I continued: “When Doctor Alfonso was dying, Cristina, his wife, called for my mother to be with him. Cristina could not bear his dying. My mother had no fear of death. She told Cristina that God had two hands and we had to accept the embrace from both. The left hand gives life, nourishes with a softness of touch and the right hand takes everything away. They come from the same Being. If we want to have a life of pleasure and success, then we have to pay the price for this by becoming nothing again. The right hand makes that happen. It makes us nothing. When Cristina heard those words, she ran from the bedroom and sitting on the bottom step of the stairs, sobbed, holding her head in her hands.
My mother, sitting beside the Doctor’s bed, took his hand. He opened his eyes, sat up in the bed, looked at my mother with great tenderness, dropped his head back onto the pillow with a thump that mother said could have broken the frame of the bed and died. Mother took care of the practicalities of closing his eyes, brushing his hair back off his head, closing his lips which had fallen open, placing a bandage around his head to make sure that the mouth would not open again, before slipping downstairs to notify Cristina of his death. She told me that story when I was seven years old. I remember thinking how brave she was in the way she could deal with death – brave and practical. She didn’t try to control either the Doctor or his wife Cristina. She did what needed to be done.
“She then did what she needed to do for me. Throughout my life, my mother could see the good in me. She knew that I was dissipating my life and talent, but she told me that for God anything was possible. She believed that I could change. She never complained about me. Maybe she should have. As I said, I was someone who needed to be disciplined before I could learn. I needed to be told that I was selfish.”
I looked again at Ishmael. He opened his eyes as if he knew that I was looking at him. He sat up on the sofa and with one gulp drank the remainder of the absinthe. He asked me a question which no-one had asked me before: “Your mother sounds like a woman of great faith. What about you?”
“Well, I have been influenced by my theological studies which included exploring the writings of Thomas Aquinas, Saint Theresa of Avila and Saint John of the Cross. I have even sporadically practiced meditation but that was only because so many wealthy, famous and successful people meditate. I had a selfish motivation. So, in answer to your question, if I was asked to honestly say if I believe in God, I would say, ‘I don’t know’, and I would also say, ‘If I have a God. It is I. I am undoubtedly the most selfish and untruthful person I have ever met’.”
Ishmael placed his empty glass on the table between us. He chuckled. I so loved the way he chuckled – it was a gentle, soft guttural purring. What surprised me was that Gregoriano laughed in the same way. If I closed my eyes and only listened to the chuckle, I don’t think I would be able to tell if it came from Gregoriano or Ishmael. Ishmael picked up the problem with me saying that I am untruthful in a way that made me laugh. It was a great gift that he had – to be able to take your weaknesses and not make you feel bad about them – to feel accepted with all those vulnerabilities, weaknesses and to place a spotlight on what was unique and good about you.
“Maybe that’s a lie. How can I know if anything you have told me is true? I need to think about everything you have said about Gregoriano and your mother and imagine what I would discover that was true about them – if everything you have told me since I arrived was a lie.”
I filled his glass a third time. “We have a saying here that a person can look ‘as ugly as sin’. I have looked at myself in the mirror over the years and I have seen changes in the way I look. I am not talking about physically ageing – beauty does not disintegrate as you get older. In fact I see in my mother that it can be enhanced as she transmits a glowing, transcendent ‘otherness’. In myself I see twistedness, a hardening of the face, a cruelty which is tangible. All a result of dissipating the artistic talent with which I had been endowed and squandering a fortune instead of providing for my mother. I have lived a life of debauchery and of lies. I get away now with lies about my painting. I tell a story about what they mean, and art critics and collectors believe it. They pay a fortune for lies. I seek out people who are vulnerable, weak minded and easily influenced. There is only one art critic who has seen through the deterioration of my art and talks about it – Miguel del Salmorejo. He is the only art critic I respect. I attempt to learn from his comments, but it is impossible. I have to change before my art will change. I know what is wrong with what I am painting but I am helpless in correcting it. It is like knowing how to speak a language but not being able to allow words to emerge in a way that they can be heard. It is devastating.”
Ishmael responded as he threw another log on the fire. “The relationship between a painter, his painting and his psyche must be complex. Ghandi said ‘Be the change you want to be in the world’. Why don’t you be the person you want to be and maybe the art will improve of its own accord?”
I walked to the window in the sitting room and looked at the mountains which were turning tangerine in the light of the setting sun. The sky was clear – a blue light which would gradually lose its colour and descend into a blackness which also disguised the infinite space hidden from my ordinary awareness. I reminded myself that the setting sun was only one of a hundred billion of stars in the Milky Way which is one of at least hundreds of billions of galaxies in the Universe. There was no way I could imagine what that meant with my rational mind, other than know that my life was a flicker of dust, appearing and disappearing in a nanosecond. I gave it such significance. I worried and fretted while space expanded into infinite mystery. I walked back to the fire, warmed my hands and answered Ishmael. “I don’t know who I want to be. I am paralysed. I am a fraud. I am an angry, jealous, envious, devious man who doesn’t know how to be any different.”
