The Painter of Battles

by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

  There was still much to be done—he had covered a little more than half of the painting sketched in charcoal on the white wall—but the painter of battles was satisfied. As for the morning's work, the beach beneath the rain and the ships sailing away from the burning city, that recently applied misty blue on the melancholy of the horizon, nearly gray between sea and sky, oriented the spectator's gaze toward hidden converging lines that connected the distant silhouettes bristling with metallic sparks to the column of fleeing soldiers, and especially to the face of a woman with African features—large eyes, strong line of brow and chin, hand about to cover those eyes—positioned in the foreground in warm tones that accentuated her proximity. But nothing comes out of you that you don't have inside, Faulques believed. Painting, like photography, love, or conversation, was like those rooms in bombed-out hotels—all the window glass broken, all the contents stripped—that can be furnished only with things you take from your own backpack. There were scenes of war, situations, faces, the obligatory photos that belonged to a different order of things: Paris, the Taj Mahal, the Brooklyn Bridge. Nine of every ten recent photographs observed the ritual, looking for the quick shot that would inscribe them in the select club of tourists of horror. But that had never been the case with Faulques. He didn't try to justify the predatory character of his photographs, like some who claimed they traveled to wars because they hated wars and went with the goal of bringing an end to them. Neither did he aspire to collect the world, nor to explain it. He wanted only to understand the code of the blueprint, the key to the cryptogram, so that his pain and all pains might become bearable. From the beginning, he had sought something different: the point from which he could become aware of, or at least intuit, the tangle of straight and curved lines, the chess-like scheme upon which the mechanisms of life and death were formulated, chaos in all its forms, war as structure, as fleshless skeleton . . . the gigantic cosmic paradox. The man who was painting that enormous circular painting, the battle of all battles, had spent many hours of his life seeking such a structure, like a patient sniper, whether on a terrace in Beirut, on the shore of an African river, or on a street corner in Mostar, waiting for the miracle that would suddenly, through his lens, sketch on the rigorously Platonic camera obscura of his camera and his retina the secret of that surpassingly complex warp and woof that returned life to what it really was: a perilous excursion toward death and nothingness. To reach these kinds of conclusions through their work, many photographers and artists tended to isolate themselves in a studio. In Faulques' case, his had been special. After abandoning a series of classes in architecture and art, he had at the age of twenty thrown himself into war, observant, lucid, with the caution of one exploring a woman's body for the first time. And until Olvido Ferrara walked into and out of his life, he had believed he would survive both war and women.

  Intently, he studied that other face, or rather, the stylized representation on the wall. She had been on the cover of several magazines after he had captured her face, almost by chance—the chance, he smiled crookedly, of the randomly precise moment—in a refugee camp in the south of Sudan. One day of routine work, of a tense and silent ballet, subtle dance steps among enervated children dying before the lenses of his cameras, bone-thin women with blank gazes, skeletal old men whose memories were their only future. And as he listened to the whirring of his Nikon F3 as it rewound, Faulques saw the girl out of the corner of one eye. She was lying on the ground on a rush mat, clutching a chipped jug to her stomach; she had put one hand to her face with a gesture of incalculable weariness. It was the gesture that caught his attention. With an automatic reflex he checked the film remaining in the camera slung around his neck, an old but solid Leica M3 with its 50-mm lens. Three exposures would be enough, he thought, as he began quietly to move toward the girl, attempting not to do anything that might cause her to alter the pose—an indirect approach Olvido would later call it, fond of applying cynical military terminology to their work. But just as Faulques got the viewfinder of the camera to his eye and was focusing, the girl noticed his shadow on the ground, moved her hand slightly, raised her head, and looked at him. He had snapped two quick exposures, pressing the shutter release as his instinct told him not to miss a look that might never be repeated. Then, aware that he had only one more chance to capture her face on the gelatin silver bromide of the film before it vanished forever, with his forefinger he brushed the ring that regulated the aperture, set it at the 5.6 he calculated for the ambient light, varied the angle of his camera a few centimeters, and snapped his last shot one second before the girl turned her face away and covered it with one hand. After that there was nothing more he could do, and five minutes later, when he came back with his two cameras loaded and ready, the girl's look was not the same and the moment had passed. Faulques traveled back with those three photographs in his thoughts, wondering if the developer would bring them out just as he thought he'd seen them, or remembered them. And later, in the red dusk of the darkroom, he anxiously awaited the emergence of lines and colors, the slow configuration of the face whose eyes stared up at him from the depths of the developer tray. Once the prints were dry, Faulques spent a long time in front of them, aware that he had been very close to the enigma and its physical formulation. The first two were less than perfect, a slight problem of focus, but the third was clean and sharp. The girl was young and ethereally beautiful despite the horizontal scar that marred her forehead and the lips cracked—like the cracks in the mural—by illness and thirst. And all of it—scar, lips, the fine, bony fingers of the hand just touching her face, the line of her chin and faint suggestion of eyebrows, the background of the mat's rhomboidal braiding—seemed to flow together in the brightness of her eyes, the reflection of light in the black irises, her unflinching and hopeless resignation. A moving, very ancient and eternal mask on which all lines and angles converged. The geometry of chaos in the serene face of a dying girl.

