Although I felt distressed, I heard myself say, “I am glad to have you here with me. My life is changing for the better. I have never been happier. I have no-one to leave my money to apart from my mother. I have, of course, created a will and at the moment she is the sole named beneficiary. I would like to include you. My mother is seventy-five. Under natural circumstances I should outlive her. You are twenty years younger than me. You should outlive me. It would make me proud to think that someone like you would keep the garden evolving and have the financial freedom to continue with your sculptures.”
He shook his head. “That is unnecessary. In fact – I would feel uncomfortable if you do that. What about Gabriela? She has taken care of you for many more years than I have been here.”
“That will be up to you. If you choose to bequeath a portion to Gabriela – that will be your choice at the time.”
He placed his hands over his ears. “I don’t want to hear you talk like this. You are young. You don’t need to think of your death. It’s morbid.”
The next day we walked into Soller, down the path flanked with lemon trees, arriving on time for the eleven o’clock appointment with the notary. The will was amended. I gave a copy to Ishmael. “Don’t lose it.”
Wednesday 4th October 2017
One evening after a light supper of vegetarian dim sum and sushi with wasabi sauce, washed down with a glass of Rioja, Ishmael unexpectedly received from Gabriela a cup of camomile tea rather than a glass of absinthe. I noticed for the first time a conspiratorial look between them. She handed him two cups of camomile tea. He sniffed at both cups and handed me the cup in his right hand. I noticed his cheeks were red below the deepening shadowed bags under his eyes. I shivered as he passed the cup of tea to me. Why did Gabriela not directly pass the cup to me? Why did she need Ishmael as an intermediary? I began to wonder if Gabriela was in love with Ishmael and not infatuated with me as I had previously smugly considered being true.
During the last eighteen months I couldn’t work out if their relationship was platonic and Ishmael was merely being charming and kind as he was with everyone. I had never seen him demonstrate unpleasant behaviour – whereas I continued to be volatile from time to time; but felt that I was improving.
Even though I did not want a relationship with Gabriela other than to have her as my housekeeper I felt a stinging anger move around my heart observing that puzzling exchange between the two of them.
There is an intimacy in having a housekeeper. They know you. They see the kind of dirt you make around you – the crusted tomato sauce burnt black inside the oven, the half-drunk bottles of gin and whiskey and a dishevelled bed. There are some things I would never allow Gabriela to do – to pick up my dirty linen in all of its forms and place it into the washing machine. I made sure the clothes had finished their cycle. She only had to pin them on the washing line and iron them when they dried. I heard Gabriela folding the ironing in the kitchen. That particular evening, I felt uncomfortable sipping on the camomile tea with Ishmael’s eyes fixed on mine. “When Gabriela leaves, we can have our nightcap of absinthe. We don’t need to pretend to be so good. We can be ourselves.”
I didn’t want to drink that vile drink. Nevertheless, when the front door closed, I could not resist Ishmael pulling a chair closer to me and filling two glasses. That particular evening, he did not sit beside me on the sofa, but stayed in a chair close to the painting I was working on. He looked at the painting rather than at me – even when I reached a hand towards the bottle of absinthe hoping to touch his hand. I was in danger of making a fool of myself.
He turned towards me. “Sorry, how rude of me, I should have placed it on the table closer to you.” He leaned forward and touched the painting. “Do you think this is one of your best?”
“It’s not something I’m proud of – so I would say no.”
“What’s wrong with it?”
“I would like it to have more form. The colours are fine, but the painting overall has lost meaning through a lack of form.”
We talked a little more and I fell asleep. I don’t know for how long. I wakened. Between slits of half-opened and half-closed eyes, I watched Ishmael correcting my painting. It was subtle what he was doing – a stroke here, a dot in another place. Did he think that I would not notice what he had done? My head swirled with absinthe or was it also with something else? Perhaps a flower plucked from the herb garden by Gabriela and Ishmael, disguised within my camomile tea.
