The Blind Man of Seville

by Robert Wilson

  13th January 1944

  We held off the coast before going into the small fishing village of Salobreña under cover of darkness. A. signals from off shore and, on receiving the right reply, moves in. While we’re waiting A. lets me have a look at his only firearm, a shotgun with engraved silver above the trigger guard. ‘A work of art to kill with,’ I say. I’m only nervous that I have to do this work with just two shots, but he assures me that the shot spread is very discouraging for those on the margins. They go off to do the business and I guard the ship. They come back half an hour later arguing. The buyers would not accept R.’s inflated price. A. is furious that he has to sail to another port and find another buyer. R. tells him to be patient, they will be back to talk to us again. A. paces the deck. R. smokes. At 3 a.m. R. tells A. to start the engines. As R. prepares to cast off four men come running towards us. I patrol the deck with the shotgun. Money changes hands. We unload and leave before dawn.

  15th January 1944

  R. shows A. that if he’d accepted the price offered at Salobreña he would have broken even and if he’d paid his usual price for diesel he’d have made a loss. R. works on him about the type of cargo he is shipping. It’s too heavy and not profitable enough for a small ship. He says we should be doing cigarettes. ‘Cigarettes are the new money. You buy everything with cigarettes. Francs, Reichsmarks, Lire mean nothing.’ A. whitens at the idea. The Italians are running that show and he doesn’t want to get involved. R. points to me and says: ‘He’s a trained soldier. He was with the Legion. He’s been to Russia. There’s no Italian who could match him.’ R. has done his homework. I didn’t tell him any of that. A. looks at me and I say: ‘I’m not doing it with a shotgun. If you want to run cigarettes we need at least a sub-machine-gun.’ R. laughs at me. ‘One sub-machine-gun!’ he says. ‘That American who sold us the diesel and gasoline … he can get you anything you want. A howitzer, a Sherman tank, a B-17 bomber — although he said that might take a little longer to arrange.’

  29th January 1944

  The Allies landed in Anzio last week and R. is nervous that his precious market is going to be destroyed by the end of the war. I tell him the Allies still have plenty of work to do and that the Germans will not give up territory easily. R. is desperate to get his own boat already and I point out that we still haven’t earned our first $10, let alone enough money to put down on even a rowing boat. R. insists that A. teach him everything about the boat and the sea — how to read a chart, plot a course, read a compass and navigate by the stars. I sit in on these tutorials as well.

  20th February 1944

  A. has been having his own way and we’ve been making regular trips with chickpeas, flour and gasoline until R. pulls off a strange deal to run a cargo of black pepper up to Corsica for a very low freight. The shipper is a German who’s come down from Casablanca and bought this cargo from a Jew in the town. I can’t think what the Corsicans want with all this black pepper and, when the German realizes that I speak his language and fought in Russia, he confides in me that they will transship it and it will end up in Germany in a munitions factory.

  24th February 1944

  We have put into Corsica and R. is delighted to have made contact with both Germans and Corsicans. It now seems that we will be putting into Corsica in the future with cargoes of cigarettes and the Corsicans will have the problem of putting them into Marseilles or Genoa. As he points out to A., we make more money for less risk. A. cannot give him credit for this simple piece of business. He is king because he has the boat and does not realize how important R.’s intelligence is to making his stupid boat work profitably.

  I have a conversation with A. about the difference between peasants and fishermen: Fishermen are always humble in the presence of the sea. The sea’s might draws them together. They will always help each other out. Peasants have only their land. It makes them small-minded and possessive. They are never humble, only suspicious. They are taciturn because anything said may give their neighbour an advantage. Their nature is to protect and expand. If a peasant sees his neighbour stumble and fall it fills his mind with possibilities. He finishes with the statement: ‘I am a fisherman and your friend R. is a peasant.’

  R. maddens me with his endless dreaming about his own boat.

  1st March 1944

  We dropped off our cargo with the Corsicans and put into Naples with an empty ship for R. to find an Italian to do business with. He’s learnt from the Corsicans that permission is required. A. won’t go ashore and I realize how much the incident with the Italians shook him up.

