Art of Murder

  It was true, and Clara was angry at having shown her ignorance.

  The vagina, urethra, rectum, tear ducts, retinas, follicles, sweat glands,' Friedman reeled off the list. 'Every part of the body of a canvas can be painted. And the latest laser techniques permit us to drill into teeth, paint the roots and then, when the work is substituted, to repair any damage. A body can become a collage. Sometimes, in the most violent art-shocks, the veins and blood may be painted so that if there is an amputation, they will produce a striking effect. And in the final stages of a dirty canvas, the viscera can be painted after they've been taken out, or even while they are being removed: the brain, liver, lungs, heart, breasts, testicles, the uterus and the foetus it may contain. Were you aware of that?'

  'Yes,' Clara whispered, trying not to shudder. 'But I've never done anything like that.'

  "Yes, but we cannot know what this artist is going to do with you. We have to prepare you for everything, to expect everything, offer everything. Is that clear?'

  'Yes.'

  Clara found it hard to breathe. Her mouth was half-open, and her cheeks were flushed. The possibilities Friedman had mentioned seemed to her no worse than her own decision to accept them, to submit herself to whatever the artist wanted to do with her. The key thing was the genius of the artist. Someone had once told her that Picasso was such a genius he could do anything. Clara was sure that in the hands of a Picasso she would allow anything to be done to her.

  She thought about it for a moment. Absolutely anything?

  Yes. Without reservation.

  But the artist would perhaps have to be a bit better than Picasso.

  'Are you regretting having signed?' asked Friedman, misconstruing her expression. 'No.'

  The two of them looked at each other for a moment.

  'If you have any questions, ask them now.'

  'Which artist is going to paint me?'

  'I'm not permitted to tell you. Any other questions?'

  'No.'

  'Then we'll expect to see you here at a quarter past five precisely.'

  Eight hours to organise a life are almost too much. Or so Clara thought. Her life was very simple: there was work and leisure. To sort out the first of these, all she had to do was phone Bassan; the latter implied a call to Jorge. To make it even simpler, when she got home she discovered Bassan had left her a message on her answerphone. He did not seem too upset, but it was not his usual affectionate tone. Gertrude had called him to let him know Clara was not going on show that day, and he wanted to know why. 'You know I approve of everything you do, Clarita, but please tell me before you do it.' She could understand he might be a bit put out, but nevertheless was annoyed at his reproach. She called him in Barcelona, but only got his answering machine.

  'Alex’ she said into silence, 'it's me, Clara. Something important has come up and I'm not going to be able to continue with Girl in Front of a Looking Glass. I'm sorry. Anyway, there was only a week left at the GS gallery, and I seem to remember you had a substitute ready... Really, I'm sorry if this causes you problems, but there's nothing I can do about it. A big hug.'

  Then she thought about the call to Jorge. Once she was sure what she wanted to say, she dialled his mobile number. All she got was his voicemail. It seemed to her that all of a sudden her life had become a dialogue with silence. She decided to leave another message.

  'Jorge, this is Clara. I'm going to be away for a few days on a job that's come up.' She paused. 'It looks like a good opportunity.' Another pause. 'A very good one. I'll call you some other time, if possible. Big kiss.'

  It was just gone half past ten but her eyes were heavy as lead. She folded down the bunk in her bedroom, undressed and threw herself under the sheets. She needed to catch up on her night's sleep. She set her electronic alarm for two in the afternoon and fell straight asleep. She did not dream of Alberca or her father, but of an outdoor painting she had been for Gutierrez Reguero three years earlier, called The Tree of Science. When she woke up, she had forgotten all about it. She got up, ran to the bathroom and plunged under the jet of water from the shower. Following her instructions, she put no creams on her body afterwards. She stared at her naked body in the mirror and said goodbye to it: she knew this would be the last time she saw it in its normal state. Then she wrapped herself in a bathrobe, went into the living room, put on a jazz CD and let herself be carried away by the dark notes of the tune as she rummaged through her wardrobes.

