Jose Somoza: Art of Murder

'Aha. Right at this moment, yes. Because that's what I'm looking at.'

'And what were you thinking about your navel? That it was pretty? Ugly?'

'I was thinking how extraordinary it is. The idea of having a hole in your belly. Isn't that strange?'

Bassan stood still (his way of thinking) and almost immediately slapped his thigh (his way of announcing he had discovered something).

'Navel, navel… hole… the beginning of the world and of life

… I've got it! Stand up. You're to cover your sex with your right hand, but raise your thumb a bit. Let's see… like that… No, a little higher… That's right, pointing up towards your navel…'

In the end, the work was very simple. Bassan had placed her standing up, arms and legs slightly apart, right hand on her sex and thumb raised rather less than he had at first thought. He mixed a lot of zinc white and covered her completely, including the 'natural stains' (facial features, aureolas and nipples, navel, her genitals and the crack between her buttocks). He used white lead to cover the brightest parts, then painted over them with titanium white. He sprayed and moulded her hair in a compact white mass that stuck close to her scalp. He used a small sable brush to paint some simple traits on her face: eyebrows, lashes and lips in a Naples brown diluted with white. He stuck a full-length mirror into the floor a short distance from her and put three halogen spots on two parallel strips to highlight her body. The powerful lights made the oil paint gleam. On 22 May he tattooed his signature on her left thigh: a capital B and two small esses. 'Bss'. It sounded like a soft whistle, she thought, or the buzz of a wasp.

'I think it'd be best to try Madrid,' Bassan said. 'I've had an interesting offer from the GS gallery.'

Bassan himself prepared the catalogue. He claimed exhibition catalogues were more important than the works themselves. 'Nowadays, we painters don't create paintings, we create catalogues,' he said mockingly. As soon as he received the first proofs from the printer, he sent Clara a copy. It was beautiful: a large white satin card with a photo of Clara's painted face on the front. Opening the card, the text in gold letters read: 'The painter Alex Bassan and the GS gallery have the pleasure of…' Bassan described it perfectly with one of his impulsive phrases: 'It looks like the invitation to an elf's first communion.' The opening was at eight on the evening of Thursday 1 June at the GS gallery in Madrid, an event like many others. Gertrude Stein shared the cost of the drinks. People got drunk in the foyer, then went down into the basement to look at Clara, who was positioned in the centre of a tiny room. Opposite her stood the looking glass, with no frame or base, as if it had appeared by magic. Behind her on the white wall was an inscription: 'Alex Bassan. Girl in Front of a Looking Glass. Oils on a twenty-four-year-old girl with full-length mirror and lights. 195x35x88cm.' Under the title was a shelf with a pile of catalogues. There was no podium or any kind of security rope: she was simply standing on the bare white floor that shone as brightly as the looking glass and her body did. The room was really cramped, and as it filled up, Clara was worried someone might step on her foot. A white fire extinguisher hung from the wall in a corner. 'At least I won't go up in flames if there's a fire,' she thought.

She could hear the art critics praising the work. A few criticisms as well. Not of her, of course, but of the work. Yet it was her they were staring at: her thighs, her buttocks, her breasts, her unmoving face. And the looking glass as well. There was one exception. At a certain point out of the corner of her eye she caught sight of a silhouette coming close to her, and mouthing an obscenity into her left ear. She was used to this, and did not even blink. Often in hyperdramatic exhibitions some crazy person got in who was not in the least bit interested in the work, but in the naked woman on show. To judge by his breath, this guy was drunk. He stood right next to her for quite a while, staring at her. Clara was concerned he might try to touch her, because there were no security guards anywhere. But a few moments later he moved off. If he had tried anything, she would have been forced to abandon her state of quiescence and give him a verbal warning. If he had continued to pester her despite this, she would have had no problem kneeing him in the balls. It wouldn't have been the first time she had stopped being a work of art to defend herself from a troublesome spectator. HD art aroused a mixture of passions, and the female paintings who had no protection soon learned the lesson.

Girl in Front of a Looking Glass would fit easily into any reasonably spacious living room. Her percentage from the sale and rental, together with the money she had already received for her work with the painter, would have lasted her the whole summer. But nobody wanted to buy her.

'Clara.'

She breathed in sharply when she heard Gertrude's voice on the stairs. 'Clara, it's half past one. I'm going to close the gallery.'

It was always an effort to emerge from her state of quiescence and step back into the world of real objects. She twisted her head from side to side, swallowed several times, blinked (two cameos of her face were imprinted by light and time on her retinas), stretched her arms and stamped her feet on the floor. One of her legs had gone to sleep. She massaged her neck. The oil paint tugged uncomfortably at her skin.

'And there are two gentlemen to see you,' Gertrude added. 'They're in my office.'

Clara stopped sketching and looked at the gallery owner. Gertrude was at the foot of the stairs. As usual, her green eyes and scarlet lips gave nothing away. She was no longer young, and was as tall and white as Mont Blanc; so white she almost glistened. If she had fallen into snow, all you would have seen of her would have been a pair of almond-shaped emeralds and a stain of red lipstick. She liked wearing white tunics, and talked as if she were interrogating a prisoner of war under torture.

‘I'm German, but I've lived in Madrid for several years,' she told Clara when they met. She pronounced 'Madrid' like a robot from a B-movie. 'GS are my initials.' She went on to tell her her surname, but Clara couldn't remember it. 'Pleased to meet you,' Clara had replied, and was rewarded with a smile. Bassan said she was a successful gallery owner and had a select clientele of hyperdramatic art collectors, but Clara hadn't been able to discover if this was true or not. What she had found was that Gertrude was rude and disdainful towards the paintings. Perhaps she was a little more pleasant with the painters. On top of that, she was a cleanliness freak. She did not allow Clara to use the bathroom to wash or make up after work. She said she had no wish to see paint anywhere else apart from on the skin of her paintings. On Clara's first day she showed her a small space at the back of the upstairs office and said that all the works got on just fine in there. Each day before work Clara had to go into this wretched cubicle and put on the porous swimsuit and the hair-dyeing cap, soaked in the colours Bassan had prepared, and wait for almost an hour until they had dried on her skin. Then she took off the swimsuit and cap and emerged naked and gleaming white, walked down to the basement and took up the pose and expression the painter had chosen for her. When the gallery closed, she was forced to make her way home with her body still painted under her tracksuit and wearing a ridiculous beret to hide her white hair; all she could scrape off was the paint on her face. It was no fun driving with her skin stiffened with oil paint.

'Two gentlemen?' Clara had to clear her throat to get the words out. 'What do they want?' 'How should I know? They're waiting in my office.'