During the week Ishmael continued his work of restoring abandoned orange trees and began work on the orangery. With help from others, bulldozers and cranes, he re-planted orange trees into spirals which gave the appearance of oranges being planets and the leafy green dark space within which each orange shone, deep space. Lemon trees were planted to welcome visitors as they turned off the road from Soller, with a fragrant perfume as they drove or walked along the driveway towards the Studio. Fig trees stayed in their original location behind the swimming pool and were transformed by placing mosaic topped tables and olive wood chairs below each tree to allow visitors to relax and contemplate a garden loved into being by the gardener.
That is how Ishmael saw himself – as a custodian of Nature – a steward carrying out duties to help the trees, flowers and stones live in community and harmony together.
In addition to the garden with its orangery and labyrinth, Ishmael designed and built fourteen water fountains inspired by the Moors who created the Alhambra in Granada. The first fountain he situated outside the front door. He removed Pep Conejo’s Cupid fountain and created a new statue of Cupid standing within the fountain holding a bow and directing an arrow at the front door. He insisted that Cupid aim an arrow with a sharp golden point rather than the arrow with a point of lead.
I knew the importance of the golden tip to the arrow – anyone struck by the golden tip would be filled with uncontrollable desire. However, he insisted that Cupid would also have the arrow with the lead tip lying in water, implying that he could use it when necessary. Anyone wounded by the lead tipped arrow would be filled with aversion and a desire to flee.
“Which would you prefer Master – an arrow that strikes you with uncontrollable desire or one where you are pierced and flooded with aversion? The only desire you have is to flee?”
I laughed at the nonsense of the question and answered, “Desire will always turn into aversion. It’s only a matter of time. Desire is not love – is it?”
I didn’t know what made me say that. After all, I had never loved. Being with Ishmael encouraged thoughts to appear in my mind from a space I didn’t recognise.
As he turned the sta
tute of Cupid to point its golden arrow again at the front door, I saw that his face was sweating in spite of the cold water lapping around his knees and an icy breeze stroking his body. He scrambled from the fountain and kissed me on the cheek. The sweat from his face transferred to mine like a damp sponge. I felt a shudder of revulsion and fascination move through me. I wanted to wipe that sweat away but didn’t want him to see me do that. I waited until he walked towards the front door and rubbed my left cheek with the cuff of my jumper, until I was certain that it was dry.
That should have been a warning for me that I was filled with both desire and aversion for Ishmael. There was something about the physicality of his body which entranced me – that rounded pert bottom easily seen as he wore tight jogging trousers when working in the garden and the t-shirt, showing off the sleekness of his torso and the toned muscles of his arms. He wore the same clothes in summer as in winter, in summer only changing the jogging trousers for shorts. It was as if his body was impervious to conditions around him.
I was entranced and repulsed by his sweatiness – a dripping saltiness which exuded from every pore of his body with the minimum exertion on his part. The fact that he didn’t care that he rubbed his oozing salty face over mine, filled me with a simmering anger as I felt an inexplicable wave of personal insignificance and powerlessness over him. His spontaneity and warmth exaggerated the awareness dawning within me – I was doing nothing to make this relationship grow, it was all down to Ishmael. I’m not saying that he manipulated me, but rather that he treated me in the same way he treated everyone. He was the same person wherever he was with whomever he met. He would make any relationship grow. I was not special.
4
PABLO PICASSO
“Everything you can imagine is real.”
As the Painter I have a sense of creating and also of destroying. When I paint over a canvas, I know that another day I can create something even more sublime. My private self-made world fades and I become conscious that what seems to be impossible is always possible. This means I have to destroy. I learned that both movements of giving life and taking it away in my paintings lay within my hands – not God’s.
After Ishmael swung the Cupid towards the front door, he asked permission to create a statue to Persephone whom he suggested should be positioned with her back to the front door, holding a grain of wheat, staring at the fountain.
“Why do you want to place Persephone, the Queen of the Underworld, married to Hades, the God of the Underworld, so close to the house, or even in the garden? Are you not going to confuse visitors with the positivity of the symbolism of Cupid’s love and the close presence of Persephone from the deathly Underworld?”
Ishmael bent down and with one hand grasped a bunch of daisies and with the other he meticulously removed a creeping weed from the soil. “First of all you have to remember that Cupid is often thought to be the chubby child of the love goddess Venus and the war God Mars – so he is not a symbol of a simple child of love. He is a child of conflict between love and war.
“Persephone is the personification of vegetation which shoots into the world in spring, withdrawing in winter. She is a fertility symbol. She represents the cyclical nature of life and death. With gentleness she tells us our true nature – that we are never separate from life and death. It is who we are and what all things are, moment by moment. She tells us that there is no difference between the daisy which we love and the weed which we hate. We create that difference. Persephone welcomes all life as it is without judgement and with mutual respect.”
I looked at him wondering, what kind of a gardener have I hired? Before I could stop myself, I glibly said, “Thank goodness we sorted that one out. I’m sure the visitors will understand it perfectly.”
