The Painter of Battles

by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

  Children sitting in front of a museum (remarkably) intact . . .

  He brushed aside that memory and gave his attention to Markovic, who had repeated his question. Is that really how you see it? he persisted. Whales and all that. Faulques waved his hand in an ambiguous gesture.

  “It's here, under our skin,” he said finally. “In our genes. Only the artificial rules, culture, the varnish of successive civilizations keep man within bounds. Social conventions, laws. Fear of punishment.”

  Markovic was listening intently, his smoking cigarette dangling from his lips. Again his eyes were squinted.

  “And God? Are you a believer, señor Faulques?”

  “God? Don't be a bore.”

  Faulques half turned. He gestured toward the people sitting on the terraces or walking beside the dock, with their tans and their shorts and their children and their dogs.

  “Look at them. So civilized within their parameters, as long as it doesn't cost them too much effort. Asking for things with a ‘please’; some still do. Put them in a locked room, take away their basic necessities and you'll see them destroy each other.”

  Markovic was also looking at them. Convinced.

  “I've seen it,” he nodded. “For a piece of bread, or a cigarette. Say nothing of staying alive.”

  “That's why you know, as well as I, that when disaster throws man back into the chaos from which he came, all the civilized varnish chips off in little pieces and he is once again what he was, or what he always has been: a dyed-in-the-wool sonofabitch.”

  The Croatian was staring at the butt between his thumb and index finger. He flicked it away, as he had the one before it. It fell at the same spot.

  “You are not a compassionate man, señor Faulques.”

  “No, I'm not. But it's a little strange that you should say that.”

  “And in your opinion, what protects us? Culture, as you hinted before? Art?”

  “I don't know. I don't think so.”

  Markovic seemed disillusioned, so Faulques thought about it some more.

  “I suspect,” he added, “that nothing can change human nature. Or always keep it in line.”

  He thought still a little longer. An attractive young girl was walking toward the ticket office of the tourist boat. Maybe that's the girl, he thought. The guide on the tender who talked about the famous painter in the tower. She walked on by.

  “Memory, maybe. In a certain way it's a form of stoic dignity. Lucidity at the moment of contemplating the guiding lines of an issue. Accepting the rules of the game.”

  He saw Markovic smile, as if this time he had been able to understand the speaker's allusions.

  “The symmetries,” the Croatian said, with satisfaction.

  “Yes. An English poet wrote the words ‘terrible symmetry,’ referring to a tiger's stripes.”

  “Really. A poet, you say?”

  “Yes. He meant that all symmetry encases cruelty.”

  Markovic frowned. “So how is it possible to accept symmetries?”

  “Through the geometry that allows us to see them. And the painting that expresses the geometry.”

  I'm lost again, Markovic's wrinkled brow communicated.

  “Where did you learn all that?”

  Faulques' hands mimed turning the pages of a book. Reading, he said. Taking pictures. Looking, I suppose. Asking. It's all out there, he added. The difference is that some people notice and some don't. The Croatian was listening to every word.

  “I've lost track again,” he protested. “You have very idiosyncratic points of view.” He stopped, suspicious. “Why are you smiling, señor Faulques?”

  “It's that word ‘idiosyncratic.’ It's fine. It's interesting the way you use some words.”

  “Unlike you, I am not an educated man. In recent years I've read a few books here and there. But I'm far from being cultured.”

  “I'm not referring to that. Just the opposite. You use interesting words. Words you don't often hear. Cultured words.”

  I didn't have much schooling, the Croatian said then. Only a good technical training as a mechanic. But in the prison camp I came to know a man who had read a lot. A musician. We talked often, fancy, during that time. I learned things. You know. Things. After he repeated “things,” Markovic sat engrossed for a few moments, his air evocative. I also knew a man, he said, who had been buried for eleven hours under his bombedout house, trapped in the debris, and all he could see was an object before him: a broken straight razor. Imagine, eleven hours without moving, with that blade before your eyes. Thinking. Something like me with the tissue caught in the brush. Or the photograph you took of me. So that man came to know everything there was to know about broken razors, and any idea that can be associated with them. After listening to him, I did too.

