The Painter of Battles

by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

  “I told you before: I hear your voice every day, at the same hour. Besides, you're a good-looking woman. If you'll allow me.”

  There was a silence, and she looked away. Again she was surveying the mural, but this time her thoughts seemed to be somewhere else. Then she looked at the painter of battles' hands with an indecisive air, as if awaiting some word or attitude, but Faulques neither spoke nor moved. She shifted a little. She seemed uncomfortable.

  “Thank you for showing me your work.”

  “I'm the one who thanks you for coming.”

  “May I come back sometime?”

  “Of course.”

  Carmen Elsken walked to the door, stopped at the threshold, and looked around. It's all so strange, she said. Like you. Then she faced him squarely, silhouetted against the light from outdoors, the Prussian blue eyes made slightly less blue by the surrounding white locked with his. And Faulques knew that if he took one step toward her, lifted his hand and slipped those straps from her tan shoulders, the dress would fall to her feet with nothing to stop it, and the external light would gild her naked body. He felt a slight shiver. Fleeting. There is a time for everything, he told himself. And this wasn't it. It couldn't be. He looked away, toward the floor, and lifted his shoulders slightly. Really, he thought with amazement, it wasn't hard at all to leave things as they were. Not now. So he walked past the woman—he could feel her amazement as he brushed past her, went outside, and waited for her to join him. She came slowly, studying him thoughtfully, and when she reached his side, she smiled, and her mouth opened to pronounce words that never passed her lips. Faulques accompanied her to the beginning of the path, shook the hand she held out to him, and watched her walk away. Before she was out of sight among the pines, Carmen Elsken turned twice to look back.

  When Faulques returned to the tower, the sun was lower in its slow descent over Cabo Malo, and the light through the doorway was lending a yellow glow to the white plaster on the opposite wall where figures somewhere between Bruegel and Goya—the frontier of atrocity seen through modern eyes—were sketched in charcoal on different planes at the foot of the erupting volcano: the man clubbing the wounded one to death with his harquebus, the one stripping the dead, the dog devouring cadavers, the executions, the torture wheel, the tree with bodies hanging like clusters of fruit. Evil beyond the control of reason and presented as man's natural instinct. The painter of battles stood rooted before the scene, studying it. Evil, Carmen Elsken had said with extraordinary lucidity, or intuition. That was the precise word, and now it was slithering through every twist and turn of Faulques' memory as he picked up his brushes and started working on that area of the mural, glimpsing out of the corner of his eye the Evil incarnate in the gaze of the soldiers, in that of the child sitting on the ground beside his mother. That childish and disturbing face was not the fruit of his imagination. It had an exact locus in space and time, in addition to graphic proof: page 42 of the photography book on the table. It held Faulques' simplest and most terrible photographs. A smiling child, an empty soccer stadium. But there had never been a war disaster as sinister as this.

