The Painter of Battles

by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

  “Now you're the one who's being dramatic. It's simpler than that.”

  The gray eyes grew smaller behind the lenses of the spectacles.

  “You believe that?”

  “Of course. The influence of the camera is minimal. Life and its rules are present. If those boys hadn't been there, if you hadn't been there, it would have been someone else . . . An ant that gives itself too much importance. It's all the same which ants a man steps on. From below it will always appear to be God's shoe, but what kills them is geometry. The footsteps of Fate on a strictly regimented chessboard.”

  “Oh, now I understand what you're saying.” Markovic shot him a malicious look. “That eases your conscience, doesn't it?”

  “Of course. There's no way to ask an accounting of anyone. Futile to go there and beat someone's face to a pulp . . . Besides, remember how I got that shot, without a telephoto lens, with a 35-mm lens and from the level of a man's head. That means that I was close to those boys when the tank fired. And I was standing up.”

  Neither of the two spoke. Markovic was now studying the beached boats and the ones sailing away through the rain. The innumerable little figures heading toward them, leaving the burning city. Fire and rain, the tension of opposites giving vigor to nature and direction to life, warm colors shrouded with polyhedral, steely, cold forms. And that axis of conquerors, ships, and warriors, different from that of the conquered, a question of angles and perspective, the vertex in the city, one diagonal leading to the raped woman and the boy, stabilizing the line of refugees. All so serene. The eye of the observer was drawn first to Hector and Andromache, then slid naturally toward the battlefield, through the horsemen battling below the indifferent volcano, and, after passing through the devastations of war, ended at the dead boy and the living boy, the latter the victim and also the future executioner of himself—only the dead children were not tomorrow's killers. Despite their rawness, the disasters of war were confined to the middle distance, boxed in by the colors and forms that surrounded them, and the eye stopped for a moment on the warriors waiting to join in the combat, on the soldier in iron, on the woman at the head of the line of refugees, on the thighs of the woman lying on the ground. And finally, completing a triangle, on the volcano, equidistant between the city in flames, to the left, and the other city waking in the fog, unaware of living its last day.

  The composition was good, Faulques decided. Or at least reasonably good. Like music to the ear, it forced the eye to look unhurriedly where it should look. Leading you by the hand from the evident to the hidden, that framework of lines and shapes upon which the figurative—people, enigmas distilled into physical manifestations—fitted together with somber intensity, kept everything within natural limits. Prevented abuse, the scream. Excess. It refuted the apparent chaos. On Faulques' mental palette, that painting had the weight of a blue circle, the drama of a yellow triangle, the inevitability of a black line. Because—Olvido pointed out once, although surely it was stolen from someone—an apple could be more terrible than a Laocoön. Or a pair of shoes, she had added later, when she saw a man, with his crutches propped against the wall, polishing his one shoe on a street in Maputo, in Mozambique. Remember, she said, Atget's disturbing photographs in Paris: old shoes lined up on shelves, waiting for owners that seem impossible. Or those of the hundreds of shoes piled up in Nazi extermination camps.

  “How strange,” Markovic commented. “I always thought that painters beautified the world. That they softened ugliness.”

  Faulques didn't answer. It was all a question, he was thinking at that moment, of what the observer had in his mind as he looked, or of what the artist put in the viewer's head. Shoes or apples. Even the most innocent of these could suggest a labyrinth, with Ariadne's string twisting inside like a worm.

  “You know what I think, señor Faulques? That you don't do yourself justice. You may be a very competent painter, after all.”

  Now Markovic moved, turned in a circle, checking the windows, the door, the upper floor. He seemed to have a mental plan of it all. A last review.

  “I'm sure that anyone who comes into this tower, even if he doesn't know what you and I know, will feel a certain uneasiness.” He suddenly looked at Faulques with courteous interest. “How did the woman who was here feel?”

  For a moment, the two men's eyes locked. Then the painter of battles smiled.

  “Uneasy, I suppose. To a certain point. She said this was evil, and terrible.”

  “See? That's what I mean. Then you're not as bad a painter as you say you are. Despite all the angles and so many straight lines and so many long shadows . . .”

  He lifted his arms, his gesture taking in the totality of the mural. Finally he dropped his hands to his sides.

