The Blind Man of Seville

by Robert Wilson

  10th August 1946, Tangier

  I am hobbling around again with my bad back. I have a lump on the right side of my spine. P. arrives for her sitting and immediately sees my problem. She leaves and returns with her little wooden case of bottles of oils. The bedroom is out of bounds. I lie on the floor. She tries to work on me from the side but it is hopeless. She tells me to shut my eyes. I hear her skirt slide down her legs. She lowers herself until she is astride the backs of my thighs. Only her bare legs touch mine on the outside. I can feel the heat of her above me. She kneads the lump in my back with the tips of her fingers while I take root in the ground.

  She finishes with me. My whole body has been claimed by the floor. She puts her skirt on and tells me to get to my feet. We stand in front of each other. I have myself under control physically, but mentally I am in disarray. She tells me to walk around. I do this and there is no pain apart from a dull ache in my testicles. She tells me to keep walking. Activity is the secret of the healthy back. I must not sit to paint or draw. She leaves. I smoke some hashish until I feel liquid, like olive oil flowing greenly from room to room.

  Ahmed turns up later with a friend. He is mischievous, this boy. I wonder whether C. is putting him up to it as an artistic experiment. Where P. and I are physically so demure, these boys are completely uninhibited. I smoke and they perform for me, their muscular adolescent bodies entwining like rope. They turn their attention to me. The release is explosive and they giggle like children playing around a fountain. Before they leave Ahmed presses a stoned date between my teeth. I lie there with the dreamy sweetness leaching into me, replete and satiated as a slumbering pasha.

  11th August 1946, Tangier

  It has been reported to me that two of my legionnaires have fought over a lover in a hotel room in town. The fight was long and bloody and the floor of the room was as slippery as a butcher’s. One of my legionnaires is dead, the lover is badly wounded and the other legionnaire is in gaol. I ask the police chief if I can see the lover, thinking that this might be an international incident if she dies; he tells me not to worry as the ‘lover’ is a Riffian boy. He shrugs, arches his eyebrows, opens his hands … es la vida.

  I pay a bribe and the legionnaire is released on condition that he leaves the International Zone immediately. I take him to Tetuán and give him some money. On the trip over he tells me he was with the División Azul in Russia and stayed on with the Legión Española de Voluntarios and, after they were disbanded, he joined the SS. He was with the infamous Capt. Miguel Ezguera Sánchez when the Russians stormed Berlin. He shows me a handful of the leading currency at the end — cyanide pellets. He gives me two samples as an odd souvenir and as a novio de la muerte, a bizarre way of thanking me.

  1st September 1946, Tangier

  R. has taken out a loan and bought two more boats. I have been to Ceuta again and recruited more legionnaires. We train them to run the boats and pay them well for it. They like the work. They still have a weapon in their hands and there is adventure, although, because of our reputation for violence, nobody comes near us. The pirates pick on the small fry. My importance to the business is now paramount because trust is a rare commodity. The strong allegiances between legionnaires means we can rely on them and they will not steal. It releases R. and I from the grind of running the ships. R. is investing in property. We are building and I have to secure the construction sites. R. plays the gold and currency markets with the endless stream of cash that comes in from the smuggling operations. I do not understand these markets and have no inclination to involve myself.

  Now that Barbara Hutton, the Woolworth heiress, has taken up residence in the Sidi Hosni Palace, R. tells me that Tangier will be the new Côte d’Azur. He plans to move more heavily into property ‘to build hotels for all the people who will come here to warm their hands on our affluence’. He also tells me that La Rica bought the palace for $100,000 — a quite unimaginable sum for all us Tangerinos to contemplate. The Caudillo, as General Franco is now called, had offered $50,000. He must be sitting in his El Pardo Palace fuming.

