The Blind Man of Seville

‘Yes.’

‘You know what she stands for?’

He nodded.

‘Say it,’ said Alicia.

‘She is the ultimate mother.’

‘The Ultimate Mother,’ she repeated it for him. ‘Tell me why you went to Tangier.’

‘I wanted to know how … I wanted to know what happened when she died.’

‘Did you find out?’

‘It was inconclusive. I found out what had happened in the street, which was a memory that had bothered me. But it was just my mother’s Riffian maid going through some histrionics. It’s not uncommon in Arab women. You’ve probably —’

‘You don’t believe what you’re saying, do you, Javier? You’ve attached some importance to this.’

‘I don’t think so,’ he said.

Alicia breathed out slowly. The brick wall hit again.

‘What else did you find out in Tangier?’

‘Some nonsense gossip about how my second mother had died.’

‘Your second mother?’

‘I’m not going to give it the credibility of repetition.’

‘What else?’ asked Alicia, snapping at his resistance to talk.

‘I have an inexplicable fear of milk,’ he said, and told her about the incident in the Tetuan Medina and the dream that followed it.

‘What does milk mean to you?’

‘Nothing.’

‘And that was what you dreamt about?’

‘I meant that it has no meaning other than that I have always hated dairy products … just as my father did.’

‘And what do mothers produce to feed their babies?

‘I have to be going,’ he said abruptly. ‘The hour is up. You should have been stricter with me.’

They walked to the door. He stepped into the stairwell without looking at her. He didn’t turn on the light. He pattered down the stairs.

‘You will come back to me, won’t you, Javier?’ she called out after him.

He did not reply.

At home he sat in the study, leafing over the black-and-white print-outs from the imaging machine while guilt and failure tumbled in his mind. He stuck the print-outs up on the wall and stood back from them. They were meaningless. He switched them around, thinking that it might have something to do with the order, but soon realized there were thousands of permutations.

The wind buffeted around the patio, rattling the door. He went out and sat on the lip of the fountain and tapped his feet on the worn marble flagstones whose rectangular shapes reminded him of the diagram that had fallen out of the roll of canvases.

He tore the print-outs off the wall and sprinted up to the studio. He found the diagram on the floor of the storeroom amongst all the boxes. Five interlocking rectangles, each one numbered. He ran back down the stairs, possessed by the idea that this would be the key that would unlock the whole mystery. But of what? He slowed to a stop on the patio.

The certainties, the idea of their collapse, came to him in a series of Biblical film clips, statues keeled over, keystones plummeted, arches folded in on themselves, columns toppled into colossal fluted fragments. His view of his father had already changed — the violent legionnaire, the shell-shocked veteran of Leningrad, the murderous smuggler and finally the tortured artist. And yet somehow this was all explicable. This wasn’t nature, it was the nurture of history’s most savage century. The brutal and bloody Civil War, the catastrophic Second World War, the left-over brutality that eventually slid into hedonism in post-war Tangier. He could always point to the outside influences that had worked to brutal effect on his father’s fragile state. But perhaps this was different. It could be that this would reveal something deeply personal, some terrible weakness that would expose the hidden monster. Did he want that?

What had Consuelo called him and Ines at their first meeting? A union of truth hunters. The whole reason he’d started this terrible journey was because of the irresistible urge to discover. Was he going to shy away from that now, and end up at the only end of Calk Negacion? Then what? He would live his life as if none of this had happened, and Javier Falcon would sink without trace.

He took the rolls of canvas up to the studio and matched each one to the relevant print-out, but could find no numbering system. There was nothing written on the backs of the canvas except the letters ‘I’ and ‘D’, and he suddenly felt tired and desperate for bed. Then he saw, at the edge of the print-outs, some ink marks. He realized his father had numbered the canvases on their fronts, beyond where the canvas would stretch over the frame. He worked out the numbers and got the order right through a process of elimination. Then he understood that the ‘I’ and ‘D’ were izquierda and derecha. He marked off the print- outs accordingly and then trimmed the A3 sheets down to the edges. He turned them over and stuck them together as shown in the diagram. He took the finished piece up to his father’s work wall and stuck it there with tape. He walked away from it. He reached the bookshelves on the far wall and was about to turn when he felt the sweat break — the familiar trickle down his cheek.