The Blind Man of Seville (49 page)

‘Lost it?’ said Falcón. ‘You don’t lose your wife’s jewellery.’

‘You know how it was between him and me,’ said Manuela. ‘He was convinced that I was only interested in money so if I asked for things he would always make me grovel. Well, over mother’s jewellery, I didn’t give him the satisfaction. None of it was that special as far as I remember.’

‘What
do
you remember of it?’

‘She liked rings and brooches but not bracelets or necklaces. She said they were the chains to enslave you. She never had her ears pierced either, so she only had clasp earrings. She didn’t like expensive stuff and, because she was dark, she preferred silver. I think the only gold ring she had was her wedding band,’ she said, as if she’d been expecting the question. ‘Why, little brother, do you need to know this on a Saturday afternoon?’

‘I need to remember something.’

‘What?’

‘If I knew that …’

‘I’m joking, Javier,’ she said. ‘You need to calm down. You’re taking your work too … personally. Get some distance from it,
hijo.
Paco told me you’d forgotten about lunch tomorrow.’

‘Are you coming as well?’

‘Yes, and I’m bringing Alejandro and his sister.’

He tried to remember the details of Alejandro’s sister’s diet and hung up. He went into the storeroom where he’d discovered the journals and sorted through all the boxes. He found nothing. The only thing he came across that he hadn’t seen before was a roll of five canvases which, as he opened them up, released a small diagram that fell among the boxes. He laid the canvases out in the studio
but didn’t recognize them. They weren’t his father’s work. Layers and layers of acrylic paint giving a luminous effect, as of moonlight scarfed by clouds. He rolled them up again.

It was dark by now and he collapsed to the floor, realizing he’d forgotten to eat and forgotten to go to Salgado’s funeral. He sat against the wall, his hands dangling between his knees. He was becoming an obsessive. The mess of his father’s studio seemed to have got inside his head. His brain was as convoluted as a tangle of fishing line. He called Alicia and ran into her answering machine. He left no message.

He pulled a book out of the bookcase and realized that there was considerable space behind. His obsession resurfaced. He worked his way up and down the shelves until behind the art books he found a wooden box he recognized from his mother’s dressing table. He even remembered his little fingers amongst the jewels, a treasure chest from an adventure book.

The box had a Moorish geometric design on the lid and sides. He couldn’t open it and there was no apparent lock. He worked at it for over an hour until he twisted a small pyramidal piece of wood and the lid sprang open.

In front of his mother’s jewels, she came back to him so vividly that he put his face to them to see if, after all these years, there would be a trace of her smell. There was nothing. The metals were cold to his touch. He laid out the pieces on the table. The clasp earrings, clusters of silver-black grapes, a silver scimitar brooch set with amethysts, a large agate cube set on a silver band. Just as Manuela had said, there was no gold. The wedding band must have been buried with her.

He looked down on all the pieces and waited for the sacred memory to come back, the one he’d nearly
remembered outside Salgado’s gallery. All that surfaced was the seashell full of rings in his bobbing vision as he sat in the bath while his mother’s soapy hand rippled up and down his tiny ribs.

Extracts from the Journals of Francisco Falcón

2nd July 1948, Tangier

I squirt the oil on to my palette. I stab it with the brush. I coax colours into each other. P. lies on the divan. She is naked. Her arm rests over a pink bolster. Her feet are crossed at the ankle. Her body is fuller in pregnancy. She wears a necklace, which I have pulled tight around her neck (she does not like this) and draped down her soft back. I press the paint on to the canvas. It glides smoothly. The oil is pushing the brush. I am close. I am very close. There is form.

17th November 1948, Tangier

P. is huge with pregnancy, her belly is tautly distended, the breasts with their wide brown nipples have parted and lie in swags on her flanks. She smells different. Milky. It makes me nauseous. I haven’t touched milk since I was a boy. Just the memory of its fat coating my mouth and tongue and its cowy fumes filling the cavities of my head makes me gag. P. takes a glass of warm milk before bed. It calms her and helps her to sleep. I can’t sleep with the empty glass in the bedroom. I have not worked since August.

