“Photographing a fire doesn't mean you think you're a fireman.”
And yet, thought the painter of battles, though he didn't say it, Markovic was right. Or at least partly right. A painting like the one he was working on could not be painted with emotion, but neither could it be done by ignoring your feelings. First you had to have them, and then know you had rid yourself of them. Or be liberated from them. It was Olvido who had truly changed him, two times, and in two directions. She had also taught him to look. And, in a certain way, to paint. It was luck. When she died and the lens of the camera clouded over, painting became his salvation. Painting with the eye that she had trained.
“Tell me one thing, señor Faulques. . . . Does feeling horror blur the focus of the camera?”
Now the painter of battles couldn't help but laugh. This individual had done a good job of tracking, or interpreting, although not a hundred percent. He often lightly touched the truth without penetrating the heart of it, but some of his elementary guesses were on the mark. He had to admit that the man had good intuition. A certain style.
“That,” he admitted, “is very perceptive.”
“But answer the question, please. I'm talking about mercy, not technique.”
Faulques fell silent. His discomfort was growing. This was all going too far. But there was a certain sinister pleasure in it, he decided. Like the husband who is suspicious of his wife and searches until, triumphant, he comes up with the proof. Passing a finger gently down the sharp edge of a broken razor.
Markovic was still sitting on the stair. He nodded slowly, agreeing, as if he had just heard an answer no one had given. I thought it was something like that, he said.
“Honestly, there's no real woman?” he asked suddenly.
Faulques didn't answer. He had collected a few brushes and was washing them with soap under the spigot of the water tank. He shook them with care, sucked the tip of the finest ones, and put them back in place. Then he set about cleaning the oven-tray palette.
“I apologize for my persistence,” the Croatian continued, “but it's important. It's part of what brought me here. As for the woman on the Borovo Naselje road . . .”
He stopped himself at that point, never taking his eyes from the painter. Faulques was dispassionately cleaning the tray.
“Earlier,” Markovic continued, “we were talking about horror and losing the clean focus of the camera. And you know what I think? That you were a good photographer because to take a photograph you have to frame, and to frame is to select and exclude. Save some things and eliminate others . . . Not everyone can do that: set himself up as a judge of all that's happening around him. You understand what I'm talking about? No one who is truly in love can make that kind of judgment. Put in the position of choosing between saving my wife or saving my son, I wouldn't have been able to . . . No. I don't think so.”
“And which would you have chosen among saving your wife, your son, and yourself?”
“I know what you're getting at. There are people who . . .”
Again he interrupted himself, staring at the floor between his feet. You're right, Faulques said then. Photography is a process of visual selection. You frame a part of your line of vision. It's a matter of being in the right place at the right time. Of seeing what move to make, the way you do in chess.
Markovic's eyes were still on the floor.
“Chess, you say.”
“I don't know if that's a good example. It would also work with soccer.” The Croatian looked up, smiled a strange, almost challenging smile, and waved a hand toward the mural.
“And where is she? Have you reserved a special place in your mural for her, or is she just one among that mass of people?”
Faulques set down the tray. He didn't like that sudden insolent smile. And, to his own surprise, for an instant he found himself calculating the possibilities of attacking Markovic. The Croatian was strong, he decided. Shorter than he was, but also younger and more robust. He would have to hit him before he had time to react. Catch him off guard. He looked around. He needed a forceful weapon. The shotgun was upstairs. Too far away.
“That's not your problem,” he said.
Markovic's lip curled in an unpleasant way.
“I don't agree with you there. Everything that has any bearing on you is my business. Including that chess you talk about so cold-bloodedly . . . And the woman you photographed when she was dead.”
There was a section of scaffolding on the floor beside the door, some three meters from where Markovic was sitting. Heavy aluminum pipe about the length of his forearm. With a practiced sense of space and motion, as if he were taking a photograph, Faulques calculated how many steps it would take to get to the pipe and then to the Croatian. Five to the door, four to the objective. Markovic would not get up until he saw Faulques pick up the pipe. In two quick steps he could be near him before he was on his feet. One more to strike him. On the head, naturally. He couldn't allow him the chance to gather himself. Maybe two blows would do it. Or just one if he was lucky. He had no intention of killing him, or of calling the police. In fact, he didn't have any intention of doing anything. He was simply irritated and wanted to hurt him.
