The Painter of Battles

by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

  “Anything to survive,” Markovic repeated.

  Faulques, who was slowly returning from his memories, grimaced.

  “It doesn't do a lot of people any good to beg,” he murmured. “Not even baseness, crawling on your belly when you face your executioner, guarantees anything.”

  The Croatian leafed through more pages of the book. Finally he closed it.

  “They try,” he said. “Almost everyone, in fact. Some succeed.”

  He was staring pensively at the cover of the closed book. A black-and-white photograph, the asphalt of the Saigon airport: a dead woman on the ground with her dead baby in her arms. The husband a little farther away, clutching another child's hand. Also dead. All of them. In the middle, a conical straw hat sitting in a pool of blood. It wasn't Faulques' favorite photo, but at the time he and his editors had thought it would make a good cover.

  “When they let me go,” Markovic continued, “there were others with me, in a bus. We didn't have much to say. We didn't even look at each other. Ashamed. We knew things about each other, you know? Things we wanted to forget.”

  He was still standing beside the table with the book of photographs, lost in his own thoughts. Faulques went to get the bottle of cognac and motioned to it, querying. Markovic said no, thank you, no, without turning his head. The painter poured himself a little, wet his lips, and set the glass on the book. Then Markovic looked up.

  “There was a young kid. Handsome. About sixteen or seventeen. Bosnian. A Serbian guard took a fancy to him.”

  He smiled a little, evocatively. If it hadn't been for the expression in his eyes, you would have said it was a pleasant memory.

  “When some nights the guard took him away with him,” he continued, “that boy always came back with something. A little chocolate, a tin of condensed milk, tobacco . . . He gave it all to us. Sometimes he brought medicine for those who were sick . . . Even so, we scorned him. How about that? We did, however, take everything he brought us. Greedily, I assure you. Yes. Down to the last cigarette.”

  The sun shining through one of the tower windows illuminated the Croatian's face, and his pupils looked lighter than ever behind the lenses of his glasses. The trace of a smile evaporated from his lips as if the light had erased it: his eyes revealed their true dominion, giving the impression that the smile had never existed. Faulques was thinking how in a different time he would have moved cautiously, lifting the camera slowly in order not to disturb his prey, with the goal of capturing a look that not just anyone would ever see. You had to have a specific biography to have a look like that. Olvido called it the look of one hundred steps. There are human beings, she said, who walk one hundred steps farther than the rest of us, and never retrace those steps. They go into bars and restaurants, ride buses, and almost no one notices them. That's absurd, isn't it? We should all wear our biography on our face, like a military record. Some do, of course. Let me look at you. You do. But other people don't always know how to read that look. People walk past them and don't realize a thing. Maybe that's because no one really looks anymore. At eyes.

  “One night,” Markovic picked up his tale, “several of my companions sodomized the kid. If you let the Serbian do it, they said, then let us. They had stuffed a rag in his mouth so he wouldn't yell. We did nothing to defend him.”

  A long silence followed. Faulques was studying the mural, at the spot where the child half squatting in the sand was looking at the woman lying on her back, her thighs naked and bloody. The stream of people fleeing the city in flames, watched by armed militiamen, passed by without a glance. The woman was just one more story, and everyone had his own problems.

  “The boy hanged himself the next day. We found him behind the barracks.”

  Now Markovic was looking at the painter of battles as if inviting him to offer some judgment on what he'd said. But Faulques had nothing to say. He merely nodded, still staring at the violated woman and boy painted on the wall. Markovic followed the direction of his gaze.

  “Did you ever stop anything, señor Faulques? Even once? A beating? A death? Were you ever able to stop something, and did?” He left a deliberate pause. “Or try to?”

  “A few times.”

  “Many?”

  “I never kept count.”

  The Croatian smiled malevolently.

  “Fine. At least I know that once you did try.”

