E-X on the marble.
‘Who introduced you to my father?’ he asked; a diversionary tactic.
‘Raul was given an invitation so he sent me. I’d worked in a gallery and he assumed I knew what I was doing.’
‘Is that how you met Ramon Salgado?’
She missed a beat.
‘His gallery sent out the invitations. It was Ramon who opened the door, made the introductions.’
‘Was it Ramon Salgado who told you of your remarkable resemblance to Gumersinda?’
She blinked as if she hadn’t remembered that drop of information leaking out of her. Falcon opened the door, which led out into the short cobbled access street lined with orange trees that led down to Calle Bailen.
‘Yes, it was,’ she said. ‘Coming here tonight brought it all back. I rang the bell and heard him talking to the people he’d just let in so that he was turned away from me when he opened the door. When our eyes connected I could tell he was completely floored. I think he might have even started to call me Gumersinda, but that might be my memory exaggerating the moment. Still, by the time we got to the drinks he’d told me, which meant that I drank too much whisky and blabbed away like an idiot to your father, whom I’d spent half my life dying to meet.’
‘So Ramon and your husband knew each other from the Tangier days?’
Another thing she hadn’t remembered saying.
‘I’m not sure,’ she said.
They shook hands. He looked at her legs as she walked down to Calle Bailen. He shut the door and went straight up to the studio.
Extracts from the Journals of Francisco Falcon
20th March 1932, Dar Riffen, Morocco
Oscar (I don’t know if this is his real name, but it’s the one he uses) is not only my NCO but my teacher, too. He was a teacher in ‘real life’ as he calls it. That is all I know about him. Los brutos (my comrades), tell me that Oscar is here because he’s a child molester. They cannot know this for certain because it is one of the precepts of the Legion that you don’t have to reveal your past. Los brutos, of course, take great delight in revealing their past to me. Most are murderers, some are rapists and murderers. Oscar says they are flesh, blood and bone with some primitive strings attached inside, which allow them to walk upright, communicate, defecate and kill people. Los brutos are suspicious of Oscar only because they fear and distrust even the rudiments of intelligence. (I hide to write in this book or Oscar lets me use his room.) But los brutos respect him too. He’s beaten every one of them at some time or another.
Oscar took me on as his pupil and charge when he caught me drawing in the barracks. He had a couple of los brutos hold me and tore the paper from my hands and found that he was looking at himself in all his brutal intelligence. I was paralysed with fear. He grabbed me by the collar and hauled me off to his room, followed by shouts from los brutos egging him on. He threw me against the wall so that I collapsed winded. He looked at the drawing again, got down on his haunches, put his face up to mine and looked into my head with his steel-blue eyes. ‘Who are you?’ he asked, which was strange. I knew better than to answer with my name and shut up. He told me the drawing was good and that he would be my teacher but that he had a reputation to maintain. So I still got beaten.
17th October 1932, Dar Riffen
I admitted to Oscar that I’ve only made two entries in this book since he gave it to me. He is furious. I tell him I have nothing to report. All we do is go on endless exercises followed by bouts of drinking and fighting. He reminds me that this journal should not just be an account of the external but an examination of the internal. I have no idea how to approach this internal thing he is talking about. ‘You have to write about who you are,’ he says. I show him my first entry. He says, ‘Because you have no family does not mean you have ceased to exist. They are only a reference, now you must find your own context.’ I write this down with no idea of its meaning. He tells me that a French philosopher said: ‘I think therefore I am.’ I ask: ‘What is thinking?’ There is a long pause in which for some reason I imagine a train moving through a vast landscape. I tell him this and he says, ‘Well, it’s a start.’
23rd March 1933, Dar Riffen
I have just completed my first major work, which is the entire company individually caricatured riding their own camel, which has taken on some of their characteristics. I mount them on boards and hang them in the barracks so that they all seem to be in a caravan heading for the Dar Riffen arch, which instead of the usual legionnaire’s motto reads: legionarios a beber, legionarios a joder. All the officers come in and ask to see it. Oscar tears down my cartoon arch, saying: ‘You don’t want to be court-martialled and shot for a silly drawing.’ Now I am never short of cigarettes.
12th November 1934, Dar Riffen
We have just welcomed back Colonel Yague and the Legion, who have been in Asturias to put down the miners’ rebellion … Oscar is grim. There was no resistance and, having relieved Oviedo and Gijon, los brutos ‘demonstrated a lack of discipline and were not restrained by command’. This means that they killed, raped and mutilated without fear of punishment. Somehow in this conversation Oscar reveals that he is German and bores me by saying how German soldiers would never have behaved like this. His empty boots seem to be screaming in the corner of the room. ‘This is the beginning of a catastrophe,’ he says. I don’t see it like that and can only get excited by the gory stories told and retold. Apparently I still haven’t learnt how to think. I’ve noticed, in all the history I’ve read, under Oscar’s pointing finger, just how many times the thinkers are taken away and shot, hanged or beheaded.
17th April 1935, Dar Riffen
My second major work — Colonel Yague wants me to paint his portrait. Oscar gives me some advice: ‘Nobody likes the truth unless it happens to coincide with their own version of it.’ It’s only when I have Colonel Yague sitting in front of me that I realize the real nature of the task. He’s a bull of a man, with thick round spectacles, grey receding hair, heavy jowls and a half-smile that’s nearly friendly until you see the cruelty in it. I sit him so that none of the damaging profile is showing. I ask if he wants to retain the glasses and he tells me that if he doesn’t he will look like a newly born puppy. I see a coat on a chair with a fur collar. I ask him to wear it and tell him it will frame his face and give him an adventurous, heroic look. He puts it on. We are going to like each other.
1st May 1935, Dar Riffen, Morocco
The portrait is a triumph. There is a small private unveiling ceremony with a select band of officers. Colonel Yague is delighted by the reaction. The fur collar was inspired. I thinned his face down and gave him a jutting chin so that he looked defiant, resilient, dependable but bold and enterprising, too. In the background I
