The Painter of Battles

by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

  That evening they went back to the hotel with the last light, walking slowly along the banks of the Arno, enveloped in a melancholy Tuscan autumn sunset that seemed to have been copied from a painting by Claude Gellée. And then, once in the room, with the windows open over the city and the river below, where they could hear the murmuring sound of the current flowing over the dikes, they made long, methodical love, unhurried, pausing only to rest a few minutes and then pick up again, attacking each other in the semi-dark, with no light other than that from outside, enough, though, that Olvido, head turned toward the wall, could contemplate both their shadows on the wall. Once she got up and went to the window, and as she looked at the dark, unornamented wall of San Frediano in Cestello, spoke the only ten words in a row that Faulques heard that night: They're all gone, the women I wanted to be like. Then she wandered aimlessly around the room, so beautiful, so provocative. She had a natural tendency to walk around naked, to move in her indolent fashion, with the elegance of her fine lineage and of the model she had been for a short time. And that night, as from their bed he watched the movements of a delicate and perfect animal, Faulques thought that Olvido didn't need any illumination. Day or night, naked or clothed, light followed her as if a portable spotlight were tracking her everywhere she went. He was still thinking of that the next morning as he watched her sleep, mouth slightly open, forehead creased with the line of sorrow you see in some Sevillian images of virgins. In Florence, no doubt influenced by the place, and because she was so close to where she'd been born, Faulques discovered with calm consternation that his love for Olvido Ferrara was not merely intensely physical, or intellectual. It was also an aesthetic emotion, a fascination with all the possible soft lines, angles, and fields of vision of her body, the serene movement so much a part of her nature. That morning, contemplating the sleeping woman between the wrinkled hotel sheets, Faulques felt the claw of future jealousy superimposed on retrospective jealousy: from the men who one day would watch her move through museums and city streets and hotel rooms above ancient rivers to those who had known her that way in the past. He knew, because she had told him, that a fashion photographer and a bisexual designer had been her first lovers. He learned that unsought, when Olvido mentioned it even though the issue hadn't come up and he hadn't asked. Casually, or deliberately, she had told him and then observed him, studied him, lying in wait, until he, after a brief, silent pause, had changed the subject. Nonetheless, the idea had awakened in Faulques—it still happened—an icy internal anger, irrational and inexplicable. He never mentioned what she had confided, or alluded to his own experiences, unless as a jest or casual comment, or as when he'd become aware of how well known she was in some of the best European and New York hotels and restaurants he had joked, laughingly, that he was recognized in some of the best whorehouses in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In that case—was Olvido's reply—try and see that I get the benefit of it. She was perceptive in the extreme; she knew how to read paintings and how to read men. And above all, she was capable of listening to a silence with deep concentration, as if she were a zealous student absorbed in a problem the professor had just written on the blackboard.She dismantled silence, piece by piece, the way a watchmaker dismantles a watch. And so she easily perceived Faulques' irritation in the sudden tightening of his muscles, the expression in his eyes, the way he kissed her. Or didn't. You men are all amazingly stupid, she would say, interpreting things he had never voiced. Even the cleverest of you. I can't bear that. I detest men who take me to bed thinking about the woman they bedded before me, or the one who will be next.

  Faulques went up the spiral stairs carrying the glass of cognac in one hand and the gas lamp in the other. The liquor was making his fingers clumsy as he dug through the large box he used as a table beside the military cot where he slept. He went through papers, documents, notebooks, until he came upon the photo he was looking for: the only one he had kept of himself . . . and it had been a long time since he looked at it. Actually, it was a picture of both of them, for Olvido was there as well: a house later destroyed in a bombing raid, with Faulques—this time it was he—asleep on the floor, mouth dropped open, chin unshaven, head resting on his backpack, boots and pants stained with mud, the two Nikons and the Leica on his chest, and a wool cap covering his eyes. And Olvido, at the moment she pressed the shutter release, face half hidden by the camera and partially reflected in the broken mirror on the wall. She had taken the photo in Jarayeb, in the south of Lebanon, after an Israeli bombing raid, but Faulques hadn't realized that until much later, until everything had ended and he was packing her belongings to send them to her family. It was a black-and-white photo with a beautiful dawn light that lengthened shadows on one side of the image, framed Faulques, and on the other side illuminated the figure of Olvido, fragmenting her three times in the broken mirror. One of the reflections showed her face behind the camera, her braids, her torso clothed in a dark T-shirt, jeans molded to her waist; a second, the camera, the right side of her body, an arm, and a hip; the third, only the camera. And in each fragment of that incomplete image, Olvido seemed to fade into her own reflection, every instant of that flight disintegrating and fixed in time in the emulsion of the film, like Paolo Uccello's guerrilla and the one Faulques was painting in his mural.

  12.

