3rd July 1946, Tangier

After endless negotiations I have persuaded Pilar to come and sit for me, but a boy arrives at lunchtime to say she cannot come. In the late afternoon Carlos Gallardo comes to visit. He is another of those ‘fellow artists’, but he is not Antonio Fuentes. There is none of the ascetic about him. He is louche. He drinks heavily and usually in the Bar La Mar Chica, which was where we met. We have smoked hashish together and looked at each other’s work without comment.

He has brought a Moroccan lad with him who carries his groceries, which he leaves at the door. We sit on low wooden chairs in one of the dark cool rooms away from the heat of the patio. My houseboy puts a hookah between us and fills it with a tobacco-hashish mix. We smoke. The hashish does its work and I feel pleasant. Desultory thoughts float into my mind like aquarium fish. C.’s boy is standing by his chair with one of his brown feet resting on the other. He has had his hair shorn, probably by C., against lice. He is smiling at me. He can’t be more than sixteen years old. I reset my vision and realize that C. has his hand up the boy’s robe and is caressing his buttocks. I didn’t know this about C. It does not disgust me. I make some comment. ‘Yes,’ he says,’ of course I like women, but there’s something inhibiting about sex with a woman. I put it down to us Spanish and our mothers. But with these local youths it’s so normal, something that has always happened and to which no stigma attaches. I feel free to indulge. I am a sensualist after all. You must have seen that from my work.’ I muster some reply and he continues: ‘Whereas you, my friend, are frozen solid. Bleak and chill. I hear the wind whistling through your canvases. You should be thawing in this heat, but I can’t see it. Perhaps you should take a boy for some guilt-free sensuality.’ We smoke some more and my skin feels like velvet. C. says, ‘Take Ahmed to your room now and lie down with him.’ The idea sends a bolt of electricity through me. I find I am not appalled by the suggestion, quite the opposite. The boy comes over. I can barely speak but manage to turn down the offer.

5th July 1946, Tangier

P. comes with her mother. The heat is not so smothering and we sit in the patio under the fig tree. We talk. The women’s eyes dart about like birds in a bush. I feel like a large cat planning dinner. P.’s mother is here to find out about me …

Because R.’s company, in which I am a partner, is one of the best known in Tangier’s Spanish community, she is soon eating out of my hand as if it is chock-full of millet. I keep away from all the dull socializing and am not known. Were she to go down to the chabolas on the outskirts of town they would run away in fright at the mention of El Marroqui. But P.’s mother lives between her house and the Spanish cathedral so I am safe and I cannot see her ever straying into the Bar La Mar Chica.

She asks to see my work and I politely refuse, but relent under pressure. P. stands transfixed in front of the monochrome shapes and patterns while her mother rushes around trying to find something she understands. She settles on the drawing of a Touareg, which at least has some colour in it. I sign it and give it to her and ask to paint a portrait of her daughter. She says she will raise the matter with her husband.

They leave and moments later there is a fierce knocking on the door. It is the young lad who came round with C. the other day, Ahmed. He is eating a peach and the juice is dribbling down his chin and is smeared across his cheeks. He licks his lips. It is not subtle but it is effective. I haul him off the street and follow him, trembling, through the endless rooms and passages. He understands something of the urgency and runs kicking up his robe with his bare feet. By the time I arrive at the bedroom his caramel body lies beneath the mosquito netting. I fall on him like a demolished building. Afterwards I give him a few pesetas and he goes away happy.

3rd August 1946, Tangier

Trust has been established between myself and the doctor and P. is allowed to visit the house on her own to sit for her portrait. The sessions take place in the afternoon when the surgery is closed and can only last an hour. It is very hot. I have to work in one of the rooms close to the patio for the light. I am drawing. She sits on a wooden chair. I am close to her face. She does not flinch. We do not speak until I look at her hands. They rest in her lap, small, long-fingered, delicate instruments of pleasure.

Me: Who taught you to massage?

P.: Why do you think anybody taught me?

Me: The expertise in your fingers strikes me as coming from instruction rather than trial and error.

P.: Who taught you to paint?

Me: I had some help on how to look at things.

P.: I was taught by a gypsy woman in Granada.

Me: Is that where you’re from?

P.: Originally, yes. My father was a doctor in Melilla for some years before we came here.

Me: And your father allowed you to mix with the gypsies?

P.: I am quite independent, despite what my parents might want you to think.

Me: You ‘re allowed out?

P.: I do as I please. I am twenty-three years old.

The boy arrives with mint tea. We lapse into silence. I work on her hands and then we drink the tea.

P.: You draw figuratively but paint abstracts.

Me: I teach myself to see with the drawings and interpret it with the paint.

P.: What have you seen today?

Me: I have been looking at structure.

P.: How well am I built?

Me: With delicacy and strength.

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