The Painter of Battles

by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

  The setting sun shining horizontally through one of the narrow tower windows crowned the Croatian with an aureole red as the fires painted on the wall: the city burning on the hill and the distant volcano that illuminated rocks and bare branches, the fire reflecting off the metal of weapons and armor that now seemed to bounce off the wall and flood the room, its content, the figure of the man sitting in the chair, the curls of smoke from the cigarette he held between his fingers or left dangling from his lips, reddish spirals that in that light lent a singular animation to the scenes on the wall. Maybe, Faulques thought suddenly, this painting isn't as bad as I think it is.

  “One night,” Markovic continued, “a group of Chetniks came to the house where the Serbian woman and the son of the Croatian were living. They raped her, one after the other, as many times as they wished. Since the boy, all of five years old, cried and fought to defend his mother, they ran him through with a bayonet at the door. Just the way you pin butterflies—imagine, the butterflies of the effect you told me about. Then, when they were tired of the woman, they cut off her breasts and slit her throat. Before they left, they painted a Serbian cross on the wall and the words ‘Ustacha pigs!’ ”

  Silence. In the fiery splendor streaming through the window, Faulques tried to see his visitor's eyes, but couldn't. The voice that had recounted the story was as objective and tranquil as if the teller had been reading a pharmaceutical prospectus. Then Markovic slowly raised the hand that held the cigarette.

  “Forgive me,” he added, “if I tell you that although the woman was screaming all night, not a single neighbor turned on a light or came outside to see what was happening.”

  This time the silence lasted much longer. Faulques didn't know what to say. Slowly, the lower corners of the area were filling with shadows. The bloodred light slipped away from Markovic and spread across the wall to the charcoal sketch, black on white, of a man, hands tied behind his back, kneeling before another man raising a sword above his head.

  “Tell me one thing, señor Faulques. Does a person ever get really hardened? By that I mean, after a time, is what passes before the lens of the camera something the witness is indifferent to, or not?”

  The painter raised the glass to his lips. It was empty.

  “War,” he said, after thinking a moment, “can be photographed well only when, as you raise the camera, what you see doesn't affect you. The rest you have to leave for later.”

  “You've taken photographs of scenes like the one I just told you about, haven't you?”

  “Of the aftermath, yes. A few.”

  “And what were you thinking about as you focused, read your light meter, and so on?”

  Faulques got up to look for the bottle. He found it on the table beside the jars of paints and the empty glass of the visitor.

  “The focus, the light, and all that.”

  “And that was why they gave you the prize for my photograph? Because I didn't affect you either?”

  Faulques had poured himself two fingers of cognac. With the glass he pointed to the mural where shadows were beginning to gather.

  “Maybe the answer is there.”

  “Yes.” Markovic had half turned and was looking around him. “I think I understand what you mean.”

  The painter of battles poured more cognac into his questioner's glass and took it to him. Between drags on his cigarette, the Croatian took a swallow while Faulques went back to his chair.

  “To accept the truth of things is not to approve that they are as they are,” Faulques said. “Explication is not synonymous with anesthesia. Pain . . .”

  He stopped himself. Pain. Spoken before his visitor, the word sounded out of place. Stolen from its legitimate owners, as if Faulques had no right to use it. But Markovic didn't seem bothered.

  “Pain, of course,” he said, understanding. “Pain . . . Forgive me if I pry into matters that are too personal, but your photographs do not show much pain. I mean, they reflect the pain of others but I don't perceive any sign of your own. When did the things you saw stop giving you pain?”

  Faulques ticked the lip of his glass with his teeth.

  “It's complicated. At first it was an amusing adventure. The pain came later. In bursts. And finally, the impotence. I suppose that nothing hurts any longer.”

  “Is that the hardening I was referring to?”

  “No. I'm talking about resignation. Even if you don't decipher the code, you understand that there are rules. Then you resign yourself.”

  “Oh, but you don't,” Markovic rejoined smoothly.

  Suddenly, Faulques felt cruelly relieved.

  “You're still alive,” he said roughly. “That in itself is a kind of resignation. Your kind. You say you were a prisoner for three years, isn't that right? And when you learned what had happened to your family, you didn't die of the pain, you didn't hang yourself in a tree. You're here, now. You're a survivor.”

  “I am,” Markovic conceded.

  “Well, look. Every time I come across a survivor, I ask myself what he was capable of doing in order to stay alive.”

  Silence again. Now, almost with jubilation, Faulques regretted that the growing darkness prevented him from making out the features of his interlocutor.

  “That's not fair,” the visitor said finally.

  “Maybe. But fair or not, that's what I ask myself.”

  The shadow sitting in the chair, enveloped in the last splashes of light on the mural, reflected on Faulques' words.

  “You may not be too far off,” he concluded. “Maybe surviving when others can't implies a certain class of depravity.”

  The painter of battles raised the glass to his lips. Again it was empty.

  “You should know.” He leaned down to set the glass on the floor. “According to what you tell me, you have experience.”

