Jose Somoza - Art of Murder

Clara looked down at her feet: the carpet of thick, pointed artificial grass looked very soft. She took off a sandal and tested it with her bare foot. It was soft and springy. 'Can I sit down?' she asked.

'Of course, make yourself at home. Get comfortable.' They sat down together. The grass was an army of tiny, elegant soldiers. Nothing in the clearing jarred. Clara stroked the grass and closed her eyes: it was like sliding your hand through a fur coat. She felt happy. Gerardo on the other hand seemed increasingly sad.

'Nothing will make the birds settle here, you know. They realise at once that it's all a trompe-l’oeil and fly off at once to real trees. And they're right, dammit: trees should be trees, and people, people.'

'In real life, of course: but art is different.'

'Art is part of life, sweetheart, not the other way round,' Gerardo replied. 'Do you know what I'd like to do? To paint something in the natural-humanist style of the French school. But I don't, because hyperdramatism sells better and gives more money. And I want to earn lots of money' He threw open his arms and exclaimed: 'Lots and lots of money so I can say to hell with all the plastic woods in the world!'

'I think this place is beautiful.' 'Are you serious?' 'Aha.' He looked at her curiously.

'What an incredible woman you are. I've worked with a lot of canvases, sweetheart, but none of them was as formidable as you.'

'Formidable?'

'Yes. I mean… as determined to be a complete canvas, from head to toe. Tell me something. What do you do when you stop working? Do you have friends? Are you going out with someone?'

'Yes, I'm going out with someone. And I have male and female friends.'

'Anyone special?'

Clara was gently combing the grass. She merely smiled. 'Don't you like me asking you these things?' Gerardo wanted to know.

'No, it's all right. There is someone, but we don't live together, and he's not really my "boyfriend". He's a friend I feel attracted to.'

She smiled again, trying to imagine Jorge as her boyfriend. She had never thought of him that way. She went on to wonder exactly what Jorge was for her, what else they shared apart from their night-time moments. All at once, she realised that she used him as a spectator. She liked Jorge to know every detail of what happened to her in the strange world of her profession. She tried not to hide anything from him, not even its most vulgar aspects, or what Jorge considered as vulgar: everything she did with the public during the art-shocks for example, or her work for The Circle or Brentano. Jorge was taken aback at this, and she enjoyed watching his face at those moments. Jorge was her public, her astonished spectator. She needed constantly to leave him with his mouth open.

'So when you're not a canvas, you lead a normal life,' Gerardo said. 'Yes, pretty normal. What about you?'

‘I dedicate myself to work. I have a few friends here in Holland, but above all, I dedicate myself to work. And I'm not going out with anyone at the moment. I did have a Dutch girlfriend a while back, but we split up.'

After that there was a silence. She was still convinced Gerardo was a skilful painter, but now she was almost certain this was a real break. What did he mean by talking to her sincerely? There could be no sincerity between a painter and a canvas, and both of them knew that. In the case of artists such as Bassan or Chalboux, who were followers of the natural-humanist school, the sincerity was forced, another brushstroke, a sort of 'now we're going to be sincere', a technique along with all the others. Yet here was Gerardo apparently wanting to talk to her as if she was someone he had met on a train or bus. It was absurd.

'Look, I'm sorry, but isn't it getting rather late?' she said. 'Shouldn't we be getting back?' Gerardo looked her up and down. 'You're right,' he finally admitted. 'Let's go back.'

Then suddenly as they were getting up, he spoke to her in a different, urgent whisper.

'Listen, I wanted… I wanted you to know something. You're doing very well, sweetheart. You've understood the response right from the start. But keep on doing the same thing, whatever happens, got it? Don't forget, the key is to yield.'

Clara listened to him in disbelief. It seemed incredible to her that he was revealing the artist's secrets to her. She felt as though in the middle of a gripping drama one of the actors had turned to her, winked, and said: Don't worry, it's only a play. For a moment she thought it might have been a hidden brushstroke, but she could see from Gerardo's face that he was genuinely concerned. Concerned about her! The key is to yield. No doubt about it, he was referring to her reaction to Uhl: he was encouraging her to continue on the correct – or at least the safest – path. If you continue to yield the way you did yesterday afternoon, he was saying, Uhl will stop. Gerardo was not painting her: he was revealing secrets, the solution to the mysteries. He was the unfortunate friend who tells you the end of the film.

Clara felt as though he had deliberately tipped an inkpot over a sketch he had only just begun. Why on earth had he done it?

The poses continued all afternoon in complete silence. Uhl did not bother her again, but she had already forgotten him. She thought that Gerardo's slip was the worst mistake she had ever come across in her entire professional life: not even poor Gabi Ponce, who was not exactly subtle when it came to hyperdramatism, had been so crass. Even though she had suspected that Uhl's harassment was not for real, it was one thing to suspect it, another to know it for sure. With a single sweep of his brush, Gerardo had ruined the careful landscape of threats that Uhl and he had been painstakingly creating around her. Now any return to that make-believe was impossible: the hyperdramatism as such had disappeared. From now on there could only be theatre.

Later on, as she was going to bed, her anger subsided. She decided that Gerardo must be a novice. The refinements of pure hyperdramatism were obviously way beyond him. What most surprised her was that a painter like him had been given a position of such responsibility. Apprentices should not be allowed to sketch on originals, she thought. That should be reserved for experienced artists. Maybe all was not lost though. Perhaps Gerardo's clumsiness, the huge stain he had tipped over her, could be cleaned up thanks to Uhl's exquisite artwork. It could be that Uhl would find some way of increasing the pressure and making it part of the painting process again.

She was sure she would be frightened again. As she fell asleep, this was her last wish.

When she woke up, everything was still incredibly dark. She had no way of knowing what time it was, even whether it was still night-time or not, because before she had gone to sleep she had closed the house shutters. She guessed it must still be night, because she could not hear any birdsong. She drew her hand across her face, then turned over, confident she could get back to sleep. She was about to do so when she noticed it. She sat bolt upright on the mattress, terrified.

The distinct sound of floorboards creaking. In the living room. It had possibly been something similar that had awakened her. Footsteps.

She was all ears, listening. All her tiredness and aching muscles disappeared as if by magic. She could hardly breathe. She quickly tried a relaxation exercise, but it did not work.

There was someone in the living room, by God.

She swung her feet on to the floor. Her brain was a whirling maelstrom of thoughts.

'Hello?' she called out in a quaking, horrified voice.

She waited without moving for several minutes, ready to confront the dreadful possibility that the intruder might burst in at any moment and fling himself on her. The silence all around her made her think she might have been mistaken. But her imagination – that strange diamond, that polygon with a thousand faces – sent fleeting sensations of terror to her mind, tiny inventions like slivers of pure ice. It's the man facing the other way: he's stepped out of the photo and now he's coming for you. But he's walking backwards. You'll see him walk into the room backwards, heading straight for you, guided by your smell. It's your father, in his huge square glasses, coming to tell you that…' She made a great effort to dismiss these recurring nightmares from her mind.