He gave up on trying to find someone to explain ‘the incident’ from his father’s journals. He found a cheap hotel with a bar. He drank beer and ate albondigas in a crowd of Moroccan men, under a pall of cigarette smoke. He engaged in their small talk so as not to slip back into more despairing thoughts.
That night he was woken by a dream, a terrible dream, which he had to walk out of himself in his small room. The dream had been of nothing, of a terrible whiteness — an amorphous, consuming blankness that contained no memories, no past, no present and no future. It was the end of time and it seemed to want him.
Extracts from the Journals of Francisco Falcon
12th January 1958, Tangier
I come back home early to take Javier out for a little treat on his second birthday but P. and he are not at home. The other children are at school. There is only the one maid at home, a Riffian woman, who speaks some impenetrable Berber dialect that only P. understands. I am fuming and go back to the studio and paint a canvas with terrible slashing strokes of red, as if I’m carving my way through the ranks of the enemy. The result is a work of terrifying energy, of appalling violence such as I’ve only ever committed on the battlefield. I burn it and watching the sickle slashes of paint being consumed by fire gives me near-sexual pleasure.
15th July 1958, Tangier
R. has turned up at the studio (he’s never been before). G. is pregnant again and he’s in a terrible state. He waits for my admonishment. I say nothing and he calls me a true friend. The doctor had been savage with him. He tells me over and over that it was an accident so that I stop believing him. ‘This time I will lose her,’ he says, and I see his passion for her, a passion I used to have for P. and now have for Javier. I’m moved and try to calm him. She will have to stay still for the entire pregnancy, he says, and for the first time I think there’s something else at play here. He seems scared by the fact that she can’t be moved and when I press him on this he suddenly says: ‘We should all leave and go back to Spain.’ I think he has a problem in his business, but he won’t be drawn on the matter.
25th September 1958, Tangier
I have been naive. I should have known that, while R. can conduct himself in business with ruthlessness and tact, when it comes to affairs of the heart he is a small boy, incapable of objectivity and subject to the whim of his, still youthful, passions. I now know why he couldn’t speak to me before. He was ashamed. It seems amazing living in Tangier, where the orgies of Ancient Rome appear as staid as English tea parties, that a grown man is capable of shame. R. is an island of virtue in a sea of shamelessness. He has never indulged in the local young men and is appalled by the idea, calling it ‘unnatural’. Since he met G., as far as I know, he has not transgressed, not even with a prostitute before they were married. Just the thought of the frenzy on their wedding night leaves me weak.
R.’s revelations are quite a shock and are drawn from him at visible cost. We are on the verandah of the studio and, when he is not holding his head in his hands giving me his confession (who has begun to feel like a fat, corrupt prelate), he is pacing from side to side and casting about in case there is someone in the vicinity who can hear. R., at the age of thirty-five, has now transgressed in a spectacularly irresponsible fashion. I realize that I have been making light of this, but what R. has done is serious. I’m not sure that it has been done without the guile of the Moroccans with whom he has been doing business. We Europeans and Americans in particular are impressed by strengths, we like to see them displayed before us, especially in business. The Moroccan, however, and perhaps the African in general, is not so interested in strengths, which are always overt, but in the weaknesses which are hidden. It is sad that virtue should be seen as a weakness … or is it virtue? I was always disturbed by R.’s passion for G. when she was still a girl. He has succumbed again. He caught sight of one of the young daughters of a business associate of his in Fez. The girl was not veiled so might even have been as young as twelve years of age. R.’s interest was noted, the girl was made available, R. transgressed and now perhaps the most serious thing in Moroccan society is at stake — honour. R. is expected to take the girl for his wife. This is impossible. And here we have the cultural clash and the reason for R.’s torment. There is a solution: he must leave the country. He will lose his entire investment in the Moroccan project, which amounts to $25,000. But G. cannot be moved and he cannot uproot the family without making some unpleasant revelations. He fears that now the International Zone no longer exists, his family could be at risk. Of what? He leaves his final revelation to the last moment. The Arab girl is pregnant. He thinks that if he leaves Tangier there could be some revenge attack on his family.
7th October 1958, Tangier
As a security measure R. has rented a house nearly opposite his own and we have put four legionnaires in there. Pressure is mounting on him and he is buying time by continuing to invest money in the Moroccan project. It costs him thousands of dollars, but he is prepared to pay any amount. P. has been to see G. and she is in no fit state to be moved, let alone undergo a sea journey across the straits in winter.
14th December 1958, Tangier
The pressure on R. has been too great. His health has suffered and he has been laid up with a lung infection. I tell him that as soon as he is well he should leave, which is what he did yesterday, taking Marta, the six-year-old, (who, after her difficult birth, is a little simple) with him. R. has done everything possible. He has bribed the whole of Tangier. I don’t know how deep his resources are, but they must be considerable for him to have raised his investment with the Moroccans to close to $40,000. He has given them some excuse or other that he has to go to Spain and that they have nothing to fear from a man of honour. I wish I knew more about these people, but R. will not let me near that end of things. I have no idea whether they are rogues who’ve seen a way of milking a vulnerable European, or genuine traditionalists who adhere to some ancient code of behaviour and mores. R. says they do not understand why he can’t simply divorce G. In their culture they only have to say the words three times and it is done.
22nd January 1959, Tangier
G.’s waters have broken and she goes into a prolonged labour of what P. describes as almost constant contraction. P. is convinced that the baby will not be able to survive the trauma. I call R. in Spain. He receives the news in silence. Twelve hours later he appears in the house, which is tomb dark on a grim winter morning. The fifty-year-old Spanish doctor and midwife are doing everything to get the baby out, but it is the wrong way round and also stuck. The atmosphere in the house is one of hopelessness. There is something of the torture chamber about it, with G.’s screams, the attentiveness of the medical staff and the black, lightless desolation of us all. After fifty-two hours the boy is delivered. He weighs three kilos. G. is so exhausted that should she sleep too deeply she might slip away. The doctor delivers a savage monologue to R., who asks when G. can be moved. ‘She might never leave this house alive, but you should know within the week,’ he says.
7th February 1959, Tangier
I go down to the port with my pockets full of dollars. It is better for G. to be moved on a quiet sea than driven to Ceuta on rough roads. The night is calm. The officials are malleable. We bring G. down to the port in a lumbering Studebaker and load her on to the yacht R. has chartered. As they ‘re about to cast off a police car arrives on the quay and a row develops in which the travel documents are confiscated, permission to leave the port is revoked and we all have to go back to the terminal for questioning. We ask on what charge and are stunned when they say it is fraud and mention the company that R. has been investing in. R., believing that the game is up, parts with $200. The sum is so vast that a deep silence ensues in which the situation could go one way or the other. The money is pocketed. Documents are returned. Permission is granted and a salute goes up.
12th February 1959, Tangier
As the legionnaires I had positioned opposite R.’s house were leaving, a group of Moroccans
