The Painter of Battles

by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

  As she'd said those things, she was laughing from behind a crystal wineglass, in Venice, the last New Year's Eve they would have together. She had insisted on going back to where she'd celebrated several end-of-the-year holidays in her childhood, among other reasons, to see the Surrealist exhibit in the Palazzo Grassi. I want you to take me to the best hotel in that ghostly city, she said, and walk with me at night through the deserted streets, because that's the only time of year you can find them like that. It's so cold that backpackers freeze to death on benches around the city, everyone stays inside their hotels and pensiones, and outside there's nothing but gondolas silently rocking in the canals; the Calle degli Assassini seems narrower and darker than ever, and the four carved stone figures on la Piazzetta squeeze closer together, as if they have a secret that people looking at them don't know. When I was a young girl, I would sneak out in my wool cap and muffler, hearing the echo of my footsteps as cats watched me from their dark porticos. I haven't been back to that city for a long time, but now I want to see it again. With you, Faulques. I want you to help me look for the shadow of that little girl, and later when we're back in the hotel, take needle and thread and sew it back to my heels, then quietly and patiently make love to me with the window thrown open, the cold air from the lagoon raising gooseflesh on your back, and my fingernails digging into it until you bleed and I forget you, and Venice, and everything I've been and everything that awaits me.

  Now Faulques was remembering those words and remembering her walking through the narrow, snow-covered streets, the slippery ground, the gondolas covered with white splashing in the gray-green water, the intense cold and sleet, the Japanese tourists huddled in the cafés, the hotel lobby with brocades adorning the centuries-old staircase, the chandeliers in the main salon that was decorated with an enormous, absurd Christmas tree, the manager and the aged concierges who came out to welcome Olvido, calling her signorina Ferrara, as they had ten or fifteen years before, breakfasts in their room with the view of San Giorgio Island and, to the right, through the fog, the Aduana and the entrance to the Grand Canal. On St. Silvester's night they had dressed for dinner but the restaurant was crowded with Slavic mafiosi and their blond women and noisy North Americans celebrating New Year's Eve, so they got their coats and walked through the white, frozen streets to a small trattoria on the Zattere pier. There, he in a dinner jacket, she in a pearl necklace and a black dress so filmy it seemed to float around her body, they dined on spaghetti, pizza, and white wine before walking on to the point of the Aduana to kiss at exactly twelve o'clock, shivering with cold, as a colorful display of fireworks exploded over La Giudecca and they slowly walked back to the hotel, hand in hand through the deserted streets. From that night on, for Faulques, Venice would always be images of that unrepeatable night: the glow of lights through the fog and pale flakes falling on the canals, tongues of water lapping over white stone steps and washing in gentle waves across the marble paving, the gondola they watched pass beneath the bridge carrying two motionless passengers covered with snow, and the gondolier singing in a low voice. Also the drops of water on Olvido's face and her left hand sliding along the banister of the stairway up to their room, the creaking of the wood floor, the carpet that snagged the heel of her shoe, the enormous mirror on the right wall of the stairs, where he saw her glance sideways at herself as she went by, the engravings on the walls of the corridor, the pale yellow light falling through the window when, near the large bed, after peeling off their wet coats, he very slowly lifted her dress up to her hips as in the dark shadows she looked into his eyes with a fixed and impassive intensity, only half of her face lighted, as beautiful as a dream. In that moment Faulques rejoiced in his heart—a savage and at the same time tranquil elation—that he had not been killed any of the times it might have happened, because were that the case, he wouldn't be there that night, slipping off Olvido's panties, and he would never have seen her back up a little and fall onto the bed, onto the unturned spread, the loose, snow-wet hair falling across her face, her eyes never breaking from his, her skirt now up to her waist, her legs opening with a deliberate mixture of submission and wanton challenge, while he, still impeccably dressed, knelt before her and placed his lips, numb from the cold, to the dark convergence of those long, perfect legs between which throbbed, warm, soft, deliciously moist at the contact of his lips and tongue, the splendid flesh of the woman he loved.

