I heard her voice trembling and shaky. “Where are you? I have been up to Can Animes to let you know that I saw Ishmael in the Plaza. I didn’t talk to him. I think he saw me and then disappeared down the street beside the Farmacia. I reported him as missing to the Local Police after you left. Do you think I should go back and tell them I’ve seen him and to say that he is not a ‘missing person’ but for some reason doesn’t want either you or me to know what he is doing? The Police told me that they wanted to talk to you when you return as you were the last person to have seen him. What should I do? I don’t think that I am mistaken in that I saw him.” She paused and repeated, “Where are you?”
I squirmed up the bed to gasp for air. My heartbeat changed to a slower pace. I thought it would stop completely. I couldn’t breathe properly. I jumped out of bed still holding the mobile phone to my ear and opened the window. I drank in cold air, melting like ice cubes in my throat. I pressed the phone close to my ear so that I did not to miss anything.
“I’m in Sweden.”
“What are you doing there?”
“It has to do with Ishmael. It’s complicated. I know more about where he has come from and where home is for him. He is from Syria. I thought that he had returned there to help his people but if you have seen him in Soller maybe that is not true. I do not understand why he wouldn’t want to talk to you. Pep Conejo told me that you and Ishmael were closer than I realised. Is it true that you had coffee with him every Saturday in the Plaza?”
I was pleased with deflecting the attention from what I was doing in Malmo to Sophia’s activities in Soller. There was silence from Gabriela which I broke by asking, “Did you know about his life in Syria?”
There was again silence which ended this time by her hanging up.
I paced around the bedroom, punching at the walls, feeling that I was going crazy.
I was sure she would ring me back. I should have realised that she wouldn’t, not at all. She had heard my lies. She saw the darkness in my soul. Why would she me ring back? She knew something I didn’t know and which she didn’t want to share with me. I could have rung her back, but I had not the strength to continue with my lies. They were exhausting me.
I went for a walk before meeting with Sophia and Oñé. Snow had fallen heavily overnight and the pathways had been cleared to make this place walkable, driveable and liveable in its frozenness. The sun appeared today, and it sparkled on the snow, glimmering and flickering on and off like miniature Christmas tree lights. Overnight someone had made a snowman which had already been covered with another fall of snow which made it barely recognisable. Beside the snowman, obediently there sat a snow dog with a twig in its mouth. I couldn’t see its eyes and imagined them to be dark brown glass marbles.
I felt my lips cracking open with the cold temperature. I wiped them. There was blood on my hands. I was not prepared for life in this land.
I decided that today will be the day I ask Sophia who is Oñé’s father. I dismissed the possibility from my mind that it was Ishmael. There was a certain relief in the knowledge that I had not murdered Oñé’s father.
We lunched together in a shopping centre café. There were people sitting alone, looking at one another in the way I look at people these days. They frighten me because I do not know them. I do not know what they do when they return to their homes. How do they pass the minutes of every evening, with seconds ticking by incessantly towards the next moment?
I look closely as Sophia and Oñé pull out their chairs and begin to look at the menu. My eyes scan the café. What about the man beside me, to my right? He looked at me. He is drinking a mug of something, tea or coffee. I can see he is going to make it last for several hours. What else has he got to do, to trample the snow outside, where there are no longer in the darkness sparkling diamonds but ice? He will walk crisply on the familiar icy ground and find his home.
Sophia ran her finger down the menu and spotted something for Oñé. She picked a reindeer hamburger with chips. For herself she chose a selection of pickled herrings with mustard, vinegar and something slimy which was most likely another member of the herring family. I ordered a pizza which was called ‘sweet and sour’ with beetroot, goat’s cheese, rocket salad and honey.
Oñé went to the toilet. I took my chance to ask Sophia: “If you don’t mind me asking – as Oñé will be with me for six months – who is his father? Is he alive?”
She helped herself to a glass of water. “Yes. You know him. Gregoriano is the father of Oñé.”