  He seemed disappointed that there was no comment from Faulques, whose eyes were still on the mural. There were two half-painted figures behind the foreshortened soldier in the foreground guarding the refugees; another soldier, medieval in appearance but carrying modern weapons, a faceless specter behind the visor of his helmet, was aiming his gun at a man whose only finished features were his head and shoulders. Something in the victim's expression was not entirely convincing to the painter of battles. He was going to be killed an instant later, and Faulques knew it. The man who would shoot him knew it, too. The problem lay in the emotions of the man who was going to be killed. His face, touched with burnt sienna and Prussian blue to accentuate angles and foreshortening, was contorted with fear; he was not, however, turned toward the executioner but toward the viewer, or the painter, or anyone witnessing the scene. And that was why it didn't look right, Faulques realized. It wasn't terror that should be reflected on the face of that man who was about to die. He wasn't looking at his executioner but at the viewer, at the camera become the brushes and eye of the painter, the imaginary eye that was preparing so brazenly to witness his death; the condemned man's expression shouldn't reflect fear, but indignation. Indignant surprise was the exact nuance. Of course. The man was in pajamas, he had just been pulled out of his house, hair mussed, not really awake, before the passive, cowardly, rejoicing, or complicitous eyes of his neighbors. He was exactly like the man whom Faulques had photographed on the Corniche in Beirut as he was being pushed at rifle point, barefoot and dressed in a pair of ridiculous red-and-white diamond-patterned pajamas, to a place where another four neighbors from his apartment building already lay on the ground murdered. The man in the pajamas knew what awaited him, but his fearful expression—he arrived looking ill, his skin an ashen yellow—turned to surprise and irritation when behind his killers he saw the camera with which Faulques, who a week before had turned twenty-five, was photographing him. And he, the photographer, had pressed the shutter release at the precise moment to capture that irate expression of invaded privacy when the man in the pajamas registered the injustice of being photographed as he was about to die, and looking the way he did. The photo was taken just in time, for when Faulques again pressed the release, the bullets had already penetrated the victim's body and he was collapsing atop the other corpses. There was a possible third photo, but Faulques didn't take it. When he saw one of the executioners go to the body and bend over him, he changed the aperture from f 8 to f 5.6 and prepared to shoot. But when through the viewfinder he watched the man take a pair of pliers from his pocket to yank out the dead man's gold teeth, a wave of nausea prevented him from focusing. He let the camera drop onto his chest, calmly walked some distance to the rattletrap taxi with the Press-Sahafi sign stuck to the windshield and, before the amused smile of the Lebanese driver to whom he was paying two dollars' commission for every good photo he helped him get, vomited up everything he'd had for breakfast that morning in the Commodore Hotel.

  “An objective, ideal witness,” Markovic commented. “Is that what it's about? For no one would say that, seeing what you're painting here. And it didn't seem to me that you were being objective that day I saw you kneeling in the ditch along the Borovo Naselje road . . . At least not until you picked up the camera and photographed the woman.”

  No answer from Faulques. He'd gone right up to the wall and, leaning a little over the scene he'd painted, was studying it closely. It was so obvious that he cursed himself for not having noticed it before. He went to get a green kitchen scrub pad and softly and very carefully rubbed the face of the man who was going to die, lightly e
rasing his features, especially the part around his mouth, until some of the sandy irregularities of the white primer on the cement wall showed through. Then he used a pastry brush to clean the scratched surface before returning to the table, where he poked through the dried brushes clumped together in the tins that had held fruit preserves and coffee, until he found a round number 4. He could feel Markovic's eyes on the back of his neck. The painter of battles had never worked while anyone watched, but at that moment he didn't care.

  “How strange,” the Croatian murmured. “There are people who identify art with something cultivated, and delicate. I thought that myself.”

  It was difficult to decide whether he was referring to the dramatic motifs of the mural or to the scrubbing pad, but Faulques was not interested in finding out. He unscrewed the tight lids on two glass jars in which he had mixed colors—he liked to prepare the ones he used most in large quantities so he didn't waste time looking for the shade he wanted—and with his brush daubed some paint on his large oven-tray palette. The mixtures had the right consistency. He wet the brush, dried it with a rag, sucked the tip, put a bit from each jar onto the tray, and went back to the wall. Markovic followed right behind. He had picked up a flat, inch-and-a-half-wide English brush he was studying with curiosity.

