Javier’s brain ticked like a metronome counting out the seconds before insanity struck.
‘In his journals he refers to “the incident”,’ said Falcon. ‘Something that happened when he was a boy, which made him leave home and join the Legion. I think he might have told people about it, my mother being one of them, but he never wrote it down. Did he tell you?’
‘He told me,’ said El Zurdo. ‘I’ll tell you if you want. I mean … these things, the further they slip into history, the less important they seem to be. They just happen to decide the direction of a life at the time.’
‘Tell me.’
‘What do you know about his parents?’
‘Next to nothing.’
‘Well, they ran a hotel business in Tetuan in the twenties and thirties. They were very conservative. His mother was a devout Catholic and his father was a drunk. He was a nasty drunk, who took out his weaknesses on his children and his employees. That’s all you need to know to understand what happened.
‘One morning his father caught Francisco in bed with one of the houseboys and he went completely berserk. While Francisco cowered on the bed in the corner of the room, his father bludgeoned the houseboy to death in front of him. Only when he came out of his terrible rage did the father realize what he’d done. The two of them disposed of the body somehow and Francisco was kept in his bloodstained room until he’d cleaned every drop of blood and whitewashed the walls.’
El Zurdo sat back with his hands open.
‘How did his mother come into it?’ asked Falcon. ‘You said …’
‘She never spoke another word to him. She withdrew all maternal affection and acted as if he didn’t exist. She didn’t even have a place laid for him at the dinner table. As far as she was concerned, in her small Catholic mind, he’d transgressed beyond any possible forgiveness.’
‘When did he tell you that?’
‘A long time ago. More than twenty years.’
‘When you were lovers?’
‘Yes. It took a while for him to come back to men after something like that. It wasn’t until Tangier after the Second World War that he … although he did have a passion for another legionnaire who was killed in Russia — Pablito … But nothing ever came of it and, of course, Pablito was betrayed by a woman …’
‘He talks about him in the journals. My father was on the firing squad that shot the woman,’ said Falcon. ‘He purposely aimed for her mouth.’
‘Do you know how he and I stayed lovers for so long?’ said El Zurdo. ‘Because I never made any attempt to understand him. I never probed. Some people don’t like intimacy and your father was one of them. Women do like it. They want to know their man. And when they find out who you are and they don’t like it, they do one of two things: they set about changing you or they abandon you. These are your father’s words, not mine. I’ve never been with women. My tastes are more singular.’
They went down to La Cubista for lunch. Javier ordered the tuna, El Zurdo the pork. He drank wine through Javier’s tormented silence and encouraged him to do the same. The food arrived.
‘You know the other reason your father liked me?’ said El Zurdo. ‘This is strange. He liked me because I was a copyist. Odd, no? He admired it. He liked the fact that I painted upside down. He interpreted it as a lack of respect for the original, even though I told him that I only did it because I didn’t want to be distracted by the structure and wholeness of the piece when all I was doing was trying to copy it precisely. You know, sometimes he thought my copies were actually better than his originals. So there are two American collectors with my copies signed by him on their walls. That, he said to me, is art. Nothing is original.’
Falcon sipped his wine, picked up his knife and fork and started eating.
‘When did you last see him?’ asked Falcon.
‘About five years ago. We had lunch here. He was happy. He’d solved his problem of loneliness.’
‘He was lonely?’
‘All day, every day. The famous man in his big dark house.’
‘He had friends, didn’t he?’
‘He told me he didn’t. The only friend he had he lost back in 1975.’
‘Who was that?’
‘Raul Jimenez … I heard he was murdered recently,’ said El Zurdo. ‘Your father wouldn’t have been sad about that.’
‘So why did they stop being friends?’
‘That’s interesting. I didn’t understand why it incensed him so much. He told me that he bumped into Raul in the street one day in Seville. They’d both been living in the city, on either side of the river, apparently without knowing it. They went for lunch. Your father asked after Raul’s family and he said they were all fine. They talked about your father’s fame and Raul’s business success — all the shit you’d expect two old friends to talk about — except your father didn’t ask him why he hadn’t been in touch with him. I mean, given your father’s fame, Raul must have known he’d been living in Seville for ten years or more. But this is explained by what happened. At the end of lunch Raul told him something out of the blue … nothing to do with what they’d been talking about. You may have read in the journals that your father left the Legion and came here to paint. He had money saved up from the army. Combat pay from Russia.’
‘And someone stole the money,’ said Falcon, ‘which was why my father ended up in Tangier.’
‘Right,’ said El Zurdo. ‘And that’s what Raul told him at the end of the lunch, that