  12th March 1944

  R. was determined to show A. how much money can be made from a well-organized Italian deal. Our boat is filled with Lucky Strikes. We hardly have room to sleep for the cartons and boxes, even loose packets. A. is nervous. All his money is in this one run. We slip into the Gulf of Naples at night and hang in the chill blackness of a very calm sea, waiting. R. comes to me in the cabin where I cradle the sub-machine-gun. He tells me to be ready, to stay out of sight and at the first hint of trouble I am not to question anything but to kill everybody. ‘But I thought we had permission,’ I say. ‘Sometimes you have to prove yourself first to get that permission. Nothing is certain with these people.’ I ask him why he hasn’t told A. that, and he said: ‘All men have to think for themselves. If you leave it to others you ‘re taking a risk.’

  I check that all four magazines are full and click one into the breech of the gun. The water slaps against the side of the boat. After some minutes there’s the bubbling of an approaching engine. I put out my cigarette and go up to the wheelhouse and crouch below the cracked panes of glass. I sense that something has changed in R., but the approaching boat is on us before I have time to think this through. A light comes on as it pulls alongside. The old tyre buffers squeak and squeal as the boats kiss together. I hear an Italian voice, singsong and unthreatening. I put an eye over the window ledge. A. and R. are standing at the rail about three metres in front of me. The Italian understands Spanish. Two men slip over the rail aft and make their way round to the dark side of the wheelhouse. I know that this is not right. I hear the two men on the other side of the wall, their clothing brushing against the slats. Is this the first hint of trouble? I hear a shout and don’t think but put a short burst through the wheelhouse wall. I run out and jump the rail into the Italian’s boat. There’s no one on the deck of our boat. I lope around the aft of the Italian ship. The engine suddenly throttles up and I put a short burst in to the wheelhouse, killing two men. I pull the throttle back. The boat idles and drifts away from ours. I listen and check the deck and then go below. The cabin is empty. The door to the hold opens on to a diesel-smelling blackness. I find a torch in the cabin. I put my back to the bulwark and hold the torch out. Nothing. No shot. A boy, no older than seventeen, is huddled in the corner of the hold. I find only a small knife on him. He is shaking with fear. I pull him up on to the deck. The white hull of A.’s boat is still visible in the rippling darkness. A light comes on in the wheelhouse and the engine starts up. R. is at the wheel. The Italian boy is on his knees praying. I tell him to shut up, but he has found his rhythm. R. throws me a line. ‘All dead?’ he asks. I point to the boy at my feet. R. nods and says: ‘It’s better to kill him.’ The boy wails. R., who I now notice is soaking wet, gives me a handgun.

  ‘I need more of a reason than that to kill him,’ I say.

  ‘He’s seen everything,’ says R.

  ‘Maybe it’s time for you to get your hands dirty,’ I say.

  ‘Mine already are,’ he says.

  The gun is in my hand. I pull the weeping boy over to the side of the boat. His head lolls off the side. His crying is strangled in his throat. I shoot him behind the ear. I hand R. the gun thinking, This is what I am capable of.

  The same hand that pulled the trigger is now guiding the words out of the pen and I am no closer to understanding how this hand can be the instrument of creation and destruction.

  We take
the boats up to Corsica and drop the bodies overboard on the way. I am in the Italian boat and pull alongside. It’s going to take two men to shift each body. We come to A. and I say that we should honour him with a prayer. R. shrugs. I say what we used to say over a fallen comrade in the Legion. I call out his name and make my own response, which is: ‘Present!’ As we ease him over the side, I see that he’s been hit twice, in the shoulder and the back of the head.

