The Blind Man of Seville (32 page)

28th December 1941

Christmas Eve in profound cold. The men recite poetry and sing about Spain — the heat, the pine trees, mother’s cooking and women. The Russians are ruthless and attack on Christmas Day. The numbers they throw at us are appalling. We’ve heard of their punishment battalions. Political undesirables are sent to run at our guns. They fall three or four deep and the real soldiers come running over the top of them, using the bodies as a ramp. We are in the most Godless place on earth with barely any daylight and death all around. Atrocity reported in Udarnik in the north of our sector — guripas found nailed to the ground by icepicks. Our rage peters out with the cold and hunger.

18th January 1942, Novgorod

The Russians smell our weakness and, just when we think it is so cold that we’ll never move again, they attack. We’re sent to Teremets to help the Germans. We try to dissuade the endless waves of Russians by using some of our old African tricks. We strip prisoners of all useful clothing, cut off their trigger fingers, split their noses, cut off an ear and send them back. It has no effect. The next day they ‘re running at us again with clubs and bayonets. I was lucky to get out of Teremets alive and only made it back because I was sent to the rear with a broken leg.

17th June 1942, Riga

Complications set in with the leg after a bout of pneumonia. I was too weak to move and missed the return battalion in the spring. They reset the leg. I caught typhus. The wound wouldn’t heal. I hardly knew what was happening to me for five months. I had a visit from the new commander of 269, Lt Col Cabrera, who has asked me to go back up to the front with the newly manned ‘Tía Bernarda’, as my unit is nicknamed. The war has gone better for the Germans recently and they are back in control of all territory west of the Volkhov and are beginning to turn the screw on Leningrad.

9th February 1943

A Ukrainian deserter came over today and told us more than we wanted to know about what was happening in Kolpino. Huge numbers of batteries were being brought up behind the town, hundreds of trucks unloading shells. The enemy were ready to attack tomorrow. After all this waiting we didn’t believe him, but he showed us his clean underwear and that was enough. The Russians always issue clean underwear before an attack. It means you ‘re going to die, but you can do it with dignity. It was why he had deserted. But why, with all that firepower behind him, did he come over to us, who are about to receive it? Vodka does something to the Slavic brain.

The big Kolpino guns started lobbing shells at our positions south. The infantry blew up their minefields in front of their lines. Our own pathetic artillery started up and the Russian got the psychology just right … they didn’t even dignify it with a reply.

Night came at five in the afternoon. The cold crept inside our bones. We’re all scared, but the inevitability brings out the determination. The Reds’ tank engines started up in unison with a deafening roar. The motors run all night, the Russians worried they’ll freeze.

‘Tomorrow the bulls will run,’ says one of the sergeants. I go out to check the sentries. The cold makes them slack. As I chat to the men, the pine trees in front of the peat bogs bristle where thousands of soldiers rush through the woods to take up their positions for tomorrow’s attack.

10th February 1943

Nothing the Ukrainian deserter told us prepared us for this. At 6.45 the Kolpino guns opened fire on us. One thousand pieces of artillery fired at once. The devastation, in a matter of minutes, was as complete as after an earthquake. Whole hillsides came away, erupted, as if under volcanic pressure. The frost-brittle pine trees burst into flame. The snow around us instantly melted. Heavily fortified positions behind us disappeared into smoking earth. We were cut off. No phones and no visibility as the air filled with black smoke and the stink of peat. We crouched under a torrent of earth, planks, barbed wire, lumps of ice and then the limbs. Arms, legs, helmeted heads, a half-roasted torso. It was the opening statement. It said: ‘You will not survive.’

Some of the men were sobbing, but not through fear, just unable to contain their shock. We waited. The inevitable
Urrah!
and the Reds charged. They hurled themselves into our minefields and after ten metres they were all down. The next wave followed. Another ten metres and they were all down. As they reached the edge of the minefield we opened fire and mowed down line after line of them. The corpses were five deep and still they came. We blasted away, our machine-gun barrels glowing dull red even in the deep cold of the morning.

