That night of the first day, in Mexico City, he, too, succumbed to her charm. Despite his own reservations, his biography, his ideas about the world, he found himself with his wrists resting on the edge of a well-located table in a restaurant in San Ángel Inn—he in a dark blue blazer and jeans, she in a mauve dress so plain it might have been painted onto her hips and long legs; the maître d’ had said, Good evening, What a long time, How is your father, señorita Ferrara?—gazing into the grape-green eyes identical to those of that Nahui Ollin she had told him about that afternoon. He stared, unconsciously, for such a long time that Olvido had lowered her head slightly and, looking at him through the wheat-colored hair falling over her face, had become serious for an instant, just long enough to say, We don't have much time, Faulques, not specifying whether she meant that night or the rest of their lives. She had called him that, Faulques, for the first time using his family, not his given, name. And she would always call him that, up to the end. Three years. Or nearly three. One thousand and fifty days confirming how directly proportional it all was to the product of two bodies' desire—it was she who had paraphrased Newton on a certain occasion when Faulques had his arms around her in the shower of an Athens hotel—and inversely proportional to the square of the distance that separated them. Three intense and peripatetic years begun that night that ended very late, alone in a cantina on the Plaza Garibaldi after closing hours, talking about painting and photography while the waiters turned chairs up on the tables and began to sweep the floor. And when Faulques looked at the clock, she had said she found it surprising that a war photographer could not sit and drink without being affected by the fire in the glances of the impatient waiters. She was unique in injecting non sequiturs here and there in the form of her own maxims, or of spontaneous reflections, ingenious in getting around obstacles by incorporating them into the original plan, skillful in lying, making you believe that she was lying openly and deliberately. Everything faux enchanted her; she collected little trinkets everywhere only to abandon them later in hotel wastebaskets and airports, or give them to maids, telephone operators, and airline stew-ardesses: faux Murano glass, faux Brussels lace, faux antique bronzes, faux eighteenth-century miniatures she bought in flea markets. She moved with complete ease among all that kitsch, with a word or a gesture making it something to be cherished. It was Olvido who conferred importance on things and people she had contact with, maybe because she had the unassailable self-confidence some few women have when the world is their exciting field of battle, and men a useful but disposable complement.
At any rate she had been right. Three years was not very long, although neither of them could have calculated how long. That first night in Mexico City, Faulques, who by then already considered the world in the light of its paradoxes and convergences, thought about the meaning of her name. Olvido. Forgetfulness. And suddenly he knew, with the fleeting precision of a photograph perceived in an instant, that she was the only thing he would never forget.
Now, through the open windows of the tower, the painter of battles heard the sound of the rising tide at the foot of the cliff accompanying his inspection of the volcano he'd painted. At that moment, the cognac he'd drunk, shadows, or some effect of the gas lamp caused a shadow to cross before his eyes. Shaken, he looked at the part of the vast mural where that shadow had gone to hide. After an instant, he shook his head. The house where you are living, he murmured, remembering, is dark.
6.
THE NEXT MORNING THE COLD WATER of the cove cleared his head. After swimming the usual one hundred and fifty strokes out to sea, and the same number back, he worked with only a quarter of an hour break to make coffee and drain a cup as he appraised the painting before going back to work on the caballeros who, located in a group on the near left of the tower door, were awaiting the moment to join in the battle taking place on the slopes of the volcano. Although the horses had not been dealt with—Faulques had technical problems to resolve—of the three horsemen, one in the foreground and the other two farther back, two were nearly finished: armor in cold colors, blue-gray and a violet blue, the angles and edges of their weapons gleaming with fine strokes of a white base, then Prussian blue, and a little red and yellow. The painter of battles had devoted special attention to the eyes of the horseman in the foreground, who because the visor of his helmet was raised was the only one of the three whose face—or part of it—could be seen; those of the other two were hidden behind sallet and bevor. Absorbed eyes, empty, fixed on some indeterminate spot, contemplating something the viewer couldn't see but could intuit. Eyes that looked without seeing, familiar in a man about to enter combat, stirred several of Faulques' professional memories; their pictorial execution, however, owed a great deal to the master hand of the classic painter who—among many others but above them all—from the fifteenth century guided the man working in the tower: the Paolo Uccello of the three paintings of The Battle of San Romano exhibited in the Uffizi, the National Gallery, and the Louvre. The choice was not fortuitous. Along with Piero della Francesca, Uccello had been the best artist/geometer