The Painter of Battles

by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

  When Faulques walked past the hotel in Puerto Umbría—there was also a hostel a little farther away, on the same street—he stopped for a moment, quiet, reflecting, hands in his pockets and head to one side. Turning over in his mind a more immediate and urgent recollection: Ivo Markovic. Finally he decided to go in. The concierge greeted him amiably. And he was very sorry, but no. That gentleman was not registered in his establishment. At least not with that name, nor did he have anyone fitting the description. The same response ten minutes later from the clerk at the hostel. Faulques went outside, squinting from the reverberating glare off the white walls. He put on his dark glasses and went back to the port. He discarded the idea of going to the police. The local station was staffed with five officers and a chief: sometimes, as they made their rounds, they would drive in a black-and-white ATV almost up to the tower, and the painter of battles would invite them to have a beer. In addition, the wife of the police chief painted in her free time; Faulques had seen one of her oils in her husband's office—an atrocious sunset with stags and a vermilion sky—the day he went in to fill out some forms and the chief had showed it to him with pride. That put him in line for a certain warmth, and it would have been easy to have them look into Markovic. But maybe that was going too far. Aside from the strange declaration of what he intended to do, the Croatian had done nothing to justify strong measures.

  The walk under the hot sun had made Faulques sweat, and his shirt was wet. He went and sat under the awning of one of the restaurant bars on the fishing dock. He stretched his legs beneath the table, leaned back in the chair, and ordered a beer. He liked this terrace because it offered the best view: the sea beyond the inlet, between the beacon on the breakwater and the rocks. When he came down to the town to buy painting supplies or provisions, he liked to sit there at dusk, as the water became tinged with red along the coast and silhouetted the fishing boats coming back one after the other to unload boxes for the market, followed by bands of noisy seagulls. Some evenings Faulques ordered a pot of rice soup and with a bottle of wine stayed to eat, watching the sea grow dark as the green beacon on the breakwater was turned on and he could see the intermittent flashes from the Cabo Malo lighthouse.

  A waiter brought the beer and Faulques lifted it to his lips and quaffed half in one breath. When he put the glass down he noticed that he had paint, cadmium red, under the fingernails of his right hand. So like blood. And the mural, the circular wall of the tower, was again in his thoughts. A long time back, in a bombarded city—it was Sarajevo, although it could have been Beirut, Phnom Penh, Saigon, anywhere—Faulques had had blood under his nails and on his shirt for three days. The blood was that of a child blown up by a mortar grenade; he had died in his arms, bleeding to death as Faulques carried him to the hospital. There was no water to wash in, no clean clothes, so for three days Faulques had the child's blood on his shirt, on his cameras, and under his fingernails. The boy, or what was left of him in the memory of the painter of battles—often the image blended into other places, other children—was now represented with cold strokes, a leaden chiaroscuro in the tower fresco: a small silhouette lying faceup, his head resting on a stone, which also owed a great deal in its technical inspiration to Paolo Uccello. This time not his battle paintings, but a fresco recently discovered in San Martino Maggiore in Bologna: The Adoration of the Child. In the lower fragment, among a mule, an ox, and several figures decapitated by the assaults of time, a child Jesus lay with his eyes closed, in an almost cadaver-like stillness that announced, to the shudder of the attentive spectator, the tortured and dead Christ of any pietà.

  Faulques was cleaning his fingernails when a shadow fell across the table. He looked up and saw Ivo Markovic.

  7.

  WHEN THE WAITER BROUGHT HIS BEER, Markovic stared at his glass without touching it. After a while he drew a line down the sweating glass and watched drops trickle down, leaving a wet circle on the table. Finally, still without taking a sip, he took a pack of cigarettes from the knapsack he'd set on the ground beside his chair, and lit one. The breeze off the sea sent smoke through his fingers, and he was still bent over the flame he was protecting in the hollow of his hands when he looked up and saw Faulques.

  “I thought you'd be thirsty,” Faulques said.

  “And I am.”

  Markovic tossed the burnt match aside, again examined the glass of beer, and then moving as if the world had slowed, picked it up to drink. Halfway to his lips, he paused as if to say something, but seemed to change his mind. Only after he'd taken a sip and set the glass back on the table did he suck twice on his cigarette and smile at Faulques. Or maybe it was his lips that smiled, while his gray eyes, fixed on the painter of battles, remained uninvolved.

  “There's something,” the Croatian began impassively, “you learn in a prison camp, and that's to wait. At first you get impatient, of course. Fear, uncertainty, well, you can imagine . . . Yes. The first weeks are bad. And that's also the time the weakest disappear. They can't take it, they die. Some take their own lives. I always thought it was a bad idea to commit suicide out of desperation, and even more when there's a possibility of getting back at your tormentors someday. It's a different matter, I suppose, to end everything with serenity when you know you have no further to go. Wouldn't you agree?”