  It had happened on the ill-defined Serbo-Croatian border, a little before Vukovar. The village was called Dragovac; an Orthodox church, another Catholic, a town hall, a sports stadium. A quiet country place. The Balkan conflict had passed through with no apparent noise; the one visible trace was the leveled property where the Catholic church had stood. For the rest, there was no house burned, in ruins, or with traces of combat or shooting. The inhabitants devoted themselves to their chores and seldom saw soldiers. Everything would have been nearly bucolic had one detail not intervened: the Croatians of Dragovac, about a hundred persons, had disappeared overnight. Only Serbians were left. Rumors were circulating of another slaughter, so Faulques and Olvido had provided themselves with Yugoslavian Army safe conducts and driven there by way of the highway that followed the Vrbas River. They reached Dragovac in the morning, when nearly everyone was working in the fields. They parked in front of the town hall and walked around without being bothered by anyone. There was no hostility, and no cooperation; people replied to every question with evasion or silence. No one knew anything about the Croatians, no one had seen Croatians. No one remembered them. The one incident occurred at the open space where the Catholic church had stood, when two militiamen wearing the Serbian eagle on their caps asked to see their papers. No photo, they were told. Verboten. Forbidden. At first Faulques was worried because they had said verbluten, and that meant to die by bleeding to death—later he considered that there wasn't much difference, and that maybe that's what they'd meant to say. A timely smile from Olvido, some cigarettes, and a little chat had cleared the air. Period, Faulques concluded. Let's go. They went back to the car, and were about to leave town when they passed the stadium. Not a soul in sight. Suddenly Faulques had a strange sensation and stopped the car. They sat there, Faulques with his hands on the wheel, Olvido with the bag of cameras in her lap, looking at each other. Then, without a word, they got out of the car and walked around. No one was there except a boy watching them from beside a dead tree. Something sinister was floating in the air, the absence of sound in the gray cement building, so somber and deserted that not even birds were flying above it. And when they walked beneath the arch of the entrance and came out on the bare soccer field, no grass, raw dirt, and that strange odor, Olvido stopped, shaking. They're here, she said in a low voice. All of them. That was when the boy joined them. He had followed them, and now went to sit close to them on one of the stadium steps. He must have been about eight or ten years old, and he was thin and blond, with very light-colored eyes. A Serbian boy. He had a rough wooden gun stuffed into the belt of his short pants. And then, before either Faulques or Olvido had spoken a word, the boy smiled. You are looking Croatians? he asked in schoolboy English. Then without waiting for an answer, his smile grew broader. In this town you will find none, he said, his voice contemptuous. Nema nichta. No Croatians here, never been any. Olvido shivered again, as if struck by a blast of cold air. He knows as well as you and I, she murmured. But Faulques shook his head. He knows better than we do, he said. And he likes it. That was when he raised his camera to focus on the boy; eyes icy as frost, and that merciless, evil smile.

  17.

  “I HOPE IT WASN'T TOO ANNOYING,” said Ivo Markovic.

  He was sitting on the steps of the spiral stair, hands crossed in his lap, enveloped in the reddish light coming through the west window. His attitude was peaceful and courteous, as usual. Nearly solicitous.

  “I thought, just between you and me, that the gun was a little too much. It tilted the balance of the situation . . . I don't know if you understand what I mean.”

  Faulques shrugged without answering. In fact, and to his amazement, what Markovic had just told him didn't matter much. He finished cleaning the brushes, sucked the tips, and put them away. He checked to see that all the jars of paint were closed, then looked at the Croatian.

  “I thought we were going to play fair,” he said.

  “Yes, as far as possible.” Markovic blinked behind the lenses of his glasses, as if what he had just heard embarrassed him. “Except that I want to be sure that it's fair on both sides.”

  “I don't imagine myself strangling you with my bare hands. I'm too old for that.”

  “You're being dramatic, señor Faulques.”

  The painter of battles couldn't avoid a sneer. Or maybe it was the trace of a smile. He shook his head, busied himself putting his painting utensils in order, and again stopped in front of Markovic. The Croatian had showed up a quarter of an hour before, cleanly shaven and wearing a freshly ironed shirt. He knocked at the door, asking permission to come in, and once inside took a good long look at the mural, and another, no less long, at Faulques. You've done more painting since I was last here, he said. The figures beside the door, the hanged men, and the rest. Really, you've been working hard. And look. This strange couple—pointing at Hector and Andromache�
��remind me of me telling my wife good-bye. Funny, isn't it? Paradoxes of life. She was crying because she was afraid I'd be killed, and then she was the one who died. With the boy. And here I am. Markovic repeated pensively the And here I am, and stood looking at the three cigarette butts Faulques had just put on the table. He seemed completely absorbed, and then he touched his nose. It's true, he said. I took the liberty of coming this morning while you were down in the village. I wanted to take a look. I spent some time admiring your work. There are things I needed to think about, alone, before this painting. And let me tell you this: I don't know if it's good, but it makes you think. It says a lot about you. And about me. Then I was indiscreet, and looked through your things. Upstairs I found the shotgun and shells. I threw all of it over the cliff before I left.