  2.

  WHEN FAULQUES GLANCED OUT the window on the landward side of the tower, he saw the stranger standing among the pines, looking toward the tower. Cars could come only halfway up the road, which meant another half hour on foot by way of the path that snaked up from the bridge. An uncomfortable hike at that hour, with the sun still high in the sky and without a breath of air to cool the small smooth rocks of the slope. Fine physical shape, he thought. Or a strong desire to call. Faulques stretched his arms to ease the kinks in his long skeleton—he was tall, heavy-boned, and his short gray hair gave him a vaguely military air—rinsed his hands in a basin of water, and went outside. The two men stared at each other a few instants amid the monotonous shrill of the cicadas in the undergrowth. The stranger had a knapsack over his shoulder and was wearing a white shirt, jeans, and hiking boots. He was regarding the tower, and its resident, with tranquil curiosity, as if he were trying to assure himself that this was the place he was looking for.

  “Hello there,” he said.

  An accent that could be from anywhere. The painter's response was an expression of extreme annoyance. He did not like callers, and to discourage them he had put up very visible signs along the path—one warned Vicious Dogs, though there were none—making it clear that this was private property. No one ever came this way. His only relations were the superficial contacts he maintained when he went down to Puerto Umbría: the clerks in the post office and city hall, the waiter in the bar where he sometimes sat on the terrace beside the little fishing dock, the shopkeepers from whom he bought food and supplies for his work, the director of the branch bank he'd transferred money to from Barcelona. He nipped in the bud any attempt at closer ties, and anyone who breached that line of defense was dispatched with surly inhospitality, for he knew that intruders are not discouraged by a simple, courteous dismissal. For extreme cases—that term included unsettling, though remote, possibilities—he kept a sportsman's pump shotgun that until then he'd had no occasion to take from its case; it was in the trunk on the second floor, cleaned and oiled, along wit
h two boxes of buckshot shells.

  “This is private property,” he said shortly.

  The stranger nodded phlegmatically. He kept studying Faulques from a distance of ten or twelve steps. He was heavyset, of medium height. His straw-colored hair was long. And he wore glasses.

  “Are you the photographer?”

  Faulques' discomfort grew stronger. This individual had said photographer, not painter. He was referring to a previous life, and that did not please Faulques at all. Least of all from the mouth of a stranger. That other life had nothing to do with this place, or with this moment. At least in any official way.

  “I don't know you,” he said, irritated.

  “You may not remember me, but you do know me.”