  Faulques looked at him but said nothing. Markovic adjusted his glasses with a finger and shook his head. What's bad, he continued, is that the desire for revenge, or the mere hope of surviving, can become a trap.

  “Yes,” he added after reflecting a minute. “I think the worst is hope. You hinted at that yesterday, although you may not have been speaking of the same thing . . . You have faith that there's been some kind of mistake, that it will soon be over. You tell yourself it can't last. But time goes by, and it does last. And there's a moment when everything comes to a stop. You don't count the days anymore, your hope evaporates. That's when you become a true prisoner. A professional, to be more precise. A patient prisoner.”

  The painter of battles was contemplating the blue line of the sea in the inlet. He shrugged his shoulders.

  “You're no longer a prisoner,” he said. “And your beer's going to get warm.”

  Silence. When he looked toward Markovic again he saw that the Croatian was observing him, almost with caution, from behind the dirty lenses of his glasses.

  “You seem like a patient man to me, señor Faulques.”

  The painter of battles didn't answer. Markovic once again pulled on his cigarette and let the breeze blow the smoke from his open mouth. He tilted his head.

  “It's strange, that painting of yours. I assure you that it was a surprise to me . . . I'd like to ask you something, if you don't mind. You've photographed wars, revolutions . . . Is what you're working on now a summary or a conclusion? I mean by that, are you limiting yourself to reproducing what you saw or are you trying to explain it? Explain it to yourself?”

  Faulques grimaced, consciously. A disagreeable expression.

  “Come back to the tower anytime you want, and take a better look. You decide.”

  As if he were considering the pros and cons of that proposition, Markovic stroked his unshaven chin. The stubble and dirty glasses were not the only things that were slovenly about him: his skin was oily and he was wearing the same clothes he'd had on the day before. The shirt was wrinkled, and frayed around the neck. The painter of battles wondered where he might have spent the night.

  “I will come, thank you very much. Tomorrow morning, if that's not inconvenient for you.”

  He tossed away the nearly consumed cigarette, index finger flicking it off his thumb, and sat watching the smoke rise from where it lay on the ground. Then he drank a little beer and wiped his lips with his fist. I'd like to ask another question if I may, he said.

  “Do you have any idea by now why humans torture and kill others of their species? In those thirty years of photographs, did you find an answer to that?”

  Faulques laughed at that. A brief, in
voluntary snort.

  “It doesn't take thirty years. Anyone can find that out, as soon as he pays attention. Man tortures and kills because it's his thing. He likes it.”

  “To his fellow, man is a wolf, as the philosophers say?”

  “Don't insult wolves. They're honorable killers: they kill in order to live.”

  Markovic bowed his head, as if he were carefully considering what Faulques had said. Then he looked up at the painter of battles.

  “And what, in your judgment, is the reason that man tortures and kills for pleasure?”

  “His intelligence, I suppose.”

  “That's interesting.”

  “Objective, elemental cruelty isn't cruelty. To be truly cruel, there must be conscious calculation. Intelligence, as I just said. Think of whales.”

  “What about the whales?’

  So Faulques explained what whales do. How those marine predators with evolved brains, who operate within a complex social group, communicating with refined sounds, swim near the beaches and catch young seals; they toss them back and forth, playing with them as if they were balls, then let them escape almost to the shore before they catch them again and continue the game until, weary of the sport, they abandon their battered, broken prey or, should they be hungry, devour it. That, Faulques concluded, was not something he'd seen on television or heard somewhere. He had photographed it on a beach in the southern hemisphere during the war in the Falkland Islands. Those whales had seemed nearly human.

  “I'm not sure I really understand. Do you mean that the more intelligent the animal is, the crueler it may be? That a chimpanzee is crueler than a snake?”

  “I don't know anything about chimpanzees or snakes. Not even about whales, when it comes down to it. Seeing them made me think, that's all. They must have their reasons, I suppose. Play? Training? But their exquisite cruelty reminded me of man. Maybe they don't have any awareness that they're being cruel and are simply obeying the codes of their kind. And maybe man does the same: be faithful to the fearsome symmetry of his intelligent nature.”

  Markovic blinked, taken aback.

  “Symmetry?”

  “Yes. A scientist would define it as the stable properties of the whole, despite their transformations . . .” When Faulques saw Markovic's expression, he held out his hands, palms up. “Put a different way, appearances are deceptive. There is a hidden order in disorder, I would say. An order that includes disorder. Symmetries and answers to symmetries.”

  Markovic scratched his chin with a slight, negative shake of his head.

  “I don't think I understand.”

  “Well, yesterday you said that you'd come to know me. My photographs and all that.”

  Markovic squeezed his eyes, trying to think. He removed his glasses and checked the lenses, as if he had just discovered that they weren't really transparent. He took a tissue from his pocket and carefully began cleaning them.

  “I see now,” he concluded after a few moments. “You mean that an evil person can't help being evil.”

