The Maestro (9 page)

'I want to
develop my art.'

'We will see.
Miercoles
, nine o clock, there is a
place for you in the studio downstairs. It is soon to be vacated.
You will not like me, Mrs Powell. I always tell the truth. This may
be old fashioned but I believe passionately in art. It is not a
game for me. I do not believe in fun or entertainment. I will be
hard, truthful, but hard. Do you understand?'

'Yes.'

'When the time
comes I will tell you, because I am honest and because I cannot
know for sure now, if you have enough talent, if there is anything
more than technique. Do you accept my proposition?'

'Yes.'

'Until
Wednesday then,' Delgado said, bringing their brief interview to a
close.

Having a drink
downstairs with Alfonso, she expressed her fears that he had not
liked her work. She told him almost verbatim what Delgado had
said.

Alfonso
laughed. He is a good art teacher, but he is a terrible drama
queen. Of course he's not going to say that your art is great,
because if your art was great why would you need him to teach you?
With him it's not the money, it's his ego. It is enormous. He must
have thought that your work was very promising, because if he
thought it wasn't he would have told you to go home, unless of
course you gave him as much money as I do. You're a success, my
dear, a great success.'

The stress of
her meeting with Delgado coupled by the brash early summer heat
made Linda decide to take a siesta.

Her work
invaded her consciousness as she considered the merits and the
demerits of each piece that Delgado had seen. She lay down on the
bed and tried to sleep, but it was difficult with the noise that
the air-conditioner made, but also her own restless thoughts
agitating her.

Eventually she
fell into a light doze, dreaming of Delgado, a strange and
perturbing erotic dream, that in her semiconscious state she could
not and did not want to suppress. This was even more alarming, for
when she had been speaking to Delgado she had not found him at all
sexually attractive; but now in her dream, Delgado was staring at
her body as intently as he had stared at her work. She stood before
him in a white sleeveless blouse and a white diaphanous skirt.

Delgado was
kneeling down in front of her. There was nobody else in the
room.

'Lift up your
skirt if you want to be an artist!' he commanded.

Linda lifted
up her skirt quite quickly.

'No, more
slowly than that,' he said archly in his stentorian voice.

She lifted up
the skirt more slowly until Delgado could see the white of her
panties. As she pulled the dress up to her waist Delgado's
implacable face grew into a leer. He grabbed the skirt and lifted
it higher over her panties revealing her flat stomach up to her
navel.

'Pull your
panties aside,' Delgado said, and she pulled aside the gusset.

'Stick your
finger inside!'

In the dream,
Linda hesitated.

'If you want
to be a great artist.'

Linda traced
her finger along the ridge of her labial lips then to the inner
darker pink of her vulva, slipping it in tantalisingly slowly while
Delgado stared at her with those dreadful piercing eyes.

In her
half-sleeping state as she lay naked on the hotel bed she began to
do in reality what Delgado had commanded her to do in her
dream.

She imagined
Delgado's hand grasping hers and shoving it away, and still staring
at the glisten of her love juice, jab in his own finger where hers
had been, ramming it inside her hard and fast. His tongue then
sought her labial lips before he took the soft, moist folds of
flesh between his teeth and began to nibble on her, as his finger
continued sliding inside her vulva frigging her slowly. She
shuddered as he nipped on her engorged flesh with his teeth.

His other
finger slipped past her perineum down to her anus and pressed onto
the taut aperture below until it had gained entrance. Two fingers
now began jerking inside her in the haze of her dream, as she lay
semi-consciously on her hotel bed imitating the actions of the
fantasy Delgado.

As if he had
finished with her, he quickly rose to his feet and pointed to the
table where that morning he had scrutinised her portfolio. She knew
instinctively what he wanted her to do. She lay her upper torso on
the table pulling up her skirt so it bunched around her waist and
her bottom perched over the edge.

Delgado pulled
down her panties until they were at her ankles, lifted up one of
her feet at a time and removed them, and then splayed her legs so
that her exposed bottom perched up a couple of inches higher.

