The Painter Read online

  THE

  Painter

  THE

  Painter

  DEIRDRE QUIERY

  urbanepublications.com

  First published in Great Britain in 2019 by Urbane Publications Ltd

  Unit E3 The Premier Centre Abbey Park Romsey SO51 9DG

  Copyright © Deirdre Quiery, 2019

  The moral right of Deirdre Quiery to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book. All characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978-1-912666-35-5

  MOBI 978-1-912666-36-2

  Design and Typeset by Julie Martin

  Cover by The Invisible Man

  Printed and bound by 4edge UK

  urbanepublications.com

  For Martin, my husband – a marvel of a man who

  makes me laugh in the crises of life.

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  PROLOGUE

  “The Painter Augustin Silvero born in Palma, Mallorca on 1st January 1967, was named by his mother, Monica after Saint Augustine of Hippo. The Painter’s Confessions, like those of Saint Augustine, tell of a descent into Hell to allow Transformation to be possible. His journal, simply titled ‘The Painter’ explores this descent and his transformation.

  It is a journal which moves between tenses, flows from past to future, leaving the reader on a moving raft in the river of life which has no ending even when reaching the sea. This flow of life, punctuated by moments of stillness is what we know as the genius of the art of Augustin, ‘The Painter’.”

  (Art Critic, Collector and Philosopher – Miguel del Salmorejo – Palma de Mallorca – 2018)

  “Late have I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient, ever

  new, late have I loved you! You were within me, but I was outside, and it was there that I searched for you. In my unloveliness, I plunged into the lovely things which you created. You were with me, but I was not with you. Created things kept me from you; yet if they had not been in you, they would not have been at all. You called, you shouted, and you broke through my deafness. You flashed, you shone, and you dispelled my blindness. You breathed your fragrance on me; I drew in breath and now I pant for you. I have tasted you, now I hunger and thirst for more. You touched me, and I burned for your peace.”

  (From The Confessions of Augustine of Hippo 354 – 430)

  Wednesday 4th October 2017

  The rain falls gently on the ground – a kiss pressing itself into the earth. Ishmael stares at me from the fountain. Did I really kill him? His eyes filled with horror from the last breath that he took. I want to close his eyelids, but I can’t bring my hands to touch him again. Did I hold him under the water of the fountain, or had he slipped beneath my fingers? I don’t remember.

  It is strange that you can love someone in such a way that it turns to hate. I suppose that means that it is never love. Hate is something passionate and consuming. Why is it that we also say that about love?

  Why did I have to kill Ishmael to know what love is? There’s the paradox if only I could understand it. I don’t think I loved anyone before meeting him and yet in the act of murder I knew that I loved Ishmael.

  Why am I writing a journal? Why do I not instead paint viscerally as Picasso did in his response to the bombing of Guernica? It would be possible for me to paint my anguish, despair and disgust at myself.

  I have a reason for writing this journal. I want every line to be carefully explained, every splash of colour to be placed within the correct context. I desire for you to know each person as they were interpreted by me. I write the journal in a sequence of steps leading somewhere – like every true journey does – one step after another as I remembered them. I will go back in my mind and attempt to recover every moment which for me was a part of the jigsaw journey of my life with Ishmael.

  I have never tried so hard with my paintings to be so honest, so true. I ask nothing from you, other than when you have finished reading it – the journal – then you must burn my paintings. Burn anything that I have worked on including my words in this journal – erase them.

  They are worth nothing. What I would paint today, if I chose to do so, would be filled with freedom coming with a priceless tag. This journal is a journey into the freedom of my soul.

  1

  PABLO PICASSO

  “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.”

  Tuesday 6th October 2015

  I remember Ishmael walking up the driveway to my house. It was before the rain. There was a crunching of his shoes against the gravel. He didn’t wear sandals but polished shoes that shone, reflecting the mountains around. His trousers were smooth. That’s what I remember. Smooth – glistening, perfectly ironed. He wore a blue, flowery open-necked shirt and a rucksack on his back which didn’t match his clothes but then nothing matched with Ishmael. He was one of those folks who made you think that by his very being, he was not joined up. There was something missing in the glue that held him together. There was a mystery about him waiting to be known or put together.

  He sweated as he strode up the driveway. His cheeks slightly flushed; sweat dropping onto his shirt and under his armpits pools of moistness spreading down to his waist. He smiled at me as he combed hair away from his face with his fingers. I shook his hand. It was clammy but not unpleasant. I squeezed it and imagined drops of sweat falling and watering the dry earth. He leaned forward, kissed me on the cheek and slapped me on the back like an old friend.

  He had been recommended to me as a gardener by a friend; José del Pardo in La Coruña who exhibited my art in his gallery. He claimed that in one year, Ishmael had transformed his garden, creating an orchard with orange and lemon trees, planting pomegranates and kiwis. Galicia with La Coruña as its capital is called ‘The Ireland of Spain’. Orange and lemon trees were not common. Ishmael could make anything grow, anywhere.

