Ivo Markovic, for that was his name—Faulques had no reason to doubt it—had forgotten to take the cover of Newszoom that featured his photograph. The painter had realized this when he turned on the portable gas lamp. He looked for his empty glass in order to fill it again, and saw the page spread out among the cans of paint, dirty rags, and preserve jars filled with brushes. Although it was more likely that it hadn't been an oversight, but something as deliberate as leaving the worn copy of The Eye of War, which was on the seat the visitor had occupied as they talked. I need for you to understand a few things, he'd said. Then I will be ready to kill you. And on, and on.
Maybe it was the cognac, the painter of battles thought, its effect on the heart and the head, that had mitigated the sensation of unreality. The unexpected visit, the conversation, the recollections and images unfolded with evidence as strong as the cover photo and the book of his images of war, seemed to have taken their place, with no undue discord, in the familiar landscape. Even the vast concave painting—Faulques was at that moment sitting with his back against its exterior wall—and the night that was enveloping everything, had reserved appropriate locations, corners, perspectives in which to position—like a prestidigitator before his rapt audience—the things the visitor had taken from his pack as the fading light turned first crimson, then a deeper shade, until finally darkness erased their surroundings. To the surprise of the erstwhile photographer, nothing of what the other man had said, or left unsaid, including the announcement of his death, less a presentiment than a promise, seemed incompatible with the presence of the painter of battles in that place, with his labor on the immense fresco on the tower wall. If, as art theoreticians maintained, the photograph reminded painting of what it should never do, Faulques was sure that his work in the tower reminded photography of what it was capable of suggesting, but not achieving: a vast, continuous, circular vision of a chaotic chess game, the implacable rule that governed perverse randomness—the ambiguity of which governed things that were absolutely not fortuitous—of the world and of life. This point of view confirmed the geometric character of that perversity, the norm of chaos, the lines and forms hidden to the uninformed eye, so like the wrinkles on the brow and the eyelids of a man he had photographed once as he squatted for an hour or so beside a common grave, smoking and rubbing his face as his brother and nephew were being disinterred. No one would gift anyone with the dubious privilege of seeing that kind of thing in objects, or landscapes, or in human beings. For some time, Faulques had suspected that it was possible only after a certain class of travel or journey: Troy, with a return ticket, for example. The loneliness of a hotel room, captioning photos and cleaning cameras with ghosts still fresh on your retina; or later, once home, studying the prints spread across the table, shuffling and discarding them like someone playing a complicated game of solitaire. Ulysses with gray in his hair and blood on his hands, and the rain scattering the ashes of the smoking city as his ships sail away. Until then, you could look again and again, focus, clic, clic, clic, dark room, print, International Press Photo, Europa Focus, and still fail throughout a lifetime. Faulques, now a painter of battles, had been led to that tower by a dead woman and a certainty: that no one could capture all that on film in 1/125 of a second.
The man who had just marched away confirmed it. He was yet another sketch on the enormous circular fresco. One question more directed to the silence of the Sphinx. No doubt but that the man deserved a place of honor on the wall, assigned by the paradoxes and pirouettes of a world tenacious in demonstrating that, despite the fact that the straight line is absent from the animal world, and far from lavish in nature in general—except perhaps when the law of gravity tightened the ropes of the hanged—chaos did possess impeccably straight shortcuts to precise sites in place and time. Despite himself, Faulques was impressed. That afternoon, after he had laid the book of photographs on the table, Ivo Markovic had turned to the circular wall, giving it all his attention for a long time.
“So that's how you see it, then,” he murmured finally.
It wasn't a question, nor was it a conclusion. It was the confirmation of an old thought. Impossible to separate that, Faulques decided, from the dog-eared book on the table, opened—by chance was impossible—to one of his first professional photos, black and white, taken after the impact of a rocket fired by the Khmer Rouge in Pochetong, the market of Phnom Penh. A wounded boy, half sitting on the ground, his eyes clouded from the trauma of the explosion, was looking at his mother, who lay on her back, stretched on a diagonal to the frame of the camera, her head blown open by shrapnel, her blood tracing long and intricate streams across the ground. It doesn't seem possible, Olvido Ferrara would say much later—years later—in Mogadishu, at another scene identical to the one in Pochetong, identical to many others. It doesn't seem possible that we can have all that blood in our bodies, she'd said. A little more than five liters, I think. Amazing how easy it is to spill, and to lose it all. Have you thought about that? And Faulques would remember those words and those photos later, right eye glued to the viewfinder of the camera in the market in Sarajevo, which was still smoking after being battered by projectiles fired from Serbian mortars. Five liters multiplied by fifty or sixty bleeding bodies; that was a lot of blood: streams, spirals, crisscrossing lines, glossy red dulled to a matte finish, coagulating as the minutes went by and the moans faded. Children staring at their mothers as if mesmerized, and vice versa; bodies oblique, perpendicular, parallel to other bodies, and beneath them liquids in capricious patterns, all flowing into an enormous red grid. Olvido was right: we have an astounding quantity of blood inside us. After centuries of being drained, it continues to flow. But she wasn't there to appreciate the analogy. Her five liters had already been spilled, at a point in time and space located between the market in Phnom Penh and the one in Sarajevo: a ditch beside the Borovo Naselje road.