  The problem was that she liked everything she had. Buying clothes and accessories was one of her chief pleasures. Friedman's announcement that everything she wore or took with her would be destroyed had not seemed to present much of a problem, but now as she gazed at her beautiful, expensive wardrobe, she hesitated. There were clothes by Yamamoto, Stern, Cessare, Armani, Balmain, Chanel... it was not so much what all this had cost her as the pleasure she got from the softness of this woven flesh and blood. Every dress, every suit had a different personality for her. They were like new and special friends. She could not do this to them.

  What if she wore the tracksuit she went to work in? But as she considered it laid out flat and obedient on the bed, its empty sleeves just waiting for her to fill them, she understood it would be like condemning the faithful old family dog to a sudden death.

  Nothing she could sacrifice in the wardrobes then. She stood on a chair and looked in the cupboards on top. Unfortunately, she was in the habit of throwing away old clothes. She did though store some winter items, and the first things she came across were a dark velvet suit and a pink, flesh-coloured roll-neck jersey.

  The catlike feel of the velvet brought back a sudden phantom, and reminded her of the first time she had worn it.

  Vicky.

  Vicky was young, scarcely a year older than Clara. She was pretty, slim, with straw-coloured short hair. She took drugs and was a great talent. In a very short time she had become the most important hyperdramatic painter in Spain. Thanks to a grant, she had been able to broaden her studies, first with Rayback in London and then at the Van Tysch Foundation in Amsterdam with Jacob Stein. She had even received the oracle from the lips of the great Maestro himself. She did more than merely admit her lesbianism: she unfurled it like a banner. Her works denounced the way homosexuals were marginalised, or mocked men and women repressed 'by a Roman, Vatican, class-ridden society, a parody of what the Greeks had hoped to create'. The great loves of her life had been two Anglo-Saxon women, two exuberant and beautiful paintings by the name of Shannon Coller and Cynthia Bergmann. Early in 2004 she had chosen Clara for an interior duo with Yoli Ribo that she was thinking of calling Sit Down. The two of them met on a grey, freezing afternoon. Clara decided to wear the velvet suit she had just bought to visit the artist in her Las Rozas villa. Vicky received her in shirtsleeves, smeared with paint, and showed her upstairs to the studio. A slender blonde sketch she had poured several cans of paint over was standing naked on tiptoe in one corner. There were also several illegal ornaments, almost all of them obscene. A male Table designed in London served them tea, pastries and marijuana cigarettes. A Japanese toy, also masculine, his body painted quinacridone red, made her more exciting offers, but Clara was not in the mood to play with him, although Vicky insisted she could have him.

  'He's not my style,' Vicky told her, 'but he was given to me as a present. Keep him if you like.'

  Before she talked about the proposed work, Vicky carried out one of her famous quick interviews.

  'What sign are you?'

  'Aries,' Clara said. 'I was born on 16 April.' 'We won't get on then,' the artist said, scratching the air. 'I'm a Leo.'

  But they did get on, at the beginning at least. She told Clara the idea she had for Sit Down. Yoli and Clara would be six metres up on a scaffolding, painted in flesh colours and locked in an embrace. The work was a commission for a mansion in Provence already stuffed with art. Vicky thought that by putting her work high up near the ceiling, it would stand out above the rest. The two women would spend a mo
nth in the mansion, and there was a possibility that the work could become permanent It would require a great effort and would need a first-rate maintenance team, but it would mean a real fortune for all three of them. She's a great saleswoman, Clara thought. She accepted the offer, and Vicky started to sketch her the next day.

  A fortnight after that first meeting, during one of the sketching sessions, something happened. Vicky was drawing her outline, and was gently moving her hand soaked in flesh-coloured paint down the outside of Clara's thigh. When she reached the knee, Clara could feel the pressure of her hand, the protracted silence, the tingling sensation on her painted skin.