She seemed matter of fact about it, as if it was obvious. I felt encouraged to continue with my questions.
“Is it safe for Oñé to go to the toilet alone, after what you have said about the danger of Malmo?”
“Yes, it is safe. I can see the door and I know the waiter well. You can see that the waiter is also an Arab and is aware of the dangers.” She smiled at me. “I’m glad that you are taking your responsibilities seriously. It’s a good sign.”
I pulled at my pizza with my knife and fork. It was soggy but quite tasty. I kept my eyes on the toilet door to stop talking when Oñé emerged.
“Does Oñé know his father?”
She stabbed at her pickled herrings which had arrived. “Of course he knows who he is.”
“Why is he not here with you and Oñé?”
Oñé opened the door from the toilet and walked slowly towards our table. Sophia whispered to me before he sat down. “That needs a little bit more explanation. I can’t do it now. You will have to trust me. Oñé knows that his father is Gregoriano. He has never seen him in the flesh, although I have shown him a photograph of him when he was a baby. Gregoriano held him. It was my choice that Gregoriano and I did not marry. We met in Iraq before Saddam Hussein’s hanging in 2006. Oñé was born in Baghdad the following year. I can’t say anymore, he will hear us. I will tell you another time, when we have more privacy. I think Oñé is secretly hoping to meet Gregoriano in Mallorca. Don’t raise his hopes. Make up a story that will seem plausible if he asks about him. He knows that he is a Doctor and works in war zones. He knows he travels.”
16
PABLO PICASSO
“The chief enemy of creativity is ‘good sense’.”
Oné is here with me in Mallorca. The day we landed at Palma airport, he asked me if he could see his father. I told him that his father Gregoriano had taken a little break – he had gone ‘Walkabout’ like the native indigenous Australians. Then he would continue with the work that he was doing in Syria. I am so used to telling lies these days it almost feels exciting to come up with one that is better than the one before. I wondered if he believed in what I said.
He asked, “Why does he choose to know you and Ishmael more than me, his son? I have never talked to him or seen him face to face. I only have this.”
He opened a wallet and showed me two photos, protected behind plastic held in the leather frame of his wallet – one was of Sophia, with dark hair cascading over her shoulders and her blue eyes shining with what seemed to be genuine happiness. The second was that of Gregoriano, staring intently into Oñé’s eyes. I could not see whether he looked happy or not. Oñé looked at the photos.
“My mother tells me that he is a good man who risks his life for others. I would like to know him. Why would he not want to know me? He could help me.”
I made him a cup of thick hot chocolate and found a sweet muffin in the cake tin. I didn’t want to eat or drink anything. I gestured to him to sit on the sofa and pulled a small table beside him, setting the steaming chocolate and bun beside him. “What help would you need from your father?”
Oñé bit into his raspberry muffin. “He can’t help me to be like Ishmael, who is a great painter. My father is not a painter. But if he is brave in the way my mother has explained that he is he could help me to be a hero. I would like to be brave – that would help my painting. I could be the bravest man who ever existed, save people’s lives in the way that my father does and also be the best
painter in the world.”
I didn’t know what to say to him. I thought it childish nonsense. One day he would grow up and know how naive he sounded. I searched for what I thought Sophia would say in response. That was hard as she had not told me really much about Gregoriano. I took a portion of his muffin. “May I? There are more muffins if you want them.”
He nodded. “You can have it. I don’t want any more.” He sipped on his chocolate.
I placed the muffin in my mouth and talked, eating with my mouth full as I knew that Oñé liked to do.
“I can’t help you to be brave as I am a coward. Maybe you can teach me how to be brave. I think you know how to be that better than me. I will help you to paint – although I can’t guarantee to be a better painter than Ishmael.”
He stopped drinking his chocolate and ate the last of his muffin. “Why does no-one want to stay with me? Ishmael has left. My father never wanted to be with me and you will leave me too when Sophia is better.”