  “Circular, like a trap,” he frowned. “A trap for crazed moles.”

  He looked at Faulques with affection. An affection that the light gray eyes, behind the glasses, made ironic, or cold. The painter of battles shuffled the words “cold” and “affection,” attempting to reconcile them in his mind, as he would on a palette. He gave it up, but Markovic was still staring at him, and that was exactly the look. Somehow, the Croatian murmured, I'm proud of you.

  “Sorry?”

  “I say I'm proud of you.”

  Silence. Markovic's gaze still hadn't changed.

  “And I, señor Faulques, am waiting for you to be proud of me.”

  The painter of battles rubbed the back of his neck. Perplexed was not the exact word. In fact he understood perfectly what the other man wanted to say. What stunned him were his own sentiments.

  “It's been a long road,” he conceded.

  “As long as yours.”

  Now Markovic was observing the mural. I believe, he added, that there isn't much more to say. Except that you may want to tell me about that last photo.

  “What photo?”

  “The one you took of the dead woman on the Borovo Naselje road.”

  Faulques looked at him, impassive.

  “Let's call this off now,” he said. “It's time for you to go.”

  The Croatian tilted his head slightly, as if to assure himself that he'd heard correctly and that everything was in order. That everything was as it should be. Then he nodded slowly, took off his glasses to clean them with his shirttail, and put them back on.

  “You're right. That's enough.”

  It sounded like anticipated nostalgia, the painter of battles thought. Two men accustomed to each other, on the verge of parting. To his deep surprise, he felt extremely calm. Things were going along as they should. At their own time and rhythm. For a moment he wondered what Markovic would do afterward, without him. Without the broken straight razor buried in his brain. At any rate, it wasn't going to be Faulques' problem.

  The Croatian took his time going to the door. He did it almost as if he didn't want to go. He stopped there and lifted his hands to light another cigarette with Faulques' lighter, then nodded toward the mural.

  “Take your time, señor painter. You may still be able . . . I don't know. Some of it isn't finished.” He turned toward the stand of pines near the edge of cliff. “I'll be out there, waiting. Take the whole night. Does that seem all right? Till dawn.”

  “Sounds all right to me.”

  The late afternoon light was shining, very low, through the pines, surrounding Markovic with a reddish atmosphere that seemed to blend with the painted light of the scenes on the wall. Faulques saw him smile, sadly, cigarette between his lips, saying good-bye to the mural with one last, long look.

  “What a shame you can't finish it. Although, if I've understood correctly, that may be the point.”

  18.

  ALL THE COLORS OF a shadow could be transmuted into the color of that shadow, and this one was red: yellow and carmine and a little more yellow, adding a touch of blue to suggest the color of blood, of the gummy mud on the bottom of boots, of crumbled bricks, of the glass covering the ground and reflecting nearby conflagrations, of horizon
s with blazing petroleum wells, of cities black against explosions of light, the background of impossible paintings that nonetheless seemed extremely realistic. It was, in sum, the shadow of the volcano, or rather, of the objects it illuminated, both its irregular sides foreshortened in the splendor of the crater lording over all from its lethal, Olympian apex, from the upper vertex of the triangle, tinting everything around it with red symmetry.

  Inside the tower there was no sound but the droning of the generator outdoors and brushes rasping against the wall. The painter of battles was working feverishly by the light of halogen bulbs. He stopped for an instant, mixed a brownish carmine, burnt sienna, and a little Prussian blue to obtain a warm black, and immediately applied that to emphasize the edges of the zigzagging wounds, like red and ochre lightning flashes, opened in the sides of the volcano. He backed up—when he touched his face he left paint on the stubble on his chin—observed the result, and turned with anxiety toward the part of the mural in the shadows. The bodies hanging in the trees, one of the two armies battling on the plain, some ships to the right of the door, and a section of the modern city were still charcoal sketches on the white plaster. Trying not to think of that—one night didn't give him much time—Faulques went back to his work. The volcano was finished, or nearly so. That completed three parts of the planned mural.