  3rd September 1946, Tangier

  P. comes for another sitting. As soon as I open the door I see daring in her eyes, but also amusement and mockery. It is hot in the middle of the afternoon. We start to work in the usual silence until I lose concentration and she walks around the room looking for anything she hasn’t seen before. She finds a lump of hashish amongst the brushes and pots on the table and sniffs it. She knows what it is but has never tried it. She asks to smoke some. I’ve never seen her with a cigarette even, but I charge the hookah for her. Minutes later she’s complaining that nothing has happened. I tell her to be patient and she releases a small moan as I imagine she would at the first sexual contact. Her eyes have distance in them as if she has retreated into her mind. She licks her lips slowly and sensually. I want to put my own mouth there. I drift and watch the light change in the room. P. says: ‘I think you should draw me as I really am.’ This I’ve been trying to do for weeks. In fast fluid movements she stands up, removes her blouse, lets her skirt fall, unharnesses her brassiere and steps out of her underwear. I am speechless. She stands in front of me, her long dark hair on her naked shoulders, her hands resting on the tops of her thighs, framing the triangle of her pubic hair. She slowly puts her fingertips to her shoulders and moves them down over her breasts to the brown pointed nipples, which harden to her touch. Her fingers trace the outline of her body. We are both so engaged in the sensuality of the moment that I think they are my fingers. ‘This is who I am,’ she says. I grab sticks of charcoal and sheets of paper. My hand flashes over them with bold, fluid movements. I must have drawn her six, seven, eight times in a matter of minutes. As I finish, each drawing slips to the floor. She continues to hold herself, utterly beautiful, and naked, with the supreme confidence of complete womanhood and it is that mysterious essence that I am ‘seeing’ and am able to draw. Then, as occasionally happens with hashish, we are in a different moment. She is pulling her clothes back on. She moves to leave and I stand with the drawings at my feet. She looks down at them and then up at me. ‘Now you know,’ she says. Her lips brush mine with the softness of sable and the coolness of water. The lightning touch of the tip of her tongue on mine stays with me for hours.

  20th September 1946

  I have returned from Tarragona to find that P. has gone back to Spain with her mother, whose sister has died. The doctor does not know when they will be coming back. I feel both bereft and oddly free. Ahmed and his friend come round at night and my mood is celebratory. A night of total hedonism comes to pass.

  23rd September 1946

  I show Carlos the charcoal drawings of P. He is astounded. For the first time he says something about my work and the word is ‘Exceptional’. Later as we smoke a hookah together he says: ‘I see the thaw has started. I hope Ahmed and Mohammed have been a help.’ I look as if I don’t know what he is talking about. He says he will send others to my door. ‘I don’t want you to get bored.’ I say nothing.

  30th October 1946

  Still no word from P. and now her father has also left for Spain. The only possible address I have for them is Granada.

  R. has sold a plot of land to an American who wants to build a hotel. One of the conditions of sale is that we do the construction. It is our first major building contract. I want to be involved in the design, but R. insists that I keep my art and work separate. ‘Everybody associated with me knows you as my security adviser … I can’t have you designing the reception as well.’

  23

  Friday, 20th April 2001, Falcón’s House, Calle Bailén, Seville

  Clawing through oblivion was hard work. How could sleep be such toil? He surfaced, blathering like an old unvisited fool in a home for those close to the final terminus. His mobile was ringing, scintillating through the bones of his face. His mouth was as dry as bone meal. The phone ceased. He sank back into the felt grave of drugged sleep.

  Was it hours later or just minu
tes? The mobile’s trilling madness seemed to be tunnelling through his sinuses. He burst out of sleep, flailing. He found the light, the phone, the button. He sucked cool water in over the clod of tongue in his mouth.

  ‘Inspector Jefe?’

  ‘Did you call earlier?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘We’ve just had a report of another body.’

  ‘Another body?’ he said, his brain as thick as wadding.

  ‘A murder. The same as Raúl Jiménez.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In El Porvenir.’

  ‘Address?’

  ‘Calle de Colombia, number 25.’

  ‘I know that address,’ he said.

  ‘The house belongs to Ramón Salgado, Inspector Jefe.’

  ‘Is he the victim?’

  ‘We’re not sure yet. We’ve just sent a patrol car out to investigate. The body was spotted by the gardener from outside the house.’

  ‘What time is it?’

