The Painter of Battles

by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

  Faulques, a graphic predator free of complexes, had executed the horseman in his mural with all this in mind; hence the appearance of a moving photograph of an individual and the various outlines he seemed to leave behind like ghostly traces in space. As Faulques worked, he had sprayed water to keep the first layers fresh, moist over moist, diluted colors and quick brushwork on the bottom and thicker and stronger strokes on top. Now the painter of battles got up from the paint-stained mattress he had been kneeling on as he worked; he put the paint brush in the spiral of the water can, rubbed his kidneys, and stepped back. It was right. Not a self-conscious Uccello, of course, but a humble Faulques, who would not even sign his name when he was finished. But it looked good. The group of horsemen was now complete, lacking only a few touch-ups that would be done later. Above their heads, at the planned vanishing point between them and the lone rider who was approaching the forest of enemy lances, rose—or would rise when they were something more than schematic lines in charcoal—the towers of Manhattan, Hong Kong, London, or Madrid: any city of the many that lived trusting in the power of their arrogant colossi; a forest of modern, intelligently engineered buildings inhabited by people convinced of their youth, beauty, and immortality, certain that sorrow and death could be kept at bay with the Enter key of a computer. Ignorant, all of them, of the fact that to invent a technical object was also to invent its specific undoing, in the same way that the creation of the universe brought with it, implicit from the moment of primordial nucleosynthesis, the word “catastrophe.” That was why the history of humankind was so well supplied with towers built to be evacuated in four or five hours but able to withstand the fury of a fire for only two, and of intrepid, unsinkable Titanics waiting for the iceberg placed by Chaos at an exact point on its nautical chart.

  As sure of it as if he were seeing it—in truth he had seen, and was seeing it—Faulques shook his head, pleased with those lines on the wall that already had form and color in his imagination or in his memory. He had no need to invent anything. All that glass and steel was a direct continuation of the beplumed and iron-clad horsemen whose armor had chinks through which any humble peon could, with a little desperation combined with a little boldness, insert the sharp blade of a dagger.

  Olvido had expressed it with great precision in Venice. There are no barbarians now, Faulques. They are all inside us. And there aren't even ruins like those of the past, she would add later, in Osijek, as he was photographing a house whose façade had disappeared during a bombing; behind the rubble piled in the street one could still see the intimate grid of rooms, complete with furniture, domestic utensils, and family photographs on the walls. In a different time, she'd said—moving with care among chunks of cement and twisted iron, camera to her eye, searching for the right framing—ruins were indestructible. Isn't that true? They stayed there for centuries and centuries, though people used the stones for their houses and the marble for their palaces. And then a Hubert Robert or a Magnasco came along with his easel and painted them. It isn't like that now. Just look at this. Our world creates rubble instead of ruins, and as soon as possible a bulldozer comes and everything disappears, ready to be forgotten. Ruins are disturbing, they make you uncomfortable. And of course, without stone books for reading the future, suddenly we find ourselves on the shore with one foot in the boat and no coins in our pockets to give to Charon.

  Faulques smiled inside, his eyes absorbed by the mural. The boatman on the river of death had been a private joke between Olvido and him ever since the time when in company of Sahrawi guerrilla fighters they'd had to cross the sandy bed of a uad near Guelta Zemmur under Moroccan fire. While they were waiting for the moment to leave the shelter of some rocks and run fifty meters in the open—Who goes first? the guerrilla who was going to cover them with fire from his Kalashnikov asked uneasily—Olvido made a playful face and patted Faulques' pocket, staring hard at him, green eyes glittering in the glare of the sun on the sand, tiny drops of sweat beading her forehead and upper lip. I hope you have a coin for Charon, she said, her breathing ragged from her eagerness to confront the moment. Then she'd touched the lobes of her ears, where two small ball-shaped gold earrings gleamed through her hair—she almost never wore jewelry; she liked to tell about the ladies of Venice who to circumvent the laws against ostentation went out for strolls followed by servants decked out in their mistresses' jewels. These will do for me, she added. And then she got up, stretched long legs sheathed in sandcovered jeans—she was laughing quietly, and that's what Faulques would hear as she left—adjusted her camera pack, and started running after the Sahrawi preceding her, while another guerrilla emptied half a clip on the Moroccan position. Faulques photographed her—motor at four frames per second—slim and swift, running forward over the sand like the gazelle with which he associated her at every instant. And when finally it was his turn to cross, she was waiting for him on the other side, under cover, still throbbing with excitement, her mouth open as she caught her breath. With a smile of savage happiness. Go to hell, Charon, she said, touching Faulques' face with her fingertips. And smiling.