12th January 1949, Tangier

I have a son of 3,850 grams. I look at the mashed red face and blast of black hair and am sure we have been given someone’s Chinese baby by mistake. The child’s wails tear through me and I wince at the thought of this massive presence in the house. P. wants to call him Francisco, which I think will be confusing. She says he will be called Paco from the start.

17th March 1949, Tangier

… I now run R.’s building projects. I work with the architect, a brooding Galician from Santiago, whose dark ideas need enlivening. I pour light into his sound structures and he flinches from it like a vampire. The American, for whom we’re building the hotel, looks as if he might kiss me.

20th June 1949, Tangier

R. married his child bride today. Gumersinda (her grandmother’s name, handed down) has the face and sweet nature of a cherub … He is a different man around her, quiet, respectful, attentive and, I suppose this is it, totally in love with the idea of her. I cannot get so much as a squeak out of her. I rack my brains for topics of conversation — dolls, ballet dancing, ribbons — and feel lupine in her presence.

1st January 1950, Tangier

The hotel was finished before Christmas and we celebrated New Year with an exhibition of my abstract landscapes to which
le tout
Tangier came. I sold everything on the first day. C.B. bought two pieces and pulled me aside with the words: ‘This is great, Francisco, really great. But, you know, we ‘re still waiting.’ I press him on this and he says: ‘The real work. Back to the body, Francisco. The female form. Only you can do it.’

This afternoon I take one of the charcoal drawings of P. out and tell her what C.B. said. She agrees to model for me. As she undresses I feel like a client with a prostitute and go to the drawing whose simplicity is still magnificent. P. says:
‘Pronto.’
Just as a whore might say. I turn. Her shoulders and upper arms are heavy, her breasts look off to the side, her belly hangs above the bush of her pubic hair. Her thighs are thick, her knees have fallen. She has a bunion on her left foot. The green of her eyes comes swimming towards me like a tide of olive oil. She looks past me to the old drawing. ‘It’s not me any more,’ she says. I tell her to dress. She leaves. I look at the drawing like a man who’s found he can’t perform with the whore. I put it away with the rest.

20th March 1950, Tangier

R. calls me at the house to tell me that G. has given birth to a boy. The baby was big and the labour long and arduous. He is very shaken.

17th June 1950, Tangier

P. is pregnant. I move the studio out of the house to make more room. I have found a place on the bay with light from the north and which looks across to Spain. I set up a single bed and a mosquito net. I put a canvas up on the wall but no colour comes to mind.

20th July 1950, Tangier

C. arrives furious with some young Moroccan in tow. I haven’t seen him (it’s no accident) since my shameful wedding night. He demands to know why I haven’t told him about the new studio. The boy makes tea. We sit and smoke. C. drifts into a stupor and falls asleep. The boy and I exchange glances and set to under the mosquito net. I wake later to find C. in an even greater rage and the boy holding his face where C. has hit him. It seems that C. had quite fallen for this boy and is enraged at finding him behaving like a cheap whore. He won’t be pacified and leaves with the boy holding his nose with both hands and blood in flashes down his white robe. The door shuts. I look to my blank canvas and decide that red is the colour.

15th February 1951, Tangier

I have a pink and placid daughter who is a welcome relief after Paco, whose first wails were just the start of a long campaign of relentless demand. Manuela (P.’s mother’s name) sleeps constantly and only wakes to blow little bubbles at the purse of her lips and take a little milk.

