Robert Wilson - The Ignorance of Blood

‘Marisa Moreno?’ he said, holding up his police ID. ‘I am Inspector Jefe Javier Falcón.’

‘I've already told Inspector Jefe Luis Zorrita everything I know a couple of hundred times,’ she said. ‘I've got nothing to add.’

‘I've come to talk to you about your sister.’

‘My sister?’ she said, and Falcón did not miss the momentary fear that froze her features.

‘You have a sister called Margarita.’

‘I know my own sister's name.’

Falcón paused, hoping that Marisa might feel the need to fill the moment with more information. She stared him out.

‘You reported her missing in 1998, when she was two months short of her seventeenth birthday.’

‘Come in,’ she said. ‘Don't touch anything.’

The studio's floor was patched with rough concrete where the clay tiles had come up. The air smelled of bare timber, turps and oils. There were chippings everywhere and a pile of sawdust in the corner. A meat hook large enough to take a full carcass hung from the tie rod which spanned the room. Suspended from its sharp hook was an electric chain saw, its flex thrown over the bar. Three dark and polished statues stood beneath the oily, sawdust-encrusted tool, one with its head missing. Falcón made for the space around the piece. The headless statue was that of a young woman, with breasts high on her chest, perfect orbs. The faces of the men flanking her had nothing in them. Their eyes were blank. The musculature of their bodies had something of the savagery of an existence in the wild about them. Their genitals were outsized and, despite being flaccid, seemed sinister, as if they were spent from a recent rape.

Marisa watched him as he took the piece in, waiting for the banality of his comments. She had yet to meet the white man who could resist a little critique, and her warriors with their prize penises drew plenty of lewd admiration. What she registered in Falcón's face was not even a raised eyebrow, but a brief revulsion as he looked down the bodies.

‘So what happened to Margarita?’ he asked, switching to Marisa. ‘You reported her missing on 25th May 1998, and when the police came to check with you a month later you said she'd turned up again about a week after she'd disappeared.’

‘That was how much they cared,’ she said, reaching for a small half-smoked cigar which she relit. ‘They took down her details and I never heard from them again. They wouldn't take my calls, and when I went round to the station they just dismissed me, said she was with some boyfriend or other. If you're pretty and mulatto like her they just think you're some kind of fucking machine. I'm sure they did nothing.’

‘She did go to Madrid with a boyfriend, though, didn't she?’

‘They were pretty pleased about that when I told them.’

‘Where were your parents in all this?’ asked Falcón. ‘Margarita was still a kid.’

‘Dead. You see, they probably didn't put that in the report. My father died up north in Gijón in 1995. My mother died here in Seville in 1998 and two months later Margarita went missing. She was upset. That was why I was worried.’

‘Your father was Cuban?’

‘We came over here in 1992. It was a bad time in Cuba; Russian aid had dried up after the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. There's a large Cuban community in Gijón, so that's where we settled.’

‘How did your parents meet?’

‘My father had a club in Gijón. My mother was a flamenco dancer from Seville. She'd come up to perform at the annual Semana Negra fair. My father was a good salsa dancer and there's such a thing as Cuban flamenco, so they taught each other things and my mother made the mistake that a lot of other women made.’

‘So obviously she wasn't your natural mother?’

‘No, we don't know what happened to her. She was Cuban of Spanish descent, white and political. She disappeared soon after my sister was born in 1981.’

‘You were seven years old.’

‘It's not something I think about very much,’ said Marisa. ‘Things like that could happen in Cuba. My father never talked about it.’

‘So who looked after you?’

‘My father had girlfriends. Some were interested in us … others weren't.’

‘What did your father do in Cuba?’

‘He was somebody in the government. An official on the Sugar Board. Export,’ said Marisa. ‘I thought you wanted to talk about my sister, and I'm beginning to wonder why.’

‘I like to get people's family situation sorted out in my mind,’ said Falcón. ‘It doesn't sound like you had a normal life.’

‘We didn't, until my stepmother came along. She was a good woman. The caring type. She really looked after us. For the first time in our lives we were loved. She even looked after my father when he was dying.’

‘How was that?’

‘Lung cancer. Too many cigars,’ she said, waving the smoking stub in her hand. ‘He only married her after his diagnosis.’

Marisa blew a plume of smoke out into the rafters of the wooden roof. She felt she had to keep this thing going. Do one long stint with this new inspector jefe and then maybe he'd leave her alone.

‘What did you do after your father died?’ asked Falcón.

‘We moved down here. My mother couldn't stand the north. All that rain.’

‘What about her family?’

‘Her parents were dead. She had a brother in Málaga, but he didn't like black people very much. He didn't come to her wedding.’

‘How did your mother die?’

‘Heart attack,’ said Marisa, eyes shining at the memory of it.

‘Were you living here at the time?’

‘I was in Los Angeles.’

‘I'm sorry,’ said Falcón. ‘That must have been hard. She wasn't very old.’

‘Fifty-one.’

‘Did you see her before she died?’

‘Is that any of your business?’ she said, turning away, looking for an ashtray.

This cop was getting under her skin.

‘My mother died when I was five,’ said Falcón. ‘It doesn't matter whether you're five or fifty-five, it's not something you ever get over.’

Marisa turned back slowly; she'd never heard a Sevillano, let alone a cop, talk like this. Falcón was frowning at the floor.

‘So you came back from Los Angeles and you've been here ever since?’ he said.

‘I stayed for a year,’ said Marisa. ‘I thought I should look after my sister.’

‘And what happened?’

‘She left again. But she was eighteen this time so …’

‘And you haven't seen or heard from her since?’

There was a long silence in which Marisa's mind seemed to float off out of the room and Falcón thought for the first time that he was getting somewhere.

‘Señora Moreno?’ said Falcón.

‘I haven't heard from her … no.’

‘Are you worried about her?’

She shrugged and for some reason Falcón didn't think he was going to believe what he heard next.

‘We weren't very close, which was why she left the first time without telling me.’

‘Is that right?’ said Falcón, locking eyes with her across the studio. ‘So what did you do when she left the second time?’

‘I finished the course I was doing at the Bella Artes, rented out my mother's apartment, which my sister and I had inherited…’

‘Is that where you live now, in Calle Hiniesta?’

‘And I went to Africa,’ she said, nodding. ‘Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Cameroon, the Congo, until it got too dangerous and then I went to Mozambique.’

‘What about the Touaregs … didn't you spend some time with them?’

Silence, as she registered that he'd heard that from someone else.

‘If you know all this, Inspector Jefe, why are you asking me?’

‘I know it, but hearing it from you arranges the furniture.’