  Faulques had finished arranging his things, ending up before Markovic, who was still sitting on the step. With calm, deliberate movements, he went to the table, took a knife from the drawer, and placed it among the painting utensils: a strong, threatening diver's knife, its blade a little rusted. The Croatian followed every movement with his eyes.

  “The bad thing about memories,” he said finally, “is that they can turn you into a prophet. Don't you agree? Even you yourself.”

  He said this in an enigmatic tone. He seemed to be awaiting a nod of agreement, a gesture of complicity. After a pause he took out a pack of cigarettes and put one between his lips.

  “Have you ever imagined a crazed mole, señor Faulques?”

  He bent his head to light the cigarette and then sat staring at the lighter, turning it over and over. Finally he put it back in his pocket.

  “When I got out of the concentration camp and learned the news about my wife and son, that's how I felt. Like a crazed mole digging in every direction, with no objective. Until I thought of you. That led me back to sanity. To light.”

  He contemplated Faulques with a friendly expression. Grateful. Faulques shook his head.

  “Your sanity is debatable.”

  “Don't say that. I'm so sane that I amaze myself. Thanks to what you did to my life, I've become aware of the role we all play in this painting. Truthfully, I'm grateful. Very.”

  He pulled a few times on his cigarette, reflecting, and then got up and walked toward the mural. Also, he said, I've learned a few things. For example, that once something's done it can never be undone, or remedied. You can only pay the price. The penance. I hope that you've learned that, too.

  “And tell me . . . why did you paint that woman with her head shaved? Isn't the rape enough? The blood on her thighs and the little boy seeing it?”

  He seemed preoccupied with that. Truly upset. Faulques walked over to him. They stood side by side, studying the painting. Professional distortion, said the painter of battles. I suppose. A photographer's reflexes. Women with shaved heads, women violated.

  “Do you know those old photos of the liberation of France? In a photograph it's nearly impossible to tell if the woman was raped. You have to explain it, and then the image doesn't work. And it's the same if you paint it. A woman with a shaved head is more dramatic. It allows the imagination to work better.”

  Markovic reflected on that, and showed his agreement. You're right, he said. Dramatic. Smoke made him squint as he leaned over to study the image on the wall more closely.

  “There's something disturbing about that woman,” he commented. “Maybe her . . . I don't know how to say it. Animality? She seems almost inhuman, if I can say it that way. Those naked thighs, the belly. There's something about her that's more animal than human.” He looked at the painter with renewed respect. “That isn't accidental, is it? That isn't incompetence on your part.”

  Faulques made a vague gesture.

  “I'm not a talented painter. But maybe what you say is true. Violence, any violence, turns the person subjected to it into a thing, a piece of animal flesh . . . I think you will agree.”

  “I do. From experience.”

  Markovic moved along the circular wall that the light from the west was darkening in a few places and turning red in others. He stopped at the man who was clubbing the dying man. The body on the ground, barely sketched, was nothing more than a few gray and ochre lines. A formless face.

  “Someone said,” commented Markovic, “that the person who hits, who tortures, who kills, becomes an irrational animal himself . . . What's your opinion on that? Do you believe that you can think and beat someone at the same time?”

  Faulques meditated on that a moment. Or seemed to be meditating.

  “They're compatible,” he said. “Killing and thinking.”

  “Like that sniper of yours? The artist of the rifle.”

  “As one example.”

  “Once I read that there is nothing intelligent in the act of killing.”

  “The person who said or wrote that is not well-informed.”

  Markovic nodded. I believe that too, the gesture said.

  “And how are you doing? Have you thought over the things I've been telling you? I mean whether you feel you're an accomplice or a participant in your painting . . . Do you think someone can think and photograph at the same time?”

  “What I think is that you talk too much. I'm beginning to regret not having that shotgun.”

  “You have the knife.”

  “That's not the same.”

  Now Markovic laughed, pleased. A frank, sincere laugh. He drew the last drag on his cigarette, crushed it out in the mustard jar, and laughed again. Then once more he stood looking at the mural, and after that pointed to The Eye of War, still on the table. Two of your photos are very well-known, he said. They're in that book. From Africa. A man who's being beaten by several people and then hacked with machetes before your camera. You know the ones I mean?