  The painter of battles stirred, running his fingers along the cold, rough edges of the crack in the wall. Raw meat, he remembered suddenly, beside amphibian tracks in the sand. Horror always lying in wait, demanding tithes and first fruits, poised to decapitate Euclid with the scythe of chaos. Butterflies fluttering through all wars and all peaces. Every moment was a blend of possible and impossible situations, of cracks predicted from that first instant at a temperature of three billion kelvins within the fourteen seconds and the three minutes following the Big Bang, the beginning of a series of precise coincidences that create man, and that kill him. Drunken gods playing chess, Olympian risk-taking, an errant meteorite only ten kilometers in diameter that, when it struck the Earth and annihilated all animals weighing more than twenty-five kilos, cleared the way for the then small and timid mammals that sixty-five million years later would become Homo sapiens, Homo ludens, Homo occisor.

  A predictable Troy beneath every photograph and every Venice. Venerating wooden horses, their bellies bulging with bronze, cheering Florentine maestros through the streets, or, with identical enthusiasm, burning their works in Savonarola's bonfires. The balance sheet of a century, or of thirty centuries, was how Olvido summed it up that night on the point of the Aduana, watching the crowd congregated on the other side of the mouth of the canal, on San Marco, firecrackers and rockets exploding and the shouts of people celebrating the arrival of the new year, not knowing what it held in store for them. There are no barbarians now, she had murmured, shivering. They are all inside us. Or maybe it is we who have been left outside. Shall I tell you why you and I are together tonight? Because you know that the pearl necklace I'm wearing is made of real pearls. Not because you know pearls but because you know me. Do you understand what I'm saying? This world frightens me, Faulques. It frightens me because it bores me. I hate it when every idiot proclaims he is part of humankind and all the weak take up the shield of Justice, when artists smile, or spit, which is the same thing, on the dealers and critics who invent them. When my parents baptized me they missed my name by a hair. Today, to survive in the cave of the Cyclops you have to be named Nadie. No One. Yes. I think that soon I will need another strong jolt. Another of your beautiful and hygienic wars.

  The painter of battles decided to leave the crack as it was. After all, it was part of the painting, like everything there. Like Venice, like Olvido's pearl necklace, like himself. Like Ivo Markovic, who at that moment, without Faulques' having heard him arrive, was silhouetted in the tower door.

  9.

  “SO AM I ON THERE YET?”

  He was standing before the mural, and the smoke of the cigarette dangling from his lips made him squeeze his eyelids behind the lenses of his glasses. He had shaved recently, and was wearing a clean shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. Faulques followed the direction of his gaze. In an area he hadn't yet painted, the carbon sketch and a few strokes of color on the white primer described some forms stretched out on the ground that when the mural was finished would be corpses being stripped by crow-like pillagers. There was also a dog sniffing human remains, and trees with bodies hanging from their branches.

  “Of course,” the painter of battles replied. “You were there already. That's what it's about, I guess . . . know, actually. Since you showed up, I've been convinced of it.”

  “And what about your responsibility?”

  “I don't understand.”

  “You, too, are responsible for what goes on in the painting.”

  Faulques put down the short brush he had in his hand—the acrylic paint had dried and was ha
rdening, he found to his annoyance—and then, with his arms crossed over his chest, he walked to where Markovic was standing. Looking where he was looking. The drawings were reasonably eloquent, he thought to himself. Even though he did not hold himself in any great esteem as a painter, he was consoled by the knowledge that he had a certain skill in drawing. And after all was said and done, these expressive, if disparate lines did speak of war. Of desolation and solitude: that of the dead. Every dead person he had ever photographed looked terribly alone. No solitude was more perfect, absolute, and irreparable than death. He knew that very well. Drawing and color aside, that might be his advantage, he decided. What gave consistency to the work he was carrying out in that tower. No one had told him what he was telling.