  He felt the warning pain again, so the painter of battles washed down two tablets and squatted on his haunches, back against the wall. He waited, not moving, gritting his teeth, for them to take effect. When he got up, his clothing was soaked with sweat. He went to the switch and turned off the two strong lights illuminating the wall. Then he took off his shirt and went outside to wash his face and hands; still dripping with water he plunged into the night landscape with long, slow strides, wet hands in his pockets, as the breeze off the sea cooled his face and naked torso and the deafening crickets urged him on from the brush and the black woods. He could hear the sea below, breaking among the rocks of the unseen cove. He walked to the edge of the cliff—he stopped a little short, cautious, still blinded by the brilliance of the halogen bulbs—and stood there until his retinas adjusted to the dark, watching the moon and stars, and the distant flash from the lighthouse. He was thinking about Ivo Markovic. It seems—the Croatian had said that morning, when they were both looking at the mural—that what we have here is a place where a lot of broken straight razors come together, señor Faulques. The painter of battles had just recounted an experience, in the usual way he told things: long pauses, as if he were reviewing some memory inside rather than telling it to a stranger who was not really a stranger any longer. An asylum, he was saying. Once he had photographed a battle in an insane asylum. With real lunatics. The line of combat passed through the courtyard of the building, a huge run-down house near San Miguel, in El Salvador. By the time he got there, guards and attendants had fled. The guerrillas were inside and the soldiers outside, on the other side of the wall and in the house across the street, some twenty meters away. They were attacking with everything they had, guns, grenades, while the inmates wandered around as they pleased, from position to position, walking across the courtyard between bursts of shots or standing near the combatants, staring at them, jabbering at them, laughing uproariously, shrieking with terror when a bomb burst near them. Eight or ten died, but that day the best photographs Faulques took were of the living: a calm old man in a pajama top, naked from the waist down, who, steadfast amid the fire, hands clasped behind his back, was watching two guerrillas firing from a prone position. He also photographed a middle-aged woman in a blood-stained bathrobe, fat, hair flying, rocking a young combatant who'd been wounded in the neck as if he were a baby or a doll. Faulques had left there when one of the inmates picked up the gun of a wounded man and started shooting in every direction.

  “I went back two days later, to take a look . . . There were holes in the walls and the ground was covered with spent shells. The soldiers and the guerrillas weren't there any longer, but some of the patients had stayed on in the asylum. There was excrement and dried blood everywhere. One man came up to me, acting very mysteriously, to show me a jar of something that looked like peaches in syrup. When I looked more closely I saw they were cut-off ears.”
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br />   Markovic half turned toward Faulques. He seemed sincerely interested.

  “You took the photo?”

  “It would never have been published. So I didn't take it.”

  “But oh yes, you have, and those were published, the ones of men with burning tires around their necks . . . Wasn't that in South Africa?”

  “Don't believe that. They threw out the rawest ones. Companies that advertise automobiles, perfume, and expensive watches don't like to see their advertisements run alongside those kinds of scenes.”

  The Croatian kept looking at the painter of battles. His smile was placid. That was when he'd said, It seems that what we have here is a place where a lot of broken straight razors come together, señor Faulques.

  With those words Markovic had turned back to the mural. He stood a long time before he lightly shrugged his shoulders, as if in answer to internal reflections.

  “Who was it who said that words had been exhausted by wars?”

  “I don't know. It sounds like something from a long time ago.”

  “And a lie, besides. Whoever said that had never been in a war.”

  “That's what I think, too.” Faulques smiled. “Maybe war exhausts stupid words, but not the rest. The ones you and I know.”

  Facing Faulques, Markovic half closed his eyes in a look of shared complicity.

  “Do you mean the words that are seldom spoken, or that come out only before someone who knows them?”

  “Yes, those words.”

  Markovic had not taken his eyes from the mural.

  “You know what, señor Faulques? After I left that prison camp, I was taken to a hospital in Zagreb, and the first thing I did when I got out was go and sit in a café in Jelacic Square. To watch people, hear their words. And I couldn't believe what I heard: the conversations, the preoccupations, the priorities . . . Listening to them, I wondered. Don't they realize? What does a dented car matter, a run in your stocking, the payment on the TV? Do you know what I mean?”

  “Perfectly.”

  “That still happens to me . . . doesn't it to you? I get on a train, go into a bar, walk along a street, and I see them all around me. Where do they come from? I ask myself. Am I an extraterrestrial? Can it be that they're not aware that theirs is not a normal state?”

  “No. They aren't aware.”

  Markovic had taken off his glasses and was checking to see if the lenses were clean.

  “You know what I think after having looked at so much of your work? That in war, instead of your camera catching normal people doing abnormal things, it does just the opposite. Doesn't it? You photograph abnormal people doing normal things.”

  “The truth is that it's something more complex than that. Or simpler. Normal people doing normal things.”

  That stopped Markovic. After a while he slowly nodded a couple of times and put his glasses back on.

  “All right. I don't really blame them. I didn't know that myself until . . .” Suddenly he turned. “And you? Has it always been what your photos say it is?”

  The painter of battles held Markovic's eyes but his lips didn't move. After a moment, the Croatian shrugged again.

  “You were never an ordinary photographer, señor Faulques.”

