The Blind Man of Seville

Sierpes. His mind turned and spun around the crux, a truth that would enable him to see into the mind of Raul Jimenez’s killer. The one who would make his victim see, who would force him through the mind’s interference, to see an unacceptable truth. But he didn’t reach it and came round as surprised as an anaesthetized patient given time out from the world.

He circled the notched tables covered with jars and clay pots stuffed with sheaves of brushes all dried hard, crisp with encrusted paint. Underneath the tables there were cardboard boxes and piles of books, catalogues and magazines, obscure art periodicals and reams of paper, rolls of canvas, sheets of hardboard. It would take him half a day just to carry the stuff downstairs, let alone look through it all. But that was the point. He was not supposed to look through it. It was to be taken away and incinerated. Not dumped but destroyed beyond recognition.

Falcon ran his hands through his hair again and again, maddened by what he was about to embark on, aware that the reason he’d come in here was specifically to disobey his father’s wishes. He’d been avoiding this moment since his father’s death, needing to get further from the end of that era so that he could start on his own. His own era? Did ordinary men like him even have their own era?

He crouched down and pulled out a single magazine from a pile. It was a New Yorker, his father a great fan of the cartoons, the more surreal the better. He’d particularly enjoyed a drawing of a chess pawn standing next to a desert cactus with the caption: ‘Queen’s pawn to Albuquerque, New Mexico.’ The dazzling brilliance of its meaninglessness — he’d thought it such a perfect attitude to life, perhaps because his own had been brought close to meaninglessness by the loss of his dazzling genius.

The memories crowded, jostled for a ticket.

A row about Hemingway. Why Hemingway had shot himself in 1961, the year that his mother had died. A man who had achieved so much and had killed himself because he couldn’t stand not being able to do it any more. Javier had been sixteen when they talked about it.

Javier: ‘Why couldn’t he just retire? The guy was over sixty. Why didn’t he just hang up his pencil case, settle himself into a lounger in the Cuban sunshine and drink a few mojitos?’

Father: ‘Because he was sure that what he’d lost could be refound. Should be refound.’

Javier: ‘Well, that alone should have kept him occupied. Hunt the treasure … that’s a game everybody enjoys.’

Father: ‘It’s not a game, Javier. This is not a game.’

Javier: ‘His place in literature was assured. He had the Nobel Prize. With The Old Man and the Sea his work was done. There was nothing more to be said. Why try to say more if there’s …?’

Father: ‘Because he had it and he lost it. It’s like losing a child … you never get over what could have been.’

Javier: ‘And look at you, Papa. You’re no different and yet …’

Father: ‘Let’s not talk about me.’

Falcon threw down the magazine at his crassness remembered. He pulled out a box, flipped open its flaps. All this stuff. The accumulation of a lifetime’s rubbish, even more so with an artist who would hold on to anything that might precipitate a new idea. He walked the book-lined walls at the side and back of the room. ‘Should I burn these, too?’ he asked himself. ‘Is that what you want me to be — a book burner? Throw them all from the gallery into the patio and have a bonfire of words and pictures? You cannot have meant me to do this.’ The persuasiveness of the guilty mind that was about to transgress.

The wall on the street side had four floor-to-ceiling windows, which his father had installed to maximize natural light. Each window was encased in a steel lattice that could be slid back. The room no less than a fortress.

He arrived back in front of his father’s work wall and went through a door in the corner, which was windowless and lit by a single unshaded bulb. Four racks of vertical slots had been built along one wall. Stretched canvases and other material leaned in them. A plans chest occupied most of the opposite wall. It was piled high with boxes, almost to the ceiling. It smelt musty, stale and, after the long winter, damp. He went to the racks and pulled out a sheet of paper at random. It was a charcoal outline of one of the Tangier nudes. He pulled out another sheet. A pencil drawing of the same nude. Another and another sheet, each one a reworking of the same nude, a development of a detail, an examination of an angle. He went to the canvasses. The same Tangier nude painted again and again, sometimes big, sometimes small but always the same nude. Falcon searched the other racks and found that the four racks in which his father had arranged the work corresponded to each of the four Falcon nudes. Each rack contained hundreds of drawings and charcoals, oils and acrylics.

A tremendous sadness suddenly overwhelmed him. This work, the wall of racks in this dimly lit room, was what was left of his father’s attempt to refind his genius, to get it down right, even once more, even if it was just a tiny detail, to have it again. There was pain on the back of that surge of sadness, because Falcon could see, even in the pathetic light from the cheap bulb, that not one of these pieces contained anything of the exceptional qualities of the originals. Everything was in its place, but there was no life, no leap, no surge, no flow. This was mediocre. His abstract landscapes were better than this. His cupolas and windows, doors and buttresses, even they were better than this. He would burn these; he would burn them without a second thought.

He climbed up on a stool and lifted down one of the boxes from the plans chest. Heavy. More books. He flipped open the box, rooted through them, some leather-bound, others cloth, some by writers from the sixties and seventies, others classics. He opened a cover and found the personal dedication. They were gifts from admirers: aristocrats, ministers, theatre directors, poets. He tore open another box of carefully packed porcelain. Another box contained silverware. Cigars — unsmoked. Cigarette cases. Wood carvings. Figurines. His father loathed china figurines. Three boxes full of them. The early ones in newspaper from the seventies, the later stuff in bubblewrap. He realized what he was looking at. This was homage paid to his father. These were the small gifts bestowed on him when he attended public occasions. They were small expressions of gratitude for his genius.

More memories. Going away with his father. He rarely paid for a meal or a hotel room, which were always festooned with flowers. If they stayed in a private house the locals would silently leave offerings of fruit and vegetables to show their appreciation of a visit from the great man.

‘This is how it is,’ his father would say. ‘Greatness is constantly rewarded. If I were a footballer or a torero it would be no different. Genius is the thing — with foot, cape, pen or brush, it doesn’t matter, and yet … what is it? Great artists paint lacklustre paintings, brilliant toreros make terrible messes of great bulls, magnificent authors write bad books, sublime footballers can play like shit. So what is this … this fickle genius?’

Yes, he would get angry with it, hold up his hand with thumb and forefinger pinched together so that the ends turned white and Javier thought he might be about to say that genius was nothing.