The Painter of Battles

by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

  “You see it really isn't difficult. You just have to pay attention.” Faulques gestured toward the mural. “My structure is compatible with common sense.”

  Markovic's face lighted up.

  “So that's what it was.”

  “Of course.”

  “Your painting is filled with riddles, I think. With enigmas.”

  “All good ones are. Otherwise they'd be nothing but brushstrokes on a canvas or a wall.”

  “Do you think your painting is good?”

  “No. It's mediocre. But I intend for it to look like the ones that are.”

  The Croatian picked up his coffee cup, drank a sip, and looked at Faulques with a frown of interest.

  “So you're saying that every painting tells a story? Even the ones they call abstract; modern paintings and the rest?”

  “The ones that interest me do tell a story. Look.”

  He went to the books stacked on the stairway, chose three, brought them to the table, and leafed through the pages until he found what he was looking for. One illustration was of a painting by Aniello Falcone, a classic seventeenth-century painter of battles: Scene of Sacking Following a Battle.

  “What do you see in this painting?”

  Markovic looked closely, scratching his head. He set the cup of coffee on the table and lighted another cigarette. I don't know, he said, exhaling smoke. There had been a hard fight, and now the victorious soldiers are taking clothing and jewels off the dead. The horseman with the armor is the leader, and he seems merciless. He also seems to be claiming for himself the women they're about to rape. At that point, the Croatian looked at Faulques. I see a story, he said. You're right.

  “Now look at this painting,” Faulques said.

  “What is the painter's name?”

  “Chagall. Tell me what you see.”

  “Well, I see . . . Uh . . . A painting that's a little abstract, right?”

  “It isn't abstract. There are concrete human figures, objects. But all the same. Go on.”

  “All right. Well, it's . . . I don't know. Geometric like your mural there on the wall, although you don't exaggerate the angles as much or distort the look of persons or things. A man, a samovar, and a small couple dancing . . . Does that tell a story, too?”

  “It does.”

  “What is the painting called?”

  “Chagall put it at the bottom, in small letters: The Soldier Drinks. That soldier is Russian. He's come from the war, or is on his way to it, and he's so drunk that by now he can't tell vodka from tea. His cap has flown off his head; he's surprised to see a country girl he knows dancing on the table. And she's dancing, maybe, with the man who painted the painting.”

  Again Markovic scratched his brow, confused.

  “A strange story, anyway.”

  “Everyone tells things in his own way. Besides, I've already told you that the soldier is soused. Now look at this painting . . . How do you like it?”

  Markovic turned to it. He seems to be a capable fellow, Faulques thought. An interested and discreet pupil.

  “Well, it's stranger yet. It's like some of those paintings you see on the walls in some neighborhoods. In Italian, it says at the bottom. Whose is it?”

  “It was done by Jean-Michel Basquiat, a black Hispano-Haitian. He painted it in the eighties.”

  “It doesn't seem to be related to war.”

  “But it is. Not with cavalry charges, or drunken soldiers, of course. It tells of another war different from the one you and I think of when we hear the word. Though they're not really that different. Do you see those inscriptions, and the circle on the left? Money, blood, In God We Trust. Liberty as a registered trademark. That painting, too, is talking about war, in its way. The slaves rebelling against Rome. Barbarians painting on the walls of the Capitolio with aerosol cans.”

  “That part I don't understand very well.”

  “It's all the same. Doesn't matter.”

  A memory flitted through his mind, painful and swift. Olvido's last job before she went off with him to war had been to photograph Basquiat for the magazine One+Uno, a few months before the graphic painter lost it completely, between an overdose of heroin and Charlie Parker tapes. Leaving the book open to the page with the Basquiat painting, the painter of battles drained his coffee. It was cold.

  “Although in fact,” Markovic suddenly commented, “it may be that I understand what he wants to say.”

  He had turned and was looking at Faulques, smoking, musing. And there's something, he added, that I would like for you to understand, too, señor Faulques. Using your own arguments. I'm talking about the story of a specific picture, the one of me. When it comes down to my life, you played a part in a process that you didn't initiate but that you influenced with your famous prize-winning photo. A photo that destroyed my life. Now I know enough to agree that it wasn't entirely the work of chance, since there are circumstances that brought you and me to that exact moment on that exact day. And as a consequence of the process begun by you, by me, by whoever, I'm here now. To kill you. Don't forget that.

  Faulques held his gaze.

  “I don't forget,” he said. “Not for a minute.”