  We offload the cigarettes and drydock both boats in Ajaccio. We remodel and repaint both boats using the money from the cigarettes. R. disappears for a day and comes back with papers for both boats in each of our names. We sail to Cartagena and register the boats under the Spanish Flag and change the boat names. We have had no time to talk about what has happened and as the time lengthens away from the incident, and all memory of A. disappears, I see that one of R.’s talents is for shutting the door. His link to me is that he has entrusted me with the only memory of importance to him, which is the death of his parents. I think it was then that he decided memory was something that interfered, rather than clarified and, in offering only nostalgia as recompense for a lack of belonging, had no value.

  14th March 1944

  A conversation with R. goes like this:

  Me: What happened with the Italians?

  R.: You saw, you were there.

  Me: I didn’t see what started it.

  R.: Then why did you open fire?

  Me: The two guys who came aboard our boat should not have been there. I opened fire at the first hint of trouble … as ordered.

  R.: Was that all?

  Me: I heard a shout … like a signal.

  R.: The Italian had a gun. I shouted. He shot A. I jumped in the water. I heard that burst from your sub-machine-gun and the Italians did, too. They made a run for it.

  Me: A. was shot twice.

  R.: What do you mean?

  Me: He was hit in the shoulder and the back of the head.

  R.: I was in the water. Maybe the Italian fired twice.

  Me: Where did you get that handgun?

  R.: Why are you interrogating me?

  Me: I want to know what happened. You said you got your hands dirty. You said sometimes you have to prove yourself first before you get permission.

  Long pause in which I decide I will never know what goes on inside R.’s head.

  R.: The handgun belonged to one of the Italians you shot.

  At least he replied, even if it was a lie.

  23rd March 1944

  Some more information about what I now call Opera Night. I go to the American in Tangier to get another magazine for the sub-machine-gun and ask for some more bullets for the handgun he sold to R. He gives me a box of .45 calibre shells without question. He also tells me in passing that the best thing the Allies did for business was to hand over the running of Naples to Vito Genovese. I don’t know this name. The American tells me he’s a gangster with the Camorra, which I find out later is the Naples version of the Sicilian Mafia.

  There has been a change in R. since we embarked on this business. He is not as likable as before. His charm is now turned on and off as required. It occurs to me that R. has been let loose in the world with the single, burning memory of the shooting of his parents. My unthinking remark that they had been killed precisely because of his acumen must have run through him like a white-hot bayonet. The guilt I have induced has made him ruthless and savage. He has made me his partner. I don’t know why, because now he doesn’t seem to need one.

  30th March 1944, Tangier

  R. has given me my pay of $100. He tells me to keep the money in dollars and only change what I need into pesetas. I tell him I’m going back to being an artist and he says that I have learnt nothing.

  Me: It’s what I have to do.

  R.: I respect that. (He doesn’t at all)

  Me: As you said, we have to think for ourselves.

  R.: Forgive me, but what you are doing is not thinking.

  Me: I want to see how far I can take it.

  R.: Do you think that talent has anything to do with success in the world of art?

  Me: It helps.

  R.: Then you’re a fool.

  Me: You don’t think van Gogh and Gauguin and Manet and Cézanne had any talent … do you know who I’m talking about even?

  R.: The fool always thinks that everybody else is foolish. Of course I know who they are. Those men have genius.

  Me: And I don’t?

  He shrugs.

  Me: And when did you become an art expert?

  He shrugs again and nods at a few people. We are sitting outside the Café de Paris in the Place de France.

  Me: How does a peasant boy from some dusty pueblo outside Almería get to know the first thing about art?

  R.: How does an ex-legionnaire get to be a genius? El Marroquí? Is that how you will sign your work?

  Me: Genius is not selective.

  R.: But who decides? Were Gauguin and van Gogh celebrated in their time?

  Me: What makes you think I want to become celebrated?

  He says nothing but looks at me with intensity and I realize that I am sitting in front of someone who has found his milieu, a man who is utterly confident in his substance and who has seen something in me that I haven’t seen in myself.

  R.: Why do you keep those journals? Why are you writing out your life?

  Me: I only write down what happens and what occurs to me.

  R.: But why?