  SHE HAD GONE WITH HIM, just like that. Very soon. I want to go with you, she said. I need a silent Virgil and you are good at that. I want a nice-looking guide, silent and strong like the ones in the safari films of the fifties. Olvido had said that one winter twilight as they stood at the edge of an abandoned Portman mine near Cartagena, beside the Mediterranean. She was wearing a wool tam, her nose was red from the cold and her fingers protruded from the overly long sleeves of a heavy red sweater. She spoke very seriously, and then came the smile. I'm tired of doing what I do, so I'm going to stick with you. Mind made up. Oh, death, let us set sail . . . and so on. My own work bores me. It's a lie that photography is the only art form in which your training is not decisive. Now they're all that way. Any amateur with a Polaroid can rub shoulders with Man Ray or Brassai, you know? But also with Picasso or Frank Lloyd Wright. Centuries of accumulated traps weigh heavily on the words “art” and “artist.” I don't know very well what it is you do, but it attracts me. I watch you; you're all the time taking mental photos, as focused as if you were practicing some strange Bushido discipline, with a camera in place of a samurai sword. I suspect that the only contemporary, living art is what emerges from your merciless hunting trips. Don't laugh, silly. I'm being serious. I began to understand that last night, when you held me as if we were about to die. Or as if someone was going to kill us both at any moment.

  She was intelligent. Very. He'd noticed that he never had to explain, resolve, or change anything. That all she wanted was to see the world in its true dimensions, without the varnish of false normality; she wanted to place her fingers on the terrible pulse of life even if she drew them away stained with blood. Olvido was aware that she had lived in a fictitious world since she was a girl, like the young Buddha from whom, it was told, his family had for thirty years hidden the existence of death. The camera, she said, you yourself, Faulques, are my passport to what's real: there where things can't be embellished by stupidity, rhetoric, or money. I want to shred my former naïveté. My badly battered and overvalued innocence. And that may be why when she made love she whispered steamy provocations and sometimes wanted him to be rough with her. I detest, she'd told him once—they were in the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., looking at van der Weyden's Portrait of a Lady—the hypocritical, chaste mien of women painted by those northern types. Do you know what I mean, Faulques? What a contrast with Italian madonnas and Spanish saints, all of whom, should an obscenity escape their lips, look as if they know precisely what they're saying. Like me.

  From that moment on, Olvido never produced a single work that evolved from the aesthetic and the glamour in which she'd been educated and had lived, but deliberately tur
ned her back to them. Her new photos had to be a reaction to all that. Her work never had people in it, no beauty, only a jumble of things you'd find in a secondhand store, leftovers from lives now gone that time flung at her feet: ruins, rubble, skeletons of blackened buildings set against somber skies, ripped curtains, shattered china, empty armoires, broken furniture, spent shells, the tracks of shrapnel on the walls. That was the sum of her work for three years, always in black and white, the antithesis of the scenes of art or fashion that she had previously photographed or played a part in; none of the color, light, and perfect focus that made the world more beautiful than it was in real life. See how pretty I was in these pictures, she once said, showing Faulques a magazine cover—Olvido, impeccably made up, posed on the rain-slick Brooklyn Bridge. How incredibly pretty—and take note, if you will be so kind, of the adverb. So I want you please to give me what was missing in my old world. Give me the cruelty of a camera that is not an accessory to the crime. Photography as art is a perilous terrain; our era prefers the image over the object, the copy over the original, the representation over the reality, appearance over being; it prefers that I, dressed by the best designers, steal phrases from Sasha Stone or Feuerbach. That's why I love you . . . for the moment. You are my way of saying to hell with fashion magazines, to hell with the spring collection in Milan, to hell with Giorgio Morandi, who spent half a lifetime painting still lifes with bottles, to hell with Warhol and his cans of soup, to hell with the canned artist's shit they sell at millionaire auctions at Claymore's. Soon I won't need you, Faulques, but I will always be grateful for your wars. They free my eyes from that past. They give me perfect license to go wherever I want: action, adrenaline, ephemeral art. They liberate me from responsibilities and make me an elite tourist. I can look, finally. With my eyes. Ponder the world using the only two possible systems: logic and war. In that, too, there isn't much difference between you and me. Neither of us subscribes to ethical photojournalism. Who does?