“They say she was a photographer of fashion and art,” Markovic said. “That you cut her out of her world and took her with you. That you became companions and . . . which is it? Husband and wife? Lovers?”
Faulques dried his hands on a rag. Who told you that? he asked. Then slowly he walked toward the door, his air casual. First only a step. Out of the corner of his eye he glanced at the tube on the floor. He picked up the can of dirty water he'd washed the brushes in and started outdoors to empty it, to justify his movements. People told me, Markovic was saying, who knew her and knew you. I assure you that I talked with a lot of people before I came here. And I worked a lot of nasty jobs in several countries, señor Faulques. Traveling costs money. But I had a powerful motive. Now I know it was all worth it.
“I think a lot about mine, you know?” he added after remaining silent for a moment. “About my wife. She was blond, and sweet. She had hazel eyes, like my son . . . You know . . . I can't stand to think about the boy. This black despair settles over me, I want to scream until my throat is raw. Once I did; I screamed till my throat was almost bleeding. That happened in a pension, and the owner thought I was crazy. I couldn't talk for two days, imagine. I can think about her. It's different. I've been with other women since. I'm a man, after all. But there are nights that I toss and turn in my bed, remembering. Her skin was very white, and her flesh . . . She had . . .”
Faulques was at the door. He threw out the dirty water and bent down to set the can on the floor beside the piece of scaffolding. His fingers had almost touched it when he realized that his anger had dissipated. Slowly, he stood up, his hands empty. Markovic was studying him with curiosity. For a moment the Croatian's eyes focused on the aluminum pipe.
“That tourist boat goes by at the same hour, with the same woman, and you never think about going down to the port to see what she looks like?”
“Maybe I'll do it some day.”
Markovic smiled slightly with a distracted air.
“One day.”
“Yes.”
You may be disappointed, Markovic warned him. The voice sounds young and pretty, but maybe she isn't either of those things. He spoke those words as he moved over to leave room for Faulques to go up to the second level, open the turned-off refrigerator, and take out two beers.
“Have you been with women since what happened on the Borovo Naselje road, señor Faulques? I suppose you have. But it's curious, isn't it? At first, when you're young, you think it's impossible to get along without women. Then when circumstances or age force you to, you get accustomed to it. Maybe you resign yourself. But I'm not sure that ‘accustomed’ is the right word.”
He took the can Faulques offered him and stood looking at it without opening it. The painter pulled the tab to open his. The beer was warm, and a gush
of foam spilled over his fingers.
“So you live alone, then,” Markovic murmured, pensive.
Faulques drank with quick sips, observing him. Without a word he swiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Markovic nodded. He seemed to have confirmed something. Finally he opened his beer, drank a little, set it on the floor, and lighted a cigarette.
“Do you want us to talk about the woman who died on that road?”
“No.”
“I've told you about mine.”
The two men stared at each other a long time. Three pulls on Markovic's cigarette, two swallows of Faulques' beer. It was the Croatian who spoke first.
“Do you think my wife tried to ingratiate herself with the men who raped her, to save her life? Or save our son? Do you think she yielded out of fear, or out of resignation, before they killed the boy and mutilated her and slit her throat?”
He put the cigarette between his lips. The tip glowed, and for an instant a mouthful of smoke veiled the pale eyes behind the lenses of his glasses. Faulques said nothing. He was watching a fly that after dancing between them had lighted on the Croatian's arm. Who looked at it. Impassive. Without moving or waving it away.
11.
THE BREEZE WAS BLOWING OFFSHORE toward the sea and the night was very warm. Despite the bright moonlight, Faulques could see nearly all the constellation Pegasus. He was still outdoors, hands in his pockets, surrounded by the shrilling of the cicadas and the fireflies flickering beneath the black mass of the pines that stood out with each flash from the distant lighthouse. He was thinking about Ivo Markovic, his words, his silences, and the woman the Croatian had mentioned as he left. What was there between you two, Señor Faulques? he'd asked, already on his feet and on his way to the door with the empty beer can in his hand, looking for a place to put it down. I mean, what was really in that last photograph? He had said it in an off-hand way, making some vague gesture, sure that he would not have an answer. Then he'd crushed the can in his hand and deposited it in a cardboard box filled with trash, and shrugged. The photo in the ditch, he repeated as he walked away. That strange photograph that was never published.
