The Blind Man of Seville

by Robert Wilson

  The box had a Moorish geometric design on the lid and sides. He couldn’t open it and there was no apparent lock. He worked at it for over an hour until he twisted a small pyramidal piece of wood and the lid sprang open.

  In front of his mother’s jewels, she came back to him so vividly that he put his face to them to see if, after all these years, there would be a trace of her smell. There was nothing. The metals were cold to his touch. He laid out the pieces on the table. The clasp earrings, clusters of silver-black grapes, a silver scimitar brooch set with amethysts, a large agate cube set on a silver band. Just as Manuela had said, there was no gold. The wedding band must have been buried with her.

  He looked down on all the pieces and waited for the sacred memory to come back, the one he’d nearly remembered outside Salgado’s gallery. All that surfaced was the seashell full of rings in his bobbing vision as he sat in the bath while his mother’s soapy hand rippled up and down his tiny ribs.

  Extracts from the Journals of Francisco Falcón

  2nd July 1948, Tangier

  I squirt the oil on to my palette. I stab it with the brush. I coax colours into each other. P. lies on the divan. She is naked. Her arm rests over a pink bolster. Her feet are crossed at the ankle. Her body is fuller in pregnancy. She wears a necklace, which I have pulled tight around her neck (she does not like this) and draped down her soft back. I press the paint on to the canvas. It glides smoothly. The oil is pushing the brush. I am close. I am very close. There is form.

  17th November 1948, Tangier

  P. is huge with pregnancy, her belly is tautly distended, the breasts with their wide brown nipples have parted and lie in swags on her flanks. She smells different. Milky. It makes me nauseous. I haven’t touched milk since I was a boy. Just the memory of its fat coating my mouth and tongue and its cowy fumes filling the cavities of my head makes me gag. P. takes a glass of warm milk before bed. It calms her and helps her to sleep. I can’t sleep with the empty glass in the bedroom. I have not worked since August.

  12th January 1949, Tangier

  I have a son of 3,850 grams. I look at the mashed red face and blast of black hair and am sure we have been given someone’s Chinese baby by mistake. The child’s wails tear through me and I wince at the thought of this massive presence in the house. P. wants to call him Francisco, which I think will be confusing. She says he will be called Paco from the start.

  17th March 1949, Tangier

  … I now run R.’s building projects. I work with the architect, a brooding Galician from Santiago, whose dark ideas need enlivening. I pour light into his sound structures and he flinches from it like a vampire. The American, for whom we’re building the hotel, looks as if he might kiss me.

  20th June 1949, Tangier

  R. married his child bride today. Gumersinda (her grandmother’s name, handed down) has the face and sweet nature of a cherub … He is a different man around her, quiet, respectful, attentive and, I suppose this is it, totally in love with the idea of her. I cannot get so much as a squeak out of her. I rack my brains for topics of conversation — dolls, ballet dancing, ribbons — and feel lupine in her presence.

  1st January 1950, Tangier

  The hotel was finished before Christmas and we celebrated New Year with an exhibition of my abstract landscapes to which le tout Tangier came. I sold everything on the first day. C.B. bought two pieces and pulled me aside with the words: ‘This is great, Francisco, really great. But, you know, we ‘re still waiting.’ I press him on this and he says: ‘The real work. Back to the body, Francisco. The female form. Only you can do it.’

  This afternoon I take one of the charcoal drawings of P. out and tell her what C.B. said. She agrees to model for me. As she undresses I feel like a client with a prostitute and go to the drawing whose simplicity is still magnificent. P. says: ‘Pronto.’ Just as a whore might say. I turn. Her shoulders and upper arms are heavy, her breasts look off to the side, her belly hangs above the bush of her pubic hair. Her thighs are thick, her knees have fallen. She has a bunion on her left foot. The green of her eyes comes swimming towards me like a tide of olive oil. She looks past me to the old drawing. ‘It’s not me any more,’ she says. I tell her to dress. She leaves. I look at the drawing like a man who’s found he can’t perform with the whore. I put it away with the rest.

  20th March 1950, Tangier

  R. calls me at the house to tell me that G. has given birth to a boy. The baby was big and the labour long and arduous. He is very shaken.