  “After the prison camp, when I found out that I didn't have a family any longer, I traveled a little. I read a few things . . . I had a good motive: you. To know the man who had destroyed my life with a photograph required a bit of knowledge. The mechanic from before the war could never have achieved it. Without knowing it, the musician and the man with the broken razor opened doors for me. I didn't understand how useful those doors were going to be later, when I did know.”

  He stopped and looked around, leaning forward, palms of his hands on his thighs, as if he were going to get to his feet. But he remained sitting. Not moving at all.

  “I read, I looked in old newspapers, browsed the Internet. I spoke with people who had known you . . . You became my broken razor.”

  His eyes on Faulques were as cutting as if they were new razors.

  8.

  FAULQUES NEVER USED PURE BLACK. That color created holes, like a bullet or burst of shrapnel on the wall. He preferred to get to it indirectly, mixing burnt sienna with Payne's gray or Prussian blue, maybe even a touch of red, not mixing them on the palette but on the wall itself . . . sometimes, on large areas, rubbing it on directly with a finger until he achieved the tone he desired, a very dark ash streaked with light shadings that enriched it and gave it volume. In a certain way, thought the painter of battles, it was equivalent to opening the aperture of a camera one more stop when photographing people with black skin. If you trusted the meter when you shot, people looked flat, black with no shadow detail. A hole in the photograph.

  He recalled, as he applied paint with a finger—black of shadows, black of smoke from the fires, black of night with no hint of dawn—a black skin he had photographed twenty-five years before on the banks of the Chari. That photo was also in the book Ivo Markovic had left on the chair, and it was truly a good black and white, so good that in its moment it had won a double-page spread in several international magazines. Following a battle on the outskirts of N’Djamena, a dozen Chadian rebels, wounded and bound, had been dragged to the river and left to be devoured by crocodiles, not far from the hotel where Faulques was staying—shattered windows and walls pocked with holes that looked as if they had been painted on with cold black. For half an hour he photographed those men, one by one, calculating aperture and composition, preoccupied with the contrast between the sand and those black skins shiny with sweat and dotted with flies, the whites of horrified eyes leaping out at the camera. The humidity made the heat unbearable, and Faulques moved with caution, one step at a time, scrutinizing the men laid out on the ground, shirt soaked with sweat, conserving energy with every move, pausing with open mouth to breathe in the heavy, hot air that smelled of the river's foul water and the prostrate bodies along its shore. Raw meat. Never before that day had Faulques thought that African bodies smelled like raw meat. And as he bent over one of them—meat on the butcher's block, ready to be devoured—and held the lens of the camera close to a face, the wounded man lifted his bound hands to shield himself, beyond terror, the white of his eyes even more exaggerated. It was then that Faulques had opened the aperture one stop, focused on the wide, staring eyes right before him, and pressed the shutter release, capturing that image composed with terrible
technical perfection: graduated volumes of blacks and grays; bound, filthy hands in the near foreground with lighter shadings of palms and fingernails; the shadow the hands projected on the lower part of the face; the upper part illuminated by the sun: brilliant black, sweaty skin, flies, light grains of sand adhered to one cheek. And in the exact center, those inordinately wide-open eyes, staring into fear: two white almonds with blackest black pupils fixated on the lens of the camera, on Faulques, on the thousands of viewers who were going to see that photograph. And behind, in the background, at the end point of the viewer's perusal of the photo, the sum of all those blacks and grays: the shadow of the head of the man on the sand, and, in the slightly out-of-focus background—master touches of chance and implacable nature—the track of feet and the dragging tail of a crocodile. Faulques had taken nineteen exposures when a guard, with rifle and sunglasses bearing the Ray-Ban quality-control sticker on the left lens, approached and indicated with gestures that that was enough, the picture-taking was over. Faulques, more as an automatic response than with any hope, signed his protest, a vague plea for indulgence that the man in the sunglasses received with a white, insolent smile that bared his gums before he shifted his gun to the other shoulder and returned to the shelter of the shade. Then, without a backward glance, the photographer went back to the hotel, rewound the rolls of film, labeled them with a felt-tip pen, and put them into a padded envelope to send the next day on an Air France flight. And at sunset, as he was eating on the deserted terrace of the hotel beside an empty swimming pool, along with the throbbing beat of the combo—a guitar, an electric organ, and a black chanteuse he'd paid in advance to take to bed—Faulques heard the screams of the prisoners being dragged into the river by crocodiles, and left the rare meat on his plate untouched, after an abandoned attempt to cut it with his knife.

