The Blind Man of Seville

visitors. And the grief was genuine, except that it wasn’t for Pepe Leal. He was almost unknown to these people. He was not a great name. As Javier stood in dry-eyed suffering amongst the weeping and the snivelling, he understood what this grief was for. They were mourning their own losses — youth, prospects, health, talent. The death of Pepe Leal had, temporarily at least, brought an end to possibility. It was for this reason that Javier found it kitsch and he wouldn’t cry with them, and he wouldn’t join them afterwards but went home to his bruised and silent house and the compassion of his enforced leave.

He sat in his study, still in his mac, doodling on a paper with a pencil. He wanted to get out of the city. Biensolo’s horn had punched a hole in the Feria and Falcon would leave the city to bleed over Pepe’s death. He took out a map of Spain, placed the pencil over Seville and span it three times. Each time it pointed directly south, and south of Seville there was nothing apart from a small fishing village called Barbate. But beyond Barbate, across the straits, was Tangier.

The phone rang, startling him. He didn’t answer it. No more condolences required.

The following morning he packed a bag, including the unread journal, found his passport and took a cab to the bus station at the back of the Palacio de Justicia. Five and a half hours later he boarded a ferry in Algeciras to Tangier.

The ferry journey lasted an hour and a half. He spent most of it watching a Moroccan version of himself taking down the details of a group of six boys — illegal immigrants, who were being returned. They were cheerful. Tourists gave them the thumbs up and cigarettes. The policeman was firm but not unkind.

Tangier appeared out of the mist without dredging up a single memory. The long rainy winter had left the surrounding country a deep, lush green, which was not a colour he associated with Morocco. There was something familiar about the cascade of grubby whitewashed houses within the walls of the old town, which fell from the Kasbah at the top of the cliff to the Grand Mosque at the lower end. Beyond the walls the ville nouvelle had pushed further around the bay. He tried to find the old house where his father’s studio had been but it was either hidden amongst the apartment blocks or had been destroyed to make way for them.

The taxi driver took him from the port to the Hotel Rembrandt and tried to charge him 150 dirham, which involved an ugly argument and a dishonourable discharge with half that amount changing hands. The reception, still in its fifties marble splendour, gave him the key to room 422 and he took his own bag up there.

The hotel had suffered in the intervening half-century. There was a glass panel missing from one of the doors in his room. Paint peeled off the metal windows. The furniture looked as if it had taken refuge from a violent husband. But there was a perfect view of the bay of Tangier and Falcon sat on the bed and gaped at it, while thoughts of deracination spread through his mind.

He went out to get some food, knowing they ate early in Morocco, but found the time two hours behind Spain and at 6 p.m. nowhere was open. He walked to the Place de France and then down past the Hotel El Minzah to the Grand Soco and entered the Medina through the market, which brought him out in a street not far from the Spanish cathedral. From there he tried to remember the route to his old family home. He must have walked it a thousand times with his mother. It didn’t come back to him and he was soon lost in the maze of narrow alleys until quite by accident he found himself in front of a house he recognized.

The door was opened by a maid who spoke only Arabic. She disappeared. A man in his fifties wearing a white burnous and white leather babouches came to the door. Falcon explained himself and the man was stunned. It had been his own father who had bought the property from Francisco Falcon. Javier was welcomed in. The man, Mohammed Rachid, showed him around the house, which was structurally exactly the same, with the fig tree still in its place and the strange high room with the window at the top.

Rachid invited Falcon to dinner. Over a vast shared bowl of couscous Javier revealed that his mother had died in the house and asked if any of the neighbours would have been alive at the time. One of the boys was sent out with instructions. He was back in minutes with an invitation to take a coffee next door.

The neighbouring family included an old man of seventy-five, who would have been thirty-four at the time of his mother’s death. He remembered the incident very well because most of what happened took place outside his front door.

‘The unusual thing was that two doctors turned up,’ said the old man, ‘and there was a disagreement as to who was to see the patient. As it happened, the woman, your mother, was already dead and so your father had called his own doctor to deal with the matter.

‘Your father had arrived back from his studio for breakfast to find his wife dead in her bed. In his distress he called the only doctor he knew, which was his own. A German. Your mother’s doctor, a Spaniard, seemed quite satisfied with this and was about to leave when the Riffian woman, your mother’s maid, burst out of the house and announced that her mistress had been poisoned. She held a glass of something in her hand, that she said had come from her mistress’s bedside. Nobody believed her and she took the drastic step of drinking some of the liquid. Your father tore the glass from her grip and with great drama she fell to the ground. There was consternation. The Spanish doctor leapt forward. But it was a sham. She wasn’t dead. There was no poison. And the maid was dismissed as a hysteric.’

Falcon couldn’t control the trembling in his hands, not even by clasping them together. Sweat trickled down his cheek and nausea swooned in his head at this light-hearted recounting of the drama. He staggered to his feet from the cushions on the floor, knocking over the undrunk cup of coffee. Mohammed Rachid stood to help him.

They walked to the taxi rank on the Grand Soco, and a battered Mercedes took him back to the Hotel Rembrandt. Once out of the house and the Medina he calmed down, brought the panic under control. It was just that the old man’s benign recounting of the story had brought it all back to him. The horror of that morning. His mother dead in her bed and this unseemly commotion in the street outside. He remembered it and yet there were still gaps and he hadn’t wanted the old man to continue because … He didn’t know why. He just wanted to get out of there as soon as possible.

Back at the hotel he sank on to the bed in the darkness of the room and looked out to sea over the lights of the town and harbour. He was desolate. His body shuddered under a spasm of loneliness and all his deferred grief at Pepe’s death came to the surface. He fell back, drew his knees up into a foetal position and tried to hold himself together, afraid that if he didn’t do this he would fragment beyond repair. Some hours later he released himself and stripped off his clothes. He took a sleeping pill, scratched the bedclothes over himself and passed out.

The morning was nearly over by the time he woke up. There was no hot water. He showered under cold, which brought his mind back sharply to the inexplicable fact that he was quietly weeping a stream of tears that he was powerless to stop. His hands hung limp at his sides and he shook his head in misery. His body, now, was out of his control.

He walked up to the Place de France and took a coffee at the Cafe de Paris. From there he went to the Spanish consulate and, showing his police ID, asked if there was anybody Spanish still living in Tangier who had been there in the late fifties and sixties. They told him to go to a restaurant called Romero’s and ask for Mercedes of the same