work. Sixty-five-year-old women sitting outside their houses, legs apart, crow black above their dimpled thighs. His father had appalled him by endlessly negotiating a blow job until Javier couldn’t bear it any longer and ran to the end of the street and stood below a tiled advertisement for Amontillado fino and manzanilla
The street names slipped past him until he came out in San Juan de la Palma, which was packed with people spilling out of the Cervezeria Plazoleta and drinking beer around the two palm trees that disappeared above the lights. It was so easy to feel alone in this city. He walked on past the home of the Duquesa de Alba. He’d been in there once, standing below the tumbling towers of bougainvillea, drinking nectar with high society. Is this how tramps feel inside? I’m becoming a vagrant from myself.
A breeze cooled the patina of sweat on his forehead. He didn’t think he was thinking and yet words drifted up from nowhere, unbidden. Male menopause. Forty-five. Ripe for it. More crap from Manuela’s magazines. No. This is just straight, unadulterated age. The creeping onset has been noted by mind and body. Age is just the disintegration of possibility and the assertion of probability with the odds shortening every day — Francisco Falcon, June 1996.
He ran. Took off as if he had a chance of getting away from what was developing in his head. People stepped aside from his pounding feet. Those with a stronger herd instinct joined him, as if he might know where he was going. The fools, the damned fools. By the time he reached Calle Matahacas there were twenty people with him and it was then that he saw the crowd materializing out of the darkness and felt the deep silence that Sevillanos reserve for two things —
At the end of the street in Escuelas Pias, above a heaving sea of black heads, the candlelit Virgin appeared. Her bowed head, her white, bejewelled robes, her tear-splashed cheek swirled in the updraught of burnt incense. Awe lapped at her feet from the packed humanity below as her
The people behind Falcon shunted him forward towards the astonishing vision of beauty, which both amazed and repelled him, awed and terrified him. The crowd in front thickened. Small women, waist high to him, murmured prayers and kissed their rosaries. He was trapped now in this bizarre parallel world. The Alameda with its whores and grunt-driven clients, its junkies chasing spear-tailed oblivion was running a different life, one with blood and dirt in it. One that was well outside this high, cathedral silence with this mortifying beauty that moved on a tide of reverence and adulation.
Can we all be the same species?
The question came to him from nowhere, but it made him think that it was possible for good and evil to reside in the same place, the same person. Even himself. Panic tightened in him. He had to get out of this crowd and the only way was forward.
The Virgin stopped and sank into the dark. The candle-light wavered across her face, caught the crystalline tears, the mournful eyes. He had to get past her; he had to get past this terrible emblem of loss, this gorgeous example to the world of its barbaric capacity. He fought past the penitent women, the quiet mothers, the father with a sleeping child on his shoulders. He couldn’t bear it.
They hit him. They thumped his back as he crashed through. He shouldered their derision. He hit the barrier, scrambled underneath it and ran between the silent nazarenos dressed in black with high coned hats, indiscernible from the night. Their eyes were on him. Their sinister eyes in their hooded faces — the silent orders more demanding than the others. He ran through the files of barefoot men, away from the floating Virgin. He was desperate.
The crowds thinned and he was able to vault the barrier, but he didn’t slow down until he’d broken into Calle Cabeza del Rey Don Pedro and only then did he realize in the quiet of the street that he was talking out loud to himself. He tried to listen to what he was saying, which was even madder. He moved on, brought himself under control and slipped down an alleyway into Calle Abades and stopped dead in the street because alone there, looking back at the building she’d just left, was his ex-wife, Ines. She was laughing; laughing so hard that she threw her head and long hair forward and gripped her own thighs. She was facing the light shed from the door of the Bar Abades and Falcon knew she wasn’t drunk, because she didn’t like alcohol. He knew that she was laughing because she was happy.
The doors of the bar opened and a group came out. Ines took hold of an arm from one of the group and they headed down the street away from him. She was wearing very high heels, as always, and she walked with a sureness of foot that was breathtaking on the uneven cobbles. Getting his own feet to move was more problematic. The moment had opened up a yawning black ravine down his middle. On one side his earlier, happier married life and on the other his present, solitary, darkening self. And in the middle? The gulf, the rift, the bottomless pit of those terrible falling dreams where the only cure is the jolt awake into more relentless reality.
He followed her. He listened to her gaiety. There were jokes being told about judges and defence lawyers. It was a relief to find that these were work colleagues, but each peal of recognizable laughter from Ines rammed into him and stuck there with a bull’s weight behind it. Her joy was nearly unbearable beside his own brand-new torment. And when the flint of his imagination hit the circular saw of his suspicions, screeching sparks flew in his head.
On Avenida de la Constitucion the group called for taxis. He watched from the shadows to see who she was travelling with. Four of them got into one taxi. He watched her ankle, the triangle of strap from her shoe, disappear behind the closing door. He watched, derelict, as the red taillights pulled away into the traffic.
He walked down to the river, sticking to the main avenues, no appetite for the narrow streets of El Arenal, the tourists and their relaxed jollity. He crossed the black, gleaming river on the Puente San Telmo and stopped halfway, struck by the advertising on the apartment blocks on the Plaza de Cuba — Tio Pepe, Airtel, Cruzcampo, Fino San Patricio — sherry, phones and beer. This is Spain now — all our needs covered.
The river rippled and slopped underfoot. Raul Jimenez’s first wife came to mind. The torture of not knowing had been too much for a mother to bear. He wondered if she did it from where he was standing and remembered that Consuelo Jimenez had said she’d gone down to the bank one night and thrown herself away. He imagined her floating downstream, the edges of water creeping up her face, the corners of her eyes and mouth, until they met and the blackness she so craved closed over her.
His mobile rang. The stupidity of its ring welcome amongst his morbid ramblings. He put it to his ear, heard the hiss of ether and knew it was him.
No answer.
He waited, not breaking the spell with superfluous words this time.
‘You are thinking. Inspector Jefe, that this is your investigation, but you should know that I have a story to tell
