and, whether you like it or not, you will let me tell it.
14
Falcon came round with his heart thumping in his chest, still operating at the heightened speed of an adrenalin-fired pace. He checked his pulse — ninety. He swung his legs out of bed, exhausted before he’d even started. His face was hot and his hair full of sweat as if he’d been running all night, or rather morning. He hadn’t got to bed until four o’clock. He hadn’t wanted to come home.
He did an hour on the exercise bike and persuaded himself that he felt better. He showered and dressed. The world outside at this remove seemed dead. He drank coffee, ate toast rubbed with garlic and olive oil. His father’s breakfast. He went up to the studio and arranged the journals in date order, noting the quality of the books became poorer as the years progressed — the paper thinner, the bindings no longer stitched but glued and that all cracked, with loose pages. The handwriting changed, too. The first books were scarcely recognizable as his father’s. The letters cramped, the spacing uneven, the lines drifting downwards and the accents and tildas seemingly shaken up in a cup and dashed over the page. It was unconfident, unstable, close to mad. Thereafter the hand was more even but was not transformed into the beautiful script that Javier knew until he arrived back in Spain in the sixties.
It was here that the gap occurred. One diary ended during the summer of 1959 in Tangier and the next started in May 1965 in Seville. Everything had happened in those years. His mother and stepmother had died. His father had painted the Falcon nudes, become famous and left Morocco. It was the vital book, but how was he supposed to use his police skills to find it?
It was close to one o’clock and he was due for lunch at his brother Paco’s finca in Las Cortecillas, which was over an hour’s drive away. He wanted to make a start on the journals but knew he’d have to stop almost immediately. He would read the opening entry and leave it at that — a taster, a
19th March 1932, Dar Riffen, Morocco Today I am seventeen and Oscar has given me this present of an empty book, which he has told me I must fill. It has been nearly a year since what I now refer to as ‘the incident’ occurred and I have begun to think that if I do not set things down as I think of them I will forget who I used to be. Although, after ten months of the Legion’s training and brutal discipline, I am already unsure. To get through the days in barracks it is best not to think. To get through the days out in the field it is best not to think. In action I can’t think, it all happens too fast. I sleep with only one dream, which I don’t want to think about. So, I don’t think. I tell Oscar this and he says: ‘You don’t think therefore you are not.’ Whatever that means. He tells me this book will change that. I hope I am not too late. Already the life before ‘the incident’ has lost its definition. It is all irrelevant now. My education means nothing except that I can read and write, which is a lot more than the
His mobile rang, his sister Manuela reminding him to pick her up. She started to complain about how Paco was going to make her work for her lunch and Javier sympathized but didn’t listen. How the minutiae impinged.
They drove out of the city in brilliant sunshine and headed north on the road to Merida. As they came out on to the rolling plains, the swaying grasses, Javier relaxed. The pressures of the city, the intensity of its narrow streets, the crush of people, the hordes of tourists, the deepening complexity of his investigation were all behind him. He’d never envied Paco’s love of the simple life, the space, the bulls roaming the pasture, but now, since Raul Jimenez’s murder, the city, rather than provoking fascination, was inducing fear. It wasn’t the first time he’d run into a night- time procession of the candlelit Virgin. He’d even run into one after leavinga crime scene and been totally unmoved. He had never identified with the city’s mad Mariolatry. But twice in two days he’d been left shattered by what was, in effect, a mannequin on a float, and last night he’d panicked completely. The need to get away from it, or rather get past it, had come from instinct. There had been nothing rational at work. He shook his head and settled back as they eased through the blinding white village of Pajanosas.
As soon as they arrived at the finca Manuela changed out of her red Elena Brunelli linen suit into her veterinary overalls. Paco shouldered a gun and packed three tranquillizer darts. They all got into a Land Rover and went looking for one of Paco’s
They found the bull on its own under a holm oak. He was fully grown and was already sold for this year’s Feria. Paco loaded a dart and shot the bull in the haunch. The bull set off at a trot through the trees. They followed in the vehicle until the bull settled into the grasses in a sunlit clearing, confused by the lack of force in its hind legs. They got out and, as they neared, its head came up, still with some vestiges of strength in the vast hump of neck muscle. The primitive eye took them in and for a moment Javier saw inside the bull’s head. There was no fear there, only an immense intuition of its own power, which was being slowly consumed by the effects of the tranquillizer.
The bull’s head sank back into the grass. Manuela cleaned the wound, put in a couple of stitches, gave an antibiotic jab and took a blood sample. Paco talked nonstop and held the bull’s horn, thumbed its smooth, sharp tip and watched out for other bulls that might attack. Javier, patting the haunch of the dazed animal, had a sudden wish for that sense of self that the bull had momentarily shown him. Complexity made humans so fragile. If only we could be as concentrated as the bull, so conscious of its power, rather than having to see to our constant, pathetic needs.
Manuela injected the beast with a stimulant and they retreated to the Land Rover. The head came up and the bull immediately began to gather its forces, instinct telling it that it was vulnerable on the ground. It stood, centred its strength and forced itself to move. The back legs performed a skipping hop as it disappeared into the trees.
‘Fantastic bull,’ said Paco. ‘He’ll be all right for the Feria, won’t he, Manuela?’
‘He’ll still have that wound, but he’ll show them who he is,’ she said.
‘You watch him, Javier. Monday, 23rd April he’ll be in La Maestranza and there’s nobody, not even Jose Tomas, who’ll get the better of that bull,’ said Paco. ‘Pepe heard anything yet?’
‘Nothing.’
‘He’ll get his chance. Somebody will get done between now and the Feria, the numbers dictate it.’
They had lunch of roast lamb, which Paco had baked in a brick bread-oven he’d restored on the property. There was a whole crowd there for lunch, with the parents-in-law, uncles, aunts, Paco’s wife and the four children. Javier forgot himself amongst family and drank a lot of red wine, more than usual. They all slept afterwards. Manuela had to wake Javier, who was sleeping as still as a fallen idol.
