur of a husband and some other resident bandits to persuade us to leave. With my training I’m tempted to tear them to pieces but then I’d have the Guardia Civil to contend with and gaol. R. and I leave. He works on me relentlessly and now we are heading south on foot to Algeciras.

  27th December 1943

  I thought some of the Russians were poverty-stricken, primitive people, but the villages we’ve been through have revealed that this part of Spain is locked in some Dark Age with no hope and insanity a constant companion. It is not unusual to see people howling at the moon. In searching for food in one village R. came across a boy chained with a metal collar to a wall. His eyes were all pupil and in looking into them R. saw nothing to indicate there was anything human residing there.

  5th January 1944, Algeciras

  We have arrived here half-starved and in rags after an attack by some wild dogs who were hungrier than us. I killed three with my bare hands before the pack ran off leaving us torn and bleeding. R., who has always been respectful, now holds me in something like awe. There is a shrewdness about this boy that makes me feel uncomfortable.

  7th January 1944, Algeciras

  Spain in this state is no country for anyone. Africa is so close, visible and near across the straits. I can smell it and surprise myself by how much I want it again.

  R. has come back saying that he’s found a contrabandista who has offered us two months work, food and lodging on the boat with a guarantee to drop us in Tangier with $10 each in our pockets. If it works we can renegotiate terms after the two-month trial period. I ask him what we have to do, but it is not a detail that interests him. He likes to do the deal. He produces two cigarettes, which shuts me up. I wonder why I’ve put myself so completely in his hands until I remember all those other legionnaires who left and came back to Dar Riffen, unable to stomach the outside world.

  R. tells me something about himself as if to bind me to him. His tone is matter of fact. He recounts how a truckload of anarchists came into his village in 1936 and demanded from the mayor all the fascists. The mayor told them that they had all fled. The anarchists returned two days later with a list of names. Among the names were Raúl’s parents. The anarchists took them off into the ravine and shot them all. ‘Almost everybody I knew was shot that afternoon,’ he said. He was twelve years old.

  10th January 1944, Algeciras

  The contrabandista’s boat is an old fishing vessel about 15 metres long and 3 or 4 metres wide. It has one large hold aft with all the accommodation in the fore. There’s a small wheelhouse with two cracked panes of glass; underneath is the engine, which is where we find Armando. He is thickset with black hair and a dirty, stubbled face. His eyes are brown and soft but he has a thin-lipped mouth with a taut smile. I don’t dislike him, especially when he makes up a stew of beans, tomatoes, garlic and chorizo. He tells us there are clothes in one of the cabins that will fit us better than anything of his would. We eat and drink and I feel fat and sleepy but remember to ask A. whose clothes we are wearing. They belonged to the last crew who were shot and killed by some Italians. R. asks him how he got away and he says bluntly: ‘I killed the Italians.’

  After the crumbling and sordid Algeciras, Tangi
er is prosperous. The port is full of ships and all the cranes are working. The dockside is massed with Moroccans, either huddled under the pointed hoods of their burnouses or crouching under the weight of some cargo. Trucks and cars crawl amidst the jostle of humanity; many of them are large American automobiles. Above the port, in a commanding position, is the Hotel Continental. Other hotels line the Avenida de España — the Biarritz, the Cecil, the Mendez. I blanche at the possibility that my father has moved here to take advantage of the boom.

  R. jumps about the foredeck, whooping for joy. A. looks at me with dead eyes and asks what this is all about. I tell him that R. has the same nose for money that a dog has for a bitch on heat. A. rubs his chin, which rasps against his rope-hardened hands. I would like to draw those hands … and his face, where the sensual and the brutal meet.

  Once we have moored up A. has a private talk with R. who disappears. A. smokes a pipe; he gives me a paper and tobacco to roll a cigarette. He puffs away and says: ‘You’re the best crew I’ve ever had.’ I tell him that we haven’t done anything yet. ‘But you will,’ he says. ‘R. will be the trader and you’ll do the killing.’ Those words chill my guts. Is that all he could see when he looked into my face? I realize that R. has been talking.

  11th January 1944

  We sailed last night. R. was back within a few hours, followed by an American and two Moroccans wheeling a barrow with two 200-litre drums of diesel. The fuel was cheaper than any A. had ever bought. R. and A. talked some more prices and by nine we were loading sacks of chickpeas and flour and 8 drums of gasoline. R. offers to do the books and A. says: ‘What books?’ R. can read and write but his real gift is with numbers. He did the books for his parents from the age of eleven. ‘When they went to market they bought this and sold that. I wrote it down. After six months I could tell them where they were making money and losing it.’ This market was in the next village. ‘Now you know why your parents were shot by the anarchists,’ I say. This had never occurred to him.