The Silent and the Damned. Robert Thomas Wilson

He was compact, unyielding and electric. His hair was long, thick and completely white and fell below the neck of his collarless shirt. His moustache was equally impressive, but had yellowed from smoking. Two creases ran from the entradas of his hairline to his eyebrows and had the effect of pulling Falcón into his dark brown eyes.

      ‘You’ve only just moved in, haven’t you?’ asked Falcón.

      ‘Nine months ago…and six weeks later, this shit happens. The house used to have two rooms built over a cesspit, which holds the sewage for the four houses you can see around us. Then the previous owners built another two rooms on top of them and, with the extra weight, six fucking weeks after they sold me the house, the roof of the cesspit cracked, the wall subsided and now I’ve got the shit of four houses bubbling up through the floor.’

      ‘Expensive.’

      ‘I have to take down that side of the house, repair the cesspit, strengthen it so it can take the additional weight and then rebuild,’ said Ortega. ‘My brother sent somebody round who’s told me I’m looking at a bill for twenty million, or whatever the fuck that is in euros.’

      ‘Insurance?’

      ‘I’m an artist. I didn’t get round to signing the vital piece of paper until it was too late.’

      ‘Bad luck.’

      ‘I’m an expert in that particular commodity,’ he said. ‘As I know you are. We’ve met before.’

      ‘We have?’

      ‘I came to the house on Calle Bailén. You were seventeen or eighteen.’

      ‘Most of Seville’s artistic community passed through that house at some stage or other. I’m sorry I don’t remember.’

      ‘Bad business, that,’ said Ortega, putting a hand on Falcón’s shoulder. ‘I’d never have believed it. You’ve been through the media mill. I’ve read everything, of course. Couldn’t resist it. Drink?’

      Pablo Ortega was wearing blue knee-length shorts and black espadrilles. He walked with his feet splayed and had immense, bulbous calf muscles, which looked as if they could support him through long stage runs.

      They entered round the back of the house through the kitchen. Falcón sat in the living room while Ortega fetched beer and Casera. The room was chill and odourless apart from the smell of old cigar butts. It was stuffed full of furniture, paintings, books, pottery, glassware and rugs. On the floor leaning against an oak chest was a Francisco Falcón landscape. Javier looked at it and felt nothing.

      ‘Charisma,’ said Ortega, returning with beer, olives and capers, and nodding at the painting, ‘is like a force field. You don’t see it and yet it has the power to suspend everybody’s normal levels of perception. Now that the world has been told that the emperor has no clothes it’s easy, and all those art historians that Francisco so despised are endlessly writing about what an evident departure the four nudes were from his other work. I’m with Francisco. They’re contemptible. They delighted in his fall but do not see that now all they’re doing is writing about their own failures. Charisma. We are kept in such an ordinary state of boredom that anybody who can light up our life in any way is treated like a god.’

      ‘Francisco used to substitute the word “genius” for “charisma”,’ said Falcón.

      ‘If you have mastered the art of charisma you don’t even need genius.’

      ‘He certainly knew that.’

      ‘Quite right,’ said Ortega, guffawing back into the armchair.

      ‘We should get down to business,’ said Falcón.

      ‘Yes, well I knew something was going on when I saw that rat-faced bastard out there, smug and comfortable in his expensive lightweight suit,’ said Ortega. ‘I’m always suspicious of people who dress well for their work. They want to dazzle with their carapace while their emptiness seethes with all forms of dark life.’

      Falcón scratched his neck at Ortega’s melodrama.

      ‘Who are we talking about?’

      ‘That…that cabrón…Juez Calderón,’ said Ortega. ‘It even rhymes.’

      ‘Ah yes, the court case with your son. I didn’t…’

      ‘He was the cabrón who made sure that Sebastián went down for such a long time,’ said Ortega. ‘He was the cabrón who pushed for the maximum sentence. That man is just the letter of the law and nothing else. He is all sword and no scales and, in my humble opinion, for justice to be justice you have to have both.’

      ‘I was only told about your son’s case this morning.’

      ‘It was everywhere,’ said Ortega, incredulous. ‘Pablo Ortega’s son arrested. Pablo Ortega’s son accused. Pablo Ortega’s son blah, blah, blah. Always Pablo Ortega’s son…never Sebastián Ortega.’

      ‘I was preoccupied at the time,’ said Falcón. ‘I had no mind for current affairs.’

      ‘The media monster ate its fill,’ said Ortega, snarling and scoffing at the end of his cigar.

      ‘Do you see your son at all?’

      ‘He won’t see anybody. He’s shut himself off from the rest of the world.’

      ‘And his mother?’

      ‘His mother walked out on him…walked out on us, when he was only eight years old,’ said Ortega. ‘She ran off to America with some fool with a big dick…and then she died.’

      ‘When was that?’

      ‘Four years ago. Breast cancer. It affected Sebastián very badly.’

      ‘So he knew her?’

      ‘He spent every summer with her from the age of sixteen onwards,’ said Ortega, stabbing the air with his cigar. ‘None of this was taken into consideration when that cabrón…’

      He ran out of steam, shifted in his chair, his face crumpled in disgust.

      ‘It was a very serious crime,’ said Falcón.

      ‘I realize that,’ said Ortega, loudly. ‘It’s just that the court refused to accept any mitigating circumstances. Sebastián’s state of mind, for instance. He was clearly mentally deranged. How do you explain the behaviour of someone who kidnaps a boy, abuses him, lets him go and then gives himself up? When his time came to defend himself in court he said nothing, he refused to dispute any point of the boy’s statement…he took it all. None of that makes any sense to me. I am not an expert, but even I can see he needs treatment, not prison, violence and solitary confinement.’

      ‘Have you appealed?’

      ‘It all takes time,’ said Ortega, ‘and money, of course, which has not been easy. I had to move from my house…’

      ‘Why?’

      ‘My life was made impossible. They wouldn’t serve me in the cafés or the shops. People would cross the street if they saw me. For my son’s sins I was being ostracized. It was intolerable. I had to get out. And now here I am…alone with only the shit and stink of others for company.’

      ‘Do you know Sr Vega?’ asked Falcón, seizing his opportunity.

      ‘I know him. He introduced himself about a week after I moved in here. I rather admired him for that. He knew why I’d ended up here. There were photographers in the street. He walked straight past them, welcomed me and offered me the use of his gardener. I asked him over for a drink occasionally and when I had the trouble with the cesspit he gave his opinion, sent round a surveyor and costed it all out for me for nothing.’

      ‘What did you talk about over drinks?’

      ‘Nothing personal, which was a relief. I thought he might be…you know, when people come round to your door and want