The outside world began to blur and move. I looked at the ceiling. It appeared to be covered with insects swarming towards the light hanging from the middle of the ceiling. I knew they were not real. I blinked several times, but they didn’t disappear. I looked at Ishmael again. He was standing at the canvas, holding a paintbrush in his hand. He took a few steps backwards to enhance his perspective. He moved forward again, dipped his brush into Titan blue oil and with three smooth strokes allowed the contour of a woman’s body to emerge from the gold, turquoise and cerise oils.
Ishmael was destroying my art – my reputation. How did he dare to do that after the warmth of my friendship towards him? He had used my home like a hotel and now he was betraying me. I stared at the canvas. I knew that he had improved the painting. That had to be delusional thinking. It was another side effect of the drugs they had given me. How could a gardener with no formal artistic training paint better than I? It was impossible. I felt a surge of hatred towards him. I couldn’t stop myself doing what happened next. I felt myself possessed, out of control. I had turned into a killing machine. If anything moved, I had the desire and the will to kill it – to stop it in its tracks.
I struggled to my feet and took Ishmael by surprise by grapping him by the neck of his shirt. He dropped the paintbrush onto the ground, broke free from my hold and ran towards the hallway leading to the front door. I found myself laughing out loud at this act of cowardice. Why didn’t he face me and fight? I ran after him. I could see him clearly in the centre of my vision but the peripheral vision around him was hazy. I knew exactly what I had to do. I caught up with him by the fountain.
He shouted at me. “I’m only helping you. I want your exhibitions to be a success. You said that you weren’t happy with the painting. It was meant to be a surprise. It was a present for you. Then I planned to tell you about the two people who were most significant in my life and you would understand how I knew how to improve your painting.”
I didn’t listen. I lunged at him. He didn’t move. I don’t think he believed what was happening. He was paralysed, frozen to the ground. It was easy then. I squeezed his neck with both hands. He broke free, staggered backwards and hit his head on the Cupid statue.
Lying on the grass, Ishmael placed a hand to his head. He stared at it. “Oh my God – it is covered in blood. You’ve hurt me. I need to get to a hospital.”
He shouted at me in a voice which I heard to be truly filled with fear. Whatever was inside me made me laugh hysterically out aloud. I enjoyed hearing the terror in his voice and his staring eyes, pleading for me to regain my sanity.
“What are you doing? Are you insane? You are going to kill me.” He attempted to catch my arm and scramble to his feet. I then had my chance. I heard a noise. I glanced to my right. Was there someone there, hiding behind the olive tree or to the left in the labyrinth?
I ignored it when the olive tree began to morph and twist in my vision. It had to be the drugs again. There was no-one there. I had to act fast. I looked at Ishmael. He crawled onto the grass beside the fountain. There was a fuzzy moment before I easily lifted him from the ground. I had developed superhuman strength. I laughed again as I thought that they hadn’t considered it might be an unexpected side effect from the drugs.
I pushed him into the fountain and held his head under the water with my left hand. His arms flapped wildly. I only needed a minute or maybe two or three. There was a spluttering sound and bubbles rose to the surface from the bottom of the fountain. I searched in the water below
the line of bubbles with my right hand and found what I thought was his mouth. I placed my hand over it, allowing another minute for the pressure from my hand to do its work. When there was no movement, no bubbles, or thrashing about, I knew it was over. The fountain began to spin around in my head. I fell backwards onto the gravel.
I remember seeing stars circling above me. I don’t know how long I lay there. At some point I struggled to my feet, peered into the fountain. Ishmael was in the fountain and not moving. I pushed my fingers into his neck to check if there was a pulse. There was nothing. His neck felt hard and grainy like an olive tree. He was dead.
