P.: They knew exactly where we were. My father had told them and he had also told them not to tell anyone answering to your description, coming from Tangier, asking questions about his daughter.
Me: I don’t understand.
P.: He didn’t want me to see you ever again.
Me: Was it something to do with me … I mean, … those drawings? Did he hear about them? That you had stood before me …?
P.: No. That was private between you and me.
Me: So what happened? I can’t think how I could have crossed him. We only ever talked about my back.
P.: My father speaks Arabic.
Me: Of course he does, he was in Melilla. Where is your father … I must talk to him.
P.: My father is dead.
Me. I am sorry.
P.: He died six months after my mother.
Me: You have been suffering.
P.: I have had eighteen months of sorrow. It has aged and hardened me.
Me: You still look as you did. You don’t wear it in your face.
P.: I was telling you that my father spoke Arabic and because he spoke some of the Riffian dialects he was asked if he would spend a morning a week treating poor people in the chabolas on the outskirts of town. The American woman, ‘La Rica’, Sra Hutton had given money for medicines and food. He volunteered. He came across the usual things in malnourished people, but he also came across a surprising number of mutilations. Ears missing, fingers and thumbs cut off, nostrils split. Nobody would tell him how these injuries were incurred until he treated a woman who had been there the week before with her son, who had lost an ear. She was covered in shame at having to be handled by a man but was in such pain she had to succumb. He asked her about her son and why nobody would tell him what had happened. ‘They won’t talk because it is your people who are doing this,’ she said. My father was stunned. She told him how these boys have to steal because they are starving and about the injuries they have to sustain to feed their families and the deaths that have resulted. My father was appalled and asked who was doing this. ‘The men who are guarding the warehouses.’
I am silent. The inside of my body is frozen. My chest is an ice cave through which the coldest wind is blowing. My muse has returned to tell me why she can never speak to me again.
P.: A boy with an infected wound was brought back to the surgery. This was unusual but he’d touched my father by his courage and his acceptance of pain without complaint. The boy recovered and my father employed him around the house. One lunchtime he disappeared. We searched the house. He was cowering in the back of the laundry. He couldn’t speak except to ask, ‘Has he gone? Has he gone?’ His terror was pure. We asked him who he was afraid of and he would only say: ‘El Marroqui.’ It happened again the next day. My father looked in his consultation book and his only patients that day were Sr Cardoso, who was eighty-two, and … you.
The next day he took the boy to the Petit Soco. You took your usual seat at the Cafe Central. And the boy told my father that you were the one — El Marroqui.
I cannot move. The green eyes are on me. I know that this is the crux. I know it because life is tearing past as if both our lives are being compressed into this one moment. I decide I will ignore it. I will lie. Just as I have lied to all of them — C.B., the Queen of the Kasbah, the Contesse de Blah and the Duque de Flah. I will lie. I am Francisco Falcon. No. He is Francisco Falcon. I no longer exist.
P.: Were you responsible for what happened to those people?
The green eyes are willing me, beseeching me and I know that I am lost. I look into my hands, which contain life’s water, and see it bubble and wink, mocking me, as it leaks through my fingers.
Me: Yes, I did those things. I am responsible.
She doesn’t leave. She looks into me and I realize I have done the right thing.
P.: My parents made discreet enquiries about the company you worked for. My father found out that you were a legionnaire and a contrabandista and that it was your capacity for violence which inspired fear in all your enemies and competitors. They decided to send me away. It was a coincidence that my aunt became sick.
Me: But why force you to leave? Why not just forbid you to see me?
P.: Because they knew I was in love with you.
She finally sits down and asks for a cigarette. She can hardly hold it. I light it for her and put it in her fingers. She stares into the floor. I tell her everything. I tell her about ‘the incident’ (or nearly everything about it) that drove me out of my family home to join the Legion. I tell her what I did in the Civil War, in Russia, at Krasni Bor. I tell her why I left Seville, what happened in Tangier … everything. I tell her about my desolation. I tell her how she fits Inside me, how she is my structure. She listens. The sky grows dark. The wind gets up. The boy brings more mint tea and a candle that wavers in the draught. There is only one thing I don’t talk about. I tell her every hideous thing, but I don’t tell her about the boys. That is not something for a woman’s ears. The admissions have been of such staggering enormity that to introduce depravity would put me beyond redemption. I finish by talking about the work. How I have stopped the work. How I have been unable to progress beyond the drawings. How I need her to open my eyes again. I ask her if she remembers her last words to me on the day we made the drawings. She shakes her head. I tell her: ‘Now you know.’
As I write this she lies on the bed, a vague form beneath the mosquito netting. A candle with a tall spear of flame burns by her bed. She sleeps. I reach for the charcoal and paper.
3rd June 1948, Tangier
