The Blind Man of Seville

Falcon drifted back to the window as the personal reentered their dialogue. He wondered if he could do it now — salvage the situation. If he could talk about his father in this way, why not Ines? Why not bare his neck to this man? There was a knock at the door. Fernandez put his head in.

‘Inspector Ramirez has found a trunk up in the attic,’ he said. ‘The lock’s been sawn through and the dust on the surface has been disturbed. Felipe is looking at it for prints.’

They got the trunk down to the landing after Felipe had declared it clean. It was heavy. They opened it up and parted the brown paper covering the contents — books and old catalogues, copies of a magazine called the Tangier-Riviera, manila envelopes packed thick with photographs. Slotted down the sides were four reels of magnetic tape of the sort used on the old reel-to-reel tape recorders. There was a single can of film but no camera or projection equipment. There was a diary whose first entry was on 2nd April 1966 and which ran out after twenty pages with a final entry on 3rd July 1968.

Calderon left for a meeting when he saw that the trunk offered no fast solutions. They fixed a meeting for midday on Monday. As Calderon left the house he was confronted by four journalists who were too well informed to be ignored. He held an impromptu press conference in which one of the journalists said that the media was dubbing the killer El Ciego de Sevilla. To which he automatically replied that there was no logic in calling the killer the blind man when, in fact, he was just the opposite.

‘So you can confirm that the killer cuts the eyelids off his victims?’ asked the journalist, and the press conference was prematurely terminated.

Falcon and Ramirez split the workload. Ramirez was happy to take Fernandez down to the gallery on Calle Zaragoza when he heard that Salgado had a blonde, blue-eyed secretary called Greta. Baena and Serrano continued the search of the house with Felipe and Jorge while the trunk was taken down to the study and the contents laid out on the desk. A further search of the attic uncovered no camera or projection equipment, but there was an old reel-to-reel tape recorder which Felipe managed to get working.

The diary seemed the obvious place to start but was very badly kept up. The first entry showed why Salgado had started it. He was happy. He was getting married to a woman called Carmen Blazquez. Falcon, who’d never known that Salgado had had a wife, grunted as he read the words — Salgado already proud, pompous and unctuous at the age of thirty-three. ‘Francisco Falcon has done me the great honour of agreeing to be my testigo. His genius will make the occasion one of the talked-about events of the Seville social calendar.’ It was no wonder he hadn’t kept up the entries. The man had nothing to say. The only time he was moving was when he talked about his new wife. Then, all the artifice was stripped away and he wrote in unembellished prose. ‘I love Carmen more with every day that passes.’ ‘She is a good person, which makes her sound dull but it is her goodness which affects everyone who meets her. As Francisco says: “She makes me forget the uglinesses of my life. When I’m in her company I feel as if I have only ever been a good man.”’

Falcon tried to imagine his father saying those words and decided they were Salgado’s invention. He opened up the manila envelope of photographs and found one of Carmen dated June 1965 in which she looked to be in her late twenties. There was nothing striking about her face except her eyebrows, which were short, dark and completely horizontal with no arch to them at all. They gave her an earnest, concerned look, as if she would look after her husband well.

Another entry dated 25th December 1967: ‘Last night before dinner I was taken back to childhood. My parents always allowed us one present on Christmas Eve and Carmen has given me the best gift of my life. She is pregnant. We are deliriously happy and I get quite drunk on champagne.’

The diary charted Carmen’s uneventful pregnancy, which was intercut with stupefying details of successful art shows and sale values. Salgado mentioned the purchase of the tape recorder, which he’d bought intending to record Carmen’s singing, which he never managed to do due to her self-consciousness in front of the microphone. Salgado was also entranced by Carmen’s pregnant belly, which was enormous. He even asked her if she’d let Francisco Falcon draw her. She was appalled at the suggestion. The final entry read: ‘The doctor has agreed to allow me to record my child’s first cry in the world. They are bemused by the request. It seems that men are never present at the birth. I ask Francisco where he was for the birth of his children and he says he can’t remember. When I ask if it was at Pilar’s bedside he is stunned by the notion. Am I the only man in Spain to be fascinated by such a momentous occasion? And Francisco, an artist of such genius, I would have thought he would find birth as compelling as inspiration.’

A strange note to end on. Falcon counted back the months and reckoned that if Carmen had announced her pregnancy at the end of December then the baby should have been born in July. He went through the contents of the trunk to see if there was a record of the child’s birth. In a stained blue folder was his answer — Carmen Blazquez’s death certificate dated 5th July 1968. The medical report beneath it detailed a catastrophic birth marred by high blood pressure, fluid retention, septicaemia and finally death for both mother and child.

The thought of the padlocked trunk high up in the attic of Salgado’s house took on a terrible poignancy for Falcon. The loneliness of the man — the solitary diner, the forlorn shopper, the desolate hanger-on — whose whole life had been dedicated to the genius of Francisco Falcon, walked the streets with his only possibility of happiness boxed away in a dry dusty place.

He turned to the next photograph from the manila envelope under the horizontal eyebrows of the undemanding Carmen Blazquez and there they were on their wedding day. Ramon and Carmen holding hands. Their whole happiness contained in that pocket. It was astonishing for Falcon to see Salgado so young. The subsequent thirty- five years had ruined his looks. The misery had been a weight he carried in his face.

The stack of tapes demanded Falcon’s attention, but he continued to flip through the photographs until he came to a shot of his father sitting with Carmen in a garden, the two of them laughing. It was true of his father that he’d always been drawn to ‘good’ women. His mother, Mercedes … even the eccentric Encarnacion was tolerated because she was ‘a good woman’. He carried on through the stack of photographs and realized that this was Salgado’s entire collection of shots of Carmen. They were all different sizes and taken with a variety of cameras. Salgado must have systematically removed her from the photographic record of his life.

The tapes. The thought of the tapes made his hands sweat. He didn’t want to hear what was on those tapes. His hands trembled as he threaded the tape through the heads. He played it and was relieved to find that it was completely silent.

The second tape burst straight into a conversation between Salgado and Carmen. He was imploring her to sing. She was refusing. Her heels paced a wooden floor while Salgado pleaded with her, right down to begging her for something that he could remember her by if she happened to die before him. The conversation bled into classical music, followed by some flamenco and Falcon fast-forwarded to the end.

The third tape started with Albinoni’s Adagio. There followed other stirring pieces by Mahler and Tchaikovsky. He barely managed to feed the fourth tape through the heads, his hands were so slippery. He pressed ‘play’ and heard only the ethereal hiss, but then came everything that he’d dreaded. There was screaming and exhortation and panic. There was the rushing of feet on hard floors, steel trays clanging on tiles, tables and screens toppling,