Art of Murder

by Jose Carlos Somoza

Evening was drawing in. The work had been performing for an hour and a half. As an appendix to her private bacchanal, the girl masturbated: slowly, imperiously, on her back on the sand. Jorge did not think she was pretending.

  'So then,' Edith continued her commentary in her foreign, musical Spanish, 'after the ecstasy she starts to feel hungry and thirst v. Cold as well. She remembers the food, water and her dress are back in the room. So she crawls back through the slit, gets into the cubicle, eats, drinks, puts her wedding dress on again, and becomes the chaste, well-educated young woman she was at the start. It's full of meaning, isn't it?'

  'A typical Vicky Lledo piece,' Pedro gave his verdict, stroking his beard. 'Women's liberation will not be complete while men keep on blackmailing them with the apparent benefits of the welfare state.'

  That night, the canvas was returning to Madrid by taxi. Jorge offered to take her instead - fortunately, Pedro preferred to go on his own. Dressed in jersey, jeans and with a scarf round her neck, she seemed to him just as exciting as when she had been naked, dishevelled and glistening with sweat and sand. Her lack of eyebrows and the sheen of her skin caught his attention. She explained that she had been primed. It was the first time he had heard this expression. 'To prime means to prepare a canvas for painting,' she told him. During the journey, with his hands tight on the wheel, he asked many questions, and obtained a few answers: she was twenty-three years old (about to be twenty-four), and had been an HD model since she was sixteen. Jorge was delighted at her self-assurance, her intelligence, the way she waved her hands as she spoke, the gentle but determined edge to her voice. She told him some extraordinary things about her work. 'Don't get it wrong: the HD models are not actors: they are works of art and do everything the artists decide they should do -yes, everything, without exception. Hyperdramatism is called that precisely because it goes beyond drama. There is no make-believe. In HD art, everything is real, including the sex when there is sex, and the violence.'

  How did she feel doing all this? What she was supposed to feel, what the painter wanted her to feel? When she was doing The White Queen it was claustrophobia, complete freedom, unease, then claustrophobia once more. 'It's an incredible profession’ he admitted. 'What do you do for a living?' she asked. I'm a radiologist, he told her.

  After that there were dates, evenings out, shared nights.

  If anyone had asked him to define their relationship, he would have responded without hesitation: strange and exciting.

  Everything about her fascinated him. The way she sometimes made up. The exotic essences she occasionally used as perfumes. The rich elegance of her wardrobe. Her complete indifference when it came to showing herself off naked. Her unabashed bisexuality. The scandalous exercises she had to do for some painters. And in spite of all this, her incredible naivete. Contradictions were the norm for her. He savoured her qualities until he was full of them, and then found himself wishing for a little bit of simplicity. After spying on her copulating bacteria, Beatriz became simple again. Why couldn't Clara be the same after she had wiped all the paint off? Why did he always have this terrible sense of fetishism, as if sleeping with her was like kissing a luxury shoe?

  Recently he had been forcing her to argue with him - it was his way of trying to rediscover this simplicity. All couples argue. We do too. Conclusion: we are like all couples. The logic of this argument seemed to him watertight. Their last fight had been on her birthday, 16 April. They went out to eat in a new restaurant - candelabra, accordeons and dishes their tongues had to do yoga to pronounce - he had discovered. Jorge closes his eyes and can see her just as she was that night: a Lacroix leather dress and a choker with the designer's name on a silver ring. This and nothing more - no underwear, because in the morning she was appearing naked in a work by Jaume Oreste. Jorge kept glancing from the ring to the curve of her breasts pressed together by the dress. As she breathed, her breasts looked like two white whales, and the ring swung to and fro like a ship's porthole. He was excited of course ( he always was when he went out with her), but he also felt a strange desire to destroy all this magnificent harmony. Like the temptation a child feels to smash the most expensive piece of crockery. He began stealthily, without revealing his real intentions.

  'Did you know "Monsters" was the most popular exhibition the Haus der Kunst in Munich has ever had? Pedro told me so the other day.'

