Art of Murder (7 page)

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.