The Reds sent their new KV-1 tanks towards their objective — the Sinevino heights. Our 37mm shells bounced off the armour.

We were cut off to our left and rear. They pounded our position. Our Captain was hit in the arm. The smaller T-34 tanks smashed through our line, infantry behind, which we mowed down, blood streaking across their white capes. They hit us with anti-tank and mortar until we couldn’t think. We had no machine guns by the end of it. No automatic rifles. Any Russian who got close enough was dragged in and stabbed. More mortar fire. I wanted to laugh, our position was so desperate. The Captain was hit in the leg. He hopped around, exhorting us to stand firm.
‘Arriba España! Viva la muerte!’
We were stupid with battle. Our faces were all blackened, apart from the eye sockets, which were white. We slept where we stood. The Captain started a final rousing speech: ‘Spain is proud of you. I am proud of you, it is completely my privilege to have commanded you in today’s battle … ‘ He was interrupted by twenty Russian rifles pointing down into our trench.

12th February 1943, Sablino

The first question from the Reds was: ‘Who’s got a watch?’ Our two remaining officers had their watches taken. Four of our wounded were bayonetted where they lay. They marched us down the Moscow-Leningrad road. The scene of devastation was so immense, the Russian casualties so thick on the ground, that it was understandable that every Red we met should be blind drunk. Some of our guards drifted off to various drinking parties on the way. As we reached the river two of the Russians escorted the Captain away for interrogation. That left four men to take us to the barbed-wire corral at Ian Izhora. We didn’t fancy a night out in the open. We talked it through in Spanish and at the signal hit them. A single punch to the throat of the guard nearest me and I was off the log road and running for the peat bog, zig-zagging over the ground. Their aim was wild. We made it to an old anti-tank ditch and ran along it to where our own lines had been. We saw only drunk and sleeping Russians. We made it back to the main road where we heard the words,
‘Alto! ¿Quién vive?’
We replied,
‘España’,
and fell into waiting arms.

13th February 1943

What I saw a few days ago has diminished me. I am less human after what I have seen and done. Glory in battle is a thing of the past. Individual heroics disappear in the miasma of modern warfare, where thundering machines annihilate and vaporize. One is brave and should feel glorious to have even entered the arena. I have and I have survived, and I have never felt more lonely. Even after I ran away from home I was never as lonely as I am now. I know no one and no one knows me. I am cold, but from the inside out. In my wolf-fur coat and bearskin hat I am a lone animal, with no pack, out on the snow plain where the horizon has merged with the landscape so that there is no beginning and no end. I am tired with a tiredness that crushes my bones, so that I only wish to sleep with dreams as white as the snow and in a cold that I know will carry me away painlessly.

9th September 1943

I haven’t written a word since Krasni Bor and now that I read it back I know why. I am gathered under Return Battalion 14 and that gives me the strength to face the page again. Today the Russians told us that the Italians had capitulated. They put up a poster in huge red letters: ‘Españoles, Italia ha capitulado! Uníos a nosotros.’ Some guripas slipped under the wire and tore down the sign and put up their own: ‘No somos Italianos.’ For once the Germans agreed.

My mind is set on home, except I have no home. All I want is to go back to Spain, to sit in the dry heat of Andalusia with a glass of tinto. I decide that I will go to Seville and Seville will be my home.

14th September 1943

We marched away from the front to Volosovo, about 60 km. I expected to be happy, most of the guripas were singing. I am still plagued by fatigue. I hoped that moving away from the front would help, but my spirit has darkened and I can barely speak. I sweat at night, my pillow is sodden even though it is not hot. I never slip into sleep. My dropping off is a series of jolts, of body spasms that start in my middle and crack up into my head like a bullwhip. My left hand shakes and has a tendency to go spastic. I wake up with the feeling that my hands are not my own and I am terrified from the first moment.