She could
smell the pine of the table and the strong aroma of the chemicals
used for mixing paint. The sunlight streamed into the room as it
had done that morning, the large, oblong window making a rhombus of
bright light on the wooden floor.

Maybe she was
using Maria's story as a source for her fantasy because there had
been no such implement in Delgado's room as far as she was aware,
but she felt the hard electric lash of a whip on her bare
buttocks.

'If you want
to be an artist you have to be spanked on your bottom, Mrs
Powell.'

Lash after
lash followed. Linda imagined the loud crack the noise would make
on her, the excitement of the searing pain that Maria had described
to her, and the lash falling on the taut sensitive surrounding
flesh of her anus.

After the
whipping, Delgado entered her from behind, burying himself deep
inside her, pulling apart the sleeveless blouse and grabbing her
firm, voluptuous breasts in his hands. Each mighty stroke of his
thick hard tool caused an immense stab of pleasure, as she imagined
her cunny muscles contracting against the hot meat of his cock.

His left hand
had slipped down between her legs and as he thrust into her he
manipulated her clitoris, pinching it between his finger and thumb,
then sliding two fingers hard over the moist little hill, roughly,
as roughly as he was fucking her.

In her sexual
reverie she was coming as she was coming in Delgado's studio as
Delgado exploded inside her, shooting his jism into the depth of
her sex. Her skin tingled, prickled; the prickling sensation seemed
tied somehow to the satiation of her gnawing need. She had
masturbated herself to climax, but as soon as her climax came it
jolted her back into consciousness.

My god, she
thought to herself, what had she done? Maybe it was the summer
heat. It was very rare for her to masturbate over anybody apart
from Sebastian, and if she ever did, she did not normally pick a
man she knew, but imagined somebody that she had seen in the
gallery where she had worked, or a waiter perhaps where she had
dined. She felt it faintly obscene to think that she had
masturbated over Delgado, her prospective teacher, and a man, that
now she was fully conscious, she still found rather repulsive.

She showered
and ordered a light snack, which she ate on the balcony of her
room, watching the throng below. The telephone rang while she was
eating. It was Alfonso. Sebastian had rang and told him that she
wouldn't be able to contact him for a couple of weeks as he was
going into the Peruvian jungle to do some research and the director
had forbid them to have any contact at all with the outside
world.

What a load of
nonsense, she thought after she replaced the dial. If the director
had insisted on that he must be incredibly pretentious, but she
suspected that Sebastian was lying and that he did not want to
interrupt his illicit sexual pleasure with Simone Jaeger, his
delectable co-star, by engaging in uxorial calls with her. And
anyway he could have got the number of her hotel from Alfonso so he
could have told her all this himself. He was lying; he was cheating
on her again, and as per usual he expected her just to lie down and
take it.

What was
strange, however, was the realisation that flashed into her mind.
Of course she had seen Delgado before. Why hadn't she realised? The
curious face that night in El Attico, towering above the other
spectators as Jorge fucked her, the face, it must have been, it
must have been him.

There were
only five other people in the studio. There was Anita, a lively
Basque girl in her early twenties with long copper-coloured hair
and pert breasts enclosed in a Che Guevara tee-shirt. She wore long
stripy pants and bounced around the room with a natural vivacity.
There was Damian, a sombre looking boy with a dark complexion and
fine black, shoulder length hair parted in the middle of his high
forehead. There was another English girl, Rebecca, a student from
London who said 'gosh' and 'beastly' and 'my dear' a lot. She wore
expensive designer clothes, and on the first day that Linda
nervously attended the studio, Rebecca was wearing a lilac chiffon
blouse and a white, pleated skirt. And there was Alfonso and
her.

'We work in
quite a structured way, Linda.' Rebecca told her as they gathered
around a couple of chairs at the far end of the room. 'Every week
Delgado gives us a theme and we have to develop this in the
morning.' Rebecca talked in a rapid flourish, almost as if she was
frightened of being interrupted before she had finished
speaking.

'Isn't that a
little unorthodox?'

'It's
Delgado's way, his method.' Rebecca looked a little suspiciously at
Linda for doubting Delgado's approach.