  Olvido made the decision to go with him as she was contemplating the devastated landscape of Portman. Or at least that was when she told him. I know a place, Faulques had suggested, that's exactly like a painting by Dr. Atl, except without the fire and lava. Now that I know those paintings, and I know you, I would like to go back there and photograph it. She looked at him, surprised, over her cup of coffee—they were having breakfast in Faulques' house in Barcelona when the idea came to him—and said, but that isn't a war, and I thought that all you photographed was wars. It is war in a way, he replied: now those paintings and that place are also part of a war. So they rented a car and traveled south until one winter day at dusk, in the silence of winding dirt roads bordering ravines and mountains of mineral slag, demolished towers and collapsed houses, walls without roofs, old strip mines open to the sky, revealing their brown, red, and black guts, ochre oxide lodes, exhausted veins, enormous buddles where cracked gray mud had escaped through crumbled walls and carpeted the bottom of the ravines, creeping among dead prickly pears and dry fig trees like tongues of old, solidified lava. It looks like a dormant volcano, Olvido murmured with awe when Faulques stopped the car; he picked up the pack with his cameras, and they walked through the landscape of somber beauty, hearing the crunch of stones beneath their feet in the absolute silence of the vast wasteland abandoned by the hand of man for nearly half a century; wind and rain, however, had continued to erode it into capricious forms, flumes, crisscrossing gullies, landslides, collapses. You might think that a gigantic and chaotic hand had wielded powerful implements to strip the earth until mineral and stone had been torn from its viscera and then left it to time to work on the scene like a demented artist in a chaotic workshop. Then the sun, which was about to set behind slag heaps that stretched to the nearby sea, peered out for an instant from beneath the layer of leaden clouds, and a brilliant red splendor burst over the water and spilled like an eruption of incandescent lava across the tormented land, over the eroded tops of the buddles, the deep gullies of slag, and the ruined mine towers silhouetted in the distance. And as Faulques lifted the camera to photograph it, Olvido stopped rubbing her hands together to keep warm; her eyes opened wide beneath the wool tam, she struck her forehead with her open palm, and said, Of course! My God! That's exactly what happens. It isn't the pyramid of Giza, or the Sphinx, it's what's left of them after time, wind, rain, and sand storms have done their work. It won't be the real Eiffel tower until the iron structure, finally rusted and crumbling, rises over a dead city like a specter in its watchtower. Nothing will truly be what it is until the unfeeling Universe wakes like a sleeping animal, stretches its legs, stirring the skeleton of the Earth, yawns, and takes a few random slashes. Do you realize that? Yes, of course you do. Now I understand. It's a question of geological amorality. Of photographing the useful certainty of our fragility. Of keeping a sharp eye on the roulette of the cosmos, the wheel spinning on the exact day that, yet again, the mouse of the computer fails to work, Archimedes triumphs over Shakespeare, and a disconcerted humanity pats its pockets, confirming its fear that it has no change for the boatman. Photographing not man, but the traces of man. The naked man descending a staircase. But I had never seen it that way before. It was only a painting in a museum. My god, Faulques. My god—the red light illuminated her face like the flames of a volcano hung on a wall. A museum is nothing but a question of perspective. Thank you for bringing me here.

  From that day on, she went everywhere with him. She hunted in her own way, concentrating on her vision of the world, which was not identical to Faulques' but was nourished from the same desolation. The first place was Lebanon. He took her there because it was familiar territory, and he had spent a lot of time there during the civil strife. He knew its highways, towns, cities, and in all of them he had groups of friends and contacts that allowed them, up to a certain point, to keep the situation under control. The war had dropped back south of the Litani River, to incursions and bombings by Islamic guerrillas on the northern border of the Hebrew state, and to Israeli retaliations. The couple traveled by taxi along the coast, from Beirut to Sidon, and from there to Tyre, where they arrived one luminous, blue Mediterranean day, with a blinding sun gilding the stones of the ancient port. Faulques' septuagenarian friend Father Georges, still alive and immediately seduced by Olvido, showed her the crypt of his medieval church; there they'd seen the recumbent figures of knights of the Crusades—their stone features disfigured by hammers when the city fell into Turkish hands. The next day, Olvido had her baptism of fire on the Nabati highway: an attack by Israeli armored helicopters, a missile fired at a car carrying leaders of the Hezbollah, a man without legs dragging himself from the wreckage of smoking sheet metal as from a Rauschenberg anti-Futurist bricolage. Out of the corner of his eye, Faulques saw her working, pale, avid, between photos examining the scene around her with burning eyes, but never a word. Neither lament nor commentary; prepared and patient, like a dedicated student. Do what I do, he'd told her. Move the way I do. Make yourself invisible. Do not wear military or flashy clothing, do not step off the blacktopped roads, do not touch abandoned objects, do not stand motionless in doorways or windows, never lift a camera to the sun when airplanes or helicopters are flying over, and remember that if you can see a man with a rifle, he can see you. Don't ever hold your camera too near people who are weeping or suffering; they might kill you. The only thing about you they should be aware of, the first thing they should notice, is the sound of your shutter. Calculate your distance, focus, light, and frame before you get close, and do it discreetly; work in silence and disappear with caution. Before you go into a risky area, check out a way to leave, study the terrain, look for protected spots, go from one to the next in stages or dashes. Remember that every street, trench, hill, tree, has a good side and a bad side; make no mistake when identifying them. Don't complicate your life unnecessarily. And especially don't complicate mine.