  Markovic emitted a kind of grunt. Maybe a hint of a cough, or a surprised laugh. You're a survivor, too, señor Faulques, he said. You kept breathing when others were dying. That day I observed you kneeling beside the woman's body. I think you were showing pain.

  “I don't know what I was showing. No one took my photograph.”

  “But you took hers. I watched you take up your camera and photograph her. And this is interesting: I know your photographs as well as if I had taken them myself, but I never found that photo. Did you keep it for yourself? Did you destroy it?”

  Faulques didn't answer. He sat quietly in the darkness that was painting, just as he'd first seen it take form in the tray of developer, the image of Olvido lying facedown on the ground, the strap of her camera around her neck, one motionless hand almost touching her face, and the small red stain, the tiny dark thread beginning to trickle from her ear down her cheek until it met the other, larger, and more brilliant stain spreading beneath her. Antipersonnel mine, slivers of shrapnel, Leica 50-mm lens, l/125 exposure, 5.6 aperture setting, black-and-white film—the Ek-tachrome of the other camera was at that moment rewinding—for a neither good nor bad photograph, perhaps a little underexposed. One photograph that Faulques never sold, and he had burned that one print some time later.

  “Yes,” Markovic continued without waiting for an answer. “Somehow that's how it is, isn't it? However intense it might be, there is a moment when pain ceases to register. Maybe that was your remedy. That photo of the dead woman. In a certain way, the depravity that helped you survive.”

  Faulques slowly came back to the tower and the conversation.

  “Don't be melodramatic,” he said. “You know nothing about it.”

  Then, in fact, he hadn't known, the other man conceded as he crushed out his cigarette. I was very slow to learn. But I came to understand things that had escaped me before. This place is an example. If I had come here ten years ago, before I knew you as I know you now, I wouldn't even have glanced at these walls. I would just have given you time to remember who I was before settling accounts. Now it's different. This confirms everything. It really explains my presence here.

&
nbsp; Once he had said all that, Markovic leaned forward, as if to see Faulques better in the waning light.

  “And is it?” he added suddenly. “Is it enough for you to assume responsibility?”

  The painter shrugged his shoulders. I will know when I've finished my work, he said, and his answer sounded strange even to him, with that absurd threat of death floating between them. The visitor sat for a while, thinking, and then said that he, too, was making his own painting. That was what he said: his landscape of battles. When he saw that wall, he added, he realized what had brought him there. Everything has to fit together, didn't Faulques agree? Fit with uncommon precision. But it was strange. Markovic thought the author of the mural didn't seem to be a very classic painter. He himself had already confessed that he didn't understand painting, but he did know a few famous paintings, like anyone else. This one, in his opinion, had too many angles. Too many sharp edges and straight lines in the faces and hands of those people depicted on the wall. Cubism, is that what they called it?

  “Not exactly. There's some of that, but the mural isn't Cubist.”

  “I thought it was, you know. Those books you have piled around everywhere. Do you get your ideas from them?”

  “ ‘Enough that you could say that I've used old words . . . ’ ”

  “Is that your answer, or did someone else say that?”

  Now Faulques laughed aloud, a dry laugh. His visitor and he were two shapes in the shadows. It was a quote, he answered, but it didn't matter. What he was trying to say was that those books helped him put his own ideas in order; they were tools like the brushes and paints and the rest. In truth, a painting, a painting like this one, posed a technical problem that had to be resolved efficiently. That efficiency was provided by tools in combination with each individual's talent. He didn't have much talent, he repeated. But that wasn't an obstacle to what he intended to do.

  “I'm not able to judge your talent,” Markovic replied. “But in spite of the angles, I think what you're doing is interesting. Original. And some of those scenes are . . . Well. They're real. More real than your photos, I suppose. And I guess that is what you're aiming for.”

  His features were suddenly illuminated. He was lighting another cigarette. With the match still burning in his fingers, he got up and went to the mural, holding the faint light to the images painted there. Faulques could see the face of the woman at the very forefront, broken down into violent strokes of ochre, sienna, and cadmium red, her mouth opened in a scream of coarse, dense, silent brush lines, as old as life itself. A fleeting glimpse before the light of the match burned out.

  “Is it really like that?” Markovic asked, again in the dark.

  “That is how I remember it.”

  Neither of the men spoke. Markovic moved, maybe looking for his chair. Faulques did not want to help him by lighting a lantern or the gas lamp he kept nearby. The darkness gave him a feeling of having a slight advantage. He remembered the palette knife on the table, the shotgun he had upstairs. But the visitor was speaking again, and his tone sounded relaxed, alien to the painter of battles' suspicions.

  “The technical aspect must be complicated, no matter how good the tools you have at your disposal. Had you painted before, señor Faulques?”

  “Some. When I was young.”

  “So you were an artist?”

  “I tried to be.”

  “I read somewhere that you studied architecture.”

  “For a brief time. I preferred painting.”

  The tip of the cigarette glowed red for an instant.

  “And why did you leave it? Painting, I mean.”

  “I quit very soon. When I realized that every painting I began had already been painted by someone before me.”

  “And that's why you became a photographer?”