  “Of course. Freetown, in Sierra Leone. The man they killed there. One photo shot before and the other afterward.”

  Markovic nodded, satisfied. It was interesting, he said, to compare those two photos with images on a TV program he'd seen about war photographs. He didn't know whether Faulques knew, but he, too, appeared in that report, in a sequence recorded at the time of the event. In your first photo you see how the victim was being beaten and hacked with machetes, and in the second you see him lying on the ground, bleeding, badly slashed. However, in the television footage shot from a greater distance, you could see Faulques shooting the first photo, and then on his knees, asking them not to kill the man. In a posture like praying, or pleading.

  The painter of battles' mouth twisted.

  “I wasn't convincing.”

  It certainly wasn't among his best memories. If all wars were a road to hell, Africa was the shortcut. Chac, chac. That sound of machetes striking flesh and bone was another thing he hadn't been able to photograph, not even paint. Certain sounds were perfect in themselves, and had their own color: the tempered green in the middle and long tones of the violin, the dark blue of the night wind, the gray of rain drumming on the window. But that chopping sound was impossible to compose on the palette. Its features were lost, like planes in Cézanne's colors.

  “You didn't, it's true, convince them.” Markovic was watching him closely. “Although I confess that I was surprised to see you do it. I'd thought you were an indifferent witness.”

  “There's your answer. Sometimes photographing and thinking are compatible.”

  “At any rate, you kept working. You took the second photo after the man was dead at your feet . . . Had it occurred to you in the interim that maybe they killed him because you were there? That they did it so you would photograph it?”

  The painter of battles didn't answer. Of course he'd thought of it. He'd even suspected that that's exactly what had happened. Now he knew that no photograph is inert, or passive. They all had an influence on the surroundings, on the people they framed. On each of the infinite Markovics whose lives the camera appropriated. That's why Olvido photographed only places and objects, never persons; she had been the subject of cameras for to
o long not to know the dangers. The responsibilities. In the time they had traveled together through wars, it was she who succeeded in keeping herself on the margin, not Faulques.

  “Do you think that kneeling down for ten seconds redeems you?” Markovic persisted.

  Faulques slowly returned to the present: the tower, the man at his side examining the mural. Those photographs the Croatian had been talking about. After thinking it over for a moment, Faulques gestured with upturned palms.

  “There were times my camera prevented things.”

  Markovic clicked his tongue, doubtful. Then he in turn seemed to reflect, and he made a gesture that rectified his reaction. Maybe, he concluded finally, Faulques wasn't actually proud that he had prevented something. But maybe he wasn't sorry for the times he hadn't, either. He was thinking, for example, of those kids he had photographed in Lebanon, attacking a tank.

  The painter of battles looked at the Croatian with surprise. That individual had done his homework.

  “I told you, you're my broken razor.” Markovic tapped his forehead with one finger. “I've had a lot of time . . . You remember that photo?”

  Faulques remembered. On the outskirts of Beirut, four very young Palestinian children had left their cover so he would photograph them attacking an Israeli Merkava tank with a handheld RPG grenade launcher. The tank's turret had swung around like a lazy monster, fired its cannon, and killed three of the boys. Front page on the world's newspapers. David against Goliath, and so on. One child left standing in the dust in front of the tank, grenade launcher on his shoulder, looking with bafflement at his three dead companions. Faulques knew that if he hadn't been there with his cameras, it would never have happened. Or not that way. Apparently, Markovic thought the same thing. The painter of battles wondered how much time the Croatian had dedicated to studying each of his photos.

  “You know what I think now?” Markovic asked. “That photographing people is the same as raping them. Beating them. It tips them out of their normal course, or maybe puts them back on it, I'm not sure which . . . It also obliges them to confront things that weren't in their plans. To see themselves, to know themselves in ways they would never have done otherwise. And sometimes it forces them to die.”