  He chose a medium round brush and on a clean corner of the tray quickly mixed white, yellow, a little carmine, and a dot of blue. Then, again approaching the wall, with the resulting color he prolonged one of the cracks on the side of the volcano, giving it the look of a road, a path, and edged it on both sides by mixing grays and blues directly onto the wall. The long, thick stroke—he hadn't time to work it in detail—gave the road an odd appearance. It was a road that in truth led nowhere; it emerged from the crack in the volcano and died here where it met white plaster. It had not figured in Faulques' plans, nor was it sketched on the wall. The effect, nonetheless, was good. It introduced a new axis, an unexpected variant, an exceptional line running from that volcano to the one hanging on the wall of the Museo Nacional de Arte in Mexico, to the green eyes that had met Faulques' when he was looking at that painting for the first time. To Faulques himself, standing there observing Olvido Ferrara walk into his life. A menacing road that ran ahead as straight as the line of a shot, passing through the landscape on the wall to a certain place in the Balkans.

  What the hell. Surprised, the painter of battles paused and drank a sip of the cold coffee remaining in the cup sitting atop The Eye of War. Reflecting on volcanoes and roads. There wasn't time for anything new, he told himself. Every area of the mural had been meticulously planned before being transferred to the wall, and he'd not foreseen that particular variant; he did, however, see that it fit as if the space had been reserved for it from the beginning. The painter of battles drained the coffee, confirming that in his head, in the eyes contemplating the mural, in the paint-stained hands and the wet brush, unexpected possibilities emerged. Hidden nuances that may always have been there. Paradoxically, those new strokes venturing into the part as yet unpainted—or the bare space itself—seemed to materialize and confirm what had been painted on the rest, in the same way that a handful of sand sifting through your fingers until it disappeared would perhaps be a suitable artistic concept for the word “sand.”

  The pain sent its warning again, issuing from his gut. The painter of battles didn't move for a couple of seconds, lying in wait for it, and when the warning was confirmed he barely smiled to himself, with the perverse malice of knowing things the pain didn't know. In any case, Faulques was not disposed that night to concede anything to it; he didn't have time. So he cut it off immediately, almost precipitously: two tablets, a sip of cognac from a glass. He set the bottle on the table among the jars and brushes and after a moment's hesitation picked it up again and drank directly from the bottle. Then he went outdoors and propped himself against the exterior wall, feeling the coolness of the night breeze as he waited for the medication to take effect. He watched the stars and the distant reflection from the lighthouse slashing across the cliff. At some moment, among the luminous dots of the fireflies flitting beneath the dark mass of the pines, he thought he saw the red glow of a cigarette.

  When the last thrusts of pain faded, Faulques went back inside the tower, feeling the gentle chemical lucidity of the sedative dissolved in his stomach. Prepared to renew his work, he again reviewed the part of the mural that wasn't finished. Suddenly he saw something he'd not seen before. A different, more heterodox and daring work had slipped in there, he discovered with great surprise. A white space in which what was incomplete, absent, was a confirmation of its very presence. Motivated by this intuition, he put down the brush—without rinsing or drying it, just as it was—and worked at obtaining the effect he wanted by coating the thumb of his right hand with the mixture on the palette. Then he rubbed the paint the length of the recently created road, making it into an inexorable river of long meanderings, of stream beds and tiny offshoots difficult to perceive at a glance. He kept working with his hands, without brushes. Now he was applying paint with his fingers—white, blue, yellow, white—obtaining unique greens similar to the morning light on a meadow, grays like the asphalt of a highway plowed up by shrapnel, dirty blues of a sky clouded by the smoke from burning houses. And a green as liquid as the eyes of the woman he remembered in that landscape, jeans tight over her long legs, khaki safari jacket, blond hair combed into two braids held by rubber bands, the bag with her cameras over her shoulder and one across her chest. Olvido Ferrara walking along the Borovo Naselje road.

  She had said something that very morning. She said it as they were checking the equipment after spending the night curled up together under an archway on a patio near the main street of Vukovar that seemed to be sheltered from Serbian mortars. They'd been bombing the immediate areas: several times flashes illuminated the broken roof tiles of nearby buildings, but three hours of silence had followed. The two photographers got up at dawn, when the first light was creating a chiaroscuro-like glaze over everything, and it was then that Olvido had looked around—fronts of deserted houses, bits of brick and glass scattered everywhere—and she had spoken without looking at Faulques, as if expressing aloud a thought that was deep inside her. It's more a matter of imagination than of optics, she'd said. Then she fell silent, glancing around that somber place, the camera body open in her hands, the film half loaded. She closed the camera back with a clic, started the winding motor, and smiled at Faulques, distracted, as if everything that was in her head at that moment was somewhere far away. Those guys, she added suddenly, that Géricault and Rodin, were right: only the artist is truthful. Photography is what lies.

