‘By your mother?’
Falcón faltered.
‘Now that is odd,’ he said.
Silence.
‘It came back to me with the clarity of a dream,’ he said. ‘Except now I realize there was one feature missing, but I’ve got it now. I was being thrown up in the air by a man.’
‘Your father?’
‘No, no. He’s a stranger.’
‘You’ve never seen him before?’
‘He’s Moroccan. I think he must have been a friend of my mother’s.’
‘Was that unusual?’
‘No, no. Moroccans are very friendly people. They love to talk. They’re very curious and inquisitive. They have an amazing facility …’
‘I meant for your mother, a married woman, to be meeting a stranger on the beach. Allowing her son to be thrown up in the air by him.’
‘I’m not sure he was a complete stranger. No. I’d seen him before. He probably owned a shop, which my mother used to buy from. It would be something like that.’
‘What happened in the judge’s office?’
He recounted the meeting: the attempted dialogue with Sergio, the Almodóvar film, the terrible reply from Sergio and what it had done to him.
‘What shook me was the talk about outsiders beforehand and then the killer using a line from the book. I’m sure it’s L’Étranger. The Outsider. It makes me feel as if I’m going mad.’
‘Ignore it,’ she said. ‘Synchronicity. It happens all the time. Concentrate on the issues.’
‘Which are?’
Silence from Alicia Aguado.
‘My mother,’ he said. ‘That’s an issue.’
‘Why did the line from Camus have such a terrible effect on you?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘How did your mother die? Was she ill?’
‘No, no, she wasn’t ill. She had a heart attack but …’
A long silence in which Falcón blinked once a minute.
‘There was something … a crisis of some sort in the street. We were in the house, Paco, Manuela and I. And there was this big row in the street outside our house. I can’t remember what it was about. It was afterwards though, that my father came to tell us that our mother was dead. But it won’t come back to me … what happened.’
‘What happened after she died?’
‘There was a funeral. I only remember people’s legs from that day and the general gloom. It was February and raining. My father spent a lot of time with us. He nursed us all through it.’
‘Did you ever see the stranger on the beach again?’
‘Never.’
‘How long was it before your father married again?’
‘We already knew Mercedes,’ he said. ‘She’d been a family friend for a long time. She helped my father a lot, marketing his work in America. They were having an affair before my mother died … did I tell you that? I only just found out.’
‘Carry on.’
‘Mercedes was still married when my mother died and then her husband subsequently died in America. Cancer, I think. She came back to Tangier in her husband’s yacht. It must have been about a year after my mother died that they got married.’
‘Did you like Mercedes?’
‘I loved Mercedes from the moment I first saw her. I still have that vague memory of seeing her for the first time. I was tiny. She came to my father’s studio and picked me up. I think I played with her earrings. I loved her from that moment, but then my father always said I was a very loving child.’
‘What happened with Mercedes?’
‘It was a very good time. My father was successful. The Falcón nudes were the talk of the art world. He was being hailed as the new Picasso, which was ridiculous given the size and quality of his oeuvre. Then tragedy. It was after a New Year’s Eve dinner. Everybody went down to the yacht in the port afterwards to see the fireworks and then some of them went out on the boat at night and a storm got up. Mercedes fell overboard. They never found her body.
‘But … but just before the party left the house I crept down from my bedroom and Mercedes spotted me,’ he said, replaying it like film through the gate of his mind. ‘She took me back up to bed. I was reminded of this the other day because … That was it. It’s coming together. In my murder investigation the first victim, Raúl Jiménez, smoked these cigarettes, Celtas, and that was the smell in her hair. I only just found out that my father knew Raúl Jiménez from the forties and now I realize that he must have been at that party except … he’d already left Tangier by then.’
‘I’m sure other people smoked that brand in those days.’
‘Yes, of course,’ said Falcón. ‘So, Mercedes took me up to bed and kissed me and hugged me tight to her bosom. She was squeezing her love into me so hard I could barely breathe. She was wearing perfume, which I now know is Chanel No.5. Women don’t use it so often these days. But years ago if I came across that smell in the street it would transport me back to that moment. Being in the grip of love.’
‘And after Mercedes left you?’
Falcón grabbed his stomach with his free hand, stricken with pain.
‘I hear …’ he said, struggling. ‘I hear her heels receding down the corridor and stairs. I hear the talk and the laughter of the other guests. I hear the door shutting. I hear the shoes pattering on the cobbles. And I remember that she never came back.’
Tears blurred his vision. Saliva filled his mouth. He couldn’t swallow. The last words came out from under the shuddering wall of his stomach.
‘There were no more mothers after that.’
Alicia made some tea. The cup burnt his fingers, the tea scalded his tongue. Physics brought him back into the room. He felt a strange newness, a cleansed satisfaction, as when he and Paco had scraped and rendered an old bullpen at the finca and whitewashed it to a solid white cube in the burnt umber landscape. He’d photographed it. It had something of the simplicity of a great work of art.
‘I’ve never remembered that all the way through,’ he said. ‘I always used to stop before I got to her receding heels.’
‘And you know now, Javier, don’t you, that it wasn’t your fault that she didn’t come back?’