Another memory is returning to me now. When Ishmael fell into the fountain, I pushed him under the water with such force that the golden tipped arrow fell from Cupid’s bow and stabbed me on the hand. I threw it to one side, vaguely remembering pressing Ishmael’s shoulders into the side of the lead tipped arrow which lay at the bottom of the fountain. I recovered the golden tipped arrow and replaced it in Cupid’s bow. I looked at my left hand and there was a small hole the size of a one-euro coin. For a moment, I thought that it looked like one of the wounds of Christ, where a nail had been hammered into this hand. I looked at my right hand to see if there was another hole but of course there wasn’t. I fumbled in the sculpture to retrieve the lead tipped arrow. As I grasped it, I was aware of how sacrilegious that thought was of making any connection to what I had done and thinking of Christ. Cold water lapped around my calves. I took the lead tipped arrow and plunged it into my right hand. I wanted to punish myself. I scrambled from the fountain with the arrow in my hand. I ran towards the labyrinth and hid it within the Leylandii by the entrance. I twined leaves from the Red Robin shrub around the arrow and pushed it deeper into the wall of the labyrinth. No-one would find it.
I returned to the fountain, swung my legs over the edge once more. With difficulty I twisted the Cupid statue around so that the golden tipped arrow pointed at the spot where I intended hiding Ishmael’s body.
I knew I had to work quickly. The body had to be hidden before sunrise – before Gabriela returned and anyone found out what happened.
I needed to focus. I dragged his body from the fountain and placed it within a casing which would hold him upright in the garden. My head was not spinning. I was clear about what I had to do. I didn’t feel the nausea that made me vomit minutes after I killed him. His murder wasn’t a planned act. A good lawyer could perhaps have helped me to walk free. What I did afterwards was premeditated. What worried me was that I didn’t recognise him. Maybe the drugs that I suspected Gabriela and Ishmael gave me were responsible for that.
I worked on the sculpture like a blind man. The moon was my guide. I did not want to see what my hands were doing. That was not so unusual. I often painted like that. When the sculpture was finished, I smelt the herbs planted by Ishmael in the tubs beside me. I tasted salt on my lips. I bit my lips so hard that I they tasted not only of salt but of blood. I knew as I rooted the sculpture into the ground that it would be an acclaimed work of art – perhaps the best sculpture of my life.
After I had secured the sculpture in the garden, near the front door, I kept an eye on the moon as I rushed towards the Studio. I unlocked the heavy oak door, heard it scratch against the tiles. I uncovered the four paintings which I had completed for the exhibition in the Reina Sophia. They rested on canvases, ready to be dispatched within the next few days. Miguel del Salmorejo’s painting had already been sent. In the dark with the help of moonlight shining through the Studio windows, I saw how Ishmael had changed them. It felt like a game and a welcome distraction to identify which lines and colours he had added. I moved close to each painting, frowning in an effort to concentrate. His work was subtle. He had improved the paintings. To do that, I knew that he to be a painter with a talent greater than mine.
I locked the door behind me and walked back to the house, taking the path past the swimming pool on my right before reaching the labyrinth where I turned left towards the house, without looking at the sculpture outside the front door. It was open – ajar in exactly the same position as when I ran after Ishmael seething with anger. For a moment, looking inside, I thought that I saw a shape resembling that of Gabriela sitting on the sofa. My heart fluttered in what I knew was an unhealthy way. As I approached the sofa, it was easy to see that the shape was formed by a bundle of cushions which I had piled one on top of the other, having a siesta after lunch.
I lay on the sofa, burying my head into the cushions and tried to remember the sequence of the evening’s events. An additional concern came to my mind which seemed to be emerging from its groggy state. I wondered about Gabriela. She served dinner and left. She couldn’t have seen what happened. She had gone. Although, a doubt arose in my head because I didn’t do what I always compulsively did. I didn’t go to the kitchen door and open it to make sure that I heard her motorbike stall as it did before she joined the main road to the Port of Soller. Each evening I wanted to know that she had definitely gone. It gave me a sense of freedom. Then I waited until I heard her bike start up again and drive quickly away pursued no doubt by an Alfa Romeo or a Lamborghini, with a driver most likely heading for supper in the five-star Jumeirah Hotel in the Port of Soller.
