The Blind Man of Seville

‘I’ll try, of course. I am sure my investigation can do without me for a few hours.’

‘You always help me,’ he said.

‘You don’t need me any more,’ said Javier.

‘I do. It’s important to me.’

‘And how is the fear?’

‘Still the same. I am consistent in that. My level is fixed … but higher than most,’ he said.

‘It would interest me,’ said Javier, suddenly seeing the opportunity, ‘to know how you control your fear.’

‘No different to the way you do when you confront an armed man.’

‘I was thinking of a different fear to that.’

‘It’s all fear, whether you’re about to die or someone says: Boo!’

‘You’re an expert,’ said Javier, laughing, and grabbing Pepe by the neck, unable to restrain his affection for the boy. Maybe this was the wrong thing to talk about, he thought, I’ll just infect his mind with my idiocies.

‘Tell me what’s bothering you, Javier,’ he said. ‘As you say, fear is my speciality. I’d like to help.’

‘You’re right … we’re afraid of these outside things … You fear the bull, I fear the armed man. They’re both unpredictable. But they are only moments of fear. We feel terrible apprehension, confront them and they are gone.’

‘There you are. You know as much as I do. Controlling fear is in your training, in your willingness to confront, in the inevitability of it.’

‘The inevitability?’

‘You are bound by the state to deal with dangerous criminals on behalf of the citizens of Seville. I am bound by a contract to fight a bull. These are inevitable responsibilities that we must not shy away from or we will never work again. Inevitability helps.’

‘Your fear of failure is greater than your fear of the bull.’

‘If you think of all those soldiers who fought in all those wars with some of the most destructive weaponry known to man … how many of them were cowards? How many ran away? Very few.’

‘Perhaps that means we have an enormous capacity for accepting fate?’

‘Why try to control the uncontrollable? I could give up being a torero tomorrow because I fear injury and death too much and yet I’ll still cross crowded streets, drive on the roads, and fly in aeroplanes, where I could easily meet an inglorious end.’

‘So, it’s inevitable. What about the willingness to confront?’ said Javier. ‘That sounds like bravery to me.’

‘It is. We are brave. We have to be. This is not fearlessness. It is recognition. It is the admission of weakness and the willingness to overcome it.’

‘You talk about this a lot?’

‘With some of the brighter toreros. It’s not a profession known for its great thinkers. But we all have to deal with it, even the greatest of us. What did Paquirri say when an interviewer asked him what was the most difficult thing to do when confronting a bull? “To spit,” he said. Nada mas.’

‘The first time I had to face an armed man a senior officer said to me before I went in: “Remember, Falcon, courage is always retrospective. You only have enough of it once you’ve been through it.”’

‘That is true,’ said Pepe, ‘which is why we can talk, Javier.’

‘But now I’m in the grip of a different fear,’ said Falcon, ‘one that I’ve never come across before. I’m living in a permanent state of fear and the worst of it is that there is no armed man and no bull. It doesn’t matter how brave I am, because I have nothing to confront … except myself.’

Pepe frowned. He wanted to help. Falcon brushed the problem away.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘I should never have mentioned it. I was just wondering if there were any tricks of the trade, a way in which toreros, who live with fear, dupe themselves into thinking …?’

‘Never,’ said Pepe. ‘We never cheat ourselves on that score. It’s one of the great ironies. You need the fear. You welcome it, even though you hate it, because it’s the fear that helps you to see. It’s the fear that will save you.’

Extracts from the Journals of Francisco Falcon

7th July 1956, Tangier

I should be more concerned with what is going on. I still have coffee with R. in the Cafe de Paris and all the talk is of an independent Morocco and what will happen to us, the lotus eaters, in Tangier. (Perhaps it is only I who am the lotus eater and everybody else is firmly in a tax haven.) But I don’t care. I am floating. I rarely need to smoke because my natural state seems to be so light and feathery. My studio, with Javier mewling (never wailing), is ambrosial. I frighten myself because my mind suddenly turns on me late at night, as my pen hovers over this journal, and pokes me — it says: ‘You are happy.’ I think this and immediately the contentment is ravaged by uneasy thoughts. No word from M. still. There’s tension in the Medina, as if the narrow alleys are filled with gasoline vapour — a spark, and the whole lot will go up. The people sense independence. They are on the brink of it and are convinced it will mean that they will be as free and wealthy as the expatriates are. The slowness of political progress brings their anger and frustration to the surface.

18th August 1956, Tangier

Riots in the Medina, which spill out into the Grand Soco. No European or American ventures out on to the streets. Windows are smashed and shops looted. At night the women ululate, a noise that Europeans find terrifying. It is animal, potentially savage, like laughing hyenas or vixens on heat. In the morning the streets are filled with men and boys singing the Istiqlal (independence) song and giving the three- fingered salute (Allah, the Sultan, Morocco). Portraits of Mohammed V bob along on a tide of humanity and then it