  “Is this real hair? From a squirrel, or a marten, or some animal like that?”

  Synthetic, Faulques answered. Painting on the rough wall wore brushes down. Nylon was stronger and cheaper. Then he stood for a minute studying the figure, the eyes painted a week ago, the oval of the face, the violent and well-executed mat of disheveled hair—up close it was a simple muddle of superimposed colors—and finally he applied flesh color, Naples yellow with blue, red, and a pinch of ochre, with strong vertical strokes around the scrubbed mouth of the man dead nearly thirty years before.

  “That conversation we had yesterday, about torture,” Markovic said suddenly. “There's something I didn't tell you. I once tortured a man.”

  He was close at Faulques' side, watching him work. He kept turning the brush over in his fingers, drawing its softness across the back of his hand. The painter had squatted down to rinse his brush, and after he dried it on a rag he applied the other mixture, burnt sienna with Prussian blue, with the idea of shading the sunken cheeks beneath the strong cheekbones and giving the effect of light on the face turned toward the viewer. He took risks as he worked, wet over wet, letting the two mixtures fuse before the rapidly drying acrylic set. Then he stood back from the wall to view what he'd done. Now the expression of the man who was going to die was right: astonishment, indignation. What the hell are you looking at, observing, photographing, painting? Faulques knew that everything would depend on his skill, or lack of it, as he painted the still scratched and smudged mouth: but he would take care of that later, when the rest was dry. He stooped down to leave the brush in the spiral of the water-filled tin, took a good look from that angle at what he had done, and when he stood up continued working on getting the contours right, this time rubbing directly with his thumb and middle finger. Then once again he was listening to what Markovic was saying. It was at the beginning of the war, the Croatian recounted. I'm referring to my war, of course. My war. Before Vukovar. We had been mobilized for a week when they ordered us to rout out the Serbian civilians from the outskirts of Vinkovci. The system was the same they used: you went to a house, brought everyone outside, opened the gas tap in the kitchen, tossed in a grenade, and went on to the next house. We separated the combat-age men, fourteen to sixty more or less. Nothing you don't know. But we didn't rape the women as others did. At least, not in any organized way. Not as part of a deliberate program of terror and ethnic cleansing. They took the men away in trucks. I don't know what they did with them. It didn't matter to me, I didn't care. The thing is that when we got to one house, in Vinkovci, one of my comrades said that he knew the family, that they were wealthy farmers, and that they had money hidden. Older father and mother. One son. Young. Twenty-something. Mentally retarded.

  “I don't think I'm interested in that episode,” Faulques interrupted, still rubbing on paint with his fingertips. “It's too predictable, and not very original.”

  Markovic paused, thinking about that.

  “He laughed, you know?” he suddenly continued. “That bastard laughed as we were beating him in front of his parents. He looked at us with his eyes wide open, and he was drooling on himself, but he never stopped laughing. As if he wanted us to like him.”

  “And of course there was no hidden money.”

  Markovic looked at the painter with respectful attention. Then he gave a slight nod.

  “Nothing. Not a centime. But the thing is that it took us a long time to find that out.”

  He put the brush back in its place and stood with his thumbs hooked in his pants pockets, watching what Faulques was doing.

  “When we left there, it also took us a long time to look each other in the eye.”

  The painter stopped rubbing, stepped back and assessed the result. The face was greatly improved—he needed only to finish the condemned man's mouth. Indignation in place of fear. And those vertical, dirty shadows that brought out the expression of the face. Volume and life, one step from death. As real as his memories, or nearly so. Satisfied, he went to the basin and washed his paint-stained hands.

  “Why did you participate in it? You could just have watched. Maybe you could even have stopped it.”

  Markovic shrugged his shoulders.

  “We were comrades, don't you get it? There are group rituals. Codes.”