“That's how you see it without cameras,” Ivo Markovic insisted.
He had walked right up to the wall, hands clasped behind his back; he'd adjusted his glasses with a finger, and bent close to inspect a part of the painting, where bold strokes, a bit of color applied over the charcoal sketch, depicted a female body. An odd perspective, a face as yet not defined, naked thighs open toward the foreground, a red trickle of blood between them, and the silhouette of a child squatting beside her, turned toward the woman, or the mother. A curious evolution, man's, Faulques thought: fish, crocodile, killer, with his own corpse interposed between each stage. Today's children, tomorrow's executioners. The same partially painted features of the child reserved for one of the soldiers who, at the right of that scene, guns in hand, were driving the fleeing multitude from the city, resolved pictorially—the old Flemish masters were not only to be admired—on the basis of repeated squares of windows and crenellated lines of black ruins sharply delineated against the red of the fires and explosions crowning the distant hill.
“I'm no good when it comes to appreciating art,” Markovic commented. “In fact it isn't art. Art lives on faith.”
“I don't understand much about that, either.”
He hadn't moved, or unclasped the hands behind his back as he studied every section of the mural. Like a peaceful visitor in a museum.
“I'm going to tell you a story,” he said without turning.
“Yours?”
“What does it matter? A story.”
Then he slowly turned toward Faulques and began. He talked for a long time, interrupting himself with long pauses as he searched for a specific word. He meant to tell his story in detail, with the greatest precision possible, sometimes judging that his way of speaking, the mounting heat of the tale itself, was no longer impersonal but had become impassioned. When he noticed this, he immediately stopped, shook his head by way of apology, asked for his listener's understanding, and then after a brief silence, began again at the same point, his tone more objective. More discreet.
And this was how the amazed painter of battles, listening closely,
reconfirmed his certainty that there was a hidden network that trapped the world and its events, where nothing that happened was innocent or without consequences. He learned about a young family in a small town in a country that in another time had been called Yugoslavia: the husband an agricultural engineer, the wife dedicated to the home and to cultivating the family garden, a young child. He also learned, once again, what he already knew: that politics, religion, old hatreds, and stupidity combined with a lack of refinement and the infamous human condition, had demolished that place with a war that set relatives, friends, and neighbors against one another. Massacred by the Nazis and their Croatian allies during World War II, this time the Serbs took the lead role, which could be summarized in two words: “ethnic cleansing.” The Markovics were one of those mixed marriages encouraged by Marshal Tito's policy of integration; but the aged marshal was dead, and things had changed. The husband was Croatian, the wife Serbian. The partition separated them. When bands of Chetnik militiamen began killing their neighbors, the wife and child were lucky; they were living in a zone with a Serbian majority, and they stayed there while the husband, a fugitive, enrolled in the Croatian national militia.
“In regard to his family, the soldier wasn't worried. You understand that, don't you, señor Faulques?” Mother and child were safe. As he lived through the miseries and alarms of war, rifle in hand, he consoled himself with the knowledge that they were in a secure place. You who have been a witness with a return ticket in so many disasters, you understand what I'm saying. Isn't that right? The relief of knowing that when everything is in flames, you have no loved ones burning in the ruins of the world.
Faulques was sitting in one of the canvas chairs, with the glass of cognac in one hand, as motionless as the figures painted on the wall. He slowly nodded.
“I can understand that.”
“I know you can. At least now I know.” Markovic, who hadn't moved from his place before the painting, waved vaguely toward a point on it, as if what he was going to say was illustrated there. “When I saw you on your knees beside the body of the woman in the ditch, a few days after you took my photograph, I thought that was the situation with her. One more corpse, one more image. A shame, of course. Our closest colleagues always die. But better, I thought you'd be thinking, better her than me. How many journalists fell in that war in my country?”
“I don't know. Fifty or so. A lot.”
“That's what I mean. One among so many. One woman in your case. That's what I believed for a while. Now I know I was mistaken. She wasn't just one more.”
Faulques shifted uncomfortably in his chair.
“You were telling me about yourself. Your family.”
Markovic, who seemed about to add something, stopped, lips parted, gazing at Faulques intently. Then yet again he turned in a circle, eyes taking in the painting and the sketches on the white primer: ships sailing beneath the rain, men fleeing, soldiers, and the city in flames, the volcano erupting in the distance, the clash of cavalry, the medieval horsemen awaiting the moment to ride into combat, the men in anachronistic garments and weapons from thirty centuries ago slashing at one another in the foreground.
“The family of the soldier was safe,” Markovic continued. “Meanwhile he was fighting for his country, although that was less important to him than his other, his true, concern: his wife and child. The fact is that the official fatherland was turned into a slaughterhouse called Vukovar. Into a fearsome trap.” Markovic paused a moment, absorbed. “Can you imagine Serbian tanks bearing down on you, and you with no weapons to stop them? One morning, the soldier ran like a rabbit, along with his comrades, to save his life. Then, when the survivors regrouped, still panting for breath, you took his photo.”