Faulques slowly returned to the tower, its dark mass rising from the cliff. It served no purpose to remember, he thought. But it was inevitable. Between the two points determined by chance and time, the Mexican museum and the ditch on the Borovo Naselje road, Olvido Ferrara had loved him, he had no doubt. She had done so in her deliberate, vital, and self-centered manner, with a sediment of intelligent sadness in the pauses. Faulques had always moved with supreme caution around the subtle melancholy latent in the depths of her gaze and her words, like a prudent plunderer trying not to provide a reason to make the latent explicit. Flowers just keep growing, detached and sure of themselves, she had once said. We're the fragile ones. Faulques was worried about the eventuality of confronting aloud the reasons for the hopeless resignation that coursed through her veins, as precise as the healthy and regular beating of her heart that could be perceived, as if it were an incurable illness, in the pulse at her wrists, at her throat, in her embraces. In her impulses and in that peculiar jubilation of hers—she was capable of laughing boisterously, like a happy child—that she shielded herself behind the way other humans tend to do with a book, a glass of wine, or a word. Olvido was similarly cautious in her relationship with Faulques. During the time they were together, she always observed him from afar, or rather, from the outside, perhaps fearing to penetrate the surface and discover that he was like other men she had known. She never asked about women, about years past, about anything. Nor about the nomadic rootlessness he used as defense in a territory that from the time he was young he had decided to consider hostile. And sometimes, when in moments of intimacy and tenderness he was on the verge of confiding a memory or an emotion, she would put her fingers to his lips. No, my love. Don't talk, look at me. Don't talk, kiss me. Don't talk, come here, right here. Olvido wanted to believe that he was different, and that that was why she had chosen him, less as a companion for an improbable future—Faulques noted, impotently, the signs of that improbability—than as a path to the inevitable destiny her own hopelessness was guiding her toward. And maybe he was, in a certain way, different. Once she had told him that. They were climbing the stairway of a hotel in Athens, near dawn, Faulques with his sport coat over his shoulders. Olvido in a white, form-fitting dress that closed with a zipper from waist to neck. He, one step behind her, was suddenly struck by a thought: One day we won't be here. And he slowly unzipped the dress as they went up the stairs. Olvido continued without any reaction, one hand on the brass railing, her dress open to her hips, revealing her splendid back, her naked shoulders, as elegant as an imperturbable gazelle—she would have done the same even had they met a guest or hotel employee. When she reached the landing, she stopped and turned to look at him. I love you, she said serenely, because your eyes don't betray you. You never allow that. And that adds silent weight to your baggage.
He went into the tower, felt around for a box of matches, and lighted the gas lamp. As an effect of the darkness, the images painted on the wall seemed to encircle him like ghosts. Or maybe it wasn't the darkness, he told himself as he took a slow look around the entire perimeter of the painting, which on that night, as on many others, spirited him toward the river of the dead, to its dark and tranquil waters where bloody shadows were gathered on the opposite bank, eyes on him, answering him with sad words. Faulques searched for the bottle and poured three fingers of cognac into a glass. Night flies by, he murmured after the first sip. And we lose ourselves in weeping.
No one who truly loves, Markovic had said that evening. And have you always been the person your photos say you are? And nevertheless, the painter of battles knew that only in that way was it possible to get through it all and keep the camera's lens focused. Unlike Markovic himself, even Olvido, both of whom were caught up in war, voluntarily or involuntarily, changing their lives or destroying them, in thirty years of traveling around the world shielded behind a camera, focusing, observing, Faulques had learned a lot about humankind, but nothing had changed in him. At least, nothing that altered his premonitory vision of the problem. The Croatian was right in a certain way. That mural surrounding him with its shadows and its ghosts was a scientific exposition of what he had observed, not remorse or expiation. But there was a crack in the wall, in the circular painting, that in essence was confirmation of what in a different time Faulques had intuited and now knew. Despite his technical arrogance, the scientist who studied man from the icy solitude of his observation did not find that he himself was outside that world, although he liked to think he was. No one was completely indifferent, however much he pretended to be. If only that were possible, he thought, draining the glass and pouring himself more cognac. In their relationship, Olvido had forced him to come out of himself. But her death had ended that truce. Those steps executed with geometric precision on the Borovo Naselje road—almost the elegant moves of a knight on the chessboard of chaos—had sent Faulques back to his solitude, had in some way had a calming effect, put things in place. The painter of battles took another swallow after lifting his glass in a silent toast to the wall, nearly all its circular length, the way a torero salutes the crowd from the center of the ring. Now Olvido was on the dark shore where shadows spoke with the barking of dogs and the howling of wolves. Gemitusque luporum. As for Faulques, Olvido's last steps had consigned him for all time to the company of the shadows that populated the tower: a man standing beside the black river, watched from the other side by the melancholy specters he had known with life.