  Me: This is not for public consumption.

  R.: What is it for?

  Me: It is a record, just like your books of accounts.

  R.: They just remind you of where you are in the world?

  Me: That’s right.

  R.: You don’t think people will read them and think, ‘What an extraordinary man!’?

  I do think this sometimes but I say nothing to him.

  R.: Any man of substance has to have some vanity.

  1st April 1944

  We have our first rest so that R. can work out how the banks operate. We stay in the Residencial Almería. All nationalities are here and a lot of single women working in the hundreds of companies that have set up here since the beginning of the war.

  R. enjoys his money. He has had a suit made for himself by a French Jew in the Petit Soco. He wears this suit to visit the banks. He dines at a restaurant run by a Spanish family in the Grand Hôtel Villa de France. After he’s eaten he takes a short walk down to the Rue Hollande and then back up the hill to the Hotel El Minzah, where he takes his coffee and brandy. His vanity is that he likes to think himself wealthy. It works, because he makes contacts and does business in these places, which are full of black marketeers looking for people like R. to run their goods into Europe.

  I like to sit outside in the sunshine by the Café Central in the medina and watch the chaos of the Soco Chico. At night I find myself drawn to the sleaziness of the port. There’s a Spanish bar called La Mar Chica with sawdust on the floor and an old slut from Málaga who dances passable flamenco. She smells bad, as if her whole biology is faulty and in sweating she is actually purging her system of all its ills.

  26th June 1944

  Since the Allies invaded Normandy we have been working non-stop. R. found a drunken Scot who needs money to pay off gambling debts so we ‘re the new owners of the Highland Queen. A Spaniard, Miguel, who used to work the fishing boats out of Almuñécar, will run the new vessel.

  3rd November 1944

  Sitting off Naples at first light we are attacked. They go for the Highland Queen, which has drifted away. By the time I draw near they have M. on the deck with a gun to his head. I do not understand their language. R. radios for me to open fire, which I do and they all drop to the deck, including M. The pirates’ own boat steams away and I use a British Lee Enfield .303, which is very accurate over distance, to shoot the man at the wheel. They are Greeks. We tow the two boats into Naples. M. has a messy wound in his right leg and we have to leave him there. Our fleet
becomes four.

  15th November 1944, Tangier

  R. is working on renting warehouse space in the port and outside in the city. My role is security, which means having trusted men who will prevent outsiders getting in and insiders from stealing. He tells me that people are afraid of me. I’m surprised. They have heard how I dealt with the Greeks. I realize that it is R. who is creating this myth around me and I am powerless to stop it.

  17th February 1945, Tangier

  R. has acquired warehousing. I go direct to the Legion in Ceuta and recruit veterans who know me. I return with twelve men.

  8th May 1945, Tangier

  The war ended today. The town has gone wild. Everybody is drunk except me and my legionnaires. The suburbs of the city have been filling up with Berbers, Riffians and Tanjawis who have been drawn from the barren mountains and set up homes in chabolas made from crates and pallets. They have nothing to lose and will steal anything. We have to be severe. The beatings have not deterred them. If we catch them now we cut off an ear, again and we split their noses or cut off a thumb and forefinger. If they come back after that we throw them off the cliffs on the outside of town.

  8th September 1945, Tangier

  The Spanish administration is withdrawing from Tangier. R. is momentarily frightened but it seems the city will return to its previous international status and business will not be affected.

  1st October 1945, Tangier

  We have decided to buy property. I have found the perfect house off the Petit Soco, a labyrinthine affair built around a central courtyard in which there is a large fig tree. Light comes from the most surprising places. R. thinks it is the house of a madman. His house is just inside the medina gates off the Grand Soco where a lot of other Spanish live. He alarms me by constantly talking about the thirteen-year-old daughter of a Spanish lawyer, who lives opposite. The father of the girl miraculously becomes our lawyer and it is he who draws up the contracts for buying the property. I pay $1,500 and R. $2,200 and we don’t have to borrow a cent.