The Painter of Battles

by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

  He didn't add to that, but finally he moved in his chair as if he were going to get up, although he didn't. He may have been looking for a more comfortable position.

  “I had a lot of that kind of time,” he said suddenly. “I can't say that it was a good thing, but I had it. For two and a half years, my only view was of a fence and a mountain of white rock. There was no uncertainty there, not even close. It was a concrete mountain, bare, no vegetation, and a cold wind blew off it during the winter. You understand? A wind that shook the fence with a sound I have in my head and can't blot out. The sound of a frozen, unyielding landscape, you know, señor Faulques? Like your photographs.”

  That was when he stood, felt around for his knapsack, and left the tower.

  5.

  THE PAINTER OF BATTLES EMPTIED his glass—too much cognac and too much conversation that night—and took one last look at the flashes from the distant lighthouse. The luminous streak traveled horizontally, like the trail of a tracer bullet on the horizon. Often when he was looking at that light Faulques remembered one of his old photos: an urban, night panorama of Beirut during the battle of the hotels, at the beginning of the civil war. Black and white, dark silhouettes of buildings highlighted by bursts of explosives and lines of tracer bullets. One of those photos in which the geometry of war was indisputable. Faulques had taken it during the early stage of his career, already aware that modern photography, given its technical perfection, was so objective and exact that at times it looked false—Robert Capa's famous photos on Omaha Beach owed their dramatic intensity to an error in the laboratory during the developing process. For that reason, exactly as television reporters and cameramen for action movies did, photographers now used little tricks to blur the camera's fidelity, going back to reproduce a few imperfections that helped the eye of the observer perceive the image in a slightly different way: in pictorial language, the same focal distortion that Matisse's broad brushstrokes imposed on Giotto's meticulous blades of grass. In reality, it was nothing new. Velázquez and Goya knew about distortion; and later, by now free of complexes, so did modern painters—all twentieth-century art proceeded from there—after figurative painting had reached the absolute extreme and photography had claimed the field of faithful reproduction of the precise instant, which was useful for scientific observation but not always satisfying in artistic terms.

  As for his photo of Beirut, it was a good photo. It reflected the chaos of combat in the city, with its slight oscillation at the edges of silhouetted buildings standing amid the explosions and the luminous, parallel straight lines scoring the night sky. An image that gave you an idea, better than any other, of the disaster that could be unleashed upon a conventional urban space. Not even the photographs Faulques had taken twenty-five years later in Sarajevo, during the long siege, had matched that extreme of perfect geometric imperfection achieved because of the inferiority of the camera he had been using then—he hadn't as yet acquired good professional equipment—and his inexperience. The photo of the vast night combat, with fires in every direction and the city converted into a polyhedral labyrinth pounded by the ire of men and their gods, had been achieved by resting a Pentax with 400 ASA film on the sill of the window on the eleventh floor of a tall building in ruins—the Sheraton—and holding the shutter open for thirty seconds, with the lens at 1.8 aperture. In that way, each shot and explosion that occurred during that half minute had been recorded on a single 35-mm negative, with the result that when the image was printed, everything seemed to have happened at the same instant. Even the slight movement caused by Faulques' hands during the exposure, when he was shaken by nearby explosions, gave the outlines of the buildings that slight shiver that made everything seem so real; much more so than pictures taken by a perfect, modern camera capable of faithfully capturing the brief, authentic—and maybe commonplace—instant of one photographic second. Olvido had always liked that photo, maybe because there were no people in it, only straight lines of light and contours of buildings. The triumph of weapons of destruction over weapons of obstruction, she once commented. The ten years of Troy reduced to thirty seconds of pyrotechnics and ballistics.