  17th June 1950, Tangier

  P. is pregnant. I move the studio out of the house to make more room. I have found a place on the bay with light from the north and which looks across to Spain. I set up a single bed and a mosquito net. I put a canvas up on the wall but no colour comes to mind.

  20th July 1950, Tangier

  C. arrives furious with some young Moroccan in tow. I haven’t seen him (it’s no accident) since my shameful wedding night. He demands to know why I haven’t told him about the new studio. The boy makes tea. We sit and smoke. C. drifts into a stupor and falls asleep. The boy and I exchange glances and set to under the mosquito net. I wake later to find C. in an even greater rage and the boy holding his face where C. has hit him. It seems that C. had quite fallen for this boy and is enraged at finding him behaving like a cheap whore. He won’t be pacified and leaves with the boy holding his nose with both hands and blood in flashes down his white robe. The door shuts. I look to my blank canvas and decide that red is the colour.

  15th February 1951, Tangier

  I have a pink and placid daughter who is a welcome relief after Paco, whose first wails were just the start of a long campaign of relentless demand. Manuela (P.’s mother’s name) sleeps constantly and only wakes to blow little bubbles at the purse of her lips and take a little milk.

  8th June 1951, Tangier

  I run into C. in the Bar La Mar Chica, which has become a late-night haunt of aristocrats and other beauties. They press money on to Carmella, who beguiles the air with the horrors of her armpits, and pay no attention to her partner, Luis, who is a much better dancer. I have not seen C. since the incident with the boy in my studio. Things have not gone well for him. He is drunk and ugly. He looks drained and sucked out. The anarchy of depravity has bitten back and taken great chunks from him. He unleashes a tirade against me in English for the benefit of the onlookers. ‘Behold — Francisco Falcón, artist, architect, contrabandista and legionnaire. The master of the female form. Did you know, he once sold a picture to Barbara Hutton for one thousand dollars? No, not a picture, a drawing. A little scratching of charcoal on paper and a thousand notes fluttered down on his head.’ I sit back. It is harmless, but C. has his audience now and rises to it. He knows they’re the sort who don’t want Luis but Carmella, and he rewards them. ‘But let me tell you about Francisco Falcón and his deep understanding of the female form. He is an impostor. Francisco Falcón knows nothing of the female form, but he is an expert on boys — oh yes, let me tell you of the bums and cocks he has savoured. These are his real speciality and I should know, because he used me as his pimp …’ At this point Luis ventures over and tells him to shut up. I am white with rage but cool to the touch. C. does not shut up but launches into a final bitter tirade which ends on the occasion of my wedding night. Luis grabs him and hauls him from the bar. They do not return. I leave, followed by the audience who assume that, having seen the dirt, they will now smell the blood. Luis has taken C. away and, despite feeling capable of tearing up palm trees, I walk calmly home.

  12th June 1951, Tangier

  C. has been found dead in his rooms in the Medina, his head bludgeoned to an unrecognizable pulp. The boy whose nose he had broken in my studio was found with the body and blood on his clothes. He’s charged with the murder. This is the ultimate end of the sensualist — the kiss no longer satisfies, the touch is too delicate and so in time only a slap will do and then a punch and finally, down comes the cudgel.

  18th June 1951, Tan
gier

  I have decided to spend the summer months here in the studio. The house is in an uproar and stinks of caca and milk. The air is full of idiot talk. I’d rather lie here drowsy beneath my net, the world vague beyond, with only the muezzin calling the faithful to prayer to punctuate my day. His calls seem to come from the belly and resonate in his chest before issuing forth from his mouth — more plaintive than any of Luis’s flamenco. The sound always comes from silence and its eerie spirituality needs no translation. Five calls a day and I’m moved every time.

  2nd July 1951, Tangier

  At one of the rare lunches I attend these days P. asks me what I am doing. I go into a long diatribe about painting the muezzin’s call as an abstract skyscape and she interrupts. She has heard malicious gossip of depraved goings on. It seems that the proceedings in the law courts have penetrated her baby world. She probes and I am like a live oyster whose cold clammy world winces under the intrusions of her teasing blade. I ask her to visit my studio and see the work I am doing. I convince her of my ascetic life. She is satisfied that I am serious. I am such a monster … or at least so Paco thinks. He giggles and clasps my huge head as I feed on his tiny, tight belly. He knows no fear, this little fellow.