  The fact is, the Croatian continued in the same tone, that you can't hold any anger against me for that. You know? As I can't hold any against you. Just the opposite. I'm grateful to you for helping me understand things. From your point of view, the two of us are coincidences and determinations of those laws you mean to reflect in this tower after you tried, without success, to decipher them with your photographs. In fact, hatred and cruelty should have no place in this world. They're inadequate. Men destroy one another because the law of their nature, a serene and objective law, demands it. Isn't that true . . . ? In your opinion, intelligent people should kill one another when the time is right, like the executioner who carries out a sentence that means nothing to him . . . Is that it?

  “More or less.”

  Markovic's eyes were like ice water.

  “Well, I'm happy I've understood and that we're in agreement, because that is how I am going to kill you. There's nothing personal in it, really.”

  The painter of battles reflected on what he'd just heard. He was composed, as if he were considering the fate of a third person. To his surprise, he felt perfectly calm. The man before him was in the right: everything was as it should be. Right for the norms, or for the only norm. He looked at the painted wall and then again focused on his visitor. Markovic was serious, but nothing about him communicated threat or hostility. He seemed only to be waiting for an answer or a reaction. Expectant, tranquil. Courteous.

  “Do you see it the way I do, señor Faulques?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Of course, as the Croatian said then, it was more entertaining, thrilling, to kill out of good, solid hatred. More satisfactory, more common. With your blood boiling, howling with jubilation as you polished off your victim.

  “It's like alcohol or sex,” he added. “They're very calming. They bring relief. But for men like us who have spent a long time looking at the same scenery, that relief is a long way away. A broken razor in the rubble of a house, a bare mountain beyond barbed wire, the background of a painting you've been traveling toward your whole life . . . Places, remember, you can never go back to.”

  He looked around, as if to be sure he hadn't forgotten anything. Then he turned on his heel and went outside. Faulques followed him.

  “One of these visits may be different,” Markovic said.

  “I suppose.”

  The Croatian tossed his cigarette on the ground and meticulously crushed it out with the toe of a boot. Then he looked the painter of battles squarely in the eye, without blinking, and for the first time held out his right hand. Faulques hesitated a moment and finally took it in his. It felt rough, strong. A countryman's hand. Hard and dangerous. Markovic turned to leave but paused. You should go down to the village, he said suddenly, his air thoughtful. And meet that woman from the boat. There'
s not much time left.

  Faulques smiled. A gentle, sad smile.

  “And what will happen to the painting . . . ? Who will finish it?”

  Markovic revealed the gap in his teeth. His smile, almost timid, seemed an apology.

  “I'm afraid it won't be finished. But the important thing is that you painted it. As for the rest of it, we'll finish it, you and I. In a different way.”

  15.

  THE NEXT DAY FAULQUES WENT down to the village. He parked his motorcycle in a narrow street with no shade, squinting before the blinding perspective of white fronts of buildings stair-stepped down the hill toward the ochre mass of the ancient wall of the port. Then he went into the bank to take money from his account and on to pay his outstanding bill at the hardware shop where he ordered his paints. Then he slowly walked down to the fishing dock and lingered there awhile, looking at the boats tied up at the pier piled with nets. When behind him the clock in the town hall struck twelve, he went and sat beneath the awning of the nearest restaurant bar, the one that offered the best view of the inlet to the port and expanse of water, rippled by wind from the east, that reached to the gray line of Cabo Malo. He ordered a beer and sat there facing the sea and the empty pier where the tourist tender was usually docked, thinking about Ivo Markovic and about himself. About the last words the Croatian spoke before he left. You should go down to the village. And meet that woman. There's not much time left.

  Meet that woman. Almost unconsciously, the corners of Faulques' mouth lifted in a smile. There were no women left to paint in the great circular fresco in the tower. They were all there; the raped woman with bloody thighs, the women grouped like a frightened flock under the rifles of the executioners, the one with African features staring in her death throes at the viewer, the woman in the very front opening her mouth to scream a silent howl of horror. And also Olvido Ferrara, in all the corners and in all the lines of the vast landscape that would have been impossible to have noticed, or composed, without her. As, for instance, in that red, black, and brown volcano that served as the vertex of the mural, the point at which all the lines converged, all the perspectives, all the complex and merciless plot lines of life and its chance and coincidences ruled by rigorous lines as straight as the trajectory of sinister arrows from the quiver of Apollo. He who in the Trojan War, as he drew back the arrow in his murderous bow—a lethal combination of perennial curves, angles, and straight lines—moved like the night. Obedient to the inescapable thread spun by the Fates.

