The Blind Man of Seville

It was his last chance to walk away.

He turned with his eyes tight shut.

He opened them and saw what his father had done.

31

Sunday, 29th April 2001, El Zurdo’s workshop, Calle Parras, Seville

Falcon pinned the print-outs up on the wall while El Zurdo busied himself rolling and lighting a joint. Javier tapped him on the shoulder just as he took the first toke. El Zurdo turned.

‘Joder!’ he said. ‘Who is that?’

‘That?’ said Falcon, spitting it out. ‘She. She is my mother.’

‘Joder,’ said El Zurdo, moving closer, fascinated. ‘This is quite a piece of work.’

‘It’s not a piece of work,’ said Falcon. ‘It’s a piece of shit.’

‘Hey, I’m not involved in the same way you are,’ said El Zurdo. ‘I’m just looking at this …’

‘As art?’ said Javier, incredulous.

‘Technically. I mean, it’s extraordinary to create five interlocking pieces which are meaningless and apparently disconnected … I didn’t even see the joins in the jigsaw and yet when they’re put together …’

‘They become the most vile expression of a man’s hatred for his wife and the mother of his children, that only the mind of a monster could possibly produce,’ said Javier.

The two men stood in silence with the horror work filling the room. The picture had revealed a woman entwined and under the ministrations of two ravening satyrs, one thrusting from behind while the other graphically filled her mouth. But it was not a rape. There was compliance in the single visible eye of the woman. It was nauseating. Javier strode past El Zurdo, tore the piece off the wall, screwed it up and hurled it into an empty corner of the workshop.

‘What could possibly have made him want to produce …?’

‘Take a toke of this,’ said El Zurdo.

‘I don’t want a toke of that.’

‘It’ll calm you down.’

‘I don’t want to be calm.’

‘Look … maybe he found out she was having an affair.’

‘Oh,’ said Javier, ‘while he was a total innocent? While he wasn’t off sodomizing young men at every opportunity …’

‘It was different for women in those days,’ said El Zurdo.

‘While he didn’t go sodomizing on his wedding night. While he didn’t start having an affair with a mistress, who was to become his second wife, before his first wife had died.’

‘He hated women,’ said El Zurdo, matter-of-fact.

‘What did you say?’ said Javier. ‘I didn’t hear that … what …?’

‘I said that he hated women.’

‘What are you talking about, El Zurdo?’

‘Just what I said … and I’m not talking about the completely normal level of misogyny that existed in those days. It was beyond that … well beyond.’

‘He was married twice, he’s painted the four most sublime nudes of women the world has ever seen and you think he hated women?’ said Javier.

‘I don’t think anything,’ said El Zurdo. ‘That was what he told me.’

‘He told you that? Since when were you so intimate with my father that he would reveal something like that to you?’

‘Since we were lovers.’

A long silence developed in which Javier slumped into a battered armchair. All his strength sapped out of him. He was conscious of himself gaping, his face flabby with shock, his arms weak.

‘When?’ he asked, quietly.

‘From about 1972 for eleven or twelve years, until he got scared by SIDA.’

‘So … that time I came here with him …?’

El Zurdo nodded. More painful time eased past.

‘And you don’t think that this is the bitterest irony of all time?’ asked Javier.

‘That he should have painted those nudes?’ said El Zurdo. ‘That was just his work … it didn’t have to be his life as well.’

‘Where did it come from … the hate?’ asked Javier. ‘I don’t understand where that could come from.’

‘From his mother.’