  5th July 1951, Tangier

  I wake up in a stupor with some Mohammed or other lying by my side and P. knocking on the door down below. I send him up to the roof and let her in. I make tea. She asks to see my work. I am evasive because I have nothing to show. She touches me in a way that lets me know that she has not come here with this in mind. I am spent after a whole afternoon at play and I am dirty, too. She becomes irritable as I procrastinate and spills scorching mint tea on my bare foot, so that I hop about and the boy on the roof lets out a blurt of laughter, which I hope she doesn’t hear. She leaves soon after.

  26th August 1951, Tangier

  I glance back over the years, flicking through these journals, and am aghast at the revelations. I now hope they will never be read. If I attain any sort of fame from my work and these diaries come to light, what will it do to the classification of my genius? They have become confessions, not diaries. These aren’t the noble notes one would expect of an exhausted master but rather the tawdry jottings of a depraved rascal. I think I must be smoking too much and not spending enough time in lively company, although where I should find that I don’t know. That American Paul Bowles I mentioned earlier has had some success with a book which I haven’t troubled myself to read. I try to find him, but he’s always away. I go to Dean’s Bar, but it is full of drunks and reprobates with not one idea between them. The rest are tourists who have other things to think about. I have failed to keep up with my contacts from B.H.’s world. C.B. is not here. I give up on society.

  I hear from C.B. that he has sold two of my pieces to wealthy women in Texas. The cheque is substantial, he tells me, but I had been hoping for a space in MOMA. He tries to pacify me by saying that Picasso once told him that ‘Museums are just a lot of lies,’ which is easy to say when you hang in the best of them in every country of the Western world.

  17th October 1951, Tangier

  R. tells me that G. is pregnant again. He is both happy and terrified after the last occasion. I am amazed how this monument to ruthlessness can be reduced to the softness of dough. He quivers at the memory of her suffering. When I tell P. about the pregnancy she looks at me with longing and I realize why she came to my studio in July.

  8th February 1952, Tangier

  R. has sold all our boats to various competitors and they have paid the top market price. He has also emptied the warehouses and rents them out to the same people who bought the boats. I am astonished, but he assures me that the smuggling business has peaked, that negotiations are underway between the US and Spain. The Americans want to build bases to counter the perceived Soviet threat. Franco will let them in because he wants to stay in power. There will be a trade link.

  20th April 1952, Tangier

  G. went into labour and it was much worse than before. The complications were such that the doctors even asked R. who they should save, wife or child. He chose G. because he could not live without her. Having decided this G. rallied and the baby was delivered, apparently unscathed. This brush with near tragedy brings P. and I closer and we go back to the old days and rediscover some of our passion. She comes to the studio in the afternoons and I work and lie down with her. The paintings are better than before, but they still haven’t recaptured that lost moment.

  18th November 1952, Tangier

  At a reception in the Hotel El Minzah I meet Mercedes, the Spanish wife of an American banker. Her husband had bought my work at C.B.’s gallery in NY and so she knows me like an old friend. After her years in America, she comes across as very modern, not the typical Spanish woman from across the straits. I ask her to my studio and she arrives the next day in a chauffeur-driven Cadillac, which she sends away. I make tea. She braces herself against the verandah rail and looks out to sea. She has a boyish figure, narrow hips, small breasts and slim muscular legs. I show her some abstract Tangier landscapes I have been doing, which she notices have cubist elements from Braque floating in blazing bands of colour, as she’s seen in Rothko’s work in NY. I am taken with her intelligence. We are drawn to each other and it isn’t long before I find out what that taut little body, or rather, mind, is capable of. There is a wickedness in the workings of it. As she reaches her moment she goes into frenzy where nothing else matters (certainly not me, on whom she is pounding her pelvis) and she howls like a she-wolf. We come crashing to the floor, where she lies, eyes glazed, cheeks flushed, lips white and a vein in her neck, thick as cord, thundering with dark carnal blood. It’s invigorating to find such sophistication shot through with base animal desires. There’s danger here, too. M. seems capable of taking me across boundaries to zones where there are no limits. It is an irony not lost on me that here we are in Tangier, captives of the International Zone of Morocco, in the cockpit of Africa, where a new kind of society is being created. A society in which there are no codes. The ruling committee of naturally suspicious European countries has created a permissible chaos in which a new grade of humanity is emerging. One that does not adhere to the usual laws of community but seeks only to satisfy the demands of self. The untaxed, unruled business affairs of the International Zone are played out in its society’s shunning of any form of morality. We are a microcosm of the future of the modern world, a culture in a Petri dish in the laboratory of human growth. Nobody will say, ‘Oh, Tangier, those were the days,’ because we will all be in our own Tangier. That is what we have been fighting like dogs for, all over the world, for the last four decades.