  He spoke with such aplomb that Faulques could do nothing but stare at the man as he moved a little closer, narrowing the distance between them to facilitate communication. The painter had seen many faces in his life, most of them through the viewfinder of a camera. Some he remembered and others he had forgotten: a fleeting look, a click of the shutter, a negative on the contact sheet that only sometimes merited the circle of the marker that would save it from being assigned to the archives. Most of the people who appeared in those photos evaporated among a multitude of indistinguishable features and a succession of scenes impossible to identify without a major effort of memory: Cyprus, Vietnam, Lebanon, Cambodia, Eritrea, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Angola, Mozambique, Iraq, the Balkans . . . Solitary hunts, trips with no beginning and no end, devastated landscapes of a vast geography of disaster, wars that blended into other wars, people who blended into other people, dead that blended into other dead. Countless negatives among which he remembered one in every hundred, in every five hundred, in every thousand. And that precise, unremitting horror that extended through the centuries, through history, prolonged like an avenue between two incredibly long, desolate, parallel straight lines. The graphic evidence that summed up all horrors—perhaps because there was only one horror, immutable and eternal.

  “You really don't remember me?”

  The stranger seemed disappointed. But nothing about him was familiar to Faulques. European, he concluded, studying him more closely. Husky, light eyes, strong hands. Vertical scar through the left eyebrow. A rather rough appearance, softened by the glasses. And that slight accent. Slavic, perhaps? The Balkans, or somewhere around there?

  “You photographed me.”

  “I've taken a lot of photographs in my lifetime.”

  “This one was special.”

  Faulques knew he was bested. He stuck his hands in his pants pockets, and shrugged his shoulders. Sorry, he said. I don't remember. The visitor smiled an encouraging half smile.

  “Try and remember, señor. That photograph earned you a lot of money.” He pointed to the tower with a quick gesture. “You may owe all this to it.”

  “This isn't much.”

  The intruder's smile widened. He was missing one tooth on the left side of his mouth; an upper bicuspid. None of his teeth seemed to be in very good shape.

  “Depends on your point of view. For some it's quite a bit.”

  He had a rather stiff, formal way of speaking. As if he were pulling words and phrases from a grammar manual. Faulques made another effort to recognize his face, without success.

  “That important prize you won,” said the stranger. “They awarded you the International Press prize for taking my photograph . . . Have you forgotten that, too?”

  Faulques looked at him with misgivings. He remembered that photograph very well, as well as everyone who appeared in it. He remembered them all, one by one: the three Druse militiamen, all on their feet, eyes blindfolded—two about to drop, one proud and erect—and the six Maronite Kataeb who were executing them at nearly point-blank range. Victims and executioners, mountains of the Chouf. Cover of a dozen magazines. His consecration as war photographer five years after having taken up the profession.

  “You couldn't have been there. The militiamen died, and the ones who shot them were Lebanese Phalangists.”

  The stranger wavered, disconcerted, never taking his eyes off Faulques. He stood absolutely still a few seconds, then shook his head.

  “I'm talking about a different photograph. The one at Vukovar, in Croatia. I always thought they gave you the prize for that one.”

  “No.” Now Faulques studied him with renewed interest. “The Vukovar photo was a different one.”

  “Was it important, too?”

  “More or less.”

  “Well, I'm the soldier in that one.”