Olvido and he, he remembered, had looked from that same shore at a river in a painting in the Uffizi: Gherardo Starnina's Thebaid, which some attributed to Paolo Uccello or to the young Fra Angelico. Despite its pleasant, folkloric quality—scenes of the eremitic life with colorful, allegorical, and mythic touches—a more careful observation of that wood panel revealed a second level beyond first appearances, where beneath the Gothi
c synthesis could be noted strange geometric lines and disquieting content. Olvido and Faulques had stood rooted before the painting, enthralled by the attitudes of the monks and the other human characters in the painting, by the allegorical intensity of the numerous separate scenes. It reminds me of those nativities they set up with miniature figures at Christmas time, Faulques commented, ready to go on to the next painting. But Olvido had caught him by the arm, eyes still glued to the painting. Look, she said. There's something dark and disturbing here. Look at the ass crossing the bridge, the confused scenes in the background, and on the right, the woman who seems to be fleeing furtively, and the monk behind her, peering from a cave in the rock. When you look closer, some of these figures become sinister, you know? It makes you worry that you don't know what they're up to. What they're plotting. What they're thinking. And look at the river, Faulques. I've seldom seen one so strange. So deceptively peaceful and so dark. It's a fabulous painting, no? There's nothing naïve about it. Whether it's by Starnina, or Uccello, or whoever—I suppose it would please the museum if it were Uccello, that would raise the value—you begin by being entertained, but little by little your smile freezes.
They had talked about the painting all afternoon: first by the river and the old bridge, beneath the statue of Giovanni dalle Bande Nere in the Vasari façade, and then during an early dinner on the terrace of a restaurant on the other side of the river, from which they could see the bridge and the Uffizi galleries illuminated by the late afternoon light. Olvido was still fascinated by the painting, which she had seen before but never, until she was with Faulques, viewed in that way. It is abstract order become reality, she said. And it's as dense as Bellini's Sacred Allegory, don't you think? So surreal. Its enigmas talk among themselves, and leave us out of their conversation. And we're back in the fifteenth century, no less. Those old masters, more than anyone, knew how to make the invisible visible. Did you really look at the mountains and rocks in the background? They make you think of the geometrical landscapes of the end of the nineteenth century, of Friedrich, Schiele, Klee. And I wonder how we would title that painting today. Maybe The Ambiguous Shore. Or better, Pictorial Theology of a Strictly Geological Topography. Something like that. My God, Faulques. We are so wrongheaded. Seeing a painting like that makes it clear that photography isn't good for anything. Only painting can do what that painting does. Every good painting has always aspired to be a landscape of another landscape not yet painted, but when the truth of a society coincided with that of the artist, there was no duplicity. True magnificence came when they separated, and the painter had to choose between submission and deception, and call upon his talent to make one look like the other. That's why the Thebaid has what all masterpieces have: allegories of certainties that become a certainty only after a lot of time has gone by. And now, please, pour me a little more of that wine. She had said all that as she rolled pasta around her fork with enviable ease, wiped her lips with her napkin, or looked into Faulques' eyes with all the light of the Renaissance reflected in them. In five minutes, she added, suddenly lowering her voice—she had leaned a little toward him, elbows on the table and fingers laced together, gazing at him seductively—I want us to go back to the hotel and for you to make love to me and call me a whore. Capisci? Here I am eating spaghetti with you exactly eighty-five kilometers from the place where I was born. And thanks to Starnina, or Uccello, or whoever really painted that work, I urgently need you to make love to me with reasonable but conclusive violence and to blank out the odometer in my brain. Or break it. I have the pleasure of informing you that you are very handsome, Faulques. And I find myself at that exact point when a French woman would shift to a more intimate word for “you,” a Swiss would try to find out how many credit cards you have in your wallet, and a North American would ask if you carry a condom. And so—she glanced at the clock—let's be off to the hotel, if you have no objection.
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