  ‘Just gone seven.’

  ‘Don’t call anyone else from the group. I’ll go on my own,’ he said. ‘But you’d better notify Juez Calderón.’

  The name knifed through him as he hung up. He showered, head hung, arms weakened by the cruelty of Inés’s words from last night. He nearly sobbed at the thought of facing Calderón. He shaved, turning his face interrogatively in the mirror. It would not be mentioned. Of course it wouldn’t. How could something like that be laid out between two men? It was the end of his relationship with Calderón. ‘Things … that you could never even dream of.’

  He put his head under cold water, took an Orfidal, dressed and got into his car. He checked his messages at the first traffic light. There was one timed at 2.45 that morning. He played it back. The message began with some music, which he recognized as Albinoni’s Adagio. Through it he could hear the muffled and desperate squeaking of someone trying to shout or plead through a gag. Furniture knocked against a wooden floor as the music soared, with the violins taking the exquisite pain of loss to new heights. Then a quiet voice:

  ‘You know what to do.’

  A terrible gurgling and rattling sound, that could only have been made by a constricted throat, came through the music. The struggle continued through the adagio’s emotional peaks as the ricocheting furniture became frantic, until there was a crash and an abrupt silence before the violins returned on an even higher note and the message ended.

  Horns blared behind him and he took off down by the river to the next red light. He called the Jefatura and asked to be connected to the patrol car. They still didn’t have access to the house but there was confirmation of a body in the middle of the floor of a large room at the back of the house, which gave out on to the verandah and garden. The body was secured to a chair, which was on its side, and there was a lot of blood on the wooden floor. He told them to find the maid or check the neighbours for spare keys.

  At the Parque de María Luisa he turned away from the river up Avenida de Eritaña, past a police station and the Guardia Civil, which were no more than a few hundred metres from Ramón Salgado’s house.

  There were still no keys by the time he arrived at the house, which gave time for an ambulance to turn up, followed by Calderón and finally Felipe and Jorge from the Policía Científica.

  A neighbour found the spare set of keys at 7.20 a.m. and Falcón and Calderón entered the house, both wearing latex gloves. They went in to the large room at the back of the house with books lining the far wall. In the middle was a desk, which consisted of a sheet of three-centimetre-thick glass supported by two squares of black wood. There was an iMac, which was switched on with the ‘desktop’ showing. On the back wall behind the desk were four high-quality reproductions of the Falcón nudes. Between the desk and this wall Ramón Salgado was lying on his side attached to a high, ladder-backed, armless chair. One wrist was trapped underneath him, the other was secured so that the hand ported down the back leg of the chair. One bare ankle was tied to the front leg of the chair and the other was high up in the air with a length of cord looped around the big toe. The cord ran up to a light fitting in the ceiling that consisted of four spotlights attached to a metal strip. Concealed in the metal strip was a small pulley. The cord ran through that and back down to Salgado’s neck, which looked as if it might be broken. The cord was pulled tight so that Salgado’s head, lolling on his neck, did not make contact with the ground. On closer inspection of the pulley they found it had been jammed by a knot in the cord.

  ‘As soon as the chair went over,’ said Falcón, ‘he was a dead man.’

  Calderón stepped around the blood on the floor.

  ‘What the hell was happening in here before that?’ he asked.

  The Médico Forense, the same as for Raúl Jiménez, appeared at the door.

  This was the first time Falcón had seen someone he knew murdered. He couldn’t get it out of his head, the last occasion he’d seen Salgado, drinking manzanilla in the Bar Albariza. Now, to see him inanimate, his blood all over the floor, the gross indignity of the manner of his death, he winced with guilt at his dislike of the man. He moved further toward the book-lined wall to be able to look into Salgado’s face. He could see that the cheeks were blood-streaked and stuffed full, gagged by his socks. The collar of his shirt was soaked, heavy with blood. The eyes stared up at Falcón and he flinched. In the coagulating blood on the floor he saw what he’d dreaded: a small flap with fine hairs.