8th June 1951, Tangier

I run into C. in the Bar La Mar Chica, which has become a late-night haunt of aristocrats and other beauties. They press money on to Carmella, who beguiles the air with the horrors of her armpits, and pay no attention to her partner, Luis, who is a much better dancer. I have not seen C. since the incident with the boy in my studio. Things have not gone well for him. He is drunk and ugly. He looks drained and sucked out. The anarchy of depravity has bitten back and taken great chunks from him. He unleashes a tirade against me in English for the benefit of the onlookers. ‘Behold — Francisco Falcón, artist, architect, contrabandista and legionnaire. The master of the female form. Did you know, he once sold a picture to Barbara Hutton for one thousand dollars? No, not a picture, a drawing. A little scratching of charcoal on paper and a thousand notes fluttered down on his head.’ I sit back. It is harmless, but C. has his audience now and rises to it. He knows they’re the sort who don’t want Luis but Carmella, and he rewards them. ‘But let me tell you about Francisco Falcón and his deep understanding of the female form. He is an impostor. Francisco Falcón knows nothing of the female form, but he is an expert on boys — oh yes, let me tell you of the bums and cocks he has savoured. These are his real speciality and I should know, because he used me as his pimp …’ At this point Luis ventures over and tells him to shut up. I am white with rage but cool to the touch. C. does not shut up but launches into a final bitter tirade which ends on the occasion of my wedding night. Luis grabs him and hauls him from the bar. They do not return. I leave, followed by the audience who assume that, having seen the dirt, they will now smell the blood. Luis has taken C. away and, despite feeling capable of tearing up palm trees, I walk calmly home.

12th June 1951, Tangier

C. has been found dead in his rooms in the Medina, his head bludgeoned to an unrecognizable pulp. The boy whose nose he had broken in my studio was found with the body and blood on his clothes. He’s charged with the murder. This is the ultimate end of the sensualist — the kiss no longer satisfies, the touch is too delicate and so in time only a slap will do and then a punch and finally, down comes the cudgel.

18th June 1951, Tangier

I have decided to spend the summer months here in the studio. The house is in an uproar and stinks of
caca
and milk. The air is full of idiot talk. I’d rather lie here drowsy beneath my net, the world vague beyond, with only the muezzin calling the faithful to prayer to punctuate my day. His calls seem to come from the belly and resonate in his chest before issuing forth from his mouth — more plaintive than any of Luis’s flamenco. The sound always comes from silence and its eerie spirituality needs no translation. Five calls a day and I’m moved every time.

2nd July 1951, Tangier

At one of the rare lunches I attend these days P. asks me what I am doing. I go into a long diatribe about painting the muezzin’s call as an abstract skyscape and she interrupts. She has heard malicious gossip of depraved goings on. It seems that the proceedings in the law courts have penetrated her baby world. She probes and I am like a live oyster whose cold clammy world winces under the intrusions of her teasing blade. I ask her to visit my studio and see the work I am doing. I convince her of my ascetic life. She is satisfied that I am serious. I am such a monster … or at least so Paco thinks. He giggles and clasps my huge head as I feed on his tiny, tight belly. He knows no fear, this little fellow.

5th July 1951, Tangier

I wake up in a stupor with some Mohammed or other lying by my side and P. knocking on the door down below. I send him up to the roof and let her in. I make tea. She asks to see my work. I am evasive because I have nothing to show. She touches me in a way that lets me know that she has not come here with this in mind. I am spent after a whole afternoon at play and I am dirty, too. She becomes irritable as I procrastinate and spills scorching mint tea on my bare foot, so that I hop about and the boy on the roof lets out a blurt of laughter, which I hope she doesn’t hear. She leaves soon after.

26th August 1951, Tangier

I glance back over the years, flicking through these journals, and am aghast at the revelations. I now hope they will never be read. If I attain any sort of fame from my work and these diaries come to light, what will it do to the classification of my genius? They have become confessions, not diaries. These aren’t the noble notes one would expect of an exhausted master but rather the tawdry jottings of a depraved rascal. I think I must be smoking too much and not spending enough time in lively company, although where I should find that I don’t know. That American Paul Bowles I mentioned earlier has had some success with a book which I haven’t troubled myself to read. I try to find him, but he’s always away. I go to Dean’s Bar, but it is full of drunks and reprobates with not one idea between them. The rest are tourists who have other things to think about. I have failed to keep up with my contacts from B.H.’s world. C.B. is not here. I give up on society.

I hear from C.B. that he has sold two of my pieces to wealthy women in Texas. The cheque is substantial, he tells me, but I had been hoping for a space in MOMA. He tries to pacify me by saying that Picasso once told him that ‘Museums are just a lot of lies,’ which is easy to say when you hang in the best of them in every country of the Western world.