  Urban architecture, geometry, chaos. For Faulques, that photograph was a satisfactory graphic representation: insecure terrain. The memory of his conversation with Markovic drew a surprised grimace from Faulques. The Croatian might lack theoretical instruction, but no one could deny his intuition and perception. To survive any difficulty, whatever it might be, especially war, was a good education. It forced you to turn to your own resources and gave you a way of looking at things. A point of view. The Greek philosophers were right when they said that war was the mother of all things. Faulques himself, who when he was young and along with his photographic equipment carrying concepts still fresh from the architectural studies he had cut short, found himself stunned by the transformation war had imposed on the urban landscape, by its functionalist logic, by the problems of locating and concealing, of firing range, of dead angles. A house could be a refuge or a deadly trap; a river, an obstacle or defense; a trench, protection or tomb. And modern warfare made such dualities more frequent and more likely: the more advanced the technology, the more mobility and uncertainty. Only then did he come to truly comprehend the concepts of fortification, of the wall, the glacis, the ancient city and its relation, or opposition, to modern urbanism: the wall of China, Byzantium, Stalingrad, Sarajevo, Manhattan. The History of Mankind. To note to what point man's technical advances had made the cityscape mutable, modifying it, shrinking it, constructing and destroying it according to the circumstances of the moment. That was how, in the sequence of weapons of obstruction and destruction, you arrived at the third system: weapons of communication, something Olvido had seen with extreme lucidity in the photo of Beirut. The end of the aseptic and innocent image, or of that universally accepted fiction. In a time of information networks, of satellites and globalization, what modified territory and the lives that moved across it was specifying. To kill, you pointed a finger: a bridge framed in the monitor of a smart bomb, news of the ups and downs of the market broadcast simultaneously around the world. The photograph of a soldier who until that moment had been just another anonymous face.

  The painter of battles went inside the tower. He lit the small gas lamp and stood a moment, hands in his pockets, looking at the dark panorama around him. The light could not illuminate the entire fresco, but the parts in black and white stood out in the darkness, some faces, weapons, and armor, leaving in the shadows the background of ruins and fires, the masses of men with bristling lances battling on the plain beneath the dark red cone of lava—thick blood, it looked like—from the erupting volcano.

  The volcano. Geological layers, geometry of the earth. Ballistics and pyrotechnics of a different nature perhaps, but not at all alien to the photo of the night battle. Cézanne had seen that clearly, thought Faulques. It was not simply a question of green accentuating a smile or of ochre shading a shadow. It was, above all, a way of looking into the very heart of the matter. The structure. He picked up the lamp and moved closer, observing the deliberate similarities between the city burning on the hill and the red volcano painted on a more distant plane and to the right, at the far end of despoiled fields ripped open as if the earth had been slashed by an enormous and powerful hand. He had met Olvido Ferrara near a similar volcano, or, to be more precise, near the volcano from which this one had taken inspiration, or tried to: the 168 x 168 centimeter painting hanging in a gallery in the Museo Nacional de Arte in Mexico. Faulques had discovered it, to his surprise, when he looked to the left, toward a corner of the wall: an easy place to be overlooked by other visitors as they came into the hall and moved forward toward other paintings that caught their eye at the back of the room and to the right. Eruption of Paricutín. Not until that moment had Faulques heard of Dr. Atl. He knew nothing about him, or his obsession with volcanoes, or his landscapes of ice and fire, or his true name—Gerardo Murillo—or about Carmen Mondragón, a.k.a
. Nahui Ollin, the most beautiful woman in Mexico, who had been his lover until she more or less left him for a captain in the merchant marine with the name and look of an Italian tenor, a man called Eugenio Agacino. The day Faulques discovered Dr. Atl, he knew nothing of all that, but he stood very still before the painting, almost unable to breath, contemplating the truncate pyramid of the volcano, the glowing trajectory of the lava flowing down its side, the land devastated by the reflections of fire and silver lending depth to the scene, the extraordinary effect of light on the naked trees, the flares of flames and the plume of black ash spilling to the right under the cold gaze of the stars in the clear night, indifferent and far above the disaster. A photograph, he thought in that instant, could never achieve that. And yet, everything—absolutely everything—was explained there: the blind and impassive rule translated into volumes, straight lines, curves, and angles by which, as if on inescapable rails, lava were flowing from the volcano to cover the world.