Tonight, I had changed my routine. I didn’t listen for her motorbike. I was too busy lurching in a frenzy after Ishmael. I didn’t plan to murder Ishmael, but I was filled with rage that he thought he had the right to alter my painting. I didn’t know where or how that feeling of intense, reckless madness entered my mind. It happened as quickly as flicking a match on rough ground and seeing it burst into sparkling energy or as quickly as my thumb clicking on a lighter and twisting the top of it to ensure that the flame soared high into the sky. It was in this state of incensed being that I pursued him. I had only experienced that level of insane anger once before in my life and that too ended disastrously.
Although I did not hear Gabriela’s motorbike start up again to join the road to the Port of Soller, it was only paranoia to think that she didn’t drive home as she always did. If she had a reason to return, when my fury abated and the murder had been done, I would have heard the motorbike spluttering around the bends and crunch onto the gravel path as it always did in the morning – in the same way that Ishmael’s feet burrowed their way into the stones with every step he took the day he arrived. I would have heard her as I buried Cupid’s lead tipped arrow in the wall of the labyrinth. I remembered the heavy silence that night that covered me like a cloak. It would have been interrupted by the sound of her bike.
I lay back on the cushions, convinced that I had been drugged. How else could I have been so out of control? I wondered why Gabriela had conspired with Ishmael to drug me. She might have thought that I was unstoppable unless she intervened.
What did she want to stop? It could have been the development of my relationship with Ishmael. Or, more realistically, it could have been due to her perception of the spiralling envy, anger and jealousy which she perceived. I know my envy, jealousy and anger were not limited to Ishmael interfering with my painting. They had a wider reach. I could not stop seething at the way visitors to my Studio applauded him, circled around him, refused to walk swiftly to the Studio to see what I had created. What happened at the party eighteen months ago repeated itself regularly. She might also have wanted Ishmael in addition to the acclaim as the garden, to be recognised by the world as a better Painter than me. She had watched us together. She heard the questions which Ishmael asked about my painting. He was trying to learn from me, to steal the secrets of my genius. I was a fool to answer any of his questions. It would not surprise me if Gabriela had sat in a chair in the Studio when I was taking a siesta and watched Ishmael add those finishing touches to my paintings.
I turned my head to the left and bit at the cushion – the way I imagine that a prisoner on Death Row bites on a piece of cloth they place in his mouth before the lethal electric shock is administered. I can’t work it out. I am blaming Gabriel
a and Ishmael for what happened. How insane. I am the one who committed the murder – everything else that I am imagining is coming from a fragmented head that wants to see the world in a distorted way and believe it to be real.
I bit a second time at the cushion and shook my head violently; I am surprised that I didn’t lose my teeth. I tell myself that Ishmael is taken care of. His life will continue in other ways. He will be admired. I am sure of that. I only have to look at his garden tomorrow to know that. The plants he nurtured will continue to flower, seed and reproduce. They will be brought into being again and again. In the circulating seasons Ishmael’s hands will operate invisibly.
Tonight, when I murdered Ishmael, there was a full moon. Hours after his murder, I walked to the kitchen door and looked at the moon. The moon saw what had happened. It was the only witness. As I stared at it, I had a sense that Ishmael’s consciousness had jettisoned itself to the moon the moment that he took his last breath. Every time I looked at a full moon, Ishmael would be watching me.
I needed to get some sleep. I climbed the stairs, removed my shoes and got into bed with my clothes on. It took a while, but I did manage to fall asleep. I awakened a few hours later with the noise of the gates opening which triggered lights flooding the garden, flickering onto the oleander trees. I know that because I wriggled from the bed like a worm and peered through the window seeing the pinkness and whiteness of oleander flowers. I trembled. My hands shaking the way I witnessed my father’s hands shake on the day he died.
I didn’t know whether someone had entered the olive grove after I murdered Ishmael or whether they had been there all the time and were now leaving. However, the gates could only be opened with a remote control. The only people who had access to a remote control were my mother Monica, Gabriela, Ishmael and Pep Conejo. I listened for the sound of her motorbike. Only the hoot from an owl broke the silence.
The Painter Page 6