‘There’s a question.’
‘What question?’
He thought for a long time and shook his head.
‘You know it wasn’t your fault,’ she said.
He nodded.
‘Do you know what you’ve done this evening, Javier?’
‘I suppose you’d say that I’ve relived a moment.’
‘And seen it in its normal light,’ she said. ‘That’s how the process works. If we deny things that are painful to us they don’t go away. We only hide from them. You’ve just had the first success in the biggest investigation of your life.’
He drove back to Calle Bailén oddly refreshed, as if he’d been out running and sweated all the toxins from his body. He parked and walked through the silent, dark house until he reached the patio at its centre and its limpid pupil of black shining water. He turned the light on beneath the arched and pillared cloister. His hands shook as he entered the study. His eyes floated over the desk, the scattered photographs and the portrait of his mother and her children. He went to the old grey filing cabinet, unlocked it and took out a brown buff file from under the letter ‘I’. He sat at his desk with the file, knowing that he would take the next step, beating back the guilt. He took out the fifteen black-and-white prints and laid them face down on the desk. He asked himself in the glass of the picture on the wall: ‘How new are you?’
He turned over the first photograph. Inés lay face down, naked, on a silk sheet on the bed. She was looking back at him, resting her head on her fist. Her hair was all over. Falcón closed his eyes as the pain eased into him. He turned to the next photograph, opened his eyes. His neck shook with tension. Swallowing became impossible. Inés was propped up on the pillows, naked again apart from a piece of silk around her shoulders. She was looking at the ca
mera with a deep sexual intent. Her thighs were spread wide, revealing her shaved sex. He was standing behind the camera in the same state. The wonderful excitement as they’d shaved each other, the giggling at their trembling hands. There’d been nothing perverse about it. The joy was in the innocence of it. The brilliance of that day came back to him. The torrid heat of that big fat afternoon, the cracks of intense light around the shutters brightening the dimness of the room so that they could see each other in the mirror. The privacy of the two of them alone in the big house, so that when they were too hot he’d picked her up and, still connected, walked downstairs, her thighs clenched around his waist, ankles locked, heels riding the tops of his buttocks. He’d stepped into the eye of the fountain and sank into the cool water.
It was so unbearable that he had to put away the file and lock the cabinet. He looked at the grey metal repository of his memory. Alicia was right. You could not lock things away. You could not obsessively order them, package them, file them under ‘I and hope to confine them to their place. No amount of order could stop the mind’s inclination to leak. This was why desperate people blew their brains out. The only sure way to stop the leaking was to destroy the reservoir for ever.
That question came to him again. It still had no form. He didn’t quite believe what Alicia had said he’d achieved tonight. He had not been certain that he was not the reason that Mercedes hadn’t come back. He was responsible and the thought propelled him into his mac and out into the night air, which was now wet, the cobbles shining from some light rain. He went to the Plaza del Museo and found odd comfort pacing beneath the dark and dripping trees.
Just after 1 a.m. a taxi stopped at the junction of Calle San Vicente and Calle Alfonso XII. Inés got out and waited on the pavement. Calderón paid the driver from the back of the cab. Falcón came out from under the trees, his hair wet, and stood in the shadows of the kiosk on the plaza.
Calderón took Inés by the hand. She was staring up and down the street and across the plaza. They turned and walked up Calle San Vicente. Falcón loped across the square in a crouching run and found the shadows on the opposite side of the street to the lovers. He walked behind the cars parked on the pavement. They stopped. Calderón took out his keys. Inés turned and her eyes found him paralysed between a car and the wall of a building. He ducked and ran for the nearest doorway where he stood, back up against the wall, pressing himself flat into the darkness, heart and lungs fighting like a sack of wild animals. Inés told Calderón to go up. Her heels stabbed the street and stopped by the pavement close to him.
‘I know you’re there,’ she said.
The blood thundered in his ears.
‘This isn’t the first time I’ve seen you, Javier.’
He squeezed his eyes shut, the child about to be found out, punished.
‘Your face keeps coming out of the night,’ she said. ‘You’re following me and I won’t put up with it. You’ve destroyed my life once and I won’t let you do it again. This is a warning. If I see you again, I will go straight to the courts and apply for a restraining order. Do you understand that? I will humiliate you as you did me.’
The spiky heels backed away and then returned, this time a little closer.
‘I hate you,’ she whispered. ‘Do you know how much I hate you? Are you listening, Javier? I am going upstairs now and Esteban is going to take me to his bed. Did you hear that? He does things to me that you could never even dream of.’
Extracts from the Journals of Francisco Falcón
26th June 1946, Tangier
I have terrible lower back pain and go to the Spanish doctor on Calle Sevilla, not so far from R.’s house. He examines me, takes me into an adjoining room and lays me face down on a cloth covered bench. Another door opens and he introduces me to his daughter, Pilar, who works with him as his nurse. She rubs an oil into my back which generates a tremendous heat. She rubs the oil in down to my coccyx. By the end of this treatment I am embarrassed by the state of my manhood. Her small hands have magic in them. She tells me I have to come to her for a session every day for a week. Were all afflictions like this.