  “Of course.” Faulques' mouth twisted with sarcasm. “And what would you have done had there been a rape? Which codes would you have followed?”

  “I never raped anyone.” The Croatian shifted his feet, uncomfortable. “And I didn't see anyone do it.”

  “Maybe you didn't have the opportunity.”

  Markovic's expression was strangely malicious.

  “You did some pretty foul things yourself, señor photographer. Be careful. Your camera was a passive accomplice many times . . . Or active. Don't forget your damned butterfly. Don't forget why I'm here.”

  “The difference is that everything vile I did, I did alone. My cameras and me. Period.”

  “It's presumptuous to say that.”

  “Really?”

  “You were lucky.”

  “No.” Faulques lifted a finger. “It was deliberate. I chose to do it that way from the beginning.”

  “Maybe you're wrong. It may be that you have always been the way you are, and the word ‘chose’ has nothing to do with it. That would explain everything, even your survival.”

  As he said that, Markovic pointed to his head, indicating what kind of survival he was referring to. Then he pointed to the painting. That also explains your work here in the tower, he continued. It confirms what I always suspected from your photographs. Nothing of what you're painting is remorse or expiation. It's more like a . . . Well. I don't know how to express it. A formula? No? A theorem.

  “A kind of scientific conclusion?”

  The Croatian's face lighted up. That's it, he replied. I've finally understood that nothing has ever hurt you. Not even now. Seeing what you saw didn't make you any better or more committed to your fellow man. What happened was that your photos weren't enough any longer. What happened to them is what happens to certain words: from being overused they lose their meaning. Maybe that's why you're painting now. But painting, photos, words . . . with you it's all the same. I think you feel the same compassion the researcher feels as he observes the battle in the infection of a wound through his microscope. Microbes against amoebas.

  “Leukocytes,” Faulques corrected. “The things that fight microbes are leukocytes. White corpuscles.”

  “Right. Leukocytes against microbes. You look and you take note.”

  Faulques walked right up to Markovic and stood beside him, drying his hands on the rag. Neither spoke for a moment as they stared at the painti
ng.

  “You may be right,” said the painter.

  “That would make you worse than I am.”

  A beam of light was falling through the window onto the lines of refugees in the mural. In it were little golden specks, motes of dust suspended in the air, that made it appear almost solid. It resembled the guard tower searchlight in a concentration camp.

  “Once I photographed a fight in an insane asylum,” Faulques said.

  10.

  WHEN HE WAS ALONE, FAULQUES worked all evening and far into the night on one area of the lower part of the mural: the warriors who, located to the left of the tower door, were mounted on their horses awaiting the opportunity to ride into battle, though one had moved ahead of the group, lance in socket, advancing alone toward a cluster of lances painted a little farther to the left, where the plaster showed only the charcoal sketch, black on white, of a confusion of silhouettes that when the painting was completed would be the vanguard of an army. The form for representing that solitary horseman—at first he was going to be in a serene stance, in the style of Dürer's Knight, Death, and Devil—had been suggested to Faulques by a scene from Micheletto da Cotignola Engages in Battle, one of the three panels of the triptych based on the battle of San Romano: the one in the Louvre. The devastations of time had faded contours and imposed a strange modernity upon the original scene, converting what initially had been five mounted caballeros, five lances upraised, into a sequence given extraordinary movement, as if it were a single person whose forward motion had been visually broken into segments: an amazing augury of the temporal distortions of Duchamp and the Futurists, or of Marey's chromographs. In the Uccello painting, the group that at first view seems to represent a single horse is composed of five almost superimposed horses, and of their riders the viewer can make out four heads and three plumed helmets, one of them suspended in air. A single warrior at the left seems to be holding two of the five lances, forming a fan-like pattern, as if they were one lance in different phases of movement. All of it fused into an extraordinary, dynamic, interrupted-action composition reminiscent of a film sequence shown frame by frame; not even a modern, deliberately planned photograph taken with slow shutter speed and long exposure would ever obtain the same effect. Time and chance had also painted, in their own way.