Art of Murder

3

The card was a turquoise-blue colour, the colour of magic spells, bluebirds over the rainbow, the azure sea. It glinted in the dining-room light. The phone number was written in the centre in fine black lines. All that was on the card was the number, probably a mobile, although the code was strange. While she was dialling it, Clara noticed that her fingernail was still shining with traces of paint from Girl in Front of a Looking Glass. At the second ring, a young woman's voice answered. 'Yes?' 'Hello, this is Clara Reyes.'

She was still thinking of what to say next when she realised the other person had hung up. She thought it must have been by accident, as sometimes happened with mobiles. They were such ghastly inventions which could be used for anything, even to talk, as Jorge used to joke. She pressed the redial button. The same voice replied, in exactly the same tone.

'I think we got cut off,' Clara said. 'I…' Someone hung up again. Intrigued, Clara tried a third time. Was hung up on again. She thought about it for a moment. She had just got in from the GS gallery, and the first thing she had done after taking a shower and washing the paint from her hair and body had been to look for the card and make the call. She was sitting in the dining room on the navy-blue tatami, with her legs crossed and a towel wrapped round her body. She had opened the windows, and a cool evening breeze was fanning her back. A gentle blues number was playing on the stereo. It can't be a problem with the phone. This time they hung up at once. They're doing it on purpose, she thought to herself.

She decided to try another strategy. She used the remote control to switch off the stereo, checked the time on the bookcase clock, and called again. This time when the woman answered, Clara said nothing.

The silence at both ends of the telephone line grew, deepened and became ridiculous. There was no sound, not even of breathing, although it was obvious that this time they had not hung up. But they were not speaking either. How long will I have to wait for them to make up their minds? thought Clara.

All of a sudden she was disconnected. The clock showed it had taken a minute.

So the silence was the message. This time it had taken longer, which probably meant they did not want her to speak. But they had hung up anyway.

Angrily, she swept back the strands of wet blonde hair covering her eyes. It was clear she was facing some kind of stretching test.

All the great painters stretched their canvases before they began a work. This stretching was the doorway to the hyperdramatic world, a way of preparing the model for what was to come, of warning them that from this point on nothing of what was going to happen would follow a logical pattern or society's accepted norms. Clara was used to being stretched in many different ways. The method usually employed by the artists in The Circle and Gilberto Brentano was the full gamut of sadomasochistic techniques. Georges Chalboux, on the other hand, used more subtle means of stretching. He created emotional upheaval by bringing in specially trained people who pretended to love or hate the models used in his works; these people could by turns be threatening, elusive or affectionate, all of which created a great sense of anxiety. Exceptional painters such as Vicky Lledo used themselves to stretch their canvases. Vicky was particularly cruel, because she used genuine emotions – it was as if she could split her personality, as if there was a Vicky-human being and a Vicky-artist in one and the same person, working completely independently of each other.

In order to get through the stretching phase, the canvas had to be aware of two things: the only rule was that there were no rules, and the only possible reaction was to go on.

So it was no use Clara ringing up again and staying silent: she had to take the next step. But in which direction?

Alex Bassan's signature on her thigh was itching. She scratched herself, taking care not to use her nails, while she considered what to do.

She had an idea. It was absurd, which made her think it might be correct (that was nearly always how it was in the world of art). She left the receiver on the mat, stood up and went over to the window. Naked beneath the towel, her damp body did not feel cold or uncomfortable as she felt the cool rush of air.

The rain had washed the night clean. There was no smell of garbage, traffic, or excrement… of the centre of Madrid; instead the smell of the sea in the city, the kind of evening breeze that occasionally makes Madrid seem like a seaside resort. Yet there was traffic. The cars went by sniffing each other's backsides and winking at one another with their big luminous eyes. She looked at the building opposite: three windows on the top floor were still lit, and in one of them, which had cobalt-blue curtains, there were some flowerpots. They looked as though they contained blue hyacinths. Clara leant over her balcony ledge and looked down at the street from the top of her four-storey block. The breeze ruffled her hair like a tired puppeteer.

There was no sign of anyone watching her. It was absurd to imagine anyone was spying on her. Absurd, and therefore correct.

She picked up the cordless phone, again looked over at the clock, then walked back to the window and called the number on the card another time. 'Yes?' asked the woman's voice.