  Faulques stood very quiet, hands still in his pants pockets, with his head tilted slightly to the right, again scrutinizing the face before him. And now, at last, as in the gradual process of developing a print, the image he carried in his memory slowly began to impose itself upon the features of the stranger. Then he cursed himself for being so slow. The eyes, of course. Less fatigued, brighter, but they were the same. As were the curve of the lips, the chin with a slight cleft, the strong jaw, now recently shaved, whereas in the old image it had been covered with a two-days' growth of beard. His recognition of that face was based almost exclusively on observation of the photograph he had taken one autumn day in Vukovar, in the former Yugoslavia, when Croatian troops, battered by Serbian artillery and Serbian ships bombarding from the Danube, were battling hard to hold the narrow defensive perimeter of the walled city. The battle was intense in the suburbs, and on the Petrovci road. Faulques and Olvido Ferrara—they had slipped in a week earlier by the only possible route, a hidden path through cornfields—had come upon the survivors of a Croatian unit that was falling back, defeated, after fighting with light arms against armored enemies. They were scattered, at the limit of their strength, dressed in a motley mixture of military uniforms and civilian clothing. They were farmers, officials, students mobilized for the recently formed Croatian national army, faces bathed in sweat, mouths open, eyes crazed with fatigue, weapons hanging from their straps or being dragged along the ground. They had just run four kilometers with enemy tanks right at their heels; now, under the reverberating sun, they were moving along the road at a lethargic, nearly ghostly, pace, and the only sound was the muffled rumble of distant explosions and the scraping of their feet over the ground.

  Olvido hadn't taken any photographs—she almost never photographed people, only things—but as they passed Faulques, he had decided to record this image of total exhaustion. He put the camera to his face, and while he fiddled with the focus, f-stops, and composition he let a couple of faces go by, then captured the third in his viewfinder, almost randomly: bright, extremely vacant eyes, features distorted by weariness, skin covered with drops of the same sweat that plastered his dirty, tangled hair to his forehead. He had an old AK-47 carelessly slung over his right shoulder and held by a hand wrapped in a dark, stained bandage. After the shutter clicked, Faulques had gone on his way, and that was all there was to it. The photograph was published four weeks later, coinciding with the fall of Vukovar and the extermination of all its defenders, and the image became a symbol of the war. Or, as the professional jury that awarded him the prestigious Europa Focus for that year concluded, the symbol of all soldiers of all wars.

  “Oh, my God! I thought you were dead.”

  “I nearly was.”

  They stood not speaking, looking at each other as if neither of them knew what to say or do.

  “Well,” Faulques murmured finally. “I admit that I owe you a drink.”

  “A drink?”

  “A glass of something. Alcohol, if you like. A beer.”

  He smiled for the first time, somewhat forced, and the stranger returned Faulques' smile, as before revealing the missing tooth. He seemed to be reflecting on something.

  “Yes,” he concluded. “Maybe you do owe me that drink.”

  “Come in.”

  They went inside the tower. Faulques' unexpected guest looked around, surprised, and slowly turned in place to take in the enormous circular
painting, while the painter of battles searched beneath the table piled with brushes, jars, and tubes of paint, then, on the floor, among cardboard boxes, sheets of sketches, ladders, frames and planks for scaffolding, two halogen 120-watt lightbulbs that, placed on a mobile structure with a shelf and wheels and connected to the generator outside, illuminated the wall when Faulques was working at night. Spanish cognac and warm beer, he said. That's all I can offer you. And there's no ice. The refrigerator runs only briefly, when I turn on the generator.

  His eyes still on the mural, the visitor gave an indifferent wave of his hand. Either, it was all the same to him.

  “I would never have recognized you,” commented the painter of battles. “You were thinner then. In the photo.”

  “I got even thinner.”

  “I imagine that those were bad times.”

  “You got that right.”

  Faulques walked toward him with two glasses half filled with cognac. Bad times for everyone, he repeated aloud. He was thinking of what had happened three days later, near the place where he'd taken the photo: a ditch along the Borovo Naselje road, on the outskirts of Vukovar. He handed the visitor a glass and took a sip from his own. It wasn't the most suitable choice for that hour, but he'd said a drink and this was a drink. The stranger—that wasn't a strictly applicable term by then, he thought suddenly—had taken his eyes from the mural and was holding the glass rather apathetically. Behind the lens of his spectacles, his light eyes, a very pale gray, were now focused on the painter.

  “I know what you're referring to . . . I saw the woman die.”

  Faulques was not given to showing his stupor, or to revealing emotions. But something must have been reflected in his face, for again he saw the black hole in the visitor's mouth.