  'I'm not surprised.'

  'And in Bilbao they're wetting themselves trying to get "Flowers" to the Guggenheim, but Pedro says it'll cost them an arm and a leg. But that's nothing: everyone is saying that the new collection they're putting on this year, "Rembrandt" by Van Tysch, is going to top "Flowers" and "Monsters" both in visitors and in the price of the works. Some are even saying it's going to be the most important exhibition in history. In other words, your Maestro has succeeded in making hyperdramatic art one of the most lucrative businesses of the twenty-first century ...'

  A good line to throw, Captain Achab! The two symmetrical whales rise up as one. The silver ship trembles.

  'And you, as always, reckon the world has gone mad.'

  'No, the world always has been mad, it's not that. The fact is, I don't agree with the opinion most people have about Van Tysch.'

  'Which is?'

  'That he's a genius.'

  'He is.'

  'I'm sorry, Van Tysch is very smart, but it's not the same thing. My brother says that HD art was created by Tanagorsky, Kalima and Buncher at the start of the seventies. They were true artists, but they starved. Then along came Van Tysch, who as a young man had inherited a fortune from a distant relative in the United States. He invented a system for buying and selling the works, created a Foundation to manage his production, and he devoted himself to lining his pockets thanks to hyperdramatism. A brilliant business idea!'

  'So what's wrong with that?'

  As usual, Clara was imperturbable. She was accustomed to controlling all her impulses, and used this power to her advantage against him. It was hard for Jorge to make her lose her patience, because a canvas' patience is boundless.

  'What's wrong is that it's a business, it's not art. Although wasn't it your beloved Van Tysch who once came out with the definition "art is money"?'

  'And he was right.'

  'He was right? Was Rembrandt a genius because today his paintings are worth millions?'

  'No, but if Rembrandt's paintings weren't worth millions today, who would care whether he was a genius or not?'

  Jorge was about to respond when a dollop of cream (from the dessert-rolled crepes stuffed with cream) fell on to his tie (plop! Captain Achab, a seagull just shat on you), which meant he had to busy himself with his napkin while she carried on.

  'Van Tysch understood that to create a new kind of art all you need is for it to make money.'

  'That line of argument only applies to business, darling.'

  'Art is a business, Jorge’ she declared, unmoved, while the candle flame blinked, photocopied by her blue eyes.

  'My God, listen to the opinion of a work of art! So according to you, a professional painting, art is a business?'

  'Aha. Just like medicine.'

  Aha. That dreadful habit of hers when she spoke. She opened her mouth and arched one of her false, painted eyebrows as she pronounced the symmetrical word: Aha.

  'You charge for your X-ray plates just like a painter does for his paintings’ she went on. 'Aren't you tired of always saying that some colleague or other ought to realise that medicine is an art? There you go.'

  'There I go what?'

  'Medicine is an art, which means it's also a business. Today it's all the same: art and business. The real artists know there's no difference. At least there isn't nowadays.'

  Tine, let's admit art is a business. So then hyperdramatic art is the business of buying and selling people, isn't it?'

  'I can see where you're heading, but we models are not people when we are works of art: we're paintings.'

  'Don't talk such nonsense. That rub
bish is fine to pull the wool over the public's eyes. But people are not paintings.'

  'Now you sound like those experts who at the end of the nineteenth century said that impressionist paintings weren't real paintings. But art history finally accepted impressionism, and then cubism, and now it is accepting hyperdramatism.'

  'Because it's a profitable business?' She shrugged without saying anything. 'Look, Clara, I don't want to be an iconoclast, but hyperdramatic art consists of putting young women like you naked or semi-naked in "artistic" poses. Young men, too, of course. And a lot of adolescents, children even. But how many mature men or women do you see in HD works of art? Go on, tell me! Who would pay twenty million euros to take home a painted fat old man, and stand him there in a pose?'

  'But the work that gave the title "Monsters" to Van Tysch's collection is of two hugely fat people. And it's worth far more than twenty million, Jorge.'

