The Blind Man of Seville

‘So what happened to your mother and the baby?’ asked Falcón.

‘My mother needed some days to recover. I remember that time very well. We weren’t allowed out of the house. Servants were told to say nobody was at home. Food came in secretly from neighbours’ houses. Some armed men, who normally guarded the construction sites, were installed across the street. My father paced the floor like a caged panther, stopping only to look through a crack in the shutter if he heard something in the street. The tension and the boredom were there in equal measure. It was the start of the family madness.’

‘And you never found out what it was your father was afraid of?’

‘At the time I was a kid, I didn’t care. I just wanted to avoid being bored. Later … much later, I thought it was important to find out what it could have been that had driven my father to such lengths. So, thirty years after the event, I thought the only person to ask would be him. It was the last time we spoke on a personal level. And this is the magic of the human brain.’

‘What?’ asked Falcón, jumping in his seat, as if he’d missed the vital moment.

‘If we have something in there that we don’t like we bypass it. Like a river that’s tired of flowing around the same loop again and again, it just cuts through and joins up with the stretch of river beyond the loop. The loop becomes a small disconnected lake, a reservoir of memory which due to lack of supply eventually dries up.’

‘He forgot about it?’

‘He denied it. As far as he was concerned it had never happened. He looked at me as if I might be insane.’

‘Even with your mother dead and your sister in San Juan de Dios?’

‘It was 1995 by then. He was married to Consuelo. He was in a different life. The past could have been as distant to him as … a previous existence.’

‘Were you surprised by Consuelo?’

‘Her appearance?’ he said. ‘My God, I was stunned. It made my flesh creep. I burnt the photograph he sent of their wedding.’

‘So you got no help from your father?’

‘Only that what I thought I needed to know was unimportant. There was nothing in my father’s world, as far as I could see, that he could have possibly placed more value on than the life of a child. The admission was in his silence, in his flat denial, in the whole expression of his life … this marriage to his wife’s lookalike …’

‘Wouldn’t that have been torture?’

Jiménez gave a derisive snort.

‘If you could call the comfort of a beautiful woman a punishment … then, yes.’

‘You think he wiped the slate clean and started a new life?’

‘My father was an instinctive animal. The passages of his mind were not those of a normal human being. To be as successful a businessman as he — and I know because I work for some very successful men myself — you can’t think like ordinary people … and he didn’t.’

‘You’ve lost me again. Maybe you’re thinking too fast.’

Jiménez leaned across the table, jaw set.

‘Don’t believe for one moment that I don’t know what I’m doing,’ he said. ‘I have never spoken about these things before to anyone, other than the man who teased apart the knot in my brain. And you know why? Because I wouldn’t dream of infecting my wife’s peace of mind with such terrible things. They would blacken our home and we’d be left stumbling around in the dark.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Falcón.

Jiménez held up his hand in apology, realized he’d been too grave. He sat up and opened his shoulders.

‘We left Tangier at night. No suitcases, just the clothes we stood up in and my mother’s wedding dress and jewellery. Everyone at the port had been prepaid. We didn’t show any documents. There was a moment when it looked as if we were going to be stopped, but more money appeared and we got on the boat and sailed away. We picked up my sister in the village above Algeciras and started our lives as gypsies.

‘There was never any sense of danger. My father never again paced the floors, but as soon as his instinct told him to move on … we moved on. We normally went to large towns or cities. We spent some time here in Madrid, but my father detested Madrid. I think Madrid made him feel provincial, reminded him of who he was.

‘We arrived in Almería at the beginning of 1964. My father was running a couple of coasters from Algeciras to Cartagena, but he got a chance to build a hotel on the front in Almería so we moved there. My father seemed to like the idea of settling down. He must have thought that five or six years running was enough, that the world moves on, that fat grudges waste away without the nourishment of revenge. He was wrong. This is why I thought it was important to know what he’d done to make the people he’d offended so implacable that they would never stop trying to track him down. And I have to admit it would still interest me, even though I’ve tamed my fascination with the irrelevance of it.’

‘Why?’

‘I think it would help me to gauge what a monster he was.’

Falcón shuddered, split by the contradictory emotions of Raúl Jiménez being a monster and a memory of his own father playing at being one. What terrible slavering faces he pulled as he devoured him. His father had no inhibition because there was little in his world that demanded personal control and several times Javier had worn a toothmark embedded in his back for days.

‘Are you all right, Inspector Jefe?’

He hoped he hadn’t been pulling one of his father’s huge-tongued, gargoyle faces.

‘Unfinished thoughts,’ he said.

‘Where were we?’

‘Almería, 1964,’ said Falcón. ‘You didn’t mention how your mother took all this moving around.’

‘As far as her health was concerned, she was fine. If she was unhappy she didn’t show it to us or to him. There was no such thing as wives having a say in those days, anyway. She just got on with things.’

‘Your father was building the hotel?’

‘I should tell you about Marta at this stage. You remember what I said about how she loved to care for things?’

‘Cats.’

‘Yes, cats. Once we left Tangier she transferred all that on to Arturo. My mother could have left Arturo’s upbringing to Marta. She did everything for him. He was her life. It’s curious, isn’t it? Marta never had dolls. They were bought for her, but she never took to them. She was more fascinated by living things. Strange, don’t you think, for someone so uncomplicated?’

‘Perhaps she didn’t have a developed imagination.’

‘Possibly. Imagination is a complex thing, but then so is life.’

‘She probably wasn’t reading anything into it.’

‘I used to wonder what went through her mind.’

‘And you don’t any more?’

‘She barely said a word for the first twenty years. Then something remarkable happened. Over the years the staff have changed there. It’s a sign of the times that not many young people want to become mental health workers and so those jobs are being filled by immigrants. In María’s case there was a Moroccan boy who came in with a kitten he’d found and something must have clicked in her. She became animated. It must have brought back the early days, the houseboys and the cats.’

‘She spoke?’

‘Not words. She articulated something, nothing intelligible. She hadn’t used her vocal cords for decades. It was the start of something though. There’s been little progress since then. She doesn’t “say” anything to me when I go there. Maybe I’m too powerful a reminder of the original trauma.’

‘Did her doctors know what that trauma was?’

‘Not until three years ago, and not the full story.’