The Painter of Battles

by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

  Olvido liked to be with Faulques, and she told him that. I like to watch how you move, alert as a fox, focusing in advance, mentally preparing the photograph you're going to take before you attempt it. I like seeing you in jeans you've worn out at the knees and shirts with the sleeves rolled up, see your hard, thin body and watch you change lenses or film while you're pressed against a wall and they're shooting at us, working with the same intensity a soldier has when he's changing the clip in his rifle. I like to watch you in a hotel room, one eye glued to the loupe, marking the best images on negatives held to the light against the window glass, or to see you spend hours over prints with your pica-pole and felt-tip pen, selecting the frame and writing instructions as you calculate where the editor is going to place the fold. I like it that you are so good at your work, and that tears have never caused you to miss what your camera is focused on. Or that's how it seems.

  She, too, was reasonably good when she was working; Faulques had discovered that on dangerous roads and at hostile checkpoints in the rain, in deserted towns threatening in their silence, where all they could hear was the crunch of their own footsteps over broken glass. Olvido was not a brilliant photographer, but she was conscientious and original in conceptualizing her image. Soon she began to reveal the right talents: instinct, and a technical coolness vital in extreme situations. She also had a knack for knowing how to be adopted by dangerous people, an essential quality when roaming about in wars with a camera. She was able to convince anyone without words, with just one of her elegant smiles, that it was to everyone's advantage to let her remain there as a kind of necessary witness. That she was more useful alive than dead, or raped. But almost immediately she stopped photographing people, or nearly so. They didn't interest her. She could, however, spend an entire day wandering around inside an abandoned house, or a village in ruins. Despite her fondness for buying trinkets she found behind the line of conflict—the faux or banal objects she collected with frivolous passion and then gave away or left behind everywhere—she never took anything, not a book, not a piece of china, not the spent shell of a bullet, taking only rolls and rolls of film, photographing everything. War, she said, is filled with found objects, her trouvés. It puts Surrealism in its place. It's like the meeting on the dissecting table between a human without an umbrella and a meat grinder.

  Faulques, who until then had almost always worked alone, and never with women—it was his opinion that they created problems in a war: among them, that men would kill you to get a woman—found that Olvido's company had professional advantages: she closed some doors but she opened others with her special talent for awaking men's protective instinct, admiration, and vanity. And she took advantage of it. The way she had in Ras al Khafji during the first GulfWar, when a flirtatious Saudi colonel not only let them wander wherever they wanted—they'd arrived from Dhahran without a permit, in a vehicle camouflaged with allied military markings—he also offered them coffee in the midst of a battle, and then asked Olvido where she would like him to direct the artillery, so she could get the best photos. She thanked him with elegance and a radiant smile, pointed toward something at random—the tall water tower occupied by Iraqis—and readied her camera fitted with a 90-mm lens. The amiable colonel had a chair brought for her so she would be comfortable, and had time to direct four cannons and a TOW missile at the place she'd chosen before a detachment of North American marines came rushing up, chewed out the colonel, and made them all leave. I want a child, she told Faulques that night as they were drinking fruit juice in the alcohol-free bar of Le Meridien Hotel, laughing uproariously as they remembered the day. I want one just for me; I will carry him in my backpack and bring him up in airports, hotels, and trenches. If I don't, what will I do when our sweet camaraderie comes to an end? That night they made love till dawn, in silence, uninterrupted even during a raid of Iraqi Scud missiles, not opening their mouths except to kiss, bite, or suck. And then, exhausted, she licked Faulques' body until she fell asleep.