Silence followed. Faulques drank a sip of his cognac. He sat still as stone in his chair, soaking up every word. The visitor had again turned toward the painting. Now he was studying the forest where men were hanging from the trees like clusters of fruit.
“In recent years I've read a lot,” he continued. “Magazines, newspapers, sometimes a book. I know how to browse the Internet. I didn't use to be much of a reader, but my life has changed a lot. And then one day, I read something about you that interested me, an interview you gave on the occasion of the publication of your last book of photos. From what you said, there's a scientific formula: if a butterfly flutters its wings in Brazil, or somewhere, a hurricane will be unleashed on the other side of the world. Is that how it goes?”
“More or less. The theory is known as the Butterfly Effect.”
Markovic smiled a little, pointing one finger at Faulques. A disturbing smile, however. As rigid as if it weren't his. It stayed on his face for a time, frozen, revealing the black hole between his ruined teeth.
“It's curious that you should mention it in that interview, because what happened was like the fluttering wings of the butterfly. The soldier didn't know that until the photo reached the hospital in Osijek. Everyone congratulated him. He was famous. A Croatian hero. Vukovar had just fallen, finally, and all his comrades had died fighting, or been killed by the Chetniks: Nikola, Zoran, Tomislav, Vinko, Grüber. That Grüber was his officer. They were walking together the day you took the photo. When the city fell, Grüber was in the basement of the hospital with his foot amputated. The Serbs pulled him out into the courtyard with the others; they beat them senseless before they shot them in the head and dragged them to a common grave.”
Faulques could see that the smile, or whatever it was, had disappeared. Now Markovic's eyes were on him, though it seemed as if their true focus was on something far away, somewhere behind Faulques' back.
“The soldier in the photo,” Markovic continued, “was luckier than his comrades. Or maybe he wasn't . . . Demobilized because of his wound, he'd been sent to Zagreb to recover. In a place called Okucani, his luck ran out. The bus ran into an ambush.”
The passengers on the bus were civilians, he added after a pause. There were old men, women, and children. So instead of killing them all right there, the Serbs took them to an interrogation center under the command of the regular army, where the soldier was subjected to routine rough treatment. Later, between beatings, a guard recognized him. He was the man in the famous photo. The hero of Vukovar. The face of Croatian separatists.
“He was tortured for six months. Like an animal. Then, for some strange reason, or by chance, they let him live. He was transferred to a prison camp near Banja Luka; he spent two and a half years there. One day they loaded him onto a truck, and just when he thought they were going to shoot him, he found himself on a bridge over the Danube, and heard them say: ‘Prisoner exchange, get out and walk, you're free . . . ’”
Markovic's lips kept moving, but without words. Only silence. Faulques saw that he had stopped, as if surprised, and was looking around as if he had just found himself in bizarre surroundings. I hope it doesn't bother you if I smoke, he said suddenly. The painter shook his head, and Markovic went to his knapsack and took out a pack of cigarettes.
“Do you smoke?”
“No.”
Markovic lit a cigarette, and when he blew out the match looked for an ashtray to put it in. Faulques pointed to an empty French mustard jar. His visitor picked it up, and with the cigarette in his mouth and the jar in his hand, he went and sat down in the other chair, facing his host.
“What do you think of that story?” he asked in an ordinary voice.
“It's terrible.”
“Not especially,” the Croatian said, grimacing. “It is terrible, of course. But there are others. Some are even worse. Stories that complement one another.”
For a moment he said nothing, his eyes lost in the depths of the vast mural around them. One another, he repeated after a bit, pensive. And I'm talking, he said, about entire families being exterminated, of children killed before the eyes of their parents, of brothers forced to torture each other so that one might live. You can't imagine the things that prisoner saw. The pain, the indignity, the desp
eration. We men, señor Faulques, are bloodthirsty animals. Our ingenuity in creating horror has no limits. You must be aware of that. You learn something, I suppose, during a lifetime of photographing cruelty and wickedness.
“Is that why you want to kill me? To avenge all those things?”
That cold, somehow alien smile again crossed Markovic's face.
“The Butterfly Effect, you said. What an irony. Such a delicate word.”
4.
THE VISITOR WAS SMOKING, concentrating exclusively on his cigarette, as if each puff of smoke were priceless. Faulques recognized the familiar habit of the soldier, or the prisoner. He had watched many men smoke in many wars, where often tobacco was the only companion. The only consolation.
“When that man was set free,” Markovic said, resuming his tale, “he tried to find his wife and his son. Three years with no news of them, imagine . . . Well . . . Before long he had news. The famous photo had made its way to their town. Someone had come across a copy of the magazine. There are always neighbors willing to cooperate in that sort of thing: the girlfriend they couldn't have, the job someone's grandparents had taken from someone else's grandparents, the house or piece of land they'd wanted . . . The same old story: jealousy, maliciousness. All too predictable among human beings.”
The Painter of Battles Page 4