  'What about the HD ornaments? Converting someone into an Ashtray or a Chair, what's that? Is that art too? And what about art-shocks? And "dirty" paintings? ...'

  'All that is completely illegal, and has nothing to do with legitimate hyperdramatism.'

  'Let's drop it. I know it's a sin to take the name of God in vain.'

  'Would you like another crepe, or is the one you're dripping down your front enough?' She pointed to her plate, where the rolled-up crepes lay untouched. This was another consequence of her work: she kept a tight rein over her calorie intake, and controlled her weight with portable electronic gadgets - the latest fad. She often dined only on high-vitamin juices, but never seemed to be hungry.

  That night they made love at his place. It was as it always was: a delicately pleasurable exercise. She was a canvas, and he had to be careful. Sometimes he would ask her why she was not so careful with herself in the brutal interactive reunions known as art-shocks she sometimes took part in. 'That's different, it's art,' she would reply. 'And in art anything goes, even damaging the canvas.' 'Ah!' he would say. And go on adoring her.

  He was crazy about her. He was fed up with her. He never wanted to leave her. He wanted never to see her again.

  'You won't be able to give her up,' his brother Pedro warned him one day. 'It's always the same when we fall for a painting: we've no idea why we like it so much, but we can't get rid of it.'

  *

  Clara was not sure what she felt for Jorge. It was not love, of course, because she did not believe she had ever felt true love for anyone or anything except for art (people like Gabi or Vicky were facets of that diamond). And she guessed Jorge was not in love with her either. She could understand that for him it was very satisfactory to have made it with a canvas: it was the same kind of status symbol as buying himself a Lancia or a Patek Philippe, having an appartment in Conde de Penálver, or being the boss of a profitable radiological institute. 'Going to bed with a painting is a kind of a luxury, isn't it, Jorge? Something your social class likes to do.'

  Naturally she found him attractive: that shock of white hair, and that moustache standing out in his huge frame, those grey eyes of his, his manly chin. It excited her to think he was an older man she was perverting. She loved it when she made him blush. But she also enjoyed thinking the opposite was true: that it was he who was perverting her. Her white-haired master. The sunbed-tanned mentor. And on top of it all, Jorge was not part of the art world - a detail rare enough to make him extra special.

  On the other side of the balance was his complete vulgarity. Doctor Atienza was of the ridiculous opinion that hyperdramatic art was a kind of legalised sexual slavery, twenty-first century prostitution. He could not understand why someone might want to buy a naked minor whose body had been painted, simply to put them on show in their house. He thought Bruno van Tysch was a playboy whose sole merit had been to inherit a stupendous fortune. When she heard Jorge's pronouncements, she felt bitter. What she hated above all in this world was mediocrity. Clara longed for genius like a bird longs for the infinite air. But she could understand the reason for all this mediocrity. Unlike her, his profession did not demand he give his heart and soul to it. Jorge had never felt that shudder of emotion, the sense of fragility and fire that a model felt in the hands of an expert painter; he knew nothing of the nirvana of quiescence, the wing-beats of time in a paralysed salon, the gaze of the public like cold acupuncture on the body

  Neither of them was sure where this relationship of dates and shared nights might lead. Probably nowhere. Jorge wanted children, and occasionally said so. She looked at him with pitying compassion, as a martyr might look at someone who was asking: Does it hurt? The only life she wanted to reproduce, she would tell him, was her own. 'Don't you see, every time I'm a painting, it's as if I'm giving birth to myself?' Of course, he couldn't understand her.

  Perhaps what she valued most of all in him was his calm nature, his ability to give her good advice. Even when he was asleep, Jorge was therapeutic: he breathed steadily, was not troubled by any nightmares, did not get afraid in dark rooms (she did), was a lesson in the perfect way to rest. His words were like creams prescribed by an amiable doctor, his smile an instantly effective sedative. All this was far removed from her world, and immensely welcome.

  Right now, she needed a large dose of Jorge.

  'Are you sure you're not being duped?' he asked, trying to appear doubtful.

