The Blind Man of Seville

wasn’t in her cabin. We went mad searching the boat before facing the awful truth and calling the coast guard. We never found her. The following day I told Javier what had happened. He was heartbroken.

The voice continued, but at a distance because now Javier was back in that moment, heading for the room that used to be his father’s studio. He’s been called there to be told the terrible news, which has already reached him through the thick whitewashed walls earlier that morning. A damp gloom has filled the house and all he can hear is his own heart as he slips through the door into his father’s presence. His father calls him and he thinks that he will draw him into his chest and kiss his head, but instead he takes him by the arm, squeezing and twisting the bicep so that Javier comes up on his toes. His father’s huge face and head come down level to Javier’s own. He points his finger at Javier’s eye, as if it’s loaded.

‘You know why Mercedes isn’t coming back, don’t you, Javier?’

Javier was mute through this double pain of his pinched flesh and what I could see was the plummeting emptiness of what he feared most.

‘This is important,’ I said, pulling him to me so that his wincing face was right next to mine. ‘You must never tell anyone where I keep my journals. That is my secret. I want you to remember that … From now on, Javier, there are no journals.’

Back in the corridor outside his father’s study, he’s looking down at his arm. Tears well in his eyes and trickle cleanly and quickly down his smooth face. His mouth is thick with saliva and he knows that Mercedes is never coming back. Her smell is never coming to him again as his lies under the tight sheets. His small fingers will never trace those ears again. And it is his doing. He should never have told her. He breaks into a run, down the corridor, up the stairs, into his room, on to his bed, but still the black emptiness of his realization stays with him and the twisted pain of his burning arm.

‘Does that clarify things?’ said the voice, and Javier had the sense of rush as on a crowded street, until he popped back into reality still looking at his bicep, as if examining the bruising he’d sustained all those years ago.

‘He still loved me,’ said Javier, blurting it out through the saliva in his mouth. ‘He was just warning me, but he still loved me. We didn’t live all those years together …’

‘You still don’t want to believe it. I can understand that, Javier. It’s a difficult thing to give up … like life itself is difficult to give up … until it becomes completely intolerable. Until one’s actions become …’

‘Who are you?’ asked Javier. ‘Who the fuck are you?’

‘I am your eyes,’ said the voice. ‘Through me you will learn to see. How brave are you, Javier?’

He shook his head, not brave at all, still crushed by the weight of Mercedes’ death on his conscience and terrified at the new possibilities, the fresh horrors, the ones he knew but still didn’t.

‘You’re afraid, aren’t you, Javier? You’re afraid of what you will see.’

His face trembled under restraining flex.

‘What did you show the others … Raul and Ramon?’ asked Javier, desperate to put off the moment. ‘What did you find to show them that was so terrible?’

‘You must know that by now,’ said the voice. ‘I didn’t show them anything terrible. No abandoned children or dead babies. No raped girls or strangled sodomized boys. You can see that sort of thing on the news, in the cinema, in magazines, on the Internet, on TV. We are inured to the brutality of the human condition. Nothing can horrify us now. Did you see those pictures Ramon Salgado had on his computer? Did you see what Raul Jimenez watched while he screwed his puta? These were men well versed in horror. There was nothing more I could show them in that vein.’

‘Then what did you show them?’

‘I showed them the happiness that they had forsaken.’

‘The happiness?’

‘Arturo playing on the beach with Marta. She was tickling him, you know. She was tickling him until he couldn’t bear it. I added a soundtrack. Did Manuela ever do that to you? Tickle you nearly to death? Tickle you until it wasn’t tickling but torturing. Oh, the mind plays such tricks, Javier … after decades of denial.’

‘And Ramon? What did you show Ramon? His happy wife …’

‘I think Raul must have given them that footage as a wedding present. The happy married couple, Ramon and Carmen. Did you listen to the tapes?’

Javier nodded.

‘There was another tape, which I took with me. Carmen sang in the end. Her voice wasn’t that good, but she sang for Ramon … an aria of love. Ramon clapped at the end and I could hear the emotion in his voice. I changed it a little. There was no clapping … just those last three desperate shouts — “Ramon! Ramon! Ramon!”’

Javier shuddered at the terrible exquisiteness of that torture. The men facing the double horror of the irrevocable surgery and the last moments of true happiness cruelly disfigured by the added soundtrack.

‘And me? What will you show me?’ asked Javier, his fear making him angry while he tried to remember when he’d last been happy. ‘What happiness have I forsaken?’

‘I am going to blindfold you for a moment,’ said the voice. ‘When I take away the sleeping mask, you will see.’

Elastic snapped at the back of his head and the soft darkness of a padded mask descended. It was beautiful in the velvet, quilted dark. He thought he should never come out from under it. Something was placed on the desk. His chair was manoeuvred forward. Adrenalin pounded in his system. The purity of his seething panic thinned and cooled his blood to ether. He was cold and shaking. Fingers eased off the mask and Falcon kept his eyes tight shut.

‘Open your eyes, Javier,’ said the voice. ‘You, better than anyone, know what happens if you don’t open your eyes. It really is nothing terrible.’

‘I will open them. Just give me some time.’

‘You see it every day of your life.’