The Maestro (8 page)

'I tell you,
Linda, you must try having two men inside you at the same time. The
fire spread and seemed to increase in its intense burning. I tried
to fight my orgasm as long as I could, trying to prolong my
pleasure, but in the end it was impossible. It was too much for the
two men, watching Laura and feeling me coming. They shot their seed
into me, my orgasm extending in the excitement of having two men
discharge into my two holes. I thought it would never end. It was
too brilliant, too sustained.'

Here Maria's
story seemed to trail to an end.

'What happened
afterwards?' Linda asked.

'This is, I
think, why they were so clever.'

'Why?'

'Because the
next day they sent me home, knowing that they had instilled in me
this craving for pleasure, knowing that I would seek to recapture
the intensity of pleasure that I had experienced with them. It was
such a shock to my system, to my whole being to know that so much
was possible.

'The next
morning as I was crying in my room waiting to depart, Hugo came in
to explain why I had to leave. My education was complete.'

'It doesn't
sound to me that their reasons were all altruistic, I mean, about
just giving you an education,' Linda said, trying to bring a little
realism to bear on Maria's rosy account of her seduction.

'Linda,
really, I am not so innocent, nor do I think I was then. They had
taken their pleasure with me. For weeks they had been watching me,
knowing how they were going to take me, how they were going to
seduce me. No doubt, though I have never asked, they had plotted
and planned together what they were going to do. I know that they
were not just being altruistic but I also know that they gave me an
education. They sent me back to the world with more awareness of
the pleasures to be obtained from the body than I would have ever
realised if I had merely stayed fucking eighteen-year-old
boys.'

'Why did you
tell me all this, Maria?' Linda asked. She had been very excited by
the story, but part of her had also been shocked by the way Maria
had described how three adults had despoiled a teenage girl.

'I told you
Linda so that I could explain to you why I seek pleasure in the way
that I do. It's why I call myself an explorer. And there is another
reason...' Maria paused, became hesitant.

'Why's
that?'

'Because I
think that you are the type of woman who wants to experience more
pleasure than you have. Oh yes, I am sure that your Sebastian is
quite delicious in bed. I have heard it said.'

'By who?'

'You must ask
Alfonso about that.'

'But why can't
you tell me.'

'Because I
promised I wouldn't, and I am a loyal person.'

'But...'

'No buts,
Linda. Alfonso will tell you, but my point is Linda that Sebastian
is only one man and maybe there are certainly things you are
curious about that you have never explored with him, or maybe it is
just variety that you want to seek. Something a little more
experimental, perhaps. I watched you last night. I saw something in
you that was unfulfilled. Is that true Linda?'

'Maybe,' Linda
answered noncommittally again.

'I can promise
you that you will enjoy yourself here in Barcelona.'

'I hope so.'
Linda's mind sped back to the thought of meeting Delgado.

'Of course you will,
mi
carina
, of course you will.'

She saw
Alfonso before he saw her. She had decided to take a coffee to calm
her nerves before her meeting with Delgado. Alfonso was bounding
along the road with his usual confident stride, his eyes focused
straight ahead, distracted, so she realised as he came closer, by
an attractive blond who was walking in front of him.

Linda waved
over to Alfonso from the shaded chair where she sat, but he was
completely oblivious to anybody apart from the leggy girl he seemed
to be trying to catch up to. He looked slightly disappointed when
Linda, exasperated that her frantic signalling had not caught his
attention, shouted over to him.

It stopped him
in his track. He gave one more wistful look at the girl in front
before turning his full attention to Linda.

'You look
fantastic this morning, Linda.'

'But not as
fantastic as her,' Linda replied, her eyes motioning to the girl as
she reached the statue to Christopher Columbus.

'Who?'

'That girl
over there, the bottle-blond with the leather mini-skirt.'

'Oh Olga.'

'Do you know
her?'

'Know her, of
course I don't know her, but I somehow imagined that her name would
be Olga.'

'You're
incorrigible, Alfonso.'

'I try to
be.'

After Linda
had paid for her coffee they began walking in the direction of
Barcelonetta, passed the newly developed port.

'Modernism for
modernism sake,' Alfonso had said critically.

'Oh I quite
like it. It certainly brightens the place up.'

'Mmm,' Alfonso
replied. 'I hope your critical faculties are going to be a little
sharper when you meet Delgado.'

'You make him
sound like such a tyrant.'

'You'll
see.'

'That seems to
be your favourite expression at the moment,' Linda said jokingly,
remembering how he had fobbed her off when she had asked him about
El Attico.

'You and Maria
seemed to be getting on very well,' Alfonso said, a slight leer
claiming his face as he asked the question.

'She's a very
interesting woman.'

'And I assume you had a very
interesting
afternoon,' Alfonso
replied, a ridiculously exaggerated emphasis on the word
interesting.

'Alfonso, I
know what you are getting at, but all that happened was that we
went for a swim, she talked a little about her past and then she
drove me back to my hotel.'

'Did you get
the Hugo and Laura stuff?'

'What?'

'Did she tell
you all the stuff about her education and how she was buggered by
this man Hugo and his brother?'

'You mean she
lies?'

'Ah, so she did tell you. No, Maria doesn't lie. I've had that
story confirmed to me by very reliable sources. It's all true, I
know. You're right of course, Maria is a very interesting young
woman.' Alfonso took a dilatory sip of his
cortado
.

'Why did you
ask me if she told that story?'

'Because I
know she only tells that story to people she likes. I didn't hear
anything at all for six months. You should feel honoured.'

'Why is
Delgado called Delgado? Doesn't it mean thin in Spanish?' Linda
asked wanting to divert the conversation from the topic of herself
and Maria.

'Because that
is his name.'

'His second
name?'