  Photographs were taken and Felipe and Jorge began taking samples of blood from every spatter mark on the floor until a path had been cleared for the Médico Forense to kneel by the body. He muttered his comments into his dictaphone — a physical description of Salgado, a catalogue of the injuries sustained and the probable cause of death.

  ‘… loss of blood due to head injuries caused by the flailing of the victim’s head against the sharp edges and corners of the chair back … eyelids removed … evidence of asphyxiation … possible broken neck … time of death: within the last eight hours …’

  Falcón handed Calderón his mobile and played him the message that had been left at 2.45 a.m. Calderón listened and passed it on to the Médico Forense.

  ‘ “You know what to do”?’ Calderón repeated Sergio’s instruction to Salgado, mystified.

  ‘This pulley isn’t something installed by the killer,’ said Falcón. ‘It was already there. Somehow Sergio knew that Salgado had a predilection for auto-strangulation. He was telling him how he could end it all by taking his sexual proclivity beyond the limit.’

  ‘Auto-strangulation?’ asked Calderón.

  ‘To be on the brink of asphyxiation during a sexual experience intensifies the moment,’ explained Falcón. ‘Unfortunately the practice has its dangers.’

  Things … that you could never even dream of, thought Falcón.

  A patrolman came to the door. A policeman from the station down the road wanted to speak to Falcón about a break-in he’d investigated in Salgado’s house two weeks ago. Falcón joined the policeman in the hall and asked where the entry point had been.

  ‘That was the strange thing, Inspector Jefe, there was no evidence of a break-in and Sr Salgado said that nothing had been stolen. He just knew that somebody had been in his house. He was convinced that they’d spent the weekend here.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He couldn’t tell me.’

  ‘Does the maid come in at the weekends?’

  ‘No, never. And the gardener only comes at weekends during the summer to water the plants. Sr Salgado liked his privacy when he was at home.’

  ‘He’s away a lot?’

  ‘That’s what he told me.’

  ‘Did you check the house?’

  ‘Of course. He followed me around.’

  ‘Any weak points?’

  ‘Not on the ground floor, but there’s a room at the top of the house with its own roof terrace and the lock on that door was almost useless.’

  ‘What about
access?’

  ‘Once you were up on the garage roof almost anybody could have made it up there,’ said the policeman. ‘I told him to change the lock, put a bolt on the door … They never do …’

  Falcón went up to the top of the house. The policeman confirmed that the door and lock were the same. The key had come out of the lock and was lying on the floor. The door rattled in its frame.

  In Salgado’s study the medical examination was over and Felipe and Jorge were back on the floor taking blood samples. Falcón called Ramírez, filled him in, and told him to bring Fernández, Serrano and Baena down to El Porvenir. There was a lot of work to do just interviewing the neighbours before they left for work.

  ‘There’s an icon on the computer desktop,’ said Calderón. ‘It’s called Familia Salgado and there’s a card under the keyboard with “Sight Lesson No.3” written on it.’

  It was after midday by the time Calderón signed off the levantamiento del cadáver. It had taken Felipe and Jorge hours to take samples of each individual blood spatter in case one of them belonged to the killer. Salgado was removed, the crime scene cleaners disinfected the room. The chair was bubblewrapped and taken down to the police laboratory. It was 12.45 by the time Falcón, Ramírez and Calderón could sit in front of the iMac and watch Familia Salgado.

  The film started with repeated takes of Salgado coming out of his house with his briefcase and getting into a taxi. These were followed by repeated takes of Salgado getting out of the taxi on the Plaza Nueva and walking down Calle Zaragoza to his gallery. There followed a succession of cuts — Salgado in a café, Salgado in a restaurant, Salgado outside the Bar La Company, Salgado window shopping, Salgado in the Corte Inglés.

  ‘Yes, so … what’s his point?’ asked Ramírez.

  ‘The man spends a lot of time on his own,’ said Calderón.

  The next scene showed Salgado arriving at the door to a house. It was a classic Sevillana door of varnished wood with ornate brass studs. He arrived again and again at this house, which had a very distinctive terracotta façade, with the doorframe and friezes picked out in a creamy yellow colour.