Back-lit, standing in the doorway on the top step, being helped into her coat, was Ines. Her hair was up and she only wore it like that when she wanted to be attractive and sexy, never for work. He didn’t see the man she was with as they stepped into the darkness of the street, joined arms and headed towards Reyes Catolicos. There was no one else. This was a dinner for two. He stopped dead as Ines glanced behind her and then her high heels tickled the cobbles as she broke into a momentary skipping run to catch up. He followed them from across the street. The earlier hunger and the beginnings of exhaustion were forgotten now as the mind fell on new fuel.
They crossed Reyes Catolicos and walked past the bar, La Tienda, which was closed. They cut across Calle Bailen and went behind the museum and out on to the Plaza del Museo, so that he had to hang back until they disappeared down Calle San Vicente. He waited and then followed, but by then the street was empty. He walked up and down the first hundred metres wondering if he’d imagined it all or that maybe the man had an apartment here, in this street, barely a kilometre from his own house.
He retreated home, broken as an entire army; the hunger was gone and the exhaustion of defeat had taken over. He showered, but only the day’s grime left him. He took a sleeping pill and crept under the covers. He stared at the endlessly receding ceiling, mesmerized as he could be by the white flashes in the middle of the road unrolling in the flare of the headlights. He thought he should resist, that it was dangerous to fall asleep at the wheel. Confusion distorted his sense of place. He reached forward with a hand, expecting everything to career out of control, for the frame of his vision to suddenly include a barrier, a bank and a life-ending tree to crash into. He flew into sleep as if through an empty windscreen, into the night.
Extracts from the Journals of Francisco Falcon
12th October 1943, Triana, Seville
An army truck gave me a lift from Toledo all the way to Seville, which was lucky. The country is on its knees, with no petrol and little food. There’s not much on the roads, apart from occasional carts drawn by emaciated horses or mules.
I’ve taken a room run by a fat Moorish-looking woman with long black hair down to the small of her back, which she winds up into a bun. She has black eyes as dull as charcoal and she sweats constantly, as if on the brink of collapse. Her breasts have parted company and live in isolation on either side of her ribcage. She has a belly as big as a drinker’s, which sways under her black skirts as she walks. Her ankles are purple and swollen and she catches her breath in pain as she moves from room to room. I would like to draw and paint her, preferably naked, but she has a male companion, who is as thin as a village dog and carries a knife, which I hear him whetting lovingly every morning before he goes out. The room has a chest of drawers, none of which opens, and a bed with a picture of the Virgin above it. I take it because it has a patio outside, which only the landlady uses to dry her washing. I dump my bags and go out to buy materials and drink.
25th October 1943, Triana, Seville
It must be the soldier in me but I’ve settled into a routine although I do not get up early any more. Nothing happens in this city until after 10 a.m. I walk to the Bodega Salinas on the Calle San Jacinto, drink a coffee and smoke a cigarette. I use this bar because the owner, Manolo, keeps the best barrels of tinto from which he fills my five-litre bottles. He also sells me a homemade aguardiente, which I buy by the litre. I go back to my room and work until 3 in the afternoon. The only interruption is by the water seller. At 3 I eat lunch in the bar with a jug of tinto, refill my bottle and return to my room to sleep until 6 p.m. I work again until 10, have dinner and stay on at Manolo’s, drinking with the crooks and idiots who gather there.
29th October 1943, Triana, Seville
In the Bodega Salinas yesterday one of the other customers known only by the name of Tarzan (after the film Tarzan the Ape Man) comes to sit at my table. He has a tremendous belly and a face like a cluster of potatoes (Johnny Weismuller would be appalled). His eyes are closed up and puffy. He sits down and everybody is listening.
‘So,’ he says, putting a meaty forearm on the table, ‘where do you get that look from?’
‘What look is that?’ I ask, puzzled by the question.
There’s nothing aggressive about Tarzan, despite his pummelled face. He wears a black hat that he never removes but slips to the back of his head occasionally in order to scratch the front.
‘A look that says you don’t belong here,’ he replies calmly, but I sense those puffy eyes looking through their slits as if down a rifle barrel.
‘I’m not sure what you mean.’
‘You’re not from Seville. You are not Andaluz.’
‘I come from Morocco, Tetuan and Ceuta,’ I say, but this doesn’t satisfy.
‘You look at us and make notes. You have old eyes in a young head.’
‘I am an artist,’ I say. ‘I make notes to remind myself of things that I have seen.’
‘What have you seen?’ he asks.
I realize now that these people do not think I am who I say I am. They think I’m Guardia Civil (who are always from out of town) or worse.
‘I was a soldier,’ I say, avoiding the word Legion. ‘I’ve been in Russia with the Division Azul.’
‘Where?’ asks a bandy-legged guy, who is a picador of some repute.
‘Dubrovka, Teremets and Krasni Bor,’ I say.
‘I was in Shevelevo,’ he says, and we shake hands.
Everybody is relieved. Why they should think a member of the secret police would sit openly in a bar making notes on them (the densest group of dullards in Southern Spain) I have no idea.
15th December 1943, Triana, Seville
A young man, perhaps twenty years old, comes into the bar. He calls himself Raul and they all know him and like him. He’s been in Madrid working, but all he can talk about that first night is going to Tangier, where there is real money to be made. They humour him and tell him he should talk to El Marroqui, which is my new name. R. sits at my table and tells me of the fortunes to be made from smuggling out of Tangier. I tell him I have plenty of money and that I’m only interested in becoming an artist. He tells me that there’s lots to be made out of American cigarettes, but there’s money in everything because of the American blockade of Spanish ports. His only worry is that now that the Blue Division has been pulled out of Russia this might relax the American attitude to