  As for photographing things and not people, he had scarcely ever seen her focus on anything alive. Truth is in things, not in people, she said. But it needs us in order to be manifest. She was patient. She waited until the natural light was exactly as she wanted, and with time developed her own style. Later, in Barcelona—very soon she moved into the high-ceilinged flat he had near the Boquería—when she came out of the darkroom she would drop down on the rug, surrounded by all those black-and-white images, and spend hours marking details with a felt-tip, grouping images according to codes that only she knew and that Faulques never succeeded in penetrating completely. Then she would go back to the developing trays and the enlarger, and work on the parts of the photos she had marked earlier, blowing them up again and again in new frames, until she was satisfied. Things, Faulques heard her murmur once, bleed like people do. One of her obsessions was the photos she found in devastated houses. She photographed them just as they were, never touching or arranging them: stepped on, scorched by fires, hanging on the wall with curling edges, shattered glass, broken frames, open and torn family albums. Abandoned photos, she affirmed, are like pale spaces in a Tenebrist painting: they don't illuminate it, but they obscure the shadows. The first and only time Faulques saw her cry during a war was over an album in Petrinja, Croatia, twenty-two days before the ditch on the Borovo Naselje road. They found it on the floor, covered with plaster dust and wet from the rain leaking through the damaged roof, opened to two pages of photos of a family at Christmastime: parents, grandparents, four small children, and a dog, happy photos around a decorated fir tree and a table set with a festive meal: the same family, grandparents, and dog that she and Faulques had just seen outside lying in a puddle in the garden, a jumble of soaked clothing and raw flesh riddled with bullets and finished off by a fragmentation grenade. Olvido didn't take any shots there: she stood looking at the corpses, her cameras protected under her raincoat, and only when she went inside and saw the album on the floor had she begun to work. It was a very humid and stormy day, and her hair and face were covered with raindrops, so Faulques was slow to realize that she was crying, and noticed only when he saw her lower the camera and rub her eyes to dry away tears that prevented her from focusing. She had never spoken of that moment, nor had he. Later, when he was back in Barcelona, when everything was over and he was looking at the contact sheets Olvido hadn't had time to develop, Faulques found that by one of those singular symmetries with which chaos and its rules were so prodigal, she had taken exactly twenty-two frames of the photos pasted in the album: as many as the days she had left to live. He had checked that with a calendar in one hand and the contact sheets in the other, remembering. He hadn't been that dumbfounded since the time they'd returned from a trip to Africa—Somalia, the hunger and the killing were intense—and she'd spent a week in an industrial slaughterhouse, photographing sharp blades and great slabs of meat impaled on hooks, wrapped in plastic, and stamped with health department seals. All in black and white, as usual. Olvido had developed that strange body of work and kept it in a file on which she'd written: Der müde Tod. Weary Death. In those images, as in the war photos in which there was no human presence—at most, a dead foot with a worn-through shoe sole, a dead hand with a wedding ring—blood resembled the tongues of dark gray mud she had seen around the collapsed buddles at the Portman mine. Lava from a cold volcano.

  The silence in the tower was absolute. He could not even hear the sea. Faulques put away the photo they both appeared in—he and her ghost in the broken mirror—and closed the lid of the box. Then he drained his glass and went down the spiral staircase in search of something more to drink, feeling as if the steps were yielding beneath his feet. I hope, he thought fleetingly, that Ivo Markovic doesn't get the urge to visit me right now. The bottle was still sitting among the jars and brushes, asking no questions and adding nothing more than what Faulques brought with him. That's good, he told himself. It's the right thing, no question. Perfect. He poured more cognac, emptied it in one gulp, and
as he felt the alcohol burn his throat spoke Olvido's name aloud. An unusual name, he meditated. Deceptive word. Again he picked up the bottle, hazy, standing by the river of the dead, glimpsing on the other side slow-moving shadows surrounded by darkness and the black shadows of their shadows. The painter of battles studied the shadowy mural as he considered the paradox: some words committed semantic suicide, disavowing themselves. Olvido was such a word. From the dark shore of his memory, she watched him drink cognac.

  13.