Clara waited in silence, as close as she could get to the window, without moving a muscle. The breeze rippled through the fringe of her blue towel. All of a sudden they hung up. She looked back at the clock. A record, which must mean she had done something right and that, yes, however incredible it might seem, she was being watched. Yet she had still not done everything required of her. She decided to try something new: she phoned once more and, while she was standing at the window, raised a hand and tousled her hair. Almost before she had time to finish the gesture, they hung up.

She smiled her agreement in silence, staring down at the street. 'Aha, now I've caught you: you want me not to talk, to stand at the window, to remain motionless, and… what else?' Bassan sometimes told her that her face could look kind and heartless at the same time, 'like an angel who has nostalgic memories of being a devil'. Right now, her expression was more devilish than angelic. 'What more, eh? What more do you want?'

It was always the same when she took the first steps in the strange temple that was art, at the beginning of a new work: she felt aroused. It was the greatest feeling in the world. How could anyone want to work in anything else? How could there be people like Jorge, who were not works of art or artists?

She amused herself by imagining what might come next; her imagination always raced in situations like this. The silence on the phone would last ten minutes if she leaned over her balcony, fifteen if she put one leg down on the ledge, twenty-five if she put the other one there, thirty if she stood up on the ledge, thirty-five if she took a step forward into the void… perhaps then someone would respond… But that would be ruining the canvas, not stretching it.

She chose another, more modest option. She looked over at the clock again, and then, still standing at the window, dropped the towel to the floor. She dialled the number. Heard the same reply as always. Waited. The silence went on and on.

When she calculated that a good five minutes had passed, she wondered what else she would need to do if they hung up again.

She did not want to have to think about it. She stood at the window without moving. The silence in her earpiece persisted.

The black cat was to blame.

She saw it for the first time in Ibiza, beneath a blazing sun. The cat was staring at her in that strange way all cats do, opening its quartz-crystal eyes wide and challenging her to discover its secret. But she was fourteen years old, was lying on her stomach on a towel with the top half of her bikini undone, and at that moment secrets did not mean much to her. She won the animal's confidence by calling gently to it. Or perhaps the cat was won over by her beauty. Uncle Pablo, who had invited her to spend the summer in Ibiza, used to ask her jokingly who her image consultant was. Someone as beautiful as you must have one, he said. With her long blonde hair, eyes like two tiny marine planets with no shoreline in view, her taut adolescent silhouette perfectly set off by her blooming skin, Clara was well accustomed to admiring glances.

As a child, the father of a school friend called Borja had given her father a business card, saying he was a TV producer and wanted to offer Clara a screen test. He had never seen anyone like her, he said. Her father got very angry and didn't want to hear any more about it. That night there was a violent argument at home, and Clara's TV career was cut short before it began. This happened when she was seven. At nine, when her father died, it was already too late to disobey him. From then on, life was hard, because his death had left the family unprotected. The draper's store her mother ran, where Clara helped as soon as she was old enough, enabled them to get by, and provided the funds for her brother Jose Manuel to finish school and enrol to study Law. They could also count on Uncle Pablo's help. He was a businessman married to a young German woman and lived in Barcelona. It was his idea to rescue Clara every summer and take her to his apartment in Cortixera on Ibiza, with her cousins. They were girls, too, but older than Clara and so often left her on her own, but she didn't mind: the mere fact of being able to leave her sad home in Madrid to spend a month in that tiny but immense space, painted bright blue by the sun, was wonderful enough.

Nevertheless, nothing would have happened but for the black kitten.

Or perhaps it would, but in a different way: Clara was a believer in the hand of fate. The kitten came over to her, and from being suspicious at first was soon converted into a gleaming velvet ball with deep blue reflections in its fur. This was in the glorious summer of 1996, with its smell of chlorine and sea breeze. But the kitten itself smelt of soap, and it was obvious it belonged to someone because it was too well groomed to have come directly from the wild.

'Hello, there,' Clara greeted it. 'Where's your master, little kitty?'

The animal meowed between her fingers, its mouth shaped like a tiny heart, or an almond split in two. She smiled at it, completely unafraid. In her house in the mountain village of Alberca, where her father had been born and where they spent every summer while he was alive, she had got used to all kinds of pet animals. She stroked the kitten as she might have stroked a lamp containing a genie who could grant all her wishes. 'Are you lost?' she asked. 'He's mine,' a voice replied.

