The Painter

by Deirdre Quiery

  I said nothing until I looked at the final part of the triptych which Oñé called ‘Transformation’. I was there and my hands were pointing upwards, in the direction of a golden sky. I wore a white tunic with garlands of roses around my neck. I held my right hand in the air, showing three fingers as though I had counted something and wanted the observer to know that three things had been achieved. I was smiling, not a self-conscious false smile that I knew myself to be capable of producing, but a transcendent smile of knowing something which no-one else knew. Something which could only be known face-to-face not in words; only in a relationship between me in the painting and the person looking at me. I didn’t know what to say. I blurted out, “I thought that you said that you were going to reproduce Ishmael’s painting. He had never met me when he painted it, so how come you have painted this?”

  Oñé stuttered. “Don’t be angry with me. It is the truth. Ishmael painted you into his painting. I don’t know why or how. Although when he said that the painting came alive, he thought that meant that he had painted himself into it. I knew when I met you in Malmo, that it was you. You can see the original for yourself if you don’t believe me. It is in the Reina Sophia, in Madrid.”

  I felt enraged by his lies and by what I imagined was some kind of psychological game he was playing with me to make me feel that I was going mad. I walked swiftly to the kitchen, opened a drawer, took out a meat carving knife, walked back to the painting and slashed at it. “Do you see how I have improved it?”

  I didn’t tell you how Oñé’s hair had grown since Sophia handed him over to my care. It was quite beautiful in its natural state – allowed to grow rather than to be pruned. He grabbed the knife from my hand and began to chop at his hair. Clumps of hair fell onto the ground in a way which produced another panic attack in me. I breathed in deeply attempting to lengthen the short breaths. I clenched my fists into two tight balls and for what seemed an eternity, avoided eye contact with him.

  When I plucked up the courage to look at him, he had taken the knife from the table where he had left it after his hair cutting episode. He walked briskly towards his painting and made three more slashes. He turned and looked at me.

  “I think you’re right. That was what was needed. A little bit more do you think?”

  He held the knife in his hand and waved it at me. His voice shook. I saw that he had managed to slice not only the painting but also his left hand. A few drops of blood fell onto the ground making small Pollock purple dots on the Tuscan yellow tiled floor. His eyes were wide open like the day in Malmo when he fell into the sea, before he disappeared under the water. The thought crossed my mind that he would plunge the knife into my heart or maybe into his own. Instead, he threw it on the ground and moved towards me as if (I trembled at the thought) he might embrace me.

  My voice croaked as I asked, “Show me your hand. Have you hurt yourself?”

  He held his hand out in a fist. I pulled it open. There was a small gash. Nothing that I thought would need stitches and mean that we could be late in collecting Sophia. I looked at him, commanding, “Stay here, I’ll find a plaster. Do not do any more damage to yourself or to the painting. Think about Sophia. She needs a calm and positive atmosphere for her stay here.”

  I stumbled down the pebbled path towards the house, into the bathroom, pulled out the first aid box that Ishmael had filled for me with cream for burns, a bottle of oxygenated water and plasters. Grabbing the water and plasters I ran back, slipping on the pebbles and fell, crunching my head against the small stones. I lay there for a minute, turning my head to one side and breathing deeply.

  As I pulled myself into a kneeling position, there was a shadowy figure beyond the Studio looking at me. I don’t know if I had bumped my head on the pebbles and had suffered a slight concussion, but I could have sworn that it was Ishmael. I shouted at him.

  “Ishmael help me. I need your help. Don’t leave me.”