of his time, with an engineer's intellect for resolving problems that still today impress specialists. The shadow of the Florentine fell across the entire circular fresco in the tower, among other reasons because the first thought of leaving cameras behind to paint the battle of battles had occurred to Faulques there in the Uffizi before Uccello's painting, the day that Olvido Ferrara and he had stood in the gallery, by good fortune empty for five minutes, admiring the extraordinary composition, the perspective, the magnificent foreshortening in that painting on wood, one of three representing the encounter between the armies of Florence and Sienna on July 1, 1432, in San Romano, a valley near the course of the Arno. It had been Olvido who called Faulques' attention to the horizontal line that ended on the horseman unseated by a lance, and who pointed out the broken lances on the ground beside the bodies of the fallen horses, crisscrossing in the simulation of a net, a pictorial underpinning—the perspective stretching back toward the background and the trees on the horizon—on which was arranged the mass of men fighting in the principal scene. Olvido had had a good eye from the time she was a little girl: the instinct to read a painting the way someone reads a map, a book, or a man's thoughts. It reminds me of one of your photos, she said suddenly. A tragedy resolved with almost abstract geometry. Look at the arches of the crossbows, Faulques. Look at the lances that seem to continue beyond the painting, the curved lines of armor that disrupt the planes, the volumes interrupted by helmets and breastplates. It wasn't by chance, was it, that the most revolutionary artists of the twentieth century had reclaimed this painter as a master? Not even he could have imagined how modern he was, or was going to be. Or you either, with your photographs. The problem is that Paolo Uccello had brushes and perspective, and all you have is a camera. That imposes limits, of course. From so much abuse, so much manipulation, it's been a long time since a picture was worth a thousand words. But that isn't your fault. It isn't the way that you see things that's been devalued, it's the tools you use. There are just too many photos, don't you agree? The world is saturated with photographs. When he heard that, Faulques had turned to look at her; she was profiled against the light beaming through the window on the right side of the gallery. Maybe one day I will compose a painting based on that idea, he thought of saying, but didn't. And Olvido died a little later, never knowing that he was going to do it; that, among other things, for her. At that moment she was studying the Uccello, fascinated: long neck, hair caught back at the nape, a statue sculpted with exquisite delicacy absorbed in the men killing and dying, in the dog by the head of the central horse, poised to give chase to some hares. And you? he had asked. Tell me how you resolve the problem. Olvido was slow to answer, but finally she tore her eyes from the painting and looked toward him out of the corner of her eye. I don't have a problem, she said finally. I'm a comfortable girl with no responsibilities and no complexes. I don't pose for couturiers or magazine covers anymore, or photogr
aph luxurious interiors for magazines intended for society ladies married to millionaires. I am a simple tourist of disaster, happy to be that, with a camera that serves as a pretext for feeling I'm alive, as it was in those long-ago days when every human had a shadow glued to his heels. I would have liked to write a novel, or make a movie about the dead friends of a Knight Templar, about a love-sick samurai, about a Russian count who drank like a Cossack and gambled like a criminal in Monte Carlo before he became the doorman at Le Gran Véfour in Paris, but I don't have the talent to do that. So I look. I take pictures. And you are my passport, for the moment. The hand that leads me across landscapes like the one in that painting. As for the definitive image, the one that everyone is looking for in our profession—including you, though you never say it—that isn't important, I don't care whether I find it or not. You know that I would shoot—clic, clic, clic—with or without film in the camera. You know damn well I would. But it's different with you, Faulques. Your eyes, so charged with defensiveness, want to ask an accounting of God using their own rules. Or weapons. They want to peer into Paradise, not at the beginning of Creation but at the end, just at the brink of the abyss. Although you will never capture that with one miserable photo.
This place is known as Cala del Arráez. It was once the refuge of Berber pirates . . . The woman's voice, the sound of the tourist boat's motors, and music rose from the sea at the exact hour. Faulques stopped working. It was one o'clock. And Ivo Markovic still wasn't there. Faulques reflected on that, then went outside and took a cautious look around. He went to the shed and washed his arms, torso, and face. Back in the tower, he thought about fixing something to eat, but he couldn't make up his mind and he couldn't get the strange visitor out of his head. He had thought about him all night, and through the morning while he was working he couldn't help seeing places where the Croatian could be included in the mural. Markovic, independent of his intentions, was by rights part of it. But the painter of battles didn't have enough information. I want you to understand, the Croatian had said. There are answers you need as much as I do.