  “I don't know what I was . . . I know what I wasn't. I began the way everyone does, it seems to me: as a privileged witness of history, danger, and adventure. Youth. The difference is that most of the war photographers I knew discovered an ideology after the fact. With time they were humanized, or pretended to be.”

  Markovic pointed to the book on the table.

  “ ‘Humanitarian’ is not a word I would use to label your photos.”

  “It's just that when you apply the word ‘humanitarian’ you spoil the photograph. It makes it self-conscious, and that means no longer seeing the external world through the viewfinder. The photo ends up photographing itself.”

  “But that isn't what made you retire . . .”

  “In a way it did, yes. At the end, I, too, was photographing myself.”

  “And were you always suspicious of the landscape? Of life?”

  Faulques, who was distractedly rearranging some brushes, reflected on that a moment.

  “I don't know. I suppose that the day I left home with a pack on my back, I still wasn't. Or maybe I was. Maybe I became a photographer in order to confirm some suspicion I had in advance.”

  “I know what you mean. An educational journey. Scientific. The leukocytes and all the rest.”

  “Yes. The leukocytes.”

  Markovic took a few steps into the room, examining everything as if he had just taken a new interest in it: the table covered with jars of paint, rags, and brushes—the photography book was still lying there—books stacked on the floor and on the steps of the spiral staircase that led to the upper floor of the tower.

  “Do you always sleep up there?”

  The painter of battles looked at him with mistrust, and didn't answer, and the Croatian made a mocking face. It's an innocent question, he said. Curiosity about your way of life.

  “In fact,” Markovic added, “I was just going to pose a more impertinent question and ask whether you always sleep alone.”

  This place is known as the Cala del Arráez. It was once a refuge for Berber pirates . . . The woman's voice and the amplified music echoed off the cliff, above the noise of the engines of the tourist tender passing by, as it did every day. Faulques turned toward the window the sound was coming through. A well-known painter lives in that tower . . . and there he was, standing stock-still until the boat moved on and the sound faded away.

  “How about that,” said the Croatian. “You're a local celebrity.”

  He had walked to the foot of the stair and was studying the titles of the books stacked there. He picked up a copy—underlined on nearly every page—of Pascal's Pensées and put it back where it had been atop an Iliad, Franco and Stefano Borsi's Paolo Uccello, Vasari's Lives, and Sánchez Ron's Diccionario de la ciencia.

  “You are a refined man, señor Faulques. You read a lot.”

  The painter of battles pointed to the wall. Only things that relate to this, he replied. And Markovic again turned to the mural. Finally his face lighted up. I understand now, he said. You mean that the only things that interest you are those that can be useful to this enormous painting. Things that give you good ideas.”

  “That's it.”

  “Well, the same's true of me. I've already told you that I was never a person to read much. Although because of you I tried several times. I read books, I assure you. But only when they had some connection to you. Or when I thought they would help me understand. Many of them were difficult books. Some I couldn't finish, no matter how hard I tried . . . But I read a few. And it's true: I learned things.”

  As he was talking, his eyes went from the windows to the door to the upper floor. Faulques felt a flash of apprehension. The Croatian reminded him of a photographer studying how to slip into hostile territory and how to get out. Also a murderer studying the future scene of a crime.

  “There's no woman?”

  Faulques had no intention of answering. However, he did, some five seconds later. You just heard her, he said, passing by down there. Markovic, surprised, seemed to consider the possibility that Faulques was pulling his leg. And he must have come to that conclusion, for he smiled a little and shook his head.

  “I'm being serious,” Faulques insisted. “Or almost.”

  Now the Croatian was studying him. His smile was a little broader.

  “Come on,” he said. “What does she look like?”

  “I don't have the least idea . . . All I know is her voice. Every day, at the same hour.”

  “You haven't seen her in the port?”

  “Never.”

  “And you're not curious?”

  “Only relatively so.”

  A pause. Markovic wasn't smiling anymore. His gaze had become suspicious. Intelligent.

  “Why are you telling me tha
t?”

  “Because you asked me.”

  The Croatian pushed his glasses with a finger and for a moment looked at Faulques without speaking. Then he sat down on a step of the stairway, beside the books, and without taking his eyes from the painter of battles made a gesture that encompassed the entire tower.

  “How did you get the idea for all this? To do something like this? Here?”

  Faulques told him. Old story. He'd been in an ancient, ruined mill near Valencia, where an anonymous seventeenth-century author, no doubt a soldier passing by, had painted chiaroscuro scenes of the siege of the Salses Castle in France. That had left certain ideas in his head that later hatched somewhere between visiting a hall of battle paintings in the Escorial and a certain painting he'd seen in a museum in Florence. That was it.

  “I don't believe that was all there was to it,” Markovic protested. “There are those photos of yours . . . And isn't it extraordinary. I never thought of you as a man who was dissatisfied with his work. Horrified, maybe, I told myself. But not dissatisfied. Although in this painting the last thing you seem to be is horrified. Maybe that's because paintings aren't painted with emotion. Right? Or are they? Maybe what can't be painted with emotion is a painting like this.”