The Blind Man of Seville by Robert Wilson Read Free Book Online

eyes black and glistening.
    ‘You were asking about his personal and business relationships,’ she said, staring off out of the window.
    ‘He was forty-four when his first wife died. I can’t believe he went twenty years without …”
    ‘Of course there were women,’ she said savagely, angrynow, possibly at him for his curiosity and his uselessness. ‘I don’t know how many there were. I imagine lots, but none of them lasted. Quite a few of them came to look at me … the winner of Raúl’s devotion. Most had their nails dipped in spite, ready to scratch. You know how I dealt with them, Inspector Jefe? I gave them the satisfaction of thinking me a silly little tart. You know, a little bit cursi, twee. It made them happy. They were superior. They left me alone after that. Some of them are friends now … in the Seville sense of the word.’
    ‘And business?’
    ‘He didn’t start the restaurants until the tourist boom in the eighties when people found there was more to Spain than the Costa del Sol. It was a hobby to begin with. He was very sociable and he didn’t see why he shouldn’t make money out of it. He started with that one in El Porvenir for his rich friends, then the one in Santa Cruz for the tourists, likewise the big one off the Plaza Alfalfa. After we married he added the two on the coast and last year we opened that one in La Macarena.’
    ‘Where did the money come from in the first place?’
    ‘He made a lot of money in Tangier after the Second World War when it was a free port. There were thousands of companies there in those days. He even had his own bank and a construction company. It was an easy place to get rich then, as I’m sure you know.’
    ‘I was very young. I have no memory of the place,’ said Falcón.
    ‘He started a barging company here in Seville in the sixties. I think he even owned a steel-pressing factory for a while. Then he got into property and went into partnership with the construction company Hermanos Lorenzo, which he pulled out of in 1992.’
    ‘Was that amicable?’
    ‘The Lorenzos are regular clients of the restaurants. Weused to take the children to their house in Marbella every summer until Raúl got bored.’
    ‘So since the death of his first wife and his daughter going insane you don’t think there’s been any major disturbance in Raúl’s life?’
    She remained silent for some time, staring out of the window, her foot nodding, the shoe working loose from her heel.
    ‘I’m beginning to think that Raúl was the quintessential Spaniard, maybe the quintessential Sevillano, too. Life is a fiesta!’ she said, and held her hands out in the direction of the Feria ground. ‘He was as you see him there in the photographs. Smiling. Happy. Charming. But it was a cover, Inspector Jefe. It was a cover for his total misery.’
    ‘An antidote, too, maybe,’ he said, not agreeing with her, thinking that he was Spanish, too, and he didn’t consider himself miserable.
    ‘No, not an antidote, because his alegría didn’t counteract anything. It never remedied his essential condition which, believe me, was one of abject misery.’
    ‘And you never got to the root of that?’
    ‘He didn’t want me to and I didn’t want to. He quickly discovered that while I was the visual replacement of his wife I was not her clone. Having pursued me relentlessly, he totally failed to love me. I think, in fact, I made him even more miserable by constantly reminding him of her. Still, he kept his side of the bargain, I’ll say that for him.’
    ‘What was that?’
    ‘He absolutely didn’t want any more children and I very much wanted them. I said I wouldn’t marry him if he wasn’t going to give me children. So we … copulated, I think that’s the right word, on the three occasions necessary. He only just made it for the youngest. Those were pre-Viagra days.’
    ‘And so you found Basilio Lucena.’
    ‘I’m not finished about the children yet,’ she said, snapping.