  For José del Pardo, he created a labyrinth tiled with blue and white mosaics and opened up a view to the sea where he placed oak benches so visitors could watch the sun set over the Atlantic. José only had praise for Ishmael’s work. What puzzled him was Ishmael’s background. Where did he come from? Why had he come to Spain? He certainly looked Spanish with curly black hair falling onto the collar of his shirt, dark brown eyes and a swarthy, lined skin which conveyed a maturity beyond his thirty years of age. José mentioned that Ishmael had lived previously in Malmo, Sweden but when I checked, there were no references for his work there and internet searches revealed nothing of his past or present.

  I don’t know why I looked at Ishmael’s shoes first and then his trousers and rucksack. I did eventually get to his face. He looked at me as if he knew me �
�� as if he was coming home. He had a handsome rugged look. A straight nose, piercing blue eyes, lips curved into a smile, hair parted on the left and curling with snake-like twists. He drew me in. I knew that he was special. I never thought for a minute with the scent of jasmine hanging in the air, that I would be the one to kill him. I did kill him. I know before that I said that I wasn’t sure, but I know I did it.

  I’m also sure that he had tried to escape that fate from others. He had a look of someone who knew that he would be hunted to death. Why did he walk up my driveway and ask to be the gardener? It was a lie from the start. He had other plans in visiting me. He should never have told that lie. He should have told me who sent him and why he was there. That lie about wanting to be my gardener created the end for him. It wasn’t me. He did it to himself. We all have to take the consequences of our actions.

  Within an hour of arriving, I felt obliged to give him a cup of tea. Gabriela my housekeeper had gone to Palma to buy food for Ishmael’s arrival. She had already made his bed up with fresh linen and lit a log fire in the inglenook fireplace in the sitting room. Although the autumn sun still burnt the body, inside the house it was cold.

  I had never made a cup of tea for anyone in my life. I liked the innocence of this new tea ritual with him and the sound of a kettle boiling for the next cup. As he sipped at the Rooibos tea, I felt embarrassed that I had no biscuits to offer him and no cake. I apologised, explaining that the pantry would be full of delicious Mallorcan treats when Gabriela returned. He shook his head quickly from side to side. “Don’t be silly. This is perfect. I am more interested in the fact that your house is called Can Animes – which I know to mean a house of courage, soul or spirit. There’s nothing that’s a coincidence in life. This house is made for you. You will learn how to become a courageous spirit here. You need go no further. This world is here for you in this house.”

  That was the first time that I felt annoyed by him. I responded gruffly. “You do not know me. How do you know that I am not courageous? I may be more courageous than you.”

  He sat the teacup gently on the table beside the inglenook fireplace. He looked at me, his eyes smouldering brown like the logs on the fire. “We do not know one another. I am sure that will change over our time together. If you are a courageous man – you will be only the second courageous person I have met in my life. I apologise. I should have said that I am hoping to gain greater courage from my stay here. I am sure you have to make your own learning journey.”

  That last comment irritated me. I found it downright passive-aggressive. There was an implication – little hidden – that I needed to change. I managed to maintain silence as I poured another cup of tea for us both.

  He looked around the sitting room. “I like the fact that you have not put in central heating or air conditioning.”

  I replied with what I heard as a hint of arrogance in my voice: “I refuse to put air conditioning into the house. I want to experience what life really is instead of pressing buttons and controlling life with a perfect temperature around me.”

  “Why do you want a perfect garden? Why not leave the plant life wild, feverishly unfolding its beauty aligned with Nature rather than controlled by man?”

  I didn’t want to answer that question because I suspected that he knew the answer. It was a valid question for a gardener to pursue but one that Pep would not have asked me. Pep knew his place.

  Before Ishmael arrived, I had a gardener called Pep Conejo. Conejo means rabbit and he was affectionately called Conejo because the local people from Soller joked that he came from a family who bred like Conejos. He had seventeen brothers and sisters. Pep’s character was strong but his body fragile. In spite of all the physical effort he put into pruning the orange and lemon trees, growing tomatoes and taking care of the fig trees, which I would have thought would have built muscles on his chest and arms – it didn’t. With his shirt open to the waist, it revealed a scraggly body with a long scar in the centre of his chest from an earlier heart operation.

  One day when I was away at an art exhibition, he climbed an olive tree to trim the branches. He fell from the tree on top of his own knife and managed to accidently chop off four of the fingers from his right hand. I knew nothing about it until I returned from Madrid. By then he had collected his four fingers, placed them into a plastic bag and with the bag inside his trouser pocket, he drove to the Health Centre in Soller.