3rd July 1946, Tangier
After endless negotiations I have persuaded Pilar to come and sit for me, but a boy arrives at lunchtime to say she cannot come. In the late afternoon Carlos Gallardo comes to visit. He is another of those ‘fellow artists’, but he is not Antonio Fuentes. There is none of the ascetic about him. He is louche. He drinks heavily and usually in the Bar La Mar Chica, which was where we met. We have smoked hashish together and looked at each other’s work without comment.
He has brought a Moroccan lad with him who carries his groceries, which he leaves at the door. We sit on low wooden chairs in one of the dark cool rooms away from the heat of the patio. My houseboy puts a hookah between us and fills it with a tobacco-hashish mix. We smoke. The hashish does its work and I feel pleasant. Desultory thoughts float into my mind like aquarium fish. C.’s boy is standing by his chair with one of his brown feet resting on the other. He has had his hair shorn, probably by C., against lice. He is smiling at me. He can’t be more than sixteen years old. I reset my vision and realize that C. has his hand up the boy’s robe and is caressing his buttocks. I didn’t know this about C. It does not disgust me. I make some comment. ‘Yes,’ he says,’ of course I like women, but there’s something inhibiting about sex with a woman. I put it down to us Spanish and our mothers. But with these local youths it’s so normal, something that has always happened and to which no stigma attaches. I feel free to indulge. I am a sensualist after all. You must have seen that from my work.’ I muster some reply and he continues: ‘Whereas you, my friend, are frozen solid. Bleak and chill. I hear the wind whistling through your canvases. You should be thawing in this heat, but I can’t see it. Perhaps you should take a boy for some guilt-free sensuality.’ We smoke some more and my skin feels like velvet. C. says, ‘Take Ahmed to your room now and lie down with him.’ The idea sends a bolt of electricity through me. I find I am not appalled by the suggestion, quite the opposite. The boy comes over. I can barely speak but manage to turn down the offer.
5th July 1946, Tangier
P. comes with her mother. The heat is not so smothering and we sit in the patio under the fig tree. We talk. The women’s eyes dart about like birds in a bush. I feel like a large cat planning dinner. P.’s mother is here to find out about me …
Because R.’s company, in which I am a partner, is one of the best known in Tangier’s Spanish community, she is soon eating out of my hand as if it is chock-full of millet. I keep away from all the dull socializing and am not known. Were she to go down to the chabolas on the outskirts of town they would run away in fright at the mention of El Marroquí. But P.’s mother lives between her house and the Spanish cathedral so I am safe and I cannot see her ever straying into the Bar La Mar Chica.
She asks to see my work and I politely refuse, but relent under pressure. P. stands transfixed in front of the monochrome shapes and patterns while her mother rushes around trying to find something she understands. She settles on the drawing of a Touareg, which at least has some colour in it. I sign it and give it to her and ask to paint a portrait of her daughter. She says she will raise the matter with her husband.
They leave and moments later there is a fierce knocking on the door. It is the young lad who came round with C. the other day, Ahmed. He is eating a peach and the juice is dribbling down his chin and is smeared across his cheeks. He licks his lips. It is not subtle but it is effective. I haul him off the street and follow him, trembling, through the endless rooms and passages. He understands something of the urgency and runs kicking up his robe with his bare feet. By the time I arrive at the bedroom his caramel body lies beneath the mosquito netting. I fall on him like a demolished building. Afterwards I give him a few pesetas and he goes away happy.
3rd August 1946, Tangier
Trust has been established between myself and the doctor and P. is allowed to visit the house on her
own to sit for her portrait. The sessions take place in the afternoon when the surgery is closed and can only last an hour. It is very hot. I have to work in one of the rooms close to the patio for the light. I am drawing. She sits on a wooden chair. I am close to her face. She does not flinch. We do not speak until I look at her hands. They rest in her lap, small, long-fingered, delicate instruments of pleasure.
Me: Who taught you to massage?
P.: Why do you think anybody taught me?
Me: The expertise in your fingers strikes me as coming from instruction rather than trial and error.
P.: Who taught you to paint?
Me: I had some help on how to look at things.
P.: I was taught by a gypsy woman in Granada.
Me: Is that where you’re from?
P.: Originally, yes. My father was a doctor in Melilla for some years before we came here.
Me: And your father allowed you to mix with the gypsies?
P.: I am quite independent, despite what my parents might want you to think.
Me: You ‘re allowed out?
P.: I do as I please. I am twenty-three years old.
The boy arrives with mint tea. We lapse into silence. I work on her hands and then we drink the tea.
P.: You draw figuratively but paint abstracts.
Me: I teach myself to see with the drawings and interpret it with the paint.
P.: What have you seen today?
Me: I have been looking at structure.
P.: How well am I built?
Me: With delicacy and strength.
P.: Do you know why I like you?
The question silences me.
P.: You have strength and individuality, but you are vulnerable, too.
Me: Vulnerable?
P.: You have suffered, but there is still the small boy in you.
This intimate exchange seals something between us. She has told me something she has kept from her parents. She has seen something in me which I have not denied. But she is wrong. I am those things … but I am not individual … not yet.