  A fleeting fear filled my body that in some way he had come back from the dead. I knew that was nonsense. No-one had ever appeared to me from the dead. My mother Monica, who might deserve such a visit if it were possible, had shared with me that it had never happened to her except in dreams. I wondered if I was dreaming. I looked around me. The orangery was close by, with orange trees heavy with fruit. I struggled to my feet, touched my head and gazed at the deep red blood on my fingers. I felt tears welling up at the unfairness and uncontrollable nature of life. I walked slowly towards the nearest orange tree, pulled an orange from it and bit into the skin. I tasted its sweet bitterness. This was not a dream. I had never tasted anything real in a dream before. I licked at my hand. It tasted of iron. It was human blood. I looked carefully around. There was no sign of my dream manifestation of Ishmael.

  After washing Oñé’s small wound with the water and sticking a plaster over it, I dripped the oxygenated water onto my own head and asked him, “Have a look – is it a bad cut? Does it need stitches?”

  I knelt on the tiled floor at his feet, bent my head forward. I felt his tiny fingers gently pull my hair apart and his eyes drilling into my scalp. “It doesn’t look too bad.” He laughed. “Do you think it will have knocked some sense into you?”

  My body shook with laughter. I remembered that feeling because I rarely laughed those days. It was bubbliness like champagne rising all the way up from my knees pressed in a kind of prayer through my throat where I was making a sound like a donkey braying and then up further into my eyes which stung. I didn’t know at that point whether I was laughing or crying. I wiped my eyes with the sleeve of my jumper as I leaned on a chair to get to my feet and mumbled, “What will your mother say about your hair?”

  Oñé looked at me with a look of curiosity as if he didn’t know who he was looking at. “She will say what she sees and thinks. How can I tell you what she will think? I am not her.”

  I walked to the drawer in the kitchen area and found a pair of scissors. “You sit down and I will sort this out”

  The hairdressers were closed. I found a peg I had used to attach the installations onto a clothesline. I held it against each handful of hair to ensure that his hair was cut evenly all over. I lifted the mirror from the studio bathroom to show him how it looked from behind. He laughed in that familiar way which I maybe in the past had mistakenly interrupted as being aggressive.

  “Mother will be delighted. Did you never think of a change of career?” Oñé brushed his hair from the floor. Without looking at me, he commented, “You haven’t said what you thought about my painting apart from the fact that you didn’t like to see yourself in it and didn’t believe that Ishmael had painted you into a painting which nearly drove him crazy and forced him to abandon Sophia and me.”

  I knew that I had to move this conversation onto something less judgemental to allow the mood to be a welcoming one for Sophia. “I think the texture and colours are impressive – although I can’t see anything like this being accepted for the Reina Sophia. It’s like nothing I have seen before.”

  Oñé picked up a glass of water sitting on the table and threw it at me which I didn’t expect at all. I mean the whole glass – water and glass. The cold water hit me full in the face and the glass splintered on the tiled floor. He shouted at me, “Don’t be so patronising. I have seen your ‘works of art and installations’. Do you think for a moment that they are better than those of Ishmael which I reproduce?”

  I was beginning to think that Oñé had serious psychological problems which may have been caused, as José Miguel and Pep Serrano had hinted, by his time spent as a child in Iraq. Perhaps, I thought, they had been exaggerated by abandonment issues. He had never met his father and had been abandoned by Ishmael of whom he was obviously fond.

  I had no idea of how to respond. I felt guilty that I had provoked this outburst. I walked towards Oñé, wiped my face to dry it on his installation apron.

  He tore the sheet away from my face. “Wipe your tears on someone else’s clothes, not mine.”


  I sat on the ground and began to talk in a way that was so disjointed that I couldn’t even follow it myself. It had little to do with what Oñé had said.

  “We must try to become wise – both of us. It will help our art. We don’t want to turn into one those mad Painters. You can be a great painter and be sane.”

  Oñé curled up like a worm on the floor – a worm that moves slowly and is shiny on the outside. He shouted at me from a mouth stuffed into the sleeve of his jersey.

  “Stop talking about wisdom. You know nothing about it. Ishmael was a great painter. I do not know if he was wise or what that means.”

  I knelt on the floor beside Oñé, edged close towards me. I held him in my arms.

