He tried to remember the details of Alejandro’s sister’s diet and hung up. He went into the storeroom where he’d discovered the journals and sorted through all the boxes. He found nothing. The only thing he came across that he hadn’t seen before was a roll of five canvases which, as he opened them up, released a small diagram that fell among the boxes. He laid the canvases out in the studio but didn’t recognize them. They weren’t his father’s work. Layers and layers of acrylic paint giving a luminous effect, as of moonlight scarfed by clouds. He rolled them up again.
It was dark by now and he collapsed to the floor, realizing he’d forgotten to eat and forgotten to go to Salgado’s funeral. He sat against the wall, his hands dangling between his knees. He was becoming an obsessive. The mess of his father’s studio seemed to have got inside his head. His brain was as convoluted as a tangle of fishing line. He called Alicia and ran into her answering machine. He left no message.
He pulled a book out of the bookcase and realized that there was considerable space behind. His obsession resurfaced. He worked his way up and down the shelves until behind the art books he found a wooden box he recognized from his mother’s dressing table. He even remembered his little fingers amongst the jewels, a treasure chest from an adventure book.
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 Falcon
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