  IVO MARKOVIC CAME BACK the next day at midmorning. When Faulques went outside to get water from the tank, he found him sitting beneath the pines on the cliff, gazing at the sea. Without a word, the painter returned to the tower and continued to work for a little more than an hour, putting the last touches to the warriors on horseback, until he considered that part of the mural finished. Then he went out again, squinting in the strong noon light flooding over everything, and washed his hands and arms; then, after thinking a moment, he walked to where the Croatian was sitting, still motionless in the shade of the pines. Between his boots were crushed-out cigarette butts and a plastic bag with ice and four cans of beer.

  “Beautiful view,” said Markovic.

  Both men observed the sweep of blue that opened in a fan toward the horizon: the Bocas de Poniente to the north, with Los Ahorcados Island and the dark, hazy gray outline of Cabo Malo reaching out to sea toward the southwest. It looked, Faulques thought, and not for the first time, like a Venetian watercolor. The effect of lights and fog was more evident in the late afternoon, when the sun began to go down behind the successive irregularities of the coast as they receded into the distance, different planes and tones ranging from charcoal to light gray.

  “How much do you think light weighs?” the Croatian asked suddenly.

  Faulques thought it over for a moment. Then shrugged his shoulders.

  “The same as darkness, more or less. About three kilos per square centimeter.”

  Markovic frowned an instant.

  “You're talking about air.”

  “Of course.”

  Markovic seemed to reflect on the answer. Finally he made a gesture that encompassed the scene before them, as if there were a relationship between one thing and the other.

  “I've been thinking over what we've been talking about all this time,” he said. “My photo, your enormous painting, and all the rest. And it may make sense. You may not be too far off when you talk about rules and symmetries.”

  After he said that he fell silent, then softly tapped his temple with a finger. I'm not very swift up here, he added. I need time to turn things over in my head. You understand?

  “I come from a family of peasants. People who never made decisions lightly. They studied the sky, the clouds, the color of the earth. . . . All those things determined the abundance of a harvest, the damage from bad weather, hail, freezes.”

  Again he was silent, still looking at the sea and the rugged coastline. Finally he took off his glasses and began to clean them with the tail of his shirt, thoughtful.

  “Chance as the name we put on our ignorance. Is that it?”

  It wasn't a question. The painter of battles sat down beside him, studying the Croatian's hands: wide, with short fingers and blunt fingernails. A scar on the right hand. After holding his glasses to the light, Markovic put them back on and was again taking in the view.

  “Really a beautiful sight,” he insisted. “It reminds me of the coast of my country. You know it, of course.”

  Faulques nodded. He knew the 557 kilometers of the curving road between Rijeka and Dubrovnik very well, the shoreline of cliff-lined coves and countless islands green with cypresses and white with Dalmatian stone peppering an Adriatic of quiet blue waters, each inlet with its little village, its Venetian or Turkish wall, its tall, pointed bell tower. He had also seen a part of that landscape demolished by cannon during the week Olvido Ferrara and he spent in a hotel in Cavtat, witnessing the spectacle of Dubrovnik under Serbian bombing. Some people argued that a war photograph was the only thing that could not arouse nostalgia, but Faulques wasn't sure about that. Every night after dinner during that time, Olvido and he sat on the terrace of his room, glasses in hand, watching the city burn in the distance, the flames reflected in the black waters of the bay as flashes and explosions lent the scene a mute, unreal, and distant flavor reminiscent of the background, red among the silhouettes and shadows, of a silent nightmare by Bruegel or Bosch. I know restaurants in Paris and New York, Olvido commented, where people would pay a fortune to have dinner overlooking a panorama like this. They sat there, the two of them, quiet, mesmerized by the spectacle, and at times the only sound was that of ice clinking in their glasses as they drank, distracted, with movements that the situation and the strange reddish light made exceptionally slow, almost artificial. From time to time a gentle land breeze blew from the northeast carrying the strong odor of burning, and also a muffled, syncopated thrumming like the beat of a kettledrum or rumbling of prolonged thunder. And at dawn, after they'd made love in silence and slept to the sound of the distant bombardment, Faulques and Olvido had coffee and toast as they watched the columns of black smoke rising straight up from the ancient city of Ragusa. He awoke one night to find her not at his side, and when he got out of bed saw her standing on the terrace, naked, her splendid body foreshortened in that light and stained with red from the far-off fires, as if Dr. Atl's brushes had slipped across her skin or as if the distant war were enveloping her, but with extreme delicacy. I'm taking a fire bath, she'd said when he put his arms around her from behind and asked her what she was doing there at three in the morning, and she had tilted her head to one side and rested it against his shoulder, never taking her eyes off Dubrovnik burning in the distance. Some people take sun baths or moon baths, like that Italian song about the girl on the tile roof. I'm taking a night bath, a fire-flames bath. And when he stroked her goose-pimply skin, tinted with a red tone that didn't warm because it was as distant and cold as light from a volcano hanging on a museum wall, or as the tortured land of Portman, Olvido stirred slightly in his arms, and he pondered for a moment the differences between the words “perdition” and “volition.”