'No, his real
name is Marcelo Torres, although I've never heard anybody refer to
him as anything else but Delgado. You know he is the son of the
Torres, the painter.'

'I'm sorry
I've never heard of him.'

'I'm afraid he
doesn't seem to export very well. He was not very well known
outside our native Catalunya. When Delgado started painting he was
very much under his father's influence.'

'I wouldn't
have thought that Delgado would have been under anybody's
influence.' She was thinking of the work that she had seen. What
seemed fabulous about Delgado was that he did not seem to be one
great painter, he seemed to be ten. Each new exhibition he gave
seemed to be so radically different from the last, and even in one
exhibition, Delgado seemed to have the ability to change his style
almost at will.

'I can see how
you would think that. So many of the people who have worked under
him think he is fantastic. I mean that he has really changed their
lives, at least as artists.'

'Has he
changed yours?'

'Not yet. He
hates my work, so he told me.'

'So why do you
put up with him?'

'Because,
Linda, it is very important to learn. Delgado might be a fake as a
person, but as an artist, and more importantly for me, as an art
teacher he is genuine. He's a genius. You'll...'

'I know, I'll
see,' she said, interrupting Alfonso before he could conclude the
conversation with his usual gnomic incantation.

Whatever Delgado was, he was certainly not
delgado
: thin. He was a giant of a
man, well over six foot, with long, wavy hair parted in the middle,
a wiry black beard flecked with silver-grey and a substantial
girth. The white shirt he was wearing creased around each button of
his shirt, creating glimpses of unseemly ovals of tanned
flesh.

And he had
terrible eyes. At least that was how Linda thought of them after
Alfonso had led her up two flights of stairs and into a brightly
lit room where Delgado imposingly stood peering at her as Alfonso
introduced him.

The morning
light streamed into an extremely large but still untidy studio. His
pots and paints and easels and cloths speckled in an array of
colours lay sprawled across a dirty wooden floor. The walls were
painted haphazardly, a once brilliant white paint had patches of a
blue undercoat still showing, and the general atmosphere gave an
appearance of being unkempt that mirrored its owner.

But the eyes,
the eyes seemed the fulcrum of the room. They were dark brown and
magnetic and seemed to hold everything they saw in its gaze,
judging, querying and condemning. Linda wondered whether she was
just imagining all this after everything Alfonso had told her about
him, but she wasn't. They were eyes that Linda thought of as not
just undressing her body but undressing her soul.

She could feel
her hands slicked with sweat, knowing that this had less to do with
the burdensome heat than the presence of the maestro.

'Mrs Powell,
pleased to meet you,' Delgado said solemnly, offering his hand with
a stiff formality. Linda noticed how incongruously soft they
seemed, how slender the fingers were on such a towering and
physically powerful looking man. He spoke English accurately but
with a heavy clipped accent.

'Miss Powell,
encantado
.' 'Powell' seemed to be
pronounced with disdain.

He sat down at
a large table in the centre of the room, and gently, almost
tenderly untied the lace of her portfolio, a quick glance motioning
Linda to sit down opposite him.

'You can go now,
senor
,' Delgado said quite severely to
Alfonso. Alfonso cast an uncharacteristically tentative glance over
to Linda, but Delgado looked at him again, the piercing eyes
demanding his immediate exit.

Linda watched
Delgado as he flicked through her portfolio and then went over it
again, flicking through some, scrutinising the pencil drawings, his
face peering intensely at a sketch before relaxing to flick to
another piece of work.

There was
something else about him, a strange sensation that she occasionally
used to get when meeting friends of Sebastian that she had seen on
the television, an eerie feeling of disjunction, as if she had met
them before when she knew that she hadn't.

After a few
nerve-wracking terrible minutes, he turned to Linda, his face
betraying nothing.

'You are a
critic, yes?'

'Yes, I
am.'

'The
senor
tells me that you are a very good critic.'

'Well, I don't
know, I...'

'I'm pleased
that you are a good critic.'

Linda had no
idea what he was trying to tell her.

'Because Mrs
Powell, I do not feel that you are an artist.'

She should
have seen it coming. She had suspected that his criticism would be
severe. She could not help it. Her head drooped. She felt as if her
heart was sinking in her chest.

'Oh,' was all
she could say.

'Yet, Mrs
Powell, yet.'

'Sorry?'

'I do not feel
that you are an artist yet. There is something here in the
lithographs. You have the technique of course. You paint like a
critic, though. It's very clever. 'Satyriasis'. But it is not great
art. I do not believe in tricks and gimmicks that seem to be so
popular in your own country that you critics seem to like so
much.'

'I don't
understand what my being a critic...' Linda was bewildered. She
waited for him to continue.

'I believe
that sometimes a great artist can be a critic, but a critic, great
or good, cannot normally be an artist, not at least a great one.
You could sell these of course. You might even reach a level of
fame, but if you were successful, you know that it would be a
fraud, a fake as much as if you copied the Mona Lisa. The tragedy
is, Mrs Powell, if you don't realise this then there is little
point for you to come and work here.'

She looked at
him, feeling her will diminish under his glare and the harshness of
his criticism.

'I have only
one question for you.'

'Yes?'

'Do you think
that this work represents the best that you can do, because if it
is then I'm afraid that you are wasting your time? Tell me, Mrs
Powell.'

She knew of
course that Delgado was right. He was right about the technique. He
was right about the conceptual cleverness of some of her work.
There was a difference between creation and criticism and she was
aware of how too much of the latter could kill the former.

'No, it's
not.'

'That is
hopeful. You want to work here for some months?'

'Yes.'

'This is not a
holiday, a way of filling in your free time. If you want to be an
artist you have to forget criticism. You have to learn again. If
you want a holiday go to the coast.'