  'Of course I am. This is the most important thing that has ever happened to me. Not only am I going to earn more money than I ever dreamed possible, but I'm going to become... I'm sure I'm going to become a ... a great work of art.' Jorge noticed she had hesitated, as if anything she could say would be far beneath the reality of what was to happen to her. 'Today they told me that in another twenty-four thousand years, they would still be talking about me’ she added in a whisper. 'Can you believe it? The Foundation woman told me so. Twenty-four thousand years. I can't stop thinking about it. Can you believe it?'

  She had just given him a brief summary of all that had happened. She told him about the two men visiting the GS gallery, and her interview with Friedman on the Thursday. After that, she had been primed by five experts: Friedman himself examined her hair and skin; a Senor Zumi her muscles and joints; Senor Gargallo prepared her physiology; and the Montforts fine-tuned her concentration and habits. Friedman received her in the basement of the Desiderio Gaos building once they had stripped her, destroyed her clothing, and taken photographs of her for the insurance company. He felt her all over. Her hair, he said, needed cutting. Then it had to be coated with a gel that would allow it to be painted. He did not consider her skin soft enough, so prescribed creams she would need to rub on. He noted any abrasions or wrinkles. He observed the movement of her Adam's apple when she swallowed, and how her ribcage showed with her breathing, how her nipples reacted to pressure or cold, the character of all her muscles. After that, he probed each and every hole and cavity with his fingers and light. 'Spare me the details,' Jorge begged her.

  Zumi, a mysterious Japanese man of few words, saw her on the first floor once Friedman had finished with her. For hours, it seemed, Clara had to hang from various pieces of apparatus in the gym there. Zumi discovered a certain laxity in her cervical vertebrae, and a tendency to accumulate lactic acid in her legs. Through beads of sweat, she could see him smile silently at each successive torture: balancing on one leg, being strung from the ceiling by the ankles, standing on tiptoe on a bench, bending over backwards, raising her arms with weights attached to her biceps. Two hours later, the exhausted material was passed on to Senor Gargallo on the third floor. Gargallo was an expert in the canvas' physiological reactions. He had a huge collection of his experiments on film, an absolutely repugnant DVD library. He was convinced of his own uselessness.

  'The only organ that matters is the one I'm not expert in,' he told Clara, tapping his forehead. 'Fortunately, I am expert in the second most important one.' He pointed to his groin.

  He was a plump, affable fellow, with a yellowish complexion, goatee beard and round, smudged g
lasses. He began by warning her that his job was 'an unavoidable mess'. 'Naturally, we'd like to be a pure work of art like a piece of canvas or a lump of alabaster,' Gargallo philosophised. 'But we are alive. And life is not art: life is disgusting. My task is to stop life behaving like life.'

  The exercises he put her through were yet another nightmare: the material - her, naked and immobile - had to put up with drops being spread under her eyelids; feathers tickling her in remote folds of her body; drugs which activated her bowels and her bladder at the same time, or changed her mood, increasing or decreasing her libido or simply gave her a headache; pills that suddenly made her blood pressure collapse, or made her feel cold, hot, or itchy all over (my God, the desire to scratch, forbidden in any painting); the dizziness of intense hunger; the raging curse of thirst; the stinging threat of insects and other creatures -'in outdoor pieces they often crawl up legs', Gargallo explained; extreme tiredness and sleep, that steamroller of awareness that can flatten the willpower of any permanent work of art. Gargallo tried out further tests, made adjustments here and there when he saw the material was suspect, prescribed a few pills, noted down problems.

  She was left to rest for a few hours and then, still exhausted, she was taken up to the fifth floor and handed over to Pedro Monfort. ‘I started in a cellar and I'm going to end up in the loft,' she thought, her brain weakened but still determined to fight back. The Monforts were brother and sister: he was very young, she was older. Their speciality was to prime thoughts (a noble enough task, surely) and yet they did not seem happy. In fact, Pedro Monfort regarded Gargallo as the real specialist. He was a badly shaven, intellectual-looking man who liked lengthy silences and stuffing his phrases with obscenities.