That was when she first spied Talia's brown legs standing in front of her. When Clara looked up she could see her smiling against the sun, and knew at once that the two of them would become friends.

Talia was thirteen, with round saucer-like eyes and coffee-coloured skin. She smiled and spoke at the same time, and with the same sweetness, as if for her the two actions were identical – as if everything she had to say was happy, and all her smiles were words. Her mother was from Maracay in Venezuela; her father was Spanish. They had a house at the other end of the island, near Punta Galera. Talia was in the resort by chance, because her parents had come to visit some friends. So it was the black kitten that brought them together.

Talia's father had a lot of money – much more than Uncle Pablo, who was far from badly off. The house in Punta Galera was an enormous villa by the sea, with a walled-in garden full of trees and shade, flowerbeds and ponds. When Talia invited her there two days later, Clara was amazed to find that they had servants, not simply someone to do the washing and prepare the meals, but people in uniforms with glazed, expressionless faces. But the most incredible discovery was at the swimming pool. This was a huge blue rectangle of water. It seemed unbelievable that Talia's tiny dark body should have this immense sapphire-coloured space all to herself, those liquid tiles she could float across endlessly. Yet there was something else about it that first impressed Clara.

Talia shared the pool with another young girl. Could it be her sister? Or was it a friend?

But she was older than either of them. She was kneeling on all fours near the edge of the pool. All she was wearing was the tiniest of blue tangas. Her body glistened in a very odd way. She didn't change her position in the slightest as Clara and Talia drew closer.

'It's one of my father's works of art,' Talia explained. 'He paid a fortune for it.'

Clara bent down and peered at the unmoving face, the skin gleaming with primer and oils, the hair waving gently in the breeze.

1 don't believe it!' Talia crowed when she saw how surprised Clara was. 'Haven't you ever heard of HD art? Of course it's made of flesh and blood, just like you and I! It's a hyper… work.' Clara did not understand the other word. 'She's not in a trance or anything like that, she's simply posing. And the smell comes from the oil paint.'

Eliseo Sandoval. By the Pool. 1995. Oil and sun cream on an eighteen-year-old girl wearing a cotton tanga. Clara read the description on a small piece of card placed on the ground near the figure.

Like most people, Clara had heard of hyperdramatic art and had seen films and reports about it, but she had never actually seen one.

It was like coming under a spell. She knelt down beside the work of art and completely forgot everything else. She examined it avidly, from fingertips to the painted hair; from the neck down to the curve of its buttocks. The two thongs of the tanga made a V shape just like the shape of one of the trees in the garden. She pored over every centimetre of immobile flesh as though it were a film she had been wanting to see all her life. She raised a trembling finger and stroked the thing's right thigh. It was like feeling the outline of a flower vase… The thing did not even blink.

'Don't do that,' Talia scolded her. 'You're not to touch the paintings. If my father saw you…!'

The day was one long torture. It was impossible for her to enjoy herself. It was not Talia's fault, of course; it was the fault of that cursed thing, that obscene, cursed thing which refused to move but simply stayed there in the sun, by the water, without ever sweating or complaining, lost in the contemplation of a small square of tiles. That paralysed, magical V-shaped tanga, lifeless but at the same time full of life. That was where the blame lay.

At some point in the day, Clara felt ill. She started choking, felt she was drowning. She ran off and hid in the house. She found the kitten on the sofa in the luxurious living room, and curled up alongside it. Clara's cheeks were burning, and she found it hard to breathe. When Talia arrived at last, she looked up at her imploringly.

'Does it never move?' she sobbed. 'Doesn't it eat or sleep?' 'Of course it does. It's only on show between eleven and seven.'

At seven o'clock sharp one of the servants went out to tell the work the time. Clara, who had been anxiously watching the clock all afternoon, went up to the piece. She could see how it came to life, stretching each limb after a long pause and then, like a child being born, uncurled its body and raised its head, eyes still closed. She saw the oil paint flash on its chest when it drew a deep breath, watched as it stood up ever so slowly and before her eyes changed into a woman, a girl, into someone just like herself. On a blue background.

That's what I want to be, Clara thought. Exactly that. Her teeth were chattering.

