Jose Somoza - Art of Murder

The receiver was still silent. But they had not hung up.

Clara had been lost in her memories when the woman had appeared and brought her back to reality with a jolt. Ibiza, Talia and the unforgettable moment when she had discovered HD art dissolved into the darkest night. She could not tell how long she had been waiting in the exact same position. She thought it must be at least two hours. She could feel that the hand holding the receiver was much colder than the rest of her body, and the muscles of that arm had stiffened. She would have given anything to change position, and yet she continued to stand there motionless with the telephone to her ear; she even tried to breathe as little as possible, just as if she were being a work of art. She did not transfer her weight from one foot to another, but stood upright, her left hand on her hip and her knees pressed against the columns of the radiator under the window.

She was tempted to hang up. It was possible that this absurd wait was all a mistake. Perhaps the idea that she should wait naked and motionless in front of the window, telephone in hand, was simply the product of her own imagination. After all, she had still not received a single indication from the painter, whoever that might be, not a single gesture, not a word. Who would dream of painting with invisible silence? And besides, all this was running up a huge telephone bill. Jorge would laugh.

I'll count to thirty… OK, to a hundred… if nothing happens, I'll hang up, she decided.

Having stood all day as Bassan's work of art, she felt exhausted, was starving and needed to sleep. She started to count. She could hear a gang of kids laughing on the far side of the street. Maybe they had seen her. She was not worried. She was a professional canvas. It was a long time since she had felt ashamed or timid. Twenty-six… twenty-seven… twenty-eight…

Art was her whole life. She had no idea where its limits were, if indeed there were any.

She had learnt to show and use her anatomy alone, in front of others, and with others. Not to consider any of its nooks and crannies as sacred. As far as possible, to resist the onset of pain. To dream as her muscles contracted. To see space as time and time as something that extended before her like a landscape in which she could stroll or laze around. To control her feelings, to invent, fake, and imitate them. To go beyond all barriers, leave aside any reservations, cast off the burden of remorse. A work of art had nothing of its own: mind and body were dedicated to creating and being created, to becoming transformed.

It was the oddest yet most beautiful profession in the world. She had ventured into it that same summer she had returned from Ibiza, and had never regretted her decision.

At Talia's she had found out that Eliseo Sandoval, the man who had painted By the Pool, lived and worked in Madrid with other colleagues, in a chalet near Torrejon. A few weeks later, she went there, alone and scared. The first thing she found was that she was not the only one taking this step, and that HD art was more popular in Spain than she had imagined. The house was teeming with painters and adolescents who aspired to becoming works of art. Eliseo, a young Venezuelan artist with the looks of a boxer and a fascinating cleft chin, charged a few euros to give rough-and-ready classes to underage models. He did this in secret and with no hope of selling any of the works, because HD with minors had not yet been made legal. Clara dipped into her scant savings and began to attend every weekend. Among other things, she got accustomed to being on show naked, both inside and outside the house, on her own or with others present. And was able to spend hours with paint on her skin. And the basics of hyper-drama: the games, rehearsals, the different kinds of expression.

Her brother got wind of these visits, and the conflicts and prohibitions began. Clara discovered that Jose Manuel wanted to replace her dead father as her guardian. But she would not permit it. She threatened to leave home, and, when the situation became unbearable, did so.

At sixteen she started to work with The Circle, an international society of fringe artists who prepared young people for great painters. She got her body tattooed, dyed her hair red, perforated her nose, ears, nipples and navel with studs and was able to study with Wedekind, Cuinet and Ferrucioli. At eighteen she was living with Gabi Ponce, an up-and-coming painter she'd met in Barcelona: her first love, her first artist. By the age of twenty she was getting calls from Alex Bassan, Xavier Gonfrell and Gutierrez Reguero to create original art works. Then it was the turn of the really well-known ones: Georges Chalboux painted a spirit with her body, Gilberto Brentano turned her into a mare, and Vicky brought out expressions in her face she never thought she was capable of.

Until now though, she had never been painted by a genius.

But, she wondered, what would happen if nobody replied, what would happen if they stretched her to an unreasonable extent, tried to take the situation to its limit, what would happen if…?

The night had turned a deep midnight blue. The breeze that had refreshed her earlier now chilled her to the bone.

She had counted to a hundred, then another hundred, then another. In the end, she had given up counting. She did not dare hang up, because the more time passed the more important (and difficult) whatever might be behind this seemed to her. The most important and difficult, the toughest and most risky.

She contemplated the silence, the sparse light, the kingdom of cats. She saw how the early hours in the city passed by, as if she were staring at the imperceptible movement of the hands of a watch.

What would happen, she wondered, if they did not speak to her? When, at what precise moment would it be necessary to conclude that the game was over? Who would yield first in this completely unequal test of strength?

All at once she heard the woman's voice. Her ear had been pressed against the receiver for so long the sound hurt, just like when a blind person is suddenly brought into the light again. The voice was short and sharp. It mentioned a place: plaza Desiderio Gaos, no number. Just a name: Friedman. A time: nine o'clock precisely, the next morning. Then the phone went dead.

Clara wanted to remain in the same pose, holding the receiver up to her ear, for a few moments longer. Then she grimaced and returned to life and its inconveniences. That was in the early hours of Thursday 22 June, 2006.

The attic. The house in Alberca. Father.

The sun was shining brightly in the garden. It was a wonderful sight: the grass, the orange trees, her father's blue check shirt, his straw hat and thick square glasses. Manuel Reyes was short-sighted, almost obstinately so, or at least resigned to the fact, and was someone who did not mind having to wear such heavy, outdated, tortoise-shell contraptions. He insisted that his glasses added a weight of authority to the detailed descriptions he gave tourists of the paintings in the Prado museum. That was his job: to show people round the galleries, explaining with quiet erudition all the secrets of Las Lanzas and Las Meninas, his favourite works. Father was pruning the orange trees while her brother Jose Manuel practised at his easel in the garage – he wanted to be a painter, but Father advised him to study for a career instead – and Clara waited in her room to go to Mass with her mother. That was when she heard the sound.

In a house like her home, where there were so many, one more was unimportant. But this particular one had intrigued her. Her eyebrows raised in a questioning V. She left her room to discover who or what had made it.

The attic. Its door was ajar. Perhaps her mother had gone in to put something away and had not shut it properly afterwards.