The Blind Man of Seville

It is a freezing night, perhaps the coldest night I’ve known in Tangier. The wind blows from the northwest bringing the chill of the Atlantic. I walk through the silent city. Not even the dogs are out. It is a long walk to T.C.’s studio and it takes me more than an hour. I do not think but climb over the wall in my usual place (I have found a spot where I land on a path rather than leave a print in the earth). I go into his bedroom and hear his feet moving over the floor and I know that he is working. I step into the light of his studio. It is warm from a wood- burning salamander in the corner. He continues to work. I move towards his back. The muscles are tense beneath his robe. I stop very close to him and still he does not notice. He lays on paint as thick as flesh. I breathe on his neck and he sets solid as stone. He does not turn. He cannot bring himself to turn.

‘It is me,’ I say.

He turns. His eyes search mine for reason and, when that is fruitless, pity. I have no need of, or desire for verbal redress and so my hand flashes out and I chop him across the throat with such brutal force that his throat cracks loudly. The brush and palette fall from his hands. He drops to his knees. I hear him desperately trying to breathe over his shattered larynx. I step behind him and hold my hand over his mouth and grip his nose. All the strength has been taken out of him by the savagery of my first blow. Only as death crowds his mind does the survival reflex shoot strength into his arms, but it is far too late. I hold him tight and snuff out the last flickering flame. I lay him face down on the floor. I take the four nudes and remove them from their stretchers and roll them up. I put them by the door. I take a five-litre can of white spirit and pour it over the floor and T.C.’s inert body. There is turpentine and alcohol, too. I drop a lighted match and leave. I walk back to my studio. I hide the canvases above my bed in the roof. I lie down. My work is done and sleep comes easily to me.

Javier drank the last of the whisky in his glass. As the enormity of what he was reading had burgeoned off the page to fill the whole room with its tumorous ghastliness, he had steadily filled and refilled his glass until he was drunk. His earlier sense of triumph had disappeared. His face felt like slapped rubber. His feet were covered in the photocopied pages that had fallen from his weakening grasp. His head nodded against his shoulder. His neck cracked back as his reflexes shunned sleep and what lay in wait for him there, but he lost all resistance; exhaustion won, his mind and body were completely played out.

His dream was of himself asleep, but not as an adult, as a child. His back was warm and he was safe under the mosquito net. He was in that half-sleep where he knew that the heat on his back was the sun and that through his half-closed eyes he could see the shallow crater he had picked from the whitewashed wall by his face. He felt the wriggling happiness of childhood come up from his stomach as he heard his mother calling his name:

‘Javier! Javier! Despiertate ahora, Javier!’

He came awake instantly, because he knew she was going to be there in his room and he would be happy and loved.

But she wasn’t. Whatever was there rolled in his vision for a moment until it snapped into focus. He was back in his study. He was in his chair, except that it wasn’t his normal chair. It was one of the high-backed chairs from the dining room and he couldn’t move forward out of it because something was cutting into his neck, his wrists and ankles. His feet were bare and cold on the tiled floor.

33

Monday, 30th April 2001, Falcon’s house, Calle Bailen, Seville

There was nothing on the desk in front of him. The pictures had been removed from the wall.

‘Are you awake, Javier?’ said a voice from behind him.

‘I’m awake.’

‘If you try to shout I will have to gag you with your socks, so please be sensible.’

‘I am beyond screaming now,’ he said.

‘Are you?’ said the voice. ‘I see you’ve been reading. Did you finish?’

‘I finished.’

‘And what do you think of the great Francisco Falcon and his dependable agent, Ramon Salgado?’

‘What you’d expect me to think.’

‘Tell me. I’d like to hear it.’

‘I’d just begun to think that he was a monster … I’d found those five terrible paintings in his studio … and now … I know it. What I didn’t know was that he was a fraud as well. That adds … or rather that takes away the final dimension. Now he’s just monster. There’s nothing else left.’

‘People are very forgiving of genius,’ said the voice. ‘Your father knew that. These days you can rape and murder, but as long as you’re a genius you will be tolerated. Why do you think we tolerate evil in someone with a God-given talent? Why will we put up with arrogance and boorishness in a footballer, just because he can score great goals? Why will we accept drunkenness and adultery in a writer, as long as he gives us the poems? Why will we rape, maim and murder for someone who is able to give us the illusion of belief in ourselves? Why do we let genius get away with it?’

‘Because we are easily bored,’ said Javier.

‘Your father was right,’ said the voice. ‘You do see things differently.’

‘When did he tell you that?’

‘It’s in those diaries somewhere.’

‘He always told me I was blessed with normality.’

‘That was because he suspected something.’

‘Like what?’

‘This is not the order of things,’ said Sergio.

‘Then tell me the order.’