  Later, after coming back to himself, Faulques glanced to one side and saw a pair of large, moist green eyes studying the same painting. Then came the exchange of two courteous, and to a degree, complicitous smiles, a certain brief discussion about the painting both were admiring—even nature, she pointed out, has its passions—a silent, impersonal good-bye, during which Faulques' trained eye noticed the small camera bag the woman had over her shoulder, and then a singular interweaving of footsteps and chance through the galleries of the museum, with another accidental encounter, this time without words or smiles, before a pool where the undulating reflections of a painting by Diego Rivera wove destinies that neither of the two was aware of. And later, when Faulques left the museum, and after walking past the bronze equestrian statue located at the door had wandered in the direction of the Zócalo, he saw the girl sitting at a table on the terrace of a cantina, the photography case on a chair, the grape-colored eyes greener still in the outdoor light, jeans emphasizing long, slender legs. Her amiable smile of recognition had made Faulques stop to say something about the museum and the painting they had both admired, not knowing that at that moment he was changing the meaning of his entire life. We are a product, he would think later, of the hidden rules that determine coincidences: from the symmetry of the universe to the moment you walk into a museum gallery.

  Faulques held the lamp closer to the wall, in the area where he was painting the volcano. He studied it awhile and then went outdoors to connect the generator and halogen lights, chose brushes and paint, and set to work. The echo of his conversation with Ivo Markovic gave new shadings to the circular landscape that surrounded the painter of battles. Slowly, with extreme care, he applied Payne's gray, unmixed, for the column of smoke and ash, and then, intensifying the lower edge of the sky with cobalt blue mixed with white, forgot all precautions and built up the fire and the horror with vigorous, nearly brutal, brushstrokes of scarlet and white lacquer, cadmium orange and vermilion. The volcano that spilled its lava toward the edge of the field of battle, like an Olympus indifferent to the needs and wishes of the tiny ants bristling with lances and engaged in battle at its feet, was now furrowed with lines that opened into a fan; hills and valleys that seemed to channel the chaos of the red lava—more orange and vermilion—erupting interminably, semen ready to impregnate the entire earth with horror. And when finally Faulques put down the brushes and moved back a few steps to contemplate the result of his work, his lips curved in a smile of satisfaction before he moistened them with a new glass of cognac. Good or bad, the volcano was in a certain way different from those Dr. Atl had painted—and he had put his efforts into quite a few during his lifetime. His were marvels of a grandiose and heroic nature, an extraordinary vision of the transformation of the world and the telluric forces that create and destroy it. Something nearly congenial. What Faulques had created on the wall of the tower was more somber and more sinister: impotence in the face of the geometric caprices of the universe, Jupiter's contemptuous thunderbolt that, precise as a scalpel guided by invisible hands, strikes at the very heart of man and his life.

  We don't have much time, she'd said shortly after that. Faulques would remember those words in years to come, just as he was remembering them this night, with the smell of Ivo Markovic's cigarettes on the air, and Faulques himself motionless before the mural of which Olvido was the direct cause. We don't have much time. She had said it quite casually, with a slight smile on her lips, the night of the day they met. A long, pleasant day of walking and conversation, of professional affinities discovered in an expression, in a phrase, in the blinking of an eye. She was young, and so beautiful that she didn't seem real. Faulques had noticed that in the museum with an unprejudiced eye, but it wasn't until they were walking below Rivera's frescoes in the Palacio Nacional and he observed her leaning along the railing, photographing the effects of light and shadow in the gallery among schoolchildren marching along hand in hand, that he realized hers was an exceptional beauty: she was slim, lithe, with the subtle movements of a doe, but one with a gaze that belied innocence. She had a characteristic way of looking at you, lowering her head a little and looking up, half irony and half insolence. The look of a dangerous hunter, Faulques suddenly thought. Diana with a photographer's quiver and a pair of cameras.