After wandering around for a while, Faulques went to the upper floor of the tower, where he pulled the Remington 870, wrapped in oily rags, from the bottom of the trunk, along with two boxes of shells. It was a weapon he had never fired, a shotgun that reloaded by means of a sliding mechanism parallel to the barrel. After testing that it worked, he put in five shells and injected one into the chamber with a quick movement that produced a metallic crack! accompanied by a flood of memories: Olvido, blindfolded with a handkerchief, blindly assembling and disassembling an AK-47 amid a group of militiamen in Bulo Burti, Somalia. Like the soldier's war, the photographer's war was always one part action and the rest boredom and waiting. That was the case. They were waiting for the right time to attack a rival militia's position, when a training session for some young recruits caught Olvido's eye. They blindfold them, Faulques explained, in case their weapons jam during night combat and they have to put them right in the dark. Olvido had gone over to the recruits and their instructors, and asked to learn how to do it herself. Fifteen minutes later, she was sitting on the ground, legs crossed, in the center of a circle of armed to the teeth men smoking and watching. A skinny and very black militiaman was keeping time, Faulques' watch in hand, as Olvido, eyes covered, with precise movements, without error or hesitation, took apart and put back together an assault rifle several times, then lined up the pieces on a poncho before putting them back, one by one, by touch and pumped the bolt, clac, clac, with a triumphant, happy smile. She kept practicing the rest of the afternoon, while Faulques watched in silence close by, engraving in his memory the handkerchief around her head, the hair combed into two braids, the shirt wet with sweat, and the drops on her forehead furrowed with concentration. After a while, with the weapon again disassembled and as she was feeling the contours of each piece, Olvido divined his presence, and without slipping off the handkerchief offered an observation. Until today, she said, I never imagined that these things could be beautiful. So polished. So metallic and so perfect. Touching them reveals virtues that can't be seen. Listen. They fit together with such wonderful clicks. They're beautiful and sinister at the same time, aren't they? Through the last thirty or forty years, these strangely shaped pieces have tried to change the world, without success. A cheap weapon of the pariahs of the earth, millions of manufactured units, and here they are, innards exposed, on the knees of my very expensive jeans. The Surrealists would have been mad about this readymade. Don't you agree, Faulques? I wonder what they would have called it. Opportunity Lost? Marx's Funeral? This Weapon Is Not a Weapon? When War Goes, Poetry Returns? It just occurred to me that Kalashnikov's signature must be worth as much as R. Mutt's. Or much more. Maybe the representative work of art of the twentieth century isn't Duchamp's urinal after all but this collection of disassembled pieces. Broken Dream of Blued Metal. I think that's the name I like best. I don't know if the AK-47 is exhibited in any museum of contemporary art, but it should be, like this, in pieces. Like this one. So uselessly beautiful once it is taken apart and exposed, mechanism by mechanism, on an oil-stained military poncho. Yes. Please tie my blindfold again. It's coming loose, and I don't want to cheat. I do that often enough with a camera around my neck and a civilized passport and return ticket in my pocket. I am an indulgent technician; you know that, don't you? Woman Who Assembles and Disassembles a Useless Rifle Over and Over. Yes. Now I've got it. That, it seems to me, is the right title. And don't you even think of taking my picture, Faulques. I hear you digging into your camera bag. The true modern work of art is ephemeral, or it isn't art.
The painter of battles set the safety on the shotgun and put it back in the trunk. Then he looked for a clean shirt—wrinkled and stiff since it had hung in the sun to dry and he had no iron—rolled his motorcycle from the shed, put on dark glasses, and drove down to the town backfiring along the dirt road that snaked among the pines. The day was luminous and warm. The soft breeze from the south was not enough to relieve the temperature on the dock when he stopped, kicked down the stand, and parked the bike. He stood for a moment admiring the cobalt blue of the sea on the other side of the breakwater where the port beacon was located, the brown and green nets piled beside the bollards for the fishing boats that at this hour were out at sea, the clinking of the halyards on the masts of a dozen boats moored at the dock below the sixteenth-century wall and the small fort that in another time had protected the cove and the original town of Puerto Umbría: some twenty whitewashed houses perched along a hill on either side of the ochre bell tower of a dark, narrow church—a Gothic fortress, with windows like embrasures—that had served as a refuge for the townspeople when renegades and pirates came ashore. The abrupt orography of the place had saved it from the surrounding urban development: boxed in among the mountains, the town stayed within reasonable boundaries. The zone of the tourist expansion began a couple of kilometers to the southeast, toward Cabo Malo, where hotels lined the beaches and where the mountains, spattered with little houses, glowed at night with the lights of the housing developments gnawing into their slopes.