  Later, in a restaurant in Madrid, he told the story to a friend. I need to know if that's part of the game, he asked. If there is some scientific basis for all that rational meat lying in the sun, waiting to be dispatched. Some hidden law of life or the world. I need to know whether my photographs really are the shortest line between two points. The friend was a man of science, young, and with a good head on his shoulders, a member of two academies, and author of revelatory books. Aristotle, his friend began, and Faulques interrupted, saying, Don't start off on Aristotle, for Christ's sake. I'm talking about real life and real death. The smell of a corpse beneath the rubble, the smell of death slipping like fog along the bank of a river. His friend looked at him three seconds before speaking. Aristotle, he continued imperturbably, never limited himself to expounding on how things were, but searched for the reason why. To understand ourselves, he said, we must understand the universe; and to understand the universe, we must understand ourselves. What happens is that since then a lot of water has passed under the bridge. When we divorced ourselves from nature, we humans lost the ability to find consolation in the face of the horror awaiting us out there. The more we observe, the less meaning it all has and the more forsaken we feel. Think how—thanks to Gödel, who certainly rained on that parade—we can't find refuge any longer in the one place we thought was secure: mathematics. But look. If there's no consolation as a result of observation, we can find it in the act of observation itself. I'm talking about the analytical, scientific, even aesthetic act of that observation. Gödel aside, it's like a mathematical procedure: it has such certainty, clarity, and inevitability that it offers intellectual relief to those who know how to utilize it. I would say it's analgesic. And so we turn back to a somewhat battered but still useful Aristotle: understanding, including the effort to understand, is our salvation. Or at least it consoles us, because it converts absurd horror into serene laws.

  They ate and talked about all those things, with Faulques asking the pertinent questions and listening to the answers in silence, like a student intrigued by his professor's exposition. He didn't know it then, but their conversation altered—“completed” was, in a way, the more precise word—a vision of the world to which until then, at least that's what he'd thought, the lenses of his cameras had been the only mode of access, of knowing. In sum, it arranged intuitions and unconnected images on the rigorously aligned squares of an enormous chessboard that encompassed the world, reason, life. And it is difficult, his friend was saying, to accept the universe's lack of emotion: its pitiless nature. The scientists of old contemplated it as an enigma that could be read if you possessed the right code: something like a hieroglyph provided by God. That means that in a certain way you may be right, since if you exchange the word “God” for the concept of a system of hidden laws, the idea is still valid, although it's difficult to establish. Do you really hear what I'm saying? It's like Goldbach's conjecture: we know things we can't demonstrate. Classical science knew of the existence of problems associated with nonlineal systems—I'm referring to those systems with irregular, arbitrary, or chaotic behaviors—but it couldn't understand them because of the mathematical difficulty of analyzing them. Now, as our capacity for observation progresses, we find more and more apparent chaos in nature. We have known for more than half a century that true laws cannot be lineal. In those comfortable systems with which science tranquilized us for centuries, minuscule changes in initial conditions did not alter the solution; but in chaotic systems, when the initial conditions vary slightly, the object follows a different path. That would be applicable to your wars, of course. And also to nature, to life itself: earthquakes, bacteria, stimuli, thoughts. We live in interaction with the confusion surrounding us. But it is also true that a chaotic system is subject to laws and rules. And further: there are rules made of exceptions, or of seeming chance, that can be described with laws formulated in classic mathematical expressions. To sum up this lecture, my friend, and before you pay the bill: although it doesn't seem so, there is order in chaos.