  “Yes you are right. Ishmael was a great painter. I see that in your art. You are a better painter than I am.”

  He shouted at me. “You don’t listen. I am no longer talking about being a great painter. I am talking about being wise like no-one I know.”

  I felt an emotion which I had never experienced before. I can only describe it as something painful around my heart. I saw that the hole I had cut for him to wear the installation a little too small. He must have squeezed his head through to wear it because it seemed to choke him. Or maybe there was another reason why his face turned cherry red. I lifted the installation and tugged it over his head. I folded it neatly as he had done with the plastic.

  “It’s time to collect your mother.”

  We climbed into the front seats of the BMW. I patted at Oñé’s head the way you would pat at a horse. “Are you looking forward to seeing your mother? It has been a while. It can’t be easy living with a stranger.”

  Oñé looked out of the car window to his right. “She thinks that I don´t know, that I am a child and don’t deserve to know. I know that she is dying.”

  I heard myself say, “She told me that you knew that she was having treatment for her cancer. We are all dying. It’s only a matter of when. Your mother could outlive us both.”

  Oñe ignored me and tapped on the window as if sending a Morse code signal. “When will I meet my father?”

  I reversed out of the driveway with more haste than normal, scraping the door against a lamp on the ground and hearing it shriek at me as it tore into the door. “Why do you want to meet him?”

  Oñé dropped his voice to a level that I could scarcely hear. “Why wouldn’t I want to meet him? He is my father. If you were me, would you not want to meet your father?”

  I bumped against the pavement as I turned out of the driveway with my heart thumping again in its panic mode. My hands sweated on the steering wheel so much so that they were slipping and sliding. I gripped the wheel tightly, aware that drops of sweat were running down my face in a way that reminded me of my first sight of Ishmael walking up to the house. I tried to make my voice sound calm, “No, I have no desire to meet my father. Just as well. He is dead.”

  Oñé looked at me with that direct look he had already perfected with his few short years on earth. “What about your mother? Do you have any desire to see her? Is she alive?”

  He was beginning to do my head in. “I see her when I can.”

  I pressed my foot on the accelerator and headed for Palma.

  Sophia looked a little lost as she came through Gate C at Palma airport. She looked to the right and hadn’t spotted Oñé and I standing with a bunch of half dead flowers which I had insisted buying in a nearby garage. She held her head very straight over her shoulders. She wore an African scarf wrapped around her head. She turned to look to the left and waved energetically when she spotted us.

  I embraced her and kissed her, aware that I was doing everything gently, almost in slow motion. I smelt her perfume. It was not one that I recognised although I had kissed many women in my life. It was light and flowery with hints of lemon and lime. I pulled back as soon as I realised that I had kissed her first rather than allow her to embrace Oñé. Maybe I pulled back too abruptly as she looked startled and embarrassed.

  Oñé stayed with his hands at his side, like a soldier being inspected by an army Major. He allowed himself to be kissed by Sophia but did not kiss her back.

  Sophia rested her hands on his shoulders and turned to look at me. “I like the new ‘look’.” She smoothed her hand over his hair.

  I breathed deeply and gave Oñé a meaningful look. Sophia looked again at Oñé and then at me. “I see that he has talked to you about his desire to see Gregoriano.”

  How could she have known that by looking at us both?

  I replied, “No. He has not talked so much about Gregoriano. More about Ishmael.”

  19

  PABLO PICASSO

  “There are only two types of women goddesses and doormats.”

  31st December 2017

  We celebrated New Year’s Eve in Can Pintxos. Sophia changed her African headwear for a white beret. She wore long black boots which came up over her knees, black hot pants and a cream lace blouse. Her legs were a little thinner than I had remembered but her face was radiant – glowing with happiness. I don’t think Oñé had smiled at Sophia since she had arrived, yet he grinned at me from time to time.