I look back through my drawings and it is not the Leningrad skyline with the dome of St Isaac’s Cathedral and the Admiralty spire, nor is it the portraits of my comrades and the Russian prisoners that move me. It is the winter landscapes. Sheets of white paper with the vague smudges of buildings,
izbas
or pine trees. They are an abstraction of a mental state. A frozen wilderness in which even the certainties have only a wavering presence. I show one to another veteran of the Russian front and he looks at it for some time and I think he’s seen in it what I have, but he hands it back with the words: ‘That’s a funny-looking wolf I am perplexed by this, but eventually it amuses me and it gives me my first glimmer of hope since February.

7th October 1943, Madrid

Today I officially left the Legion after twelve years service. I have a kit bag and a satchel of my books and drawings. I have enough money to last me a year. I am going to Andalucía, to the autumnal light, the piercing blue skies and the sensual heat. I will draw and paint for a year and see what comes of it. I am going to drink wine and learn to be lazy.

Because of the American blockade there’s very little fuel for public transport. I will have to walk to Toledo.

19

Wednesday, 18th April 2001, Falcón’s house, Calle Bailén, Seville

The disasters of sleep — all that free falling and spitting out mouthfuls of teeth and examinations not reached in time and cars with no brakes and precipices with crumbling edges — how do we survive them all? We should die of fright night after night. Falcón came hurtling into the enveloping darkness with these thoughts plummeting down the lift shaft of his mind. Was he surviving them, his own personal disasters? He only survived them by banishing sleep, crashing out of his falling empire and into the cracked glass of his own world.

He went for a run by the dark river. Dawn broke and on the way back he stopped to watch a rowing eight. The hull of the shell sliced through the water, dipping with each lurch of power from the harmonious crew. He wanted to be out there with them, part of their unconsciously brilliant machine. He thought about his own team, its lack of cohesion, its fragmented efforts, and his leadership. He was out of touch, had lost control, was failing to communicate direction to the investigation. He braced himself, dropped to the ground and throughout his fifty press-ups told the cobbles that today would be different.

The Jefatura was silent. He was early again. He glanced down Ramírez’s report. The portero did not remember seeing Eloisa Gómez going into the cemetery, which was not surprising. Serrano had completed his check of all hospitals and medical suppliers and there were no records of thefts or unusual sales. He read through Eloisa Gómez’s autopsy. The Médico Forense had revised her time of death to later on Saturday morning, around 9 a.m. The contents of her stomach revealed a partially digested meal of
solomillo,
pork fillet, which must have been consumed after midnight. There was also a practically undigested snack of what was probably
chocolate con churros.
The alcohol content in her blood showed that she’d been drinking most of the night. Falcón imagined the killer taking Eloisa out as if she was his girlfriend, treating her to an expensive dinner, taking her to a bar or club and then the classic early-morning snack — and then what? Back to my place? Maybe he hadn’t chloroformed her but rolled the stocking off her leg, kissing her thigh, her knee, her foot. Then, just as she’d fallen back on the bed to be loved properly, perhaps even for the first time, she’d sensed something and opened her eyes to find his face over her, the black stocking a taut, dark crack between his two fists and his eyes intent with the relish of a live throat struggling and quivering under his restraining hands.

Except that he had chloroformed her. There were traces. Falcón moved on from the stomach and blood analysis. The vagina and anus showed signs of recent sexual activity. There were traces of spermicide, but no semen in the vagina and an oil-based lubricant in the anus, which was distended from frequent penetration. Falcón’s mind slipped again and he saw Eloisa Gómez servicing her clients in the backs of cars and in her room until she got the call, the call she’d been waiting for all day. The call she’d been thinking of as her disembodied
voice sobbed and whimpered under the bestial intrusions of her trade. The call that touched her so lightly, the words like a feather on a child’s ear, and it moved her, turned her, flipped her stomach over her heart. Such a gross seduction of someone who would start when the shadows moved, could only have been pulled off by another who had made a study of human nature with his own very specific purposes in mind. In his own way the killer was as brutally demanding as any client.

The only interesting thing to be derived from the report was that it looked as if the killer had taken Eloisa Gómez to the cemetery on Saturday morning, probably when it first opened, and had killed her there.