  Later that morning, Faulques could hear Olvido's white sneakers crunching on gravel—the road was pocked with holes from artillery—as he walked along the other side, the two loaded cameras in his hands, eyes on the terrain and on the crossroad ahead, an open area they would have to pass through to get to Borovo Naselje. A group of Croatian soldiers preceded them and another group followed. Shots from automatic weapons rattled in the distance: a muffled crackle chorused by beams of the burning roof of a nearby house. There was also a dead Serbian soldier in the middle of the road, killed the day before by one of the mortars that had left star-shaped depressions in the road. The Serb was on his back, his clothing shredded by shrapnel, covered by the same gray dust caked on his closed eyes and open mouth, his pockets turned inside out, and his boots missing. Beside him were things disdained by the pillagers: a green steel helmet with a red star, an empty wallet, a few documents scattered about him, a key ring, a ballpoint pen, a wrinkled handkerchief. As he drew near the corpse, Faulques considered the possibility of a shot with the burning house in the background. So he calculated the light at 1/125 shutter speed and the aperture at 5.6, and readied the Nikon F3, and as he drew near he paused an instant, knee on the ground, and framed the body: legs spread open in a V, shoeless feet with one toe poking throug
h a hole in a sock, arms outspread with his rejected belongings scattered nearby, the burning house to the left making another angle with the road. What there was no way to photograph was the buzzing of flies—they won all the battles—or the odor, evocative of so many other odors and buzzings, flies and stench among bloated bodies in Sabra and Shatila; hands bound with wire in the dumping grounds of San Salvador; in Kolwezi, trucks offloading cadavers pushed out by mechanical blades: zumzumzum. A clever photographer, someone had once said, could photograph anything well. But Faulques knew that whoever said that had never been in a war zone. It was impossible to photograph the danger, or the guilt. The sound of a bullet as it bursts a skull. The laugh of a man who has just won seven cigarettes by betting on whether the fetus of a woman he just disemboweled with his bayonet is male or female. As for the corpse of the shoeless Serb, maybe a writer could have found a few words. For the flies, for example. Zumzumzumzumzumzum. The smell was another thing. Or the unrelieved loneliness of the dead, dust-covered body: no one brushed the dust off a cadaver. Only the artist is truthful, Faulques remembered. And told himself that maybe it was true, that photography could have been truthful when it was naïve and imperfect, in its beginnings, when the camera could capture only static objects, and cities on old plates appeared as deserted scenes in which humans and animals were merely glimpsed, hazy, phantasmal traces very like those of a later photograph taken in Hiroshima on August 6, 1945: on a wall the hint of a human silhouette, and a stairway dissolved in the deflagration of the bomb.

  When he lowered his camera, Faulques saw that Olvido had stopped on the other side of the road in order not to interfere with his shot, and that she was watching him. He got up and crossed the road toward her, and as he did so noticed that she did not take her eyes off him, as if she were studying his every movement, his every gesture, his every expression. In recent days he had caught her several times looking at him like that, first it had been furtively, then openly, as if she were trying to engrave in her memory everything about him, all the images of that stage of a long and strange journey she was about to end. A journey for which she already had a return ticket in her pocket. Faulques was feeling infinitely sad and cold. To hide this he looked around: the soldiers moving toward the crossroad, the burning house. Overhead was a cloudless sky, and a sun that hadn't as yet reached a height that made it difficult to shoot photographs and was casting Olvido's shadow on the loose gravel of the road, its roughness deforming her silhouette. For an instant, Faulques thought of trying a shot of that flawed shadow, but he didn't do it. It was then that Olvido saw a torn, faded notebook on the ground. A school notebook with blue covers, missing some pages, lying open on the grass. She raised her camera, took two steps forward, looking for the frame, took another step to the left, and stepped on the mine.