I replied, “No-one who loves you ever leaves you. They are always with you.”
He shook his head. “Then I have never been loved.” I gave him a second muffin. “No, you don’t understand what I am saying. Even if people who love you are away in a distant land or even if they are dead they can still be with you if you touch their souls with your mind. They can never be apart from you.”
“But my father never touched my soul with his mind.”
I shook my head. “I think he did. You both did when you looked into one another’s eyes. I saw it in the photo. He will never leave you. He’s gone to help people who really need his help. That’s what he does. He will return.”
Over the next few weeks, I didn’t know what to do with Oñé. I found being in his company tedious, frightening and also intriguing. I know it’s an odd mixture of responses, but it is what life has become for me. It is confusing. What am I meant to do with this little lump of life? He decided that he will start school after Christmas. So until then, I have to occupy him. I bought him a plastic beach ball even though summer is long over. I walked along the beach with him and threw the ball into the air for him to catch. I felt as if I was treating him like a dog. I didn’t know what else I could say to or do with him. He ignored the ball as it flew into the beautiful blue sky and thudded onto the muddy sand. It had been raining for several days. I mostly detested having him around me. I even made him sit on the bench around the sculpture. I shocked myself at my own depravity, making Oñé sit within arm’s reach of Ishmael disintegrating body.
I knew that there was possibly no end to how Oñé and I may want to surprise and hurt one another – consciously or unconsciously, over the next six months. For example, he ignored the ball which I threw to him. When we were back in Can Animes, he ran towards the sculpture and tapped on it, looking at me.
“What message are you giving with this sculpture? It seems pretty boring to me. Are you really a great painter? I suppose it can only be an improvement upon this sculpture. I like the other sculptures you created with Ishmael. I imagine that it is his influence that made them so good.” He tapped at the sculpture again. “I don’t believe he had any involvement in this. There is nothing of his soul in it. Let me see your paintings.”
I wanted to slap him around the head. I did not know why I agreed to having him here. Maybe I hoped that I could fulfil Gregoriano’s wishes that he had written on the page burnt in the fire in the Castle and repeated in his letter sent to me after Ishmael’s murder – ‘learn to love someone deeply other than yourself’. Instead I found myself loathing this tiny, spotty faced ten-yearold. I wondered if that was what Ishmael felt about him. “Maybe that was why he had run away, to escape him,” I heard myself say.
“I do mostly installations, not paintings.” That was another lie, but I wanted to impress him. I thought that he wouldn’t know the difference between a painting and an installation. I would sound even more impressive than Ishmael. What could a mere boy know of world class painting?
He interrupted the dreamlike rambling in my head. “Let me see your work then. I would like to compare them with Ishmael’s paintings.”
He ignored the fact that I called my work installations. Without saying a word, I walked towards the front door and Oñé followed me. We trampled past the fountain, the sculpture, the herb garden, following the path to skirt the labyrinth and walked along the pebbled path towards the Studio.
I opened the door and sidled past a number of boxes which had been prepared to be sent to my exhibition in Japan. In the Studio I had one of my installations waiting to be hung in the Joan March hospital near Soller. There were five large tables onto each of which was draped a flimsy material. I had five more pieces of material hanging like curtains on the wall. The tables now looked to me to be like experimental beds for animal operations in a pharmaceutical ‘sleep lab’. I began to think of my art collectors as voyeurs who liked to see the beauty of the world tortured onto a canvas or a piece of gossamer and silk.
Oñé looked at one of tables and drew his head close to the silk. He appeared to be listening for a heartbeat. I wondered if he needed glasses as he lowered his head towards the fabric and then touched a blue hummingbird made from a raised silk. He raised his head and asked, “What does it mean?”
“Mean?” I repeated myself to give time for a response. “Mean?” I scrambled to uncover a painting I had done earlier, awaiting final touches and covered with silk cloth. “What does this mean to you?”