A woman drew back the cobalt curtains, leaned out and began to water the blue flowers. Suddenly she looked up and took Clara by surprise. After staring at her for a moment, she nodded in acknowledgement. Then she stepped back in from her balcony, closed the window and shut the curtains. Her window panes reflected Clara's naked body framed in her own window: her smooth figure, face without eyebrows and depilated pubis, breasts like wavy lines, hair already dried by the night breeze, right hand still clutching the telephone, all plunged into the cobalt deep-sea blue of the window panes opposite.

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.

The attic was a forbidden room. Their mother never let them go in there for fear that all the accumulated junk might fall on them. But Clara and Jose Manuel thought something terrible must be hidden in there. They both agreed on that, and only differed as to what that meant. For her brother, it was something bad; for Clara, it could be good or bad, but above all, it was attractive. Like a sweet, which could taste horrible but still look tempting. If something dreadful had appeared in front of them, Jose Manuel would have recoiled in horror, whereas Clara would have approached it fascinated, as stealthily as a child at Christmas. Horror would have provoked this contradictory movement: something truly horrible would have sent Jose Manuel running, whereas Clara would have been drawn to it like a possessed woman, as calmly and naturally as a stone dropping into the dark depths of a well.

Now, at last, the horror was calling out to her. She might have shouted to her mother – she could hear her busy in the kitchen -or run down into the garden to seek her father's protection, or gone down still further to the garage to ask her brother for help. But her mind was made up.

Trembling as she had never trembled before, not even on the day of her first communion, she pushed open the ancient door, and immediately breathed in a swirl of bluish dust. She was forced to step back, coughing and spluttering, which rather took the edge off her adventure. There was so much dust and such a horrible smell, like things fermenting, that Clara feared she would not be able to stand it. And worse still she would get her best Sunday dress filthy.

But, what the heck, it takes a sacrifice to confront horror, she thought. Horror does not grow on trees, within easy reach. It's hard work finding it, as her father always said about money.

She took two or three deep breaths outside the room, then went in again. She took a few timid steps into the evil-smelling darkness, blinking to get used to the unknown. She stumbled over bodies tied up with string, and realised they were old coats. Piles of cardboard boxes. A buckled chess board. A doll with no clothes and empty eye sockets, propped on a shelf. Cobwebs and blue shadows. All of this took Clara by surprise, but did not frighten her. She had been expecting to find this kind of thing.

She was on the verge of feeling completely defrauded when all of a sudden she saw it. Horror.

It was to her left. A slight movement, a shadow lit by the brightness outside the room. She turned to face it, strangely calm. Her sense of terror had grown to such a pitch she felt about to scream. This must mean she had at last discovered true horror and was face to face with it.

It was a little girl. A girl who lived in the attic. She was wearing a navy-blue Lacoste dress, and had lank, neatly combed hair. Her skin shone like marble. She looked like a corpse, but she was moving. Her mouth opened and shut. She was blinking continuously. And she was staring at Clara.

Her flesh crawled with terror. Her heart pounded violently inside her chest until it was almost choking her. It was an eternal moment, and yet a fleeting but definitive fraction of a second, like the moment of death.

In some inexplicable but powerful way, she realised in that split second that the girl in the attic was the most dreadful sight she had ever seen, or would ever see. It was not only horrible, but unbearable.

And yet, at the same time her happiness knew no bounds. At last she was face to face with horror. And that horror was a girl her own age. They could be friends and play together.

It was then it dawned on her that the Lacoste dress was the one her mother had helped her into that Sunday, that the girl's haircut was just like hers, that her features were the exactly the same, that the mirror was huge, with a frame hidden by the darkness.

'You got scared over nothing,' her mother told her, running up when she heard her cry out, and folding her into her arms.

Dawn was painting the deep indigo of the roof a lighter blue. Clara blinked, and the images of her dream dissolved in the light streaming on to her walls. Everything around her was as it should be, but inside she still felt the swirling memory of her distant childhood, that 'scare over nothing' in the attic of their house in Alberca, a year before her father died.

The alarm clock had gone off: half past seven. She remembered her appointment in plaza Desiderio Gaos with the mysterious Mr Friedman and leapt out of bed.

Since becoming a professional work of art she had learnt to look on dreams as strange instructions sent by an anonymous artist inside us. She was puzzled as to why her unconscious had chosen to place this piece from her life long ago on to the board again.

Perhaps it meant that the door to the attic was open once more. And that someone was inviting her in to confront horror.