  And that crack on the wall—one among many—was also part of the chaos. Despite the thick coat of plaster Faulques had applied to the circular wall of the watchtower, one of the largest lines had progressed a few centimeters in the last few weeks. It was already affecting one of the painted areas of the mural, between the black of the smoke and the city burning on the hill, dark geometry against a background of flames the painter of battles had rendered with reasonable success—a lifetime of photographing fires helped in that—with the application of English red at the edges of the zone and, in the center, cadmium red with a little yellow. The zigzag evolution of that crack—of that nonlineal system, Faulques' scientific friend would have said—was also responding to hidden laws, to a perceptible dynamic whose advance was impossible to foresee. He had attempted to repair the crack by filling it with an acrylic resin mixed with marble dust, applied with a palette knife and then painted over, but that had not greatly changed things: the crack slowly continued its implacable progression. While Faulques cleaned the gray and blue from his fingers with a rag and a little water, he studied the crazed surface of the wall with resignation. After all, he consoled himself, that was part of the cryptogram. The zigzag of chaos and its hidden meanings. Nature, too, he remembered, had its passions. From that perspective, he studied the course of the crack for a long time: its point of departure on the upper edge of the mural and the pattern of a fan or a shell it made as it descended, dividing into other, smaller cracks as the principal line followed its course toward the lower edge, cutting between the rainy dawn sky that spread toward the beach from which the ships were sailing, toward the open space between the two cities, the modern, distant, nearly Bruegelian tower of Babel still asleep and tranquil, unaware that the coming dawn was the beginning of its last day, and the ancient, wide awake, burning city from which a throng of refugees poured toward the lower edge of the painting, on the foreground plane: the terrified women and children walking between fenced-off areas and the futuristic metallic reflections of soldiers in whose eyes they attempted to read their destinies as if putting questions to the Sphinx. The crack, Faulques observed, had adopted t
he form of an irresolute lightning flash between the two cities, but the painter of battles knew that the indecision was only illusory, that there was a hidden norm beneath the paint and the acrylic primer and the layer of plaster, a rigorous and unavoidable law that would end by converting the distant towers of steel and glass dozing in the dawn fog into a landscape very like the hill in flames, and that somewhere in that crack, wooden horses were lurking and airplanes flying very low toward the twin towers of all the sleeping Troys.

  Olvido had made fun of him when he began showing signs of questions and uncertainties. By that time, Faulques still hadn't dug into the fissures and convolutions of the problem but he was already living amid intuitions, as if a swarm of annoying mosquitoes were buzzing around him. As you photograph people, you've looked for the straight lines and the curves that will kill them, she said, suddenly bursting out laughing after silently scrutinizing him. You photograph objects while at the same time you look for the dark angles where they will begin to disintegrate. You go hunting for divined corpses and anticipated ruins. Sometimes I think you make love to me with that desolate and violent desperation because when you put your arms around me you feel the cadaver I will one day be, or that we both will be. For you, Faulques, it's all over and you're only halfway there. You're changing, leaving the slim, silent soldier behind. You don't know it, but you've contracted the virus that one day will keep you from doing your work. One day you'll hold your camera up to your face and when you look through the viewfinder see nothing but lines, volumes, and cosmic laws. I hope I won't be with you at that moment, because you will be unbearable: autistic, a Zen archer making movements in the air with empty hands. And if I am still with you, I'll leave you. Ciao. So long. I swear. I detest soldiers who ask themselves questions, but I hate even more the ones who have all the answers. And if there's something about you I like, it's the silence your silences protect, so like your cold, perfect photographs. I can't bear murmuring silences, you know what I mean? I heard once, or read, that if you overanalyze events you end up destroying the concept. Or is it the other way around? That concepts destroy events?