  Now I understand what you're looking for, Olvido had once commented. They were in Kuwait, an area only recently abandoned by Iraqi troops. They had gone in the day before with a mechanized North American unit, and were on the fifth floor of the Hilton; no electricity, no panes in the windows—they had plucked a key at random from behind the deserted counter of the concierge—with water from ruptured pipes running along the floor and down the stairs. They took off the spread covered with soot from burning petroleum and slept all night, exhausted, indifferent to the panorama of the burning oil wells and the booming of the last cannons. I understand at last, Olvido persisted—she was looking out the window, wearing one of Faulques' shirts and holding her camera in her hand as she gazed out over the city—and in the process I have invested time, kisses, and a lot of looking. Studying you as you move through catastrophes with the caution of a hunter, so reliable, so secure in what you are doing and not doing, as tight-lipped as an old soldier. Preparing each photo with your eyes before you make a move, evaluating in tenths of a second whether or not it's worth the trouble. Don't laugh, because that's what you do. I swear. And I also know what I know from feeling you explode in me as you hold me in your arms, how it is to have you there, deep inside me, finally relaxed in the only moment of your life in which you lower your guard. I see what you see. I observe you as you think before and after, but never while you're taking a photograph, because you know that otherwise you will never get it. My one doubt is whether I owe this horrible understanding of mine to contagion, as if it were some virus or secret and incurable illness. Whether I'm catching the war or if it was already in me and you have merely been the inciting agent, or witness. It's all something like what my grandmother—how well you two understood each other, the Bauhaus girl and the Zen archer—as she lined up her cauliflowers and lettuces in her garden, called gestalt: a complex structure that can be described only in its whole, as its parts are indescribable. Right? But you have a problem, Faulques. A serious problem. No photograph can capture what you're seeking. I am more practical, and I limit myself to collecting broken links: ruins with classic antecedents, a discovery of imbecilic, romantic literati revisited by still more imbecilic artists. But it isn't the aroma of the past that I'm looking for. I don't want to learn, or remember, only to cast off ties. Put in your psychopathic jargon, those deserted places, broken mechanisms and objects, are mathematical formulas that point the way. My way. A little flashing phosphorus in the meninges of the world. I don't pretend to solve the problem, understand it, or take it on. It's only a part of the journey toward where I am going: a place I will recognize when I reach it. Your case is different: you are in that place for your lifetime, and you were born suspecting it was there. But I doubt that you will see it this way. How many times have critics and the public judged photos of beauty? Remember the dead Che Guevara, as beautiful as a Christ in Freddy Alborta's photograph. The beauty of Salgado's outcasts, the beauty of Gerva Sánchez's mutilated children, the beauty of that African woman you photographed as she died, the beauty of the photos Roman Vishniac took in the ghettos of Poland, the beauty of the six thousand photographs taken by Ehem Ein, one of each prisoner, including children, who were going to be executed by the Khmer Rouge. The beauty of all those beautiful people we knew were going to die. No, my love. Do you remember that old Kodak ad? You press the button, we do the rest. In a world in which horror is sold as art, in which art is born with the hope of being photographed, in which coexisting with images of suffering has no relation to conscience or compassion, war photos have no meaning. The world does the rest: it appropriates them as soon as the camera shutter clicks. Clic, oop hah, thanks, ciao. At least a photo is more effective than a fleeting image on the television. It doesn't race by so indiscriminately. But not even there. It may be that for what you want to do, painting can offer that opportunity—but far away from the public and its interpretations. Painting has its own focus, frame, and perspective, qualities impossible to achieve through the lens of a camera. Although I doubt that any painter has ever achieved it all. Goya? Maybe. It isn't the same to make a transfer from reality to canvas as it is from retina to canvas. You know what I mean? It's one thing to reproduce an aspect of life, imitating it or interpreting it: pleasure, beauty, horror, pain, things like that. All that takes is a good eye, a matter of technique, and of talent. It would be something else to be guided by the fatalism of the retina. To paint horror with cold lines—she was still at the window, naked beneath the man's shirt, observing the umbrella of black smoke that covered the city, and from time to time half lifting her camera as if to take a photo, but immediately lowering it. A homicidal landscape where engendering executioners was no virtue. But let's see who the daring person is who sees that, and paints it.