  They'd had lunch together in a restaurant near Santo Domingo after strolling past the bustle of the art printing shops beneath the arches of the plaza. And by midafternoon, contemplating the large murals by Siqueiros, Rivera, and Orozco covering the walls of the Palacio de Bellas Artes, each of them knew the basic facts about the other. In Faulques' case it was simple, or at least as he told it: Mediterranean childhood in a mining city near the sea, abandoned brushes, a camera, the world through a lens. A certain professional reputation translated into income and status. As for her, she had no idea of what war was, she had only seen images on television. She'd studied art history and then worked as a fashion model for a brief time, until she decided to move to the other side of the camera. She worked for art, architecture, and interior-decorating magazines. Ridiculously expensive magazines, she added, with a smile that removed any pretentiousness from what she'd said. Twenty-seven years old, an Italian father—a well-known businessman with important galleries in Florence and Rome—a Spanish mother. Good family on both sides, with connections to the world of painting that went back three generations, including an octogenarian maternal grandmother, whom Faulques would meet: the painter Lola Zegrí, a disciple of the late Bauhaus, a friend of Duchamp, of Jean Renoir—she had a bit part in The Rules of the Game, dressed as a seminar student next to Cartier-Bresson—of Bonnard and Picasso. Olvido truly loved that old woman, who spent her last years in the south of France, where she lived awaiting news of Kikí de Montparnasse's latest lover or whether the Germans had entered Paris. Shortly before she died, Olvido had visited her there: a little white house with straight lines and austere décor, where in her garden, also perfectly linear, she grew vegetables instead of flowers after she'd sold the last of her paintings, and those she owned by other artists, and with no regret spent her last centime—including proceeds from the auction of an old and widely famous Citroën now in the Cortanza Museum in Nice; on one of its doors Braque had painted a gray bird and on another, Picasso a white dove. Olvido introduced Faulques—my lover, she said expressionlessly—to her grandmother, in whom he could still note the elegance displayed in the photo albums she showed them during their visit: Paris, Monte Carlo, Nice, breakfast on Cap Martin with Peggy Guggenheim and Max Ernst; one photo of Olvido at five, in Mougins, sitting on Picasso's knees, seemed taken from a Penagos drawing. I was one of the last women able to make men suffer, the old woman commented with a placid smile. My granddaughter, however, came too late to a world too old.

  From the beginning, aside from her beauty, what fascinated Faulques were Olvido's mannerisms: her way of conversing; of tilting her head after a phrase or of listening with a sympathetic air, as if she never believed anything completely but was willing to listen; the manners
of a well brought up and slightly haughty girl; her gentle cruelty—she was too young and too beautiful to know compassion devoid of calculation—all tempered by a scintillating sense of humor and puckish courtesy. Also, Faulques came to know, she was a woman who never passed unnoticed, though she tried: men held doors for her and helped her into cars, waiters came if she merely glanced their way, maître d's reserved the best table for her, and hotel managers gave her the best room with the most splendid view. Olvido reacted to all these attentions with her peculiar smile, at once ironic and affectionate, with clever banter and sophisticated observations, with her inexhaustible faculty of placing herself, without giving up anything, at the level of the person she was talking to. Even tips in restaurants and hotels were slipped to the person helping her quietly, confidentially, as if she were sharing a joke. And when she laughed, really laughed—like a mischievous and guilty little boy—any man would lay down his life for her, or for that laugh. She was very good at all these things. We people who have been well brought up, she would say, seduce others with a very simple trick: we always talk about what interests them. She could seduce with words and silences in five languages; she imitated voices and gestures with awesome ease, and she had an extraordinary memory for details. Faulques heard her call a myriad of concierges, waiters, and taxi drivers by name. She adopted every slang and every accent, and when she was furious, filthy words poured from her lips with amazing fluency—her Italian blood. She also had an unstudied skill for neutralizing the swinish side of the people who waited on her: the resentment hidden beneath the servility of those who grudgingly wait on others while dreaming of head-lopping revolutions, or of those who assume their role with dignified resignation. Women envied Olvido in a sisterly way, and men adopted her at first sight, immediately taking her side. Had Olvido been a male in the early years of the century, Faulques could easily imagine the transformation: still in his dinner jacket having breakfast in a chocolatería alongside the servants from the home where the night before he had attended a dinner or a ball.