He looked at it. It showed a chalice which contained business cards from friends, a host of a sun hanging above the chalice, spilling life into the cup which floated within a background of the mountains and waterfalls. Oñé looked at it and looked at me. “I like the Devil.”
He pointed to the left of the Chalice where I thought that I had painted an olive tree. I saw that he was right. I had created a Devil side by side with everything that was good within and outside the Chalice.
I was not going to be disturbed by his observation. I would not let him get the better of me. “Interesting,” I commented and then walked towards my installations. “With permission and before you talk I will tell you that these are about silence and healing. They will be hung in the Joan March hospital for the terminally ill. It is my gift to ease the suffering of the dying. The birds represent new life and the space around them is a space of stillness from which the healing may take place or the transition can be made to calmly depart the body into the deathless realms.”
Oñé replied, “It looks like toilet paper. It would be better cut up and placed into small rolls in their bathrooms.”
I decided not to respond to this offensive taunt. Instead I asked, “Why don’t you paint? I would love to see what you can do.”
Oñé smiled at me. “Find me a large canvas and oils. I will be glad to oblige. I will recreate one of Ishmael’s paintings – the one which led to the ‘incident’ as my mother liked to call it.”
“What incident?”
“Did she not tell you about his illness?”
I nodded, feeling my breathing speeding up. Had this anything to do with Ishmael’s Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder? I tried not to look too interested in case he might not continue. I straightened the installation lying on the table and cut with tiny scissors a loose thread hanging from the beak of a miniature eagle.
“Yes, I know that he suffered from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder based on his experiences in Syria. But I had limited time with your mother. She did not have time to tell me all of the details of how this illness manifested itself in the time he was with you. What happened?”
Oñé looked around the Studio as if not paying attention to what I had asked. I knew that he had been listening. It was as if he searched for the answer to my question not in his head, but in the Studio. He no longer sounded confident as he continued, instead more like how I would expect a ten-year-old to remember what happened four years earlier.
“He arrived at our house in December 2012. I was five
years old. I remember every moment that he spent with us – including him leaving the house in a panic before Christmas Day 2013. He left before my sixth birthday on Christmas Eve. He had finished painting a magnificent painting. It was a terrifying triptych which for me had elements of the influence of Hieronymus Bosch. There were three scenes, one within each pane. Ishmael explained to me that they depicted a modern version of a Descent into Hell, Judgement and Transformation.”
I looked at Oñé. How could a child of ten be talking like this, know these things? It couldn’t be real what I was hearing. It was as if he were channelling Ishmael. A child wouldn’t have the vocabulary to be able to speak like this.
Since the death of Ishmael, I was used to my head spinning with feelings of confusion and nausea. I knew that I had to steady myself; I needed to find out more about Ishmael, the triptych and what kind of ‘incident’ seemed to have forced him to flee from Malmo. I asked Oñé in as gentle a tone of voice as I could to disguise my hysterical mind.
“What happened? What was this ‘incident’?”
A white line appeared above his upper lip. I noticed his nostrils shaking in an extraordinary way before pulling down towards that white line above his lips. I felt my heart quiver with him although another part of me did not want to know his pain. I didn’t want to be a part of it. I forced myself stay with this fibrillating heart.
He asked, “You really want to know?”
No. I didn’t. Truth be told, I wanted him to be back with Sophia, with me having discharged my duties and never to know anything more about him. I looked at him. He looked away as if he could not bear my presence. If he was here, I thought I might as well find out as much as I could from him about Ishmael.
“Tell me what happened. When he returns, it will allow us both to help him.”
I touched the hand which was dismantling one of my Albatrosses on the first installation. He picked out a part of a long wing and threw it onto the floor. The whiteness above his lip had returned to a normal shade of beige. I thought that I detected a few hairs of a possible moustache appearing on his upper lip. I felt flooded with a momentary compassion for this body in front of me that had little control over how it was being transformed from a child into an adult. I felt a responsibility to help him. He didn’t look at me as he continued.
The Painter Page 12