  'Do you like women, Clara?' Vicky asked all of a sudden, calm as could be.

  ‘I like some women,' Clara replied, equally calmly.

  She was naked, half-painted in a variety of colours as she squatted on her haunches in Vicky's studio. Vicky was wearing her work clothes: an unbuttoned, paint-covered shirt and track-suit bottom.

  Her hand was still on Clara's knee.

  'Have you had any experience with women?'

  'Aha,' said Clara. 'And with men.'

  There was nothing strange about this for a canvas, and both of them knew it. It was easy for a painting to love another body, whoever it belonged to: the barriers were unclear, the limits became blurred.

  'Would you like to sleep with me?' Vicky asked.

  Clara liked the soft guttural tone of her voice, and the way Vicky's cheeks fired up much more than her own.

  'Yes,' she said.

  Vicky looked at her and went on painting. Her hand moved smoothly distributing the flesh colour on Clara's knee. Clara had no idea when it happened. One moment there was art, technique, a painter at work; the next, there was feeling, heavy breathing, a lover's embrace. And the brushstrokes suddenly became caresses.

  Later on, when the relationship between the two women was a reality, Vicky reproached her for having responded so matter-of-factly. She used it against Clara whenever she was angry with her. 'You said yes as though you were being asked to go hang-gliding at night. You said yes as though you were being asked to meet a Physics Nobel laureate. OK, let's give it a try, you said. There was no real love or sincerity in your declaration.' 'Maybe there was no real love,' Clara retorted, 'but I was being sincere.'

  'You have no feelings,' Vicky declared. 'I try to hide them: I'm a work of art,' replied Clara. And added, 'And you are an artist, so you find it impossible to hide them. You even invent them if you don't have any.'

  Sit Down went on permanent exhibition in Provence. It was an exhausting period: they only had a few hours in which to rest, eat and recover before they had to climb up on the scaffolding again. The length of time they had varied, because it depended entirely on the life of the purchaser, on the visitors or the parties he had organised. The maintenance team was excellent, but the two women ended up completely exhausted. Nevertheless, it was a wonderful experience for Clara. That same year, Vicky painted her in another five works, the early ones with another woman, then on her own: The Kiss. Double or Quits, Sweet Nothings, and The Black Dress. Outside work, Vicky's obsession with Clara knew no bounds: she called her in the morning, at night, cried on her shoulder, revealed intimate secrets about how cold her father was (he was a surgeon) or her mother's (a university professor) lack of interest in her career as a painter. Some days she considered herself 'a crappy daddy's girl'; on others she was the unfortunate victim of a 'marriage of snobs'. But all that was forgotten as soon as she began to work. In bed she might be a vulnerable soul, but with her hands covered in paint she became a firebird who could draw wonderful things on a woman's body. But Vicky the human being and Vicky the artist were not in watertight compartments. While Vicky the human being fell in love with the models for her works of art, Vicky the artist used that love to paint them. It was characteristic of her, but Clara could not fathom out which came first: her temperament or her way of working.

  2004 was the year of Vicky, for Clara at least: a rushing torrent she either had to escape from or let herself be carried away by. Vicky was one of those people who, like candles, consume themselves the more light they give off. The worst of it was her jealousy. Especially since at that time, there was no reason for it. Clara had left Gabi Ponce, her first love as well as her first painter, and was living alone in the loft in Augusto Figueroa. She was no longer seeing either Alexandra or Sofia Lundel, two women friends she had occasionally shared a bed with. And she had not yet met Jorge Atienza. Yet Vicky was capable not only of inventing feelings but motives as well. One night she created a scandal in a restaurant where they were dining because an Italian woman painter had asked Clara to work in an art-shock together with three other female canvases. Vicky told her not to accept, and when Clara refused she threw her cutlery on the floor and attacked the maître, who, like a good shepherd looking after his flock, had come over attentively. A few hours later, she called Clara to make up: 'I was drunk, forgive me.' Then, without warning, it was Vicky the artist who took over: ‘I wanted to tell you that your face today in the restaurant... My God, you were so pale when I shouted at you . . . Clara, please let me use that pallor . . . Those eyes of yours when you were staring at me today...'