  Ivo Markovic was gazing at the sea. I think that you're right, señor Faulques, he said. Truth corresponds to what you've said about the rules and the tiger's stripes and the hidden symmetries that suddenly are manifest and you discover that maybe they have always been there, ready to surprise us. And it's true that the least detail can change your life: a road you don't take, for example, or that you're slow to take because of a conversation, a cigarette, a memory.

  “In war, of course, all those things are important. A mine you miss stepping on by centimeters . . . Or that you don't.”

  He looked up toward the sky, and Faulques imitated him. Very high, almost invisible at six or seven thousand meters, they saw the minuscule glint off a plane that left a long straight vapor trail from east to west. They followed it with their eyes until the line, white on blue, was hidden behind the branches of the pines. Some call it chance, Markovic continued. But you don't really think it is. After I heard what you have to say, I only had to remember your photographs. Or look at that painting. I've already told you that I've been sniffing along your trail like a hunting dog for a long time.

  “And I think,” he concluded, “that I agree with you. If we set aside the natural disasters in which man has no part . . . Or at least ones he didn't intervene in, because now, with the ozone layer and all that . . . If we set those aside, I mean, it turns out that war is the best expression of how things are . . . Do I have it right?”

  He was staring at Faulques, very attentive, as if he had just posed a definitive question. Faulques shrugged. He still hadn't opened his mouth. Markovic waited a moment, and when he didn't get an answer he, too, shrugged, imitating Faulques. I guess so, he said. War as the sublimation of chaos. Order with laws disguised as a throw of the dice.

  “Is that what you truly
believe?” he persisted.

  The painter of battles spoke at last. He smiled a crooked smile, evidencing no sympathy at all.

  “Of course . . . It's nearly an exact science. Like meteorology.”

  The Croatian raised his eyebrows. “Meteorology?”

  You could know a hurricane was coming, Faulques explained, but not the precise point it would hit. A tenth of a second, one additional drop of humidity here or there, and everything would take place a thousand kilometers away. Minimal causes, imperceptible to the naked eye, gave rise to dreadful disasters. It had even been proposed that the invention of a certain insecticide had modified the mortality rate in Africa, changed its demography, put pressure on colonial empires, and altered the situation in Europe and the world. Or think of the AIDS virus. Or a chip that could transform traditional forms of work, cause social upheaval, revolutions, and changes in world hegemony. Even the chauffeur of a principal stockholder in a major company, running a red light and killing his boss in the accident, could unleash a crisis that would create havoc in world markets.

  “It's just more visible during wars. After all, wars are nothing more than life carried to dramatic extremes. Nothing that peace cannot contain, in small doses.”

  Markovic was regarding Faulques with renewed respect. When he paused, the Croatian nodded slowly, with an air of conviction. I understand, he said. I understand completely. And look, here's a coincidence. When I was a boy, my mother used to sing me a song. Something about those laws or links tied up with fate. Because someone was careless a nail was lost, for lack of the nail a horseshoe, for lack of the shoe a horse, and without the horse, a horseman. And in the end, because of all those things, a kingdom was lost.