The Blind Man of Seville

steered himself more towards Women. Or not. Maybe I’m just chasing C.B.’s dream and my own. I have worked until the light has faded. I am about to go for dinner with my family. I feel nothing but total desperation.

1st November 1955, Tangier

Last month Sultan Mohammed V was recalled from his exile in Madagascar where the French sent him three years ago. He is due back some time this month. It is the beginning of the end, although you wouldn’t know it to see the expatriates here. They fiddle while Rome burns, but what do they care? I am burning for M., who has been away for months sorting out her divorce. We will all be consumed by fire.

12th January 1956, Tangier

Another son, whom I have decided to call Javier, which is a name I have always liked and has nothing to do with family. For the first time I look down on one of my children and feel, not so much a surge of paternal love, but a wild feeling of hope. This child, with his fists clenched and eyes screwed up, for some reason makes me think that great things are possible. He is the one bright light in my forty-first year.

28th June 1956, Tangier

I lie on my back under the net with Javier on my chest. His legs are braced like a little frog’s, the toes are dug into my belly. My hand covers his entire back. He sleeps and occasionally, unconsciously, kneads my chest on the off chance that there will be some milk. How quickly disappointment enters our lives.

He lies on a blanket as I work. I talk him through the paintings, the ideas, the influences. He slowly brings his hands and feet together as if mocking me with silent, dawdling applause. I look down on him and small cracks open up in me. His soft, tiny body, his large brown eyes, his downy head, all come together and, as with a chisel slipped between my ribs, I am levered open.

27

Sunday, 22nd April 2001, Falcon’s house, Calle Bailen, Seville

Encarnacion’s niece, Juanita, was the first to arrive at 11 a.m. Falcon was still groggy from a heavily drugged sleep. The extra sleeping pill he’d taken at 4 a.m. had as good as interred him in concrete.

He showered, and put on a pair of grey trousers that were so loose at the waist he had to find a belt. The jacket, too, did not hold him at the shoulders. The weight was falling off him. His cheeks looked hollow in the mirror, his eyes sunken and dark. He was turning into his own idea of a madman.

In the kitchen, Juanita moved around on black stacked trainers, which squeaked on the floor. As she tossed her head, a river of black hair jumped off her back. Falcon checked the fridge was well stocked with fino and manzanilla and went down to the cellar to bring up the red wine to drink with the roast lamb.

The cellar was at the back of the house under the studio. He had used this enclosed space as his dark room but had not been in there since Ines had left the house. His developing paraphernalia was still there in the corner. A line of string hung across the room with clothes pegs still attached for drying prints. He missed the excitement of revelation, of the blank sheet slipping into the developer and, slowly emerging from the waters, a face coming to him. Was that what he had in his head? All these images that just needed some developer for the latent memories to find form, come through his consciousness and solve his crux.

The metal wine racks were divided into two. French and Spanish. He never touched the French, which was all expensive stuff bought by his father. But this time he felt celebratory. Those final paragraphs he’d read in his father’s journals last night had sent him to sleep weeping and he felt like toasting the generosity of his dead parent. Their intimacy had been reaffirmed and he found traces of forgiveness for all his father’s depravity and infidelity. He pulled out bottles of Chateau Duhart-Milon, Chateau Giscours, Montrachet, Pommard, Clos-des-Ursules. He took them up to the dining room and laid them on the dresser. On coming up from the cellar for the second time he saw an urn, which he’d never noticed before, in a niche above the door.

The urn was no more than fifteen centimetres high, too small to contain human remains. He put down the bottles and took it to the developing table, turned on the overhead light. The stopper was a simple clay cone that had been sealed with wax. There were no marks on the urn, which was of unglazed terracotta. He cracked open the wax and removed the stopper. He poured some of the contents on to the table. It was yellowish-white and grainy. Some of the larger pieces were quite sharp. He moved them around with his finger. There were some brown pieces in there too and the grounds suddenly struck him as macabre, something like crushed bone. He left it on the table, repelled by it.

Paco and his family arrived first. While the women went upstairs and the children careered about the gallery, Paco brought in a whole jamon, which he’d brought down from Jabugo in the Sierra de Aracena. They found a stand in the dresser and locked the jamon into position. Paco sharpened a long, thin carving knife and began slicing off paper-thin sheets of dark-red, sweet jamon while Javier filled glasses with fino.

Juanita set up a table on the patio and put out olives and other pinchos. Paco added a platter of sliced jamon. Manuela arrived with her party and they all stood on the patio, drinking fino and shouting at the children to stop running. The only adult who didn’t tell Javier he was looking thin was Alejandro’s sister, who was no fatter than a praying mantis herself.

Paco was happy and animated about his bulls, which had all been discharged in perfect condition that morning for tomorrow’s bullfight. The horn wound was still visible in the retinto but he was very strong. He called him ‘Biensolo’ and the only warning he issued to Javier was that the horn tips were unusually upturned and the space between them quite narrow. Going in for the kill was always going to be difficult, even if the head was down low.

They sat down to eat the roast lamb at four o’clock. Manuela noticed the quality of the wine immediately and asked how many more bottles ‘little brother’ was hiding. Javier told her about the urn to divert her attention. She asked to see it and, when the meal was over and Paco was lighting up his first Montecristo, Javier brought it up from the cellar. She recognized it straight away.

‘That’s odd,’ she said. ‘I don’t know how Papa lost Mama’s jewellery and yet this made it all the way here from Tangier.’

‘Ach! Manuela, he never threw anything away,’ said Paco.

‘But this is Mama’s. I remember it. It was on her dressing table for two or three days … about a month before she died. I asked her what it was, because it was different to anything else she had on her dressing table. I thought it might be a potion from that Riffian woman, who was her maid. She said it contained the spirit of pure genius and must never be opened — strange, no?’

‘She was just playing with you, Manuela,’ said Paco.

‘I see you’ve opened it,’ she said. ‘Any genie?’