  She was inspired. She finished her new painting in three weeks. It was Clara, painted in ivory white with cerulean shadows, lying face down on a velvet cloak, exactly the same material as the suit she was wearing that first afternoon they met, with her face the natural shade of her disgust. Vicky was thinking of calling the work Sweet Nothings. During the hyperdramatic rehearsal they played out the scene in the restaurant as they remembered it. The painter wanted to recapture the fleeting paleness of Clara's cheeks, but Clara was uneasy about mixing art and real life. In the end, Vicky got angry again and started to insult her. All of a sudden she stopped in the middle of her insults and clasped Clara's face in her hands. 'That's it! You've gone pale again! That's exactly what I'm looking for!' she shouted, beside herself. Vicky the artist was back in control.

  One day, Clara complained about the way she abused real emotions to paint with. Vicky gave a strange smile.

  'I'd do anything for art, sweetie,' she told her. 'Anything. I couldn't care less about anything but art: not emotions or justice, or pity, family health, love or money ... Well...' she hesitated, 'perhaps money is an exception. Art is money.'

  Sweet Nothings was bought by a Madrid collector at double its list price. Clara was on show in his house for a whole month.

  Early in 2005, Vicky tried to kill herself with a heroin overdose.

  This was not Clara's fault, but that of her new love, Elena Valero, who Clara had worked with on Instant. The day they were taking her into the intensive care unit in La Paz, it was announced that the Van Tysch Foundation had awarded her their Max Kalima prize for the totality of her work. Groggy from the effects of her oxygen mask, Vicky heard the news from a nurse. When she recovered, she declared she had also rediscovered her emotional stability. Although she was planning another work with Clara for the end of the year, she no longer phoned her as often. Then after Strawberry they had not seen each other again. Clara was unsure what she felt about her: was she in love with Vicky, or was it admiration for her talent? The truth was that although she wanted to, she could not forget her. Sometimes she pictured herself lying on the velvet cloak in the Sweet Nothings collector's room, one knee drawn up under her stomach, with the heel pointing down to her sex, her eyes shut and face livid with that 'pallor the colour of disgust' that Vicky had managed to produce in her. Perhaps this was all the painter had left her when she disappeared from her life: the feel of velvet, and her bloodless cheeks.

  So she pulled the velvet suit out of the cupboard and threw it on the bed. Then she found another beige jersey and trousers, which reminded her more of Jorge because she had worn them during the early days of her relationship with him.

  She hesitated for a while, looking at the two sets of clothing as if judging them (Vicky or Jorge? Jorge or Vicky?), bef
ore finally condemning Vicky Lledo to destruction. She would be too hot during the journey, but that did not matter.

  It was almost three in the afternoon when she realised she should eat something. She threw together a salad and a couple of sandwiches, and polished them off with a bottle of mineral water.

  Then as she still had some time left, she decided to prepare herself for what was to come. Rummaging in her medicine cabinet, she chose a couple of muscle toner tablets and a pill that would hold back her period, and swallowed them with the last of the bottled water. She took off her bathrobe, went into the kitchen for a salt cellar, an airline passenger's mask that she found in one of the drawers, and several weights. She started exercising in a very different way from her usual routine on the mat. She stood motionless on tiptoe, with salt on her tongue. She walked around her apartment with the mask on. She rolled herself into a ball, placing a weight on the highest part of her body. The exercises were designed to curb her will without breaking it, to help her see herself as a blind object, something that could be used, transformed. She had become used to this kind of preparation since her days with The Circle. It was the only way she had been able to bear the work Brentano did with her.