In Ishmael’s response I heard a love and fascination for the garden. I was beginning to see how little love I was capable of either giving or receiving as a result of my lack of attention. Ishmael’s attention to the creation of the garden – which included an intensity of symbolism, structure, and layout – were indicators of a vibrant lively interest and love of life. He worked totally in the present moment with no distractions caused by worrying about the past or anticipating the future. I envied him this deeper place of being moment by moment.
I felt myself constantly worried and in a state of anxiety even though I pretended to myself that I didn’t care what the art critics and others thought. The truth was I did. It would be more accurate to say that my body worried with turbulent waves of concern, but my mind couldn’t work out exactly what made my body feel so unpleasant. It was a battle between my mind telling me that everything was fine – I was wealthy, successful, had a world stage presence and received great reviews for my art, apart from those I mentioned before by Miguel del Salmorejo. My body didn’t believe these superficial messages. At a cellular level my body shouted at me for attention. I ignored it. I knew it held a deeper truth and if I banished those thoughts it would tell me what I had to do. I knew that I could listen to it but I was bored with people like Gregoriano and my mother Monica telling me what to do – not with words but with their bodies talking to mine.
You will have heard me say that I thought of the garden as Ishmael’s garden rather than mine as I had invested no love in it. I watched the subtlety of what he did. Weeds were not uprooted and burnt but replanted to bloom into a wild English country garden.
There were a few plants he placed in a herb garden, beside the labyrinth. I recognised the thyme, rosemary, mint and basil but there were others he refused to name. I think they included the ones which he and Gabriela later used to drug me. I remember seeing them both stroke those plants as if they were kittens. Ishmael held them up to his nose burying his head into their furry petals. I watched him knowing that he was doing something important. He gave himself away not by great acts but in the small movements he made.
I tried to make sense of why he insisted that I drink absinthe every evening after supper. He laughed as he topped up my glass with the vibrant green liquid which, to be honest, I did not like. But we drank it together and fell into an easy relationship. Now I wonder if that absinthe was his way of controlling my body. If he kept my body subdued maybe I would never find out the truth about who he was or why he had been sent to me as a Gardener.
In those days (BM – Before Murder) we would sit on the sofa together. I placed an arm around his shoulder. It is hard to describe what that contact meant to me. I know these behaviours are easily distorted today with political correctness issues and #metoo accusations. An arm resting on his shoulder gave me a sense of deep friendship and connection. It was a deeper love than brotherly love. Neither was it a touch of lovers. I didn’t understand it. The nearest I can get to it, is that it reminded me of the term ‘agape’ – which I learnt about in my theology class. It is the Greco-Christian word referring to the highest love. Cupid represented erotic love which I understood and had experienced in my life. With Ishmael the experience was more like what I imagine the love that God might have for man and man for God, as hinted at as far back as Homer.
In the first year, we stared together at the paintings I was working on. I moved from the Studio to paint in comfort, when inspiration allowed me to do so, beside the burning log fire in the sitting room. Other larger installations and paintings, I continued to develop in the Studio. I increasingly found crackling logs, flickering flames and the presence of Ishmael, propelling me to be more courageous in splashing lime green and orange together on the canvas. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed that he watched me as intently as I did with him when I observed what he did in the garden. He rarely commented on what I was painting. Instead, he asked questions. “What made you choose that colour? What options did you consider? What do you want to express? What emotion do you think you are provoking in the observer?”
Sometimes I ignored him and continued painting. Other times, I would try to explain but it was challenging as I realised that I did not paint from my thinking mind
. The colours and form came from somewhere deeper in my body. I wondered if it was possible that the new inspiration also came in a telepathic way from Ishmael. My paintings were changing, becoming more positive, lighter and childlike. They were improving – even Miguel del Salmorejo commented that I seemed to be returning to a time of former greatness. He bought one of the paintings I had planned to exhibit in the Reina Sophia exhibition. He promised that he would lend it back to me to be displayed for three months.
On occasion, after dinner and before going home, Gabriela leant against the door frame with a worried look on her face watching me paint. I thought at first that she was suspicious of Ishmael’s intentions. She was right to be concerned – not about Ishmael but about me.
5
PABLO PICASSO
“Painting is a blind man’s profession. He paints not what he sees, but what he feels, what he tells himself about what he has seen.”
Thursday 17th March 2016
Within six months Ishmael miraculously finished his garden, with the fourteen fountains, the orangery, herb garden, swimming pool, labyrinth and patio. We planned a party to celebrate his success. I invited fifty people and the five gardeners and labourers who had assisted Ishmael in this humongous effort. Ishmael asked, “Can we invite Pep Conejo? He did a lot of groundwork which I built on. It would be good to thank him and let him see how it has changed.”
I felt my face flush with embarrassment. I had sacked Pep Conejo when I committed to hiring Ishmael to create the garden. Ishmael asked to include Pep in the five assistants who would work with him. I refused. I was afraid that Pep might attempt to sabotage Ishmael’s success. Ishmael did not know the local suppliers – Pep did. He could convince suppliers to be out of the ordered materials. Or, he could light a fire after a day’s work and burn the labyrinth to the ground and make it look like an accident. Additional ideas about how Pep could harm the project flashed endlessly into my mind.
The Painter Page 4