  “Maybe.” Faulques was smiling in the darkness. “A French poet thought that photography was the refuge of failed painters. I think that in his moment he was right . . . But it's also true that photography allows us to see in fractions of a second things normal people don't see no matter how hard they look. Painters included.”

  “You believed that for thirty years?”

  “Not that long. I stopped believing it quite a while before that.”

  “And that's why you went back to your brushes?”

  “It wasn't that quick. Or that simple.”

  Once again the tip of the cigarette glowed in the shadows. What did war have to do with it, Markovic asked. There were easier ways to practice photography, or painting. Faulques responded with a simple answer. It had to do with a trip, he clarified. When I was a boy I spent a lot of time looking at a print of an old painting. And finally I decided to go see it— well, actually, see the landscape in the background. The painting was The Triumph of Death, by Bruegel the Elder.

  “I know it. It's in your book Morituri. A little pretentious, that title, if you don't mind my saying so.”

  “I don't mind.”

  Even so, Markovic commented, Faulques' book of photographs was original and interesting. It made you think. All those battle scenes hanging in museums, with people looking at them as if the paintings had nothing to do with them. Their error captured by your camera.

  This Croatian former mechanic was intelligent, Faulques decided. Damned intelligent.

  “As long as there's death,” he murmured, “there's hope.”

  “Is that another quote?”

  “It's a bad joke.”

  It was bad. It was hers, Olvido's. She'd made the comment in Bucharest, one Christmas day, after the slaughter by Ceausescu's Securitate and the revolution in the streets. She and Faulques were in the city after they'd crossed the border from Hungary in a rented car and made a mad dash through the Carpathian Mountains, twenty-eight hours taking turns at the wheel, slipping and sliding on icy roads past farmers who, armed with hunting rifles and blockading bridges with their tractors, watched them go by from high above on the cliffs, like you see in cowboy-and-Indian movies. And a couple of days later, as the families of the dead were digging graves in the frozen soil of the cemetery with pneumatic drills, Faulques had watched Olvido move with a hunter's cautious steps among crosses and headstones sprinkled with snow, photographing the miserable coffins nailed together from packing crates, feet aligned in open graves, the spades of the grave diggers piled atop icy clumps of black dirt. And when one poor woman in black knelt beside a newly closed grave, eyes closed and intoning something like a prayer, Olvido turned to the Romanian who was acting as their interpreter. The house where you are living is dark, he translated. She is praying to her dead son. Then Faulques saw Olvido nod slowly, with one hand wipe snow from her hair and her face, then photograph the back of the mourning-clad woman on her knees, a black silhouette beside a pile of black earth spattered with snow. Afterward, Olvido let her camera drop onto her chest; she looked at Faulques and murmured, “As long as there's death, there's hope.” And as she said it she smiled absently, almost cruelly. As he had never seen her smile.

  “You may be right,” Markovic conceded. “When you think about it, the world has stopped thinking about death. Thinking that we're not going to die makes us weak, or worse.”

  For the first time with this curious visitor, Faulques felt a spark of real interest. That disturbed him. It wasn't interest in facts, in the story of the man sitting with him—as conventional as that of many he had photographed through his lifetime—but in the man himself. For a while now, a certain affinity had been floating in the air.

  “It's odd,” Markovic continued. “The Triumph of Death is the one painting in your book that isn't about a battle. As I see it, the subject is the Final Judgment.”

  “It is. But you're wrong about one thing. What Bruegel did was paint the last battle.”

  “Ah, of course. I hadn't thought of that. All those skeletons like armies, and the fires in the distance. Executions included.”

  A corner of a yellow moon could now be seen at a window. The rectangle, with an arch a
t the top, was lighter than the interior, a dark blue that defined the outlines of the objects inside the tower. The white stain of the visitor's shirt became more visible.

  “So you decided that the best way to travel to a painting of war was to spend a long time in a war . . .”

  “That could be one way to sum it up.”

  But speaking of places, Markovic commented, I don't know if what happens to me happens to you. In war you survive thanks to features of the terrain. That gives you a special sense of the countryside. Don't you agree? The memory of the places where you walked is never erased, even if you forget other details. I'm talking about the meadow you see while you await the approaching enemy, the shape of the hill you climb under fire, the design of the trench that protects you from a bombardment. Do you understand what I'm saying, señor Faulques?

  “Perfectly.”

  The Croatian let a moment go by. The tip of his cigarette glowed for the last time before he crushed it out.

  “There are places,” he added, “you never come back from.”

  Another long pause. Through the windows, the painter of battles could hear the sound of the sea slapping the foot of the cliff.

  “The other day,” Markovic continued in the same tone, “something occurred to me as I was watching television in a hotel. In ancient times, men looked at the same landscape all their lives, or at least for a long time. Even the traveler did, because every road was a long road. That forced them to think about the road itself. Now it's different, everything is fast. Highways, trains . . . Even television shows us different scenes every few seconds. There's no time to reflect on anything.”

  “There are those who call that insecure terrain, something that shifts beneath your feet.”

  “I don't know what they call it. But I know what it is.”