  “I'm not sure about that word ‘responsible.’ I always tried to be the man who was looking. A third, objective man.”

  Markovic turned his head but did not take his eyes from the painting.

  “I'd say you were mistaken. I don't think anyone is objective. You're in the painting, too . . . But not just a part of it, you're the agent as well. The cause.”

  “It's strange that you say that.”

  “What seems strange about it?”

  Faulques didn't answer. He was remembering, a little disconcerted, what his scientist friend had added when they were talking about chaos and its rules: that a basic element of quantum mechanics was that man created reality by observing it. Before that observation, what truly existed was all possible situations. Only through observation did nature become concrete, take a stance. There was, inevitably, inherent indetermination, of which man was more the witness than the protagonist. Or, to put a fine point on it, both things at once: victim as well as guilty party.

  They both were staring at the mural, not speaking, not moving. Side by side. Then Markovic took the cigarette from his mouth. He leaned forward a little to better see the two men in the foreground of the lower edge of the painting, locked in a death embrace, slashing wildly at each other.

  “Is it true that some photographers pay people to kill in front of their cameras?”

  Slowly, Faulques shook his head. Twice.

  “No. That was never something I did.” His head moved from side to side a third time. “Never.”

  The Croatian had turned to look at him with interest. After a moment, he took another pull at his cigarette before crushing it in an empty mustard jar on the table among the paints and brushes. The Eye of War was still there. He leafed through a few pages, distracted, and stopped at one.

  “Good photo,” he said. “Is this the one that won the other prize?”

  Faulques went to look. Lebanon, near Daraia. Four hundred ASA black-and-white film, 1/125 shutter speed, 50-mm lens. A snow-covered mountaintop, barely visible through the mist, served as background for the principal scene: three Druse militiamen at the moment of being executed by six Christian Phalangists, the latter kneeling three meters from their victims, rifles aimed and firing. The Druse were facing them, eyes blindfolded; the two in the background of the image had already been struck by bullets, the smoke of the shots was rippling their clothing—one was clutching his belly, knees buckling, the other was falling backward, hands over his head, as if the world had evaporated behind him—and the third, the one closest to the photographer, about forty, dark-skinned, short hair, two or three days' beard, erect and strong, was stoically awaiting the bullet that hadn't as yet been fired, head high, eyes covered with a black cloth, a wounded hand supported in a bandage slung around his neck and tight against his chest. So serene and dignified in his attitude that the men aiming at him, two young Maronites, fingers on the trigger of their Galil assault rifles, seemed to be undecided about killing him. The Druse with the wounded hand had been shot a second after Faulques took his photo—he pressed the shutter release when he heard the first burst of fire, convinced that they would all fire at the same time—struck in the chest when his companions were already on the ground. Faulques did not get a picture of him falling because he was shooting with the Leica; it didn't have a motor drive but was wound by hand, and as the men fell he was advancing film for the following exposure. By the time he shot again the man already lay sprawled on the ground, bandaged hand slightly raised and rigid amid the smoke of gunfire floating in the air and the dust his body had raised when he fell. Faulques took a third photo when the leader of the executioners was standing among the corpses, having delivered the coup de grâce to the first Druse and preparing to do the same for the second.

  “This is interesting,” Markovic commented, one finger on the image. “Man's dignity, and so on and so on. But not every man dies that way, right? In fact, very few die that way. They weep, beg, crawl. That base behavior we were talking about the other day. Anything to survive.”

