The Blind Man of Seville

P. tells me she is pregnant. I drop tools for the day and we lie in bed together with our throats so full we cannot speak about the wholeness of our future together and the children we will have.

18th June 1948, Tangier

After a civil ceremony at the Spanish Legation and a short Mass in the cathedral P. and I are married. R. arranges for a reception at the Hotel El Minzah. As they have begun to say now, in true Riviera style: le tout Tangier was there. We are surrounded by strangers at our own wedding and leave as soon as it is polite. We disappear under the mosquito netting with a hashish cigarette. We float on each other’s caresses and make love as man and wife for the first time.

She is tired and wants to sleep. I rest my head on her belly and hear the cells doubling within. I have too much energy and get up to work. I think it is an auspicious day so I take up paint and make my first mark on the canvas. It is a start. I become nervous and decide to take a walk through the Medina up towards the Kasbah to stand on the fortifications and look out over the night sea to contemplate my future. I am stopped in the Petit Soco by people who want to congratulate me and buy me a drink. They are insistent. C. is among them. I haven’t seen him for months. I let him buy me a whisky. We talk and joke for a while and I take my leave. C. catches up with me on my way to the Kasbah. He takes my arm and asks why I have been ignoring him, why have I been sending his boys away? He tells me I have frozen up again, that marriage is for lawyers and doctors, that bourgeois living is the enemy of the artist. I remind him who P. is. We have been walking at a leisurely pace and he is now steering me towards a house. He tells me it is a bar and he would like to buy me one last drink. We take a seat in a courtyard and a drink is served. There is a walkway around this courtyard, like a cloister. Without my noticing, candles are lit in this walkway and suddenly young men are loitering there. C. is prattling about the subversion of sensuality, the anarchy of depravity. I don’t listen but look at the muscular delineation of the boys’ thighs as they walk beneath the uncertain light. I am stirred up. C. hands me a cigarette. There is hashish in it which slips into my blood like cream. My lips caress the cigarette. The night folds around me. More boys float past. C. leaves with one of them. They take me by the arms and lead me away. They undress me. They knead me. They massage my resistance away. I collapse to their touch.

I come round with my lips to a boy’s back. I dress quickly. I find the courtyard. There is no sign of C. I walk back home. I strip in the bathroom and scrub at my genitals until they are raw. I stand naked at the end of the marital bed and look down on my sleeping wife. What sort of a man am I?

She stirs under my gaze and her head comes up off the pillow. ‘My husband,’ she says and smiles. She rubs the bed next to her. I lie down. What sort of a man am I?

25

Saturday, 21st April 2001, Falcon’s House, Calle Bailen, Seville

What was the ingredient in sleeping pills that suppressed dreams? Was it the same one that dried the mouth and lined the brain with towelling? Falcon lay in the dark, pressing his fingers to his stiff face like a boxer inspecting last night’s damage. And what about these black holes in the memory? The thought brought back Alicia’s words to him last night.

‘A neurosis is like a black hole in space. It is bizarre and inexplicable. How can something as catastrophic as the collapse of a star happen? How can something that has happened to a human being be so painful that we refuse to remember it, that we collapse that part of the brain?’ she said. ‘There’s more to this analogy, because the collapsed star has such a powerful gravitational pull that it constantly sucks more matter into its negative world. So the neurosis draws all the positive things in your life towards it, consumes them and makes them anti-positive. You’ve described to me some important relationships in your life, with your first serious girlfriend, Isabel Alamo, and your ex-wife, Ines. They were both strong relationships, with passion on both sides, but they could not withstand the gravitational pull of the black hole within you.’

‘With Ines it was just sex. I know that now,’ he’d said.

‘Do you?’ said Alicia. ‘You don’t think that possibly it was you who wanted to maintain it at that level? Sex is manageable. Love is complex.’

‘I know it was sex. That’s why I’m suffering from this illogical jealousy.’

‘Sex normally burns itself out.’

‘And that’s what happened,’ he said. ‘The sex burnt itself out and there was nothing left.’

‘Except that you’re still fascinated by her. You still want her. There’s a part of you that hasn’t broken with her … which is one of the reasons why you can’t talk to the judge about her.’

The cyclical thinking wore him down. He was too tired for it. He got out of bed. The hard thump of his father’s journal hitting the floor brought back last night’s reading. The pity and the disgust he felt for him. He was stunned by his father’s weakness, this pathetic facet to his personality completely unknown to Javier. How strong his mother had been, how passionate to believe in his father and how feebly she’d been repaid by his ambivalence and restless sexuality. He was fragile, this genius, and another person with an instinct for worthlessness.

He dressed in his running clothes and went downstairs. The phone blinked at him. He played back the single message left for him, thinking: nobody calls me, I have a hundred messages at work and none at home. Paco’s voice intruded, telling him that the torero Pedrito de Portugal had twisted his knee in training and that there was now a vacant slot for Monday afternoon on the same day that he was supplying the bulls. He was sure they’d give Pepe a chance.

Falcon ran down to the river and along its dark edge to the Torre del Oro. A runner nodded to him as he ran by and another gave him a half-salute. He’d become a regular since he’d finished with the mad, stationary cycling. These strange channels were opening up. He hadn’t mentioned his ludicrous tears over the film of Ramon and Carmen to Alicia. Where had that sentimentality come from? There was no room for it in his work. The thought stopped him. He was completely out of breath. He’d been unconsciously sprinting to get away from his irritating thoughts. Had that been the reason he’d gone into police work? Did it suit his need for the dispassionate observation of life’s terrible crises? Was that an insight? He ran back home, picked up an ABC and found Salgado’s funeral notice.

By the time he’d stripped for his shower the progress he’d made on the run had evaporated. His back crawled with nerves and a pit had opened up in his stomach that had a terrifying similarity to Alicia’s black hole. All his positive thoughts seemed to be drawn to it and that panicked him, the idea that everything, including his sanity, might collapse into it. He took an Orfidal.

Falcon called his brother before he went out into the pasture to round up the bulls to bring down to Seville for Monday’s bullfight.