  15th March 1953, Tangier

  R., having sold all our smuggling boats, has bought a yacht. A plaything for him to bob around on and look successful. I could probably afford one myself with the money from the partnership and the sales I am making through M.’s contacts in NY, but it would give me no satisfaction. I am nearly forty years old and ostensibly successful, but I am conscious of my problem. My mind drifts from it at the first opportunity. None of my fortune is as a result of my own doing. R. has structured my entire life in no less a way than the Legion did. P. was my muse, without her the charcoal drawings would never have been done. M. has built me a reputation amongst the Americans so that I sell well in NY. But I am a shell. Knock into me and my emptiness booms.

  2nd April 1953, Tangier

  The success of Paul Bowles has attracted a crowd of American writers and artists to our little Utopia. I met a man called William Burroughs who, it seems to me, has done nothing of any note except to carry a massive reputation before him. He shot his wife in Mexico in a William Tell stunt, in which he missed the glass she’d placed on her head and the bullet drilled a hole in her brain. The American who tells me this story does so in a state of appalled amusement, as if this is something from a film he’s just seen. I look across the grubby floor of the Bar La Mar Chica to where W.B. sits and am prepared to be fas
cinated by the wife killer. Instead I see a bank clerk, just like the ones employed in town, except this one has the skull of the figure in Edvard Munch’s Scream. When we meet I tell him this and he says: ‘How that bastard knew what was coming, we’ll never know. Shit. And I tell you, that’s how I see the sky sometimes … just like that. You know … like blood. Like fucking blood.’ His magnetism lies in his instant access to savagery. He unleashes this on those around him he does not like, but I think he reserves the real ferocity for himself. He is like a howling animal and I think of that mad boy R. saw years ago in the village in the sierra, collared and chained up outside. It brings me closer to understanding why I put pen to paper.

  28th June 1953, Tangier

  I have three lives. With P. and the children I am decorous. The parameters are set for little minds. I am mild and approximately cheerful while my chest gapes with shuddering yawns. I look at P., the perfect mother, and wonder how she was ever my muse. I have my life in the studio. The work proceeds. The Tangier landscapes have developed into something different. Vast red skies bleed into a massive black continent and in between is smeared a momentary civilization. The work is broken up by a stream of boys who drop by to earn a few pesetas. My third life is with M., my society companion and deviant.

  23rd October 1953, Tangier

  C.B. invites me and P. to an evening with B.H. I am not happy about this one life bleeding into the other. We go to the Palace Sidi Hosni and as usual wait for our hostess amidst her fabulous wealth. P. is bored and C.B. takes her off and, being the man he is, manages to charm her even with his splintered Spanish. B.H. arrives as I am about to propose leaving. She works her way round to us and, on meeting P., is seized by an idea. She leads us off to the room guarded by the towering Nubian and it’s only as we enter that I realize that I have never told P. of the sale of the drawing. B.H. takes her straight to the piece in its pride of place next to Picasso. P. blinks at it as if she’s seen one of her children hurt. I know from the green look that finds its way to me that she considers this a betrayal of trust. B.H., who has had some drink, is unaware of this pain and it is C.B. who moves us on. On the way home P. is silent as she shimmers through the Kasbah, her heels clopping on the cobbles. I shamble behind, lying to her back like a beggar who’s been refused some change.