  “I mean that we are all evil, and we can't help it. That those are the rules of this game. That our superior intelligence refines our evil and makes it more tempting. Man was born a predator, like most animals. It is his irresistible impulse. Going back to science, his stable property. But unlike other animals, our complex intelligence incites us to claw our way to wealth, luxuries, women, men, pleasures, honors . . . That impulse leads to envy, to frustration and anger. It makes us even more what we are.”

  Faulques fell silent and the Croatian had nothing to say. He had put his glasses back on. He looked at Faulques before turning in the direction of the breakwater, and sat that way, contemplating the scene.

  “I used to hunt before the war,” he said suddenly. “I liked to go out in the country in the early morning, with a neighbor. Walk toward the dawn, you know, with a shotgun. Pum! Pum!”

  He was still looking at the sea, squinting against the sunlight glinting off the water by the fishing dock.

  “Who was there to tell me?” he added, his face suddenly contorted.

  Again he lowered his head to light a cigarette. Faulques studied the scar on Markovic's right hand and then the one on his forehead, vertical and deeper. An eyebrow had been split open, no doubt. By some very authoritative object. That scar wasn't in the photograph, and Markovic hadn't mentioned it when he told about being wounded in Vukovar. Maybe it was a souvenir of the prison camp. He had talked about being tortured. Like an animal, were his words. They tortured me—“he was tortured,” he'd said, in the third person—like an animal.

  “I don't know what people find beautiful about the dawn,” Markovic said suddenly. “Or a sunset. For someone who's lived a war, the dawn is a sign of possible clouds, of indecision, of fear of what's going to happen. And dusk is a threat of the coming shadows; darkness, a terrorized heart. The interminable wait, freezing to death in some hole, with the rifle stock pressed against your face . . .”

  He was nodding. His memories seemed to back up his arguments. His cigarette was in his mouth and it bobbed with his movements.

  “Have you been afraid countless times, señor Faulques?”

  “Yes. As you say, countless times. Yes.”

  The painter's half smile seemed to make Markovic uncomfortable.

  “Is there something wrong about the word ‘countless’?”

  “No, nothing. It's correct, don't worry. Countless: impossible to count.”

  The Croatian studied him intently, looking for a trace of irony. Finally, he relaxed a little. He smoked his cigarette.

  “I was going to tell you,” he said through a mouthful of smoke, “that once I vomited, toward dawn, before an attack. Pure fear. I wiped my mouth with a tissue, threw it away, and it blew into some brush, a sort of blot of light. I sat staring at that tissue as the dawn came. Now every time I think about being afraid, I remember that tissue caught in a shrub.”

  Again he pushed up his glasses with an index finger. He shifted to a more comfortable position in his chair and turned his head from side to side with a distracted air, as if looking for something interesting in the scene.

  “Symmetry, you say,” he commented finally. “Maybe. And that painting in the tower . . . That really surprised me. I think. Though maybe I wasn't as surprised as I say I think I was.”

  Now he was focused on the painter again, his face showing misgivings.

  “Do you know what I do think? That every hunter is marked by the kind of hunting he does. And I've spent ten years following your tracks. Hunting you.”

  Faulques held his eyes but said nothing. He was fascinated by the accuracy of Markovic's comment. Hunters, kinds of hunting, being marked. Olvido had said it in almost the same words. One spring day after the first Gulf War, they had seen a group of children waiting outside the Louvre museum, lined up and sitting on the ground beneath a dark, rainy sky under the eyes of the teachers walking among them. They remind me, Faulques had said, of prisoners in the Iraqi war. And Olvido had looked at him with amusement, before she walked over to him and kissed him, a loud smack, and said that there are hunts that mark the hunter for a lifetime. Yes. There are meteorologists who look at the sky and see nothing but isobars.

  “Whales, chimpanzees, snakes,” Markovic murmured. “Is that really how you see it?”

  That same day, Faulques was remembering, she had written a poem. She wasn't unduly talented as a poet, just as she had no outstanding talent as a photographer; she was too eager to speed through life, burning the candle at both ends. She wasn't a creative person. If she hadn't let herself be led by her search for the intense experience, by the need to explore the outer limits of what was reasonable without renouncing her memory and her culture, or by her desire to live enough to catch up with the shadow of herself she pursued with such long strides, Olvido would have been brilliant as an art historian, a university professor, or a gallery director, in line with her family tradition. Her talent lay in an incomparably clear vision of
art, an extraordinary eye for understanding it in any of its manifestations, a gift for analysis, and, when it came to selecting the good from the thicket of the mediocre and bad, superb taste, at once evenhanded and unadulterated. There had been a time, she said, when art was the only story in which justice triumphed, and in which at the end, however long it took to happen, the good guys always won . . . but now she wasn't so sure. For some time Faulques had kept the lines of the poem Olvido had scribbled on a café napkin, until finally he lost it, he didn't remember where, just as he didn't remember the words written on it: something about children sitting beneath the same rain that fell on other places, distant cemeteries where other children lay who would never reach old age . . . reach anything. All he could remember were the two first lines: