out…
When Clara woke up she was on the verge of tears, or perhaps had already been crying: it is hard to tell if there are no actual tears to give the game away. She remembered her dream vividly, although she had no idea what it meant. She often dreamt of her father: he was a figure who was always part of her consciousness, someone who visited her with astonishing regularity. Uncle Pablo had once confessed he also dreamt of him. He put it down to the fact that his brother had died. 'Dead people always appear when we dream,' he used to tell her, adding that our only possibility of eternal life was to figure in other people's dreams.
She was lying on the bedroom mattress in the bleary light of dawn. As she stood up, she was struck by the white plaster on the wall in front of her, and the lines on the floorboards. She was still naked apart from her labels, but neither the fact that she had no clothes, sheets or blankets to cover her, nor the three labels attached to her body, had been able to disturb her blissful sleep. She sat on the edge of the mattress with her feet on the floor and wondered what she should do next. It was then she heard voices.
The sound came from the living room. There were at least two people, and they were speaking Dutch. They were laughing, shouting, from time to time. Perhaps the noise they had made coming into the house was what had woken her.
She did not think they could be people from Conservation or Security. Perhaps they were workmen who had come to install something, or cleaners (how absurd). It could also be the first hyperdramatic rehearsal, an improvised scene they were putting on for her benefit. Or perhaps it was the artist himself, the painter who had contracted her, who had come with his group of assistants to examine the material for himself. Whoever it was, she needed to prepare herself.
She went into the bathroom, urinated (her bladder was full to bursting, but she only now realised this), then washed herself carefully with wet paper towels. She rinsed her face with water, smoothed her hair (none of this was necessary: her face was already shiny clean, her hair looked perfect); for a few moments her mind wandered to thoughts of dresses, colours, accessories, ways of presenting herself to strangers, what the best combinations might be, until she suddenly remembered she was not in her own apartment, but somewhere in Holland, and that anyway she was a primed and labelled canvas and that she should appear exactly as she was to whoever had arrived at the house. She took a deep breath, walked across the bedroom, and opened the door.
Two men were walking to and fro between the front door and the living room.
The older of the two was struggling with a large canvas bag and did not see her as he went by. He had thinning hair, and wore a dirty T-shirt and jeans. He had long, hairy, almost ape-like arms. Behind thick glasses, his eyes looked like a pair of insects stuck in amber. But what caught Clara's attention was the turquoise-coloured label attached to a fold in his ‘I-shirt. Someone from Art, she thought with a shudder. He was the first member of that select circle she had ever met. She held her breath like a believer in the presence of one of the great patriarchs of her faith. So they were from the Art department of the Van Tysch Foundation, no less: assistants of the Maestro and Jacob Stein. They were not as she had imagined, with their ordinary-looking faces and rather ragged appearance, but still the sight of the label set her heart racing.
The other man seemed very young. He had just left a bag on the carpet, and was now busy raising the blinds over the back windows, flooding the room with the dawn light. He said something in Dutch and turned round. As he did so, he discovered Clara standing in the doorway. He stood looking at her. She smiled faintly, but thought that to present herself would be inappropriate. At that moment, the older man also dropped his bag on the floor, and saw her too.
'Well, well, well,' the younger man said in Spanish, taking a few steps towards her.
He was tall and tanned, with a crewcut of black hair. Clara liked his face: thick but well-defined eyebrows, sideburns curled like commas, a moustache and beard straight out of a Three Musketeers film. He was wearing African necklaces, earrings, bracelets and leather wristbands. The badges on his jacket were a compendium of slogans in Dutch. Beside him, the older man looked like the hunchback servant of a diabolical professor. The contrast between them could not have been greater.
They said something in Dutch, pointing at Clara. She stood quietly and calmly in the doorway, making no attempt to cover her naked body.
Once they had finished their brief dialogue, the younger one put his hand in his jeans pocket and took something out. It was a pair of pliers, with sharp, curved edges. He came over to Clara, smiling. Instinctively, she took a step backwards.
'The very first thing we do with anything we are going to prepare,' he said in a singsong Spanish with a South American accent, lifting the pliers to Clara's neck, 'is to get rid of the labels.'
Snip, snip, snip, and the three yellow pieces of cardboard fell at her feet.
She tensed her stomach muscles so that Gerardo could paint the eighth vertical line next to her navel. Gerardo wore rubber gloves and had a felt tip hanging round his neck which he used to write the number of the colour on her skin. She hardly felt him press as he wrote. Now he was using the felt-tip to draw an arabesque, a butterfly's wings under the eighth line: 8. Then he took off his gloves and started the timer.
The entire morning had been spent in the same routine. Clara was lying on her back on the chest of drawers, hands behind her neck and her legs dangling over the edge. She felt a little confused. She had always thought that the technique the Foundation's artists used must be more impulsive even than that of Bassan or Vicky, and yet here were the two men painstakingly testing colours all over her body. Gerardo was the one who painted her: he prised the lid off a tin, smeared some on his forefinger, drew a line on her stomach, then wrote the number under the line. After every three or four lines, he set up the timer and left her alone while he waited for the different colours – all of them shades of pink – to dry. Then he came back, opened another tin, and began the whole process all over again.
They had not told her their names: she had read them on their turquoise-coloured labels, next to their photos. The young one was Gerardo Williams. The older man, Justus Uhl. Clara supposed they were assistants of the main artist. Gerardo spoke Spanish very well, despite a certain Anglo-Saxon accent. She thought he could be Colombian, or maybe Peruvian. Uhl never spoke directly to her, and his way of looking at her and dealing with her was considerably more curt than Gerardo's.
On the windowpane, between her body and the sun, an insect was buzzing against the glass: its shadow made a line, a trait, across her absolute nudity. The timer went off, and Gerardo returned.
'Once we've decided on the exact tone, we'll make tests on your whole body,' he said, choosing another tin and lifting the lid. 'We'll use a porous body stocking, it's quicker. Have you ever used one before?' 'Yes.' 'Oh,' he said with a smile. ‘I w as forgetting you're an expert.' 'I'm no expert, but I've been working for several years as
…'
'Don't talk… wait a moment. Stretch out more. With your hands held together above your head, as though you were an arrow. Like this.'
She could feel his cold finger sliding down her stomach. Then the timer again. If she closed her eyes, she could guess the number by the sensations on her skin: a curl, a line, a gap. As he was writing, his hand sometimes brushed her sex.
'You're from Madrid, aren't you?' Gerardo asked, busy prising open the lid of another tin of paint. She nodded. 'I've never been to Madrid, believe it or not. In Spain I only know Barcelona. Someday I must go to Madrid.' 'Where are you from?'
'Me? From here and there. I've lived in New York, Paris, and now Amsterdam…' 'You speak very good Spanish.'
From her stiff position on the chest of drawers she could see his eyebrow arch modestly. He loves being praised, she thought. Tm very good at everything, darling.' To Clara, it did not sound like a joke. ‘I can see that.'
'Well, the truth of the matter is that my father is Puerto Rican
… this blasted tin won't open. It's shy.'
She smiled. Could there be any tin capable of resisting D'Artagnan? she thought. She watched him frown, flush with effort, grimace. His biceps were inflating like balloons.
'Uf, that's it.' As he was scraping out a sample with his finger (flesh pink like all the others, it was hard to tell the difference) he spoke to her again. 'Have you been to Amsterdam before?'
'Yes.' She recalled a trip she had made years earlier with Gabi Ponce, an adventure with rucksacks and