  Faulques shut off that memory with a sip of the beer the waiter had just brought. Then he looked to the east, where the pier blocked out the sea. He heard the distant sound of engines coming from the other side of the breakwater, and at that moment saw a red-and-black smokestack moving along behind it toward the beacon at the port entry. A few moments later, the tender was crossing the inlet and preparing to dock near the terrace. After a quick, precise maneuver, a sailor leaped ashore to secure the mooring lines around the bollards and lower the gangplank, and some twenty passengers left the boat. The painter of battles watched with curiosity, trying to identify the woman with the loudspeaker as the tourists scattered. Finally a smaller group was left, and in it one woman stood out, still young, blond, tall,
strong, with a pleasant face. She was heading in the direction of the tourist office, wearing leather sandals and a white linen dress that emphasized her tan, with the strap of her large purse looped over her head and across her chest. She seemed tired. Faulques saw her open the office door and go in. He stayed where he was, watching the tourists as they moved along the dock shooting their last photographs or videos among the fishing nets beside the boats, with the background of the port and the open sea beyond the inlet.

  Tourists. Public. And again came memories. We do the rest, said the Kodak ad Olvido had referred to. The association made Faulques smile. For some time he had kept trying the photography, or almost. As a final objective, it would have resulted in a mixed and unsatisfactory formula, but it was actually a preparation, a warm-up, training for the project developing in his head. A way to sharpen his eye, obliging him to see photography and painting in a different light. After the change of course the ditch on the Borovo Naselje highway had imposed on his life—he had held back the secondary effects with two years of intense work that included Bosnia, Rwanda, and Sierra Leone—Faulques had left war photojournalism behind. The decision was made after a long, cumulative process: the raw earth of Portman, the black cloud over Kuwait, Dubrovnik burning in the distance and Olvido's body stained with red light, and even later, cold, solitary nights in a room with blown-out windows in the Sarajevo Holiday Inn, with a panoramic view of urban geometry outlined in explosions and fires, had all set Faulques on the path—with the inevitability of his straight and converging lines—to the hall of a tribunal. There, one winter morning at the midpoint of that war, a Bosnian Serb named Borislav Herak, an old member of the Boica brigade of ethnic cleansing, had related with meticulous coolness, massive executions aside, the story of his thirty-two personal assassinations—he had trained earlier by beheading hogs in a slaughterhouse—including the deaths of sixteen women, students, and housewives whom he, as his comrades had done to hundreds more, had raped and killed after taking them from the Sanjak hotel-prison that had been converted into a whorehouse for Serbian troops. And when before the tribunal and the journalists, Herak, with suitable mimicry, told of killing a young woman of twenty—“I ordered her to take off her clothes and she screamed, but I hit her again and she took them off, so I raped her and gave her to my companions, and after we all had raped her we took her in a car to Mount Zuc, where we shot her in the head and threw her into the bushes”—Faulques, who had Herak's head in his viewfinder, an insignificant, common face that in times of peace would have been considered almost pitiful, slowly lowered his camera without pressing the shutter release, with the certainty that no photograph in the world, not even the image and sound that the television cameras were recording, could reflect or interpret that reality. Geological amorality, Olvido had said once in regard to something else, although it may have been about the same thing: impossible to photograph the indolent yawn of the Universe. And that was how Faulques' thirty years as a war photographer came to an end. The inertia of those three decades carried him to other scenes of war for a time, but by then he had lost the last traces of his faith in what the lens showed, the old hope that had animated his fingers on the shutter release and rings for focus and aperture. Later—Olvido would never know how much she had had to do with it all—Faulques spent a lot of time wandering through museums, putting together a collection he was making of battle paintings and of the public viewing them, a strange series, the purpose of which he himself was gradually discovering. After an exhaustive labor of research and documentation, armed with the correct permissions and a Leica without flash or tripod, a 35-mm lens and the proper color film for shooting with natural light and at low speeds, the former war photographer sat for several days in front of each of the sixty-two paintings of battles he had chosen from a long list drawn from nineteen museums in Europe and America, and photographed a painting and the people he found before it, individual visitors and groups, students and guides, at moments when the room was empty or when it was so crowded that he could scarcely see the painting. He worked for four years, selecting, discarding, until he had gathered a last series of twenty-three photographs, ranging from the crazed eyes of a man knifing a Mameluke in The Second of May, barely glimpsed among the heads of the people thronging the Goya hall of the Prado museum, to Bruegel's Mad Meg in darkness, with the plundering warrior and his sword on one side, and on the other the profile of a scholar studying the painting in a nearly empty room in the Mayer van den Bergh museum in Antwerp. The final result of it all had been the collection entitled Morituri: his last published work. The shortest route between two points: from man to horror. A world in which the only logical smile was that of the skulls painted by old masters on canvas and board. And when the twenty-three photographs were ready, he realized that he, too, was ready. So he put down his cameras forever, called on everything he had learned about painting in his youth, and looked for the appropriate site.