  Doctor Carlos was shocked that Pep waited in a queue to be seen with a bloody bandaged hand. He placed Pep’s fingers with tweezers into an iced bag, telling him to go urgently to the hospital of Son Espaces in Palma. An ambulance had been called but Pep insisted on driving himself to Palma with his bandaged hand on the steering wheel and the bag of fingers in his trouser pocket. Once there, the doctors stitched the fingers back on, shaking their heads and sighing without hope that the fingers would heal. They did. He was asked in Son Espaces to return for work to be carried out to rehabilitate his hand – to force those turkey claw-like shaped fingers straight. He refused. Instead, each day, he placed a towel on an outside table, covered his hand on top with a second towel, and hammered his fingers. When he visited the hospital for a check-up a few months later the doctors were amazed that his hand was straight and the fingers working perfectly.

  That was Pep Conejo whom I admired in a certain way as he was so different from the world within which I circulated. I liked to share brunch with him and listen to his stories. Normally they were about a new dispute with his brother, or the fact that his son and daughter-inlaw didn’t care about him and were waiting for Pep and his wife to die to inherit the parents’ property. I listened carefully over bread with olive oil and cheese and a bottle of red wine. It was easy to get distracted and instead of listening I found myself watching the spaces in his gums where numerous teeth had fallen out. In the last year, he only had two teeth in the middle of his upper gum. I thought that God had a sense of humour transforming him rapidly with each passing year to resemble a Conejo. I watched the way he ran across the olive grove with his long thin legs and a bob in his step as he jumped over rocks embedded as sculptures in the grass.

  When Ishmael arrived, I felt that I no longer needed Pep Conejo as a gardener. That might have been a mistake as it would have been amusing to observe how they interacted with one another. From the first day of Ishmael’s arrival, I was infatuated by him and didn’t want Pep Conejo smiling at me or getting in the way of me making an impression on Ishmael – or even worse watching him laugh with Ishmael. God forbid that Ishmael would enjoy Pep’s company. I wanted to keep as much of Ishmael for myself as I could. I didn’t know that at the time. It was only on reflection that the hidden meaning of my relationship with Ishmael became clear.

  The way I treated Pep Conejo shows you how callous I am capable of being with someone who worked so hard for me and whom I rewarded poorly. Whereas with Ishmael, I showered him with money and presents, including a dark blue Boggi suit with a waistcoat which looked stunning on him.

  I let Pep Conejo collect oranges that fell from the orange trees as they sat gathering heavy dew in the December early mornings. I offered him hard kiwis which hadn’t ripened, and which frankly would take months to do so – if indeed they ever did. I acted on the tip I was given about pricking the top of the kiwis with a needle which aimed to hasten the ripening process, but it never worked for me or for Pep Conejo. I handed my kiwis over to him as if in an act of generosity. They sat in a plastic bag in his sitting room until even he gave up on them ever ripening and threw them on a compost heap of leaves. I gave him permission to collect lemons rotting on the ground – with a white mould that looked as if they had been frozen for a dessert – as a payment to him rather than provide him a salary whilst I on occasion sat alone drinking champagne and ate strawberries for breakfast.

  In summer he shared with his friends his gathered over ripe tomatoes. Oranges, kiwis, lemons and tomatoes became a friendship currency in Soller. I didn’t care that everyone t
alked about my meanness. As the Painter, I knew that I was better than all of them – even if they didn’t know it. I then believed that I had to place boundaries around people. I suppose it was a little bit like an Indian caste system. I was on the path to discover Atman – my true self – a transcendent Braham and to do this, it was necessary to circulate with care the ‘Untouchables’.

  How ironic that it was I who became an ‘Untouchable’, or at least deserved to be called one. I became an expert at hiding my dark side when I needed to. There was never a greater need than to hide what I did to Ishmael. After murdering Ishmael my life was never the same. I crossed a threshold in the same way you do when you leave the safety of your mother’s womb and face the world. I did my best to keep my secret from the world until now. I did not want to see my face on national television, photos of me and my art in the press and to see my reputation as the Painter destroyed forever.

  From that first cup of tea together, Ishmael was someone I wanted to touch. I was drawn to his body like a magnet. When the sun set early that evening, it plunged not behind the mountains but into his oiled hair. I wanted to hold his hair; to hold the sun shining within its darkness and allow it to burn my hands.

  I heard the sound of my BMW in the driveway. I had lent it to Gabriela as she had quite a lot of food to buy for Ishmael’s arrival. Once a month, I allowed her to drive to Palma in my BMW rather than be forced to shop in Soller on her motorbike.

  Ishmael jumped to his feet. “Is that her?”

  I nodded. “There’s no need to get excited. She’s only brought the shopping.”

  He sounded pleased to see her – as if he knew her. He ran to the front door, reaching out a hand either to shake her hand or to help her carry the shopping indoors. She handed him two shopping bags and then two more. She looked at him the way you might inspect an alien life form – letting her eyes roll over his body from his head to his shoes and then scanning across his shoulders and down his arms. She talked to him in an unusually meek soft-spoken apologetic voice. “We were expecting you. Sorry I’m a little late there was an accident outside Palma.”