The tourist tender was docked at the pier, with no one aboard. Faulques took a look around, trying to pick out the guide from among the few people strolling back from the beach that stretched beyond the port, or eating beneath the awning of one of the bars on the fishing dock, but none of the women he saw resembled the one he imagined, and the office where tickets for the boat tour and sales of summer homes and rental cars were posted was closed. He devoted only a moment to that. There was another person he was interested in, although there was no trace of him, either. Ivo Markovic was not on the terraces, not in the narrow white streets behind them—a hardware shop where Faulques bought brushes and paints, a grocery and souvenir shops—where he walked for a while, looking relaxed and casual but keeping a sharp eye out. One of the pensioners who planted themselves in front of the local men's club greeted him as he passed, and he responded without stopping
. Although he had no more to do with people than was necessary, or inevitable, he was known in Puerto Umbría and awarded a certain courteous status. He had the reputation of being an unsociable and somewhat eccentric artist, but one who paid punctually for what he bought, respected local customs, would buy you a beer or a cup of coffee, and left the women of the town alone.
Faulques went into the hardware shop and asked for four tins of green chromium oxide and several of natural sienna; he was getting low on those and needed them to finish the ground painted on the mural with superimposed layers: a heavy brush, wet over wet, taking advantage of the irregularities of the sand and cement layer on the wall around a scene of two men, arms locked around each other, one fallen on the other as he stabbed at him with rage, cooling the vivid colors of the violent foreshadowing with layers of ultramarine blue with a little carmine in the shadows, an effect owed to the intermingling splendors from the city in flames and the distant volcano. The painter of battles had worked for a long time on that detail, devoting special attention to it. He had vague recollections of Goya's Duel with Cudgels: two men struggling in water up to their calves, in the most brutal symbol of civil war ever painted. Compared to it, Picasso's Guernica was an exercise in style—although in truth the figures weren't that great, Olvido had said, the real painting is on the right of the canvas, don't you think? Our don Francisco was so modern that it hurts. At any rate, as Faulques himself knew all too well, the most direct antecedents of the scene he had painted in that part of the mural, Goya aside, could be found in Vicente Carducho's Victory at Fleurus; it too was exhibited in the Prado museum—the Spanish soldier run through by the sword of the Frenchman he was stabbing—and especially in an Orozco fresco painted on the ceiling of the Hospicio Cabañas in Guadalajara, Mexico: the conquistador sheathed in steel—those futuristic, angular planes of armor—crushing the slashed Aztec warrior, a bloody fusion of iron and flesh as a prelude to a new race. Years before, when he had not even thought about painting, or believed that he had given up attempting it forever, Faulques, lying on his back on one of the benches beside Olvido, admired that enormous fresco for almost half an hour, until he had imprinted all the details in his memory. I've seen this before, he said suddenly, and his voice echoed in the painted dome. I've photographed it many times but never been able to capture an image that expresses it with such precision. Look at those faces. The man who kills and dies, confused, blind, locked together with his enemy. The history of the labyrinth, or the world. Our history. Olvido looked at him and put her hand on his but didn't speak for a while, until finally she said: When I stab you, Faulques, I want to have my arms around you like that, looking for the chink in the steel as you bury yourself in me, or rape me, scarcely adjusting your armor. And now, reserving a space on the interior wall of the watchtower for all that, mixing it on his own palette of memories and images, the painter of battles was trying to reproduce not Orozco's terrifying fresco but the sensation of viewing it at Olvido's side, her words, and the touch of that hand, recorded so long ago in his heart and his memory. How subtle and how strange, he thought, the ties that can be established among things that appear not to be connected: paintings, words, memories, horror. It seemed that all the chaos of the world, scattered across the earth by the caprice of drunken or imbecilic gods—an explanation as good as any other—or by coincidences devoid of mercy, could find itself quickly rearranged, converted into a whole of precise proportions by the key to an unsuspected image, a word spoken by chance, an emotion, a painting contemplated with a woman who had been dead for ten years, remembered now and painted again in the light of a biography different from that of the one who conceived it. Of a gaze that perhaps enriched and explained it.
The Painter of Battles Page 7