  There was a set menu in Can Pintxos starting with a glass of cava. Oñé sipped on an orange Fanta as Sophia and I clinked glasses.

  “Happy New Year.”

  As I said that I was aware that she may not survive the year. She seemed to know what I was thinking.

  “Let’s hope so.”

  She ignored Oñé and began talking as if he weren’t there. “You see Gregoriano asked me to take care of Ishmael – as he asked you.”

  I shook my head. “He never asked me to take care of Ishmael. I needed a gardener and my friend José recommended Ishmael.”

  Sophia sliced her small scallop into four pieces. “Sometimes that is the way that Gregoriano works. He works indirectly, enlisting third party help. The more that you know of him, the more you see that he is a mystery who becomes more and more intimate as time passes. Even if he is not with you, he somehow becomes tenderer. He slips through the cracks of our words and gestures and opens us up to a different level of being.” Staring at the ceiling, she added, “With me he was both direct and indirect.”

  She stopped. “Is Oñé okay?”

  She looked to her right where Oñé watched the black and white screen playing scenes from Charlie Chaplin and Laurel and Hardy on the wall of the restaurant. He sipped on his Fanta. Sophia winked at me; the first time she had done that since we had met.

  She smiled answering her own question. “I think he is fine. He loves anything which makes him laugh. What he doesn’t like is what he sees in me as an ineffective mother. He would like to have a man around as a father. Even for a short while Ishmael knew how to step into that comforting role. When I refused Gregoriano access to Oñé, it was to protect him from the harm of loving someone who had chosen to put themselves in high risk situations where they could die. I then believed the day to day risk that his father could be killed would be damaging. I did not appreciate the full significance of abandonment issues for a child, in spite of my training as a psychiatric nurse. I was too young. There are things to learn about love and life which need time. I was selfish enough to think that I, alone, could provide Oñé with enough love – that he didn’t need a father whose death could destroy him.”

  She sipped the cava again. “Who am I to decide who will live and who will die, or what value the time we have on earth means? How insane was that thought that he needed a young father? Look at me? I could die at any time.”

  She didn’t look as if she was looking for sympathy – more that she was being realistic. “Let me tell you what happened. I went to Baghdad as a nurse in 2005. The Iraqi War had been running for two years. I was a qualified psychiatric nurse, just 23 years of age. At first, I was needed more for my medical than psychiatric skills. I worked with the doctors to remove shrapnel from faces which would remain forever severely disfigured. We treated terribly wounded bodies wi
th what little resources we could find.

  “One day, in 2006 they wheeled a man into our makeshift hospital. He had chest wounds from multiple gun shots. He was 59 years of age – a lot older than me. I had to get him ready for theatre. He was conscious. We talked. He told me what had happened to him. Working as a doctor, he treated the wounded in a hospital in Baghdad.

  While he dressed the wounds of a young woman who had lost her arm, soldiers from the Assad army entered the hospital ward, spraying it with gunfire and he was hit. He said that one of them stood on top of his stomach, looked into his eyes and said, ‘We will leave you to die the slow way. That’s what you deserve’. Before stepping off his body, he fired another shot into his chest, saying, ‘Let’s make sure that it’s not too easy for you’.”

  I played with the scallop on my plate, finding it a bit slimy and retching as I swallowed it. “What happened?”

  Sophia watched the waiter who silently removed the starters and served a small lamb dish on a bed of mashed potato. The candlelight flickered on her face.

  “That man was Gregoriano. He had a job to do – a special job. I knew that. He recovered. I knew that he would. It was easy to fall in love with him. For me, he radiated love itself. That was irresistible. How could I not love him? During the day we worked together attending to the wounded in the hospitals, schools and driving in Red Cross jeeps to refugee camps which were under attack. In those conditions, time seemed to expand. The moments we had together when not working were precious occasions. We would drink thick black coffee from a coffee pot bubbling on a fire pit and share whatever food was available with the refugees.