  The editors at the agency Faulques had sent the undeveloped roll to had selected the photo of the Druse waiting to be shot because of his dignity in the face of death, the apparent hesitation of the executioners, and the drama of the fallen men behind him. It got great exposure. Pride in the Face of Death, an Italian magazine grandiloquently titled it, and that same year it won the twenty-thousand-dollar International Press Photo prize. In the book Markovic was holding, that image was paired, on facing pages, with one Faulques had taken in Somalia fifteen years later: a member of the Aidid militia executing a looter in the Mogadishu market. The two scenes were different in motif and composition, and Faulques had been very doubtful before deciding to place them side by side in the book; what finally convinced him was that they made more sense together. The Lebanese photo was in black and white, serene, the lines balanced despite the subject, planes well defined, a perfect vanishing point—the peak of the snow-capped mountain barely visible through the concealing fog—and diagonals running from far in the distance to converge there, with the executioners and the fallen Druse soldiers as chorus or background to the principal scene: the exact coincidence of the rifles in the foreground, two deadly parallels aimed at the chest of the third, the erect, Druse, precisely at the heart over which his hand lay in the sling, an almost circular harmony of curved lines, straight radii, and shadows, the center of which were that hand and that heart whose beating was about to be interrupted. The Mogadishu photo was just the opposite: color film, an image with no volume, nearly flat, with the ochre background of an adobe wall onto which the shadows of a group of onlookers outside the picture were projected, and in the center of the scene, a Somali militiaman wearing short pants that gave him a strangely juvenile air, his arm holding an AK-47 extended so the mouth of the barrel touched the head of a man lying faceup on the ground. The muscles and tendons of that thin black arm were clenched from the kick of the weapon's recoil; its bullets had destroyed the face of the fallen man not yet dead, hands and knees jerking upward, jolted by the impact of the bullets, dust rising around his head, his face exploding in red fragments—an absolutely pure action painting, Olvido would say afterward, still pale from fright—and two empty shells, just ejected from the chamber of the weapon and caught by the photo, frozen as they somersaulted through the air, golden and gleaming in the sun. That image had no depth, no background, no distant lines, nothing except the wall with the shadows acting as anonymous witnesses and the closed, equilateral, geometrically perfect triangle—like the symbolic triangle that represented God in Faulques' schoolbooks—formed by the standing man, the victim lying on the ground, and the weapon as an extension of the arm and rational will that had executed him. They weep, they beg, they crawl, Markovic had said. Anything to survive. That wasn't the case, Faulques thought, of the three Druse in the first photo, who would be killed without a by-your-leave or loss of composure, but it was true of the Somali in the second, who had dragged himself to the feet of his executioner, begging for his life as the latter kept kicking him—to the delight of the children watching the scene; it was their shadows that were projected onto the wall—and so, on his knees and clinging to the militiaman's legs, he had first been clubbed with the butt of th
e weapon, a blow that flung him onto his back, and then, pleading and with his hands lifted to protect his face, he had screamed when he saw the barrel of the gun so close, before his body was shaken by the hammering of the bullets. That time Faulques was using a motor-driven camera that advanced between shots, clic, clic, clic, clic, clic, clic, clic, clic, eight times, a complete series at 1/500 shutter speed and f-stop of 8. The fifth exposure was the best: the one in which the dying man's face was barely visible among his own red explosions, his arms and legs lifted in a reflex defense. Later, when the militiaman noticed the photographer—Faulques had approached with impeccable tactical stealth as Olvido whispered, You'd better not, Please, Stay here, Don't even move—the Somali struck a swaggering pose, rifle held in both hands and one foot on the chest of the cadaver in the manner of the hunter posing with his trophy. Maik mee uan photo. Smiles and relaxing. And Faulques, raising the camera again, pretended to take that image, although he didn't. He had already shot an identical scene in Tesseney, Eritrea: two FLE guerrilla fighters posing guns in hand, one with his foot on the neck of a dead Ethiopian soldier. He had no wish to publish the same picture twice: it was ridiculous to plagiarize himself. As for that Maik mee uan photo and all the rest, the most insightful summary would come from Olvido the night of the Mogadishu incident as they were having a drink in the dark by a hotel window. Africa fascinates me, she said, it's like a trial run of the future. It surpasses the most extreme Dadaist absurdity. It's like those video games in which the characters, armed with machetes and guns and grenades, go absolutely crazy.