'What type of
themes? I mean what does he want you to do?'

'Oh it could
be anything, anything at all. Last week it was 'summer', the week
before it was 'justice', and the week that I came it was 'death' of
all things.

'Isn't that a
little authoritarian? Why can't we choose ourselves what to
paint?'

'Oh no, he's
our teacher. We are here to learn. We must do what he says,'
Rebecca continued with an acolyte's fervour.

Linda looked
quizzically at the younger girl. She found her exuberance a little
off-putting.

'Don't have
the doubts, Linda. You will see what an extraordinary man Senor
Delgado is,' Anita added.

Damian looked
nervous, agitated.

'How long have
you been here, Damian?'

'A month, but
I do not think that I stay much longer.'

'Why not?'

Damian flicked
his head upwards: 'Because of him, Delgado. If I not improve in a
week I must to leave, like Jose.'

'Whose
Jose?'

'He is the man
that you are replacing. Delgado killed him.'

'Sorry?'

'Well,'
Rebecca interrupted, 'he wasn't good enough. Delgado was right. He
was wasting his time.'

'Is only the opinion. Is possible to give him one chance more.
You didn't see what he was like later. I saw him. He was
destruido
, how do you say,
destroyed. Jose had his own ideas but he not listen to him. He not
give him a chance...'

Damian was
interrupted as Delgado walked into the room. He looked stern and
imposing. He wore a navy blue smock that hung down past his baggy
cream trousers covered in various shades and combinations of
paint.

'Good, you
have met, Mrs Powell,' Delgado said in his stentorian voice looking
directly at the newcomer. 'She is to take the place of Jose. Jose
is not coming back. Senor,' Delgado reverted to Spanish but Linda
could understand. 'Please note, Damian,' Delgado continued.

Damian turned
his gaze to the blinding light splaying into the room.

'Okay, this
week's theme,' Delgado spoke in Spanish. 'You all know my theory
about sex and art. You all know that at the core of all great art
is sex, and not like Mr Freud would have us believe, that we
utilise only our repression. No, in all art we must utilise our
passion consciously and willing. The theme is simply sex. I want
you to draw for me the thing that, how do you say in English? Turns
you on? I want you to draw a sketch of anything that you find
sexually exciting. Oh yes, and for the English women present here.
No timidity please. I do not like sexual hypocrisy. You must paint
your lust, and Mrs Powell, like an artist, not a critic. Okay, one
hour, meditate.'

They were all
expected to find a place alone in the room and sit there for an
hour in silence contemplating what they might draw.

At first she
found it difficult to begin, but eventually her mind reverted to
the series of lithographs she had done of the priapic figures from
the museum in Heraklion. She could do a variation on that. She drew
a huge powerful man with an enormous cock. That certainly made her
feel sexy.

She glanced at
Delgado, wondering if he too had an enormous tool, or whether all
this forceful presence, this despotic pose covered up some sexual
inadequacy in him. She thought about Damian's skinny young body.
She imagined his lean cock, surprising him by taking it in her
mouth, placing her hand under his balls and scratching the rough
skin of his scrotum while she bobbed up and down on him, until he
jismed inside her mouth. She thought of liberating Anita from the
Che Guevara tee-shirt and suckling on her breasts, then sneaking
her hand under the waistband of her stripy trousers, tugging them
down, splaying her legs and burying her mouth in her juices. It was
exciting to think about watching the girl squirm as she slid her
fingers into her anus as had been done to her in El Attico. She
thought of Alfonso taking her roughly from behind, pumping his
sturdy cock deep inside her, his hand pressing down onto her pubic
bone to increase the pressure; she thought of him crouching down
over her, masturbating himself until he ejaculated a hot gush of
jism into her quim. She thought of Rebecca and that false refined
English voice, tethered to a bed, her creamy buttocks angled up
before her and Linda inserting one of those pearl white dildoes
deep inside. And last, she thought of Delgado and sitting on him
where he sat in his chair, Delgado's hands pushing her down hard
and deep onto his thick, long prick, squeezing her thighs and
gobbling on her breasts, refusing to stop fucking her even after
she came.