Art of Murder (18 page)

Edith Whatever-weke, resplendent in tunics and perfumes, showed them round her hovel in La Moraleja, pointing out her complete collection of HD works: painted men and women in poses in the living room, the library, on the balcony. What on earth are they doing standing there like that? Jorge wondered, fascinated by the weary beauty of their faces. What are they thinking of when we are looking at them?

Then she led them out to the garden, where the work by Vicky Lledo was on show.

It's an outdoor performance,' Edith explained.

'What does that mean?' Jorge wanted to know.

'They are HD works in which the figures move and carry out actions planned by the artist,' Pedro said, adopting a professional tone. 'They are called
outdoor
because that's where they take place, and
performance
because they follow a plan and are repeated in a continuous cycle with or without the presence of the public. If they were shown like any other dramatic work and the public had to arrive at a certain time to see them, then they would be
reunions.'

'So is this a kind of
art-shock?'

Edith and Pedro exchanged knowing smiles.

'Art-shocks, dear brother, are interactive reunions, that is, dramatic works put on at a specific time and in which the owner of the work or his friends can take part if they so wish. Most of them involve sex or violence, and are completely illegal. No, don't pull that face, Jorge, because you're not going to be that lucky today:
The Wh
ite Queen
isn't an art-shock, it's a non
-
interactive performance. In other words, a work that will perform an action according to a schedule, but the public will not take part in any direct way. As innocent as can be, isn't that right, Edith?' The Belgian woman agreed with a giggle.

Jorge got ready to be bored. He had no idea of what he was about to see.

It was a big garden, protected from prying eyes by a high wall. The work was to take place on the lawn. It consisted of a roofless box with three white walls and a floor of black-and-white tiles. At ground level on the back wall, there was a rectangular opening through which the green grass could be seen. Inside the cubicle were a table, chairs, sandwiches, water and a clothes hanger, all of them painted white. A girl with a glorious mane of blonde hair, wearing a starched white wedding dress, was lying sprawled on the floor tiles. Her face and arms glowed with an ethereal brightness. All of a sudden, as Jorge was taking all this in, the work turned onto all fours, crawled over to the slit in the back wall, put her head into it, withdrew it, put it back again. All this produced a very striking image, like a surrealist film.

'See?' Edith explained. 'She wants to get out through the hole, but she can't, because her bride's dress won't let her
...'

'It's a simple metaphor,' Pedro added. 'She's tired of living a bourgeois marriage.'

More fruitless attempts to push the flounces of the dress through the hole. Back again. Another push. Her waist wriggling, backside in the air, hips stuck in the frame. Looking at her, Jorge felt a stab
of sympathy - he could identify
with how Beatriz felt.

'Now the girl understands,' Edith went on, 'that to get out she has to take off her dress
...
yes, there she goes, she's taking it off and hanging it on the hanger .
..
she's overcome her prejudices, she's stripped naked and can escape.'

She paused to speak to all her guests: 'Let's go to the other side, shall we, to see what happens next?'

Jorge's brother had to prod him with his elbow.

'He's never seen a real live performance,' he laughed.

'It's good, isn't it?' Edith said, winking at him.

Jorge felt he was sleepwalking as they moved to the far end of the garden, behind the cubicle. Here there was a square patch of wet sand which was also part of the work. The girl was stretched out on it. She looked happy. The sun sparkled on her painted body like a pointillist painting by Seurat. An open-mouthed Jorge had never seen such a perfect nude. The breasts were not especially large, but they were in perfect harmony with the body and the gentle staircase of her ribcage. The gentle curve of her stomach was real, not the effort of her holding it in. He thought he could encircle her whole waist in his two hands. Her legs went on and on: it is easy to be mistaken when glancing at a pair of legs, but Jorge explored them in slow motion with a radiologist's trained gaze, and could find no fault as they stretched out endlessly like a highway. Not even feet and hands (always so difficult for a painter or for genetics to get right) sounded a jarring note: long, tapering finely, with tendons that stood out to emphasise they were alive, and nothing more. Her cultural archetypes, perfectly in tune with the ideas of beauty held at the end of the twentieth century and early in the twenty-first, were unanimous: it was a masterpiece.

But beyond the shape were the gestures Clara made: the contradictory effects produced by a face that was mischievous and disingenuous at the same time; the highlighted joint movements, and the use of muscles which in bodies like Jorge's lay dormant all their lives until finally awakened (perhaps) in death throes. It was the most harmonious composition Jorge had ever seen. The girl was rolling in the wet sand. She stood up and began a wild dance - her hair converted into a frenzy of whipcords - and then began to make a loincloth out of mulberry leaves, placing it round her sinuous waist. Throughout all this furious activity, her body gave off flashes of paint: the light, shiny colour of squeezed lemons which his brother defined as 'gamboge yellow'. In Jorge's feverish state, the word made it sound like a sacred dance. As they went back into the house for a drink before returning quickly to see what was to come next, he muttered to himself: Gamboge. Gamboge. It became an obsessive beat.

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
ev
ery
thing
the artists decide they should do -yes, everything, without exception. Hyperdramatism is called that precisely because it goes
bey
ond
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 Wh
ite 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 bise
x
uality. 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.