The Painter of Battles

by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

  Faulques got to his feet, brushing off his trousers.

  “It's always been that way, but we forget. The world has never known as much about itself and about nature as it does now, but it doesn't do any good. We've had tidal waves forever, you know. What's different is that in the past we didn't try to build four- and five-star hotels along the beach. Man creates euphemisms and smoke screens to deny natural laws. And also to negate his own abominable state. And every time he wakes up it costs him two hundred dead in a plane crash, two hundred thousand in a tsunami, or a million in a civil war.”

  For a moment, Markovic said nothing.

  “Abominable state, you say,” he murmured at last.

  “Exactly.”

  “You're good with words.”

  “You're not too bad yourself.”

  Markovic picked up the bag with the beers, stood up, and nodded again. He stared at the sea, reflecting.

  “Dishonor, lost nails, carelessness, symmetries, chance. And all the time we're talking about the same thing, aren't we?”

  “If not, then what?”

  “And also about broken razors and photographs that kill.”

  That, too, the painter of battles replied, and looked at him closely. In that light, he saw things in the Croatian's face he'd never noticed before.

  “Nothing is innocent, then, señor Faulques. And no one.”

  Without answering, the painter of battles turned and walked toward the tower, and Markovic followed right along. Their shadows, walking side by side, looked like two friends strolling beneath the noonday sun.

  “You know, it's possible that this business of chance is deceptive, ambiguous.” Markovic's tone was assured. “Is it chance that leaves an animal's tracks in the snow? Was that what put me in front of your camera, or did I walk toward it for subconscious reasons I can't explain? And the same could be said about you. What made you choose me, and not someone else? In any case, once the process is begun, when chance and inevitable circumstances come together, it all becomes too complex. Don't you agree? Remember, all this is new to me, and strange.”

  “ ‘Choose,’ you said.”

  “Yes.”

  “I'll tell you what it is to choose.”

  Then Faulques talked for a while—his way; talk punctuated by long pauses and silences—about choices and about chance. To illustrate, he told about the sniper he had spent four hours with, lying flat on the terrace of a six-story building that afforded a broad view of Sarajevo. The sharpshooter was a Bosnian Serb of about forty, thin, with calm eyes, who had charged Faulques two hundred marks in exchange for being allowed to stay while he was shooting at people running by on foot or speeding in a car along Radomira Putnika Avenue—on the condition that Faulques photograph him and not the street, so no one could identify his position. They had conversed in German as they waited, while Faulques played with his cameras to get the Serb accustomed to them and his subject smoked one cigarette after another, lowering his head from time to time to sight down the barrel of an SVD Dragunov rifle on which he'd mounted a powerful telescopic lens; it was aimed at the street, firmly secured between two bags of earth in a narrow opening in the wall. With no reticence, the Serb had admitted that he shot at women and children just as easily as at men, and Faulques asked no questions of a moral nature; among other reasons because that wasn't why he was there, and for another, because he knew full well—this wasn't the first sniper he'd talked to—the simple motives for which a man with the proper dose of fanaticism, rancor, or drive for monetary reward could kill indiscriminately. Instead, he asked technical questions, professional to professional, about distance, field of vision, the effect of wind and temperature on the trajectory of a bullet. Explosives, the Serb had detailed with detachment. Capable of bursting a head like a melon struck with a hammer, or rupturing guts with absolute efficacy. And how do you choose? Faulques asked. I mean, do you shoot at random or do you pick your targets? And then the Serb revealed something interesting. It's not random, he explained. Or at least not very often: maybe the reason why someone decides to cross there at just that time. The rest was up to him. Some he killed and others not. It was that easy. It depended on the way they walked, ran, or stopped. On the color of their hair, the way they moved, their attitude. On things that he associated with them when he saw them. The day before he had aimed at a young girl about fifteen or twenty meters away, and suddenly something she did very casually reminded him of his little niece—and at that point, the sharpshooter opened his billfold and showed Faulques a family photo. So I didn't shoot that one, and instead chose a woman nearby who was leaning out a window, and, who knows? maybe waiting to see how the girl who was walking so distractedly, so unprotected, was killed. That's why he said that randomness was relative. There was always something that decided things for this one or that one, operative difficulties aside, of course. It was more difficult, for example, to get a bead on children because they never stood still. The same was true of the drivers of cars passing by: sometimes they were moving too fast. Suddenly, in mid-explanation, the sniper had tensed, his features seemed to thin and his pupils contract as he leaned over the rifle, snugged the butt against his shoulder, put his right eye to the sight, and softly stroked the trigger. Jägerei, he had whispered in his bad German, muttering as if they could hear him below. Prey in view. A few seconds went by as the rifle described a slow circular movement toward the left. Then a single explosion; the butt kicked against his shoulder and Faulques was able to photograph a close-up of that tense, thin face covered with a few days' stubble, one eye shut and the other open, lips pressed together in an implacable line: just an ordinary man, with his selective criteria, his memories, antipathies and sympathies, photographed at the exact moment of killing. Faulques even took a second exposure when the sharpshooter took his cheek away from the rifle butt, looked into the lens of the Leica with icy eyes, and, after kissing the thumb and two fingers of the hand that had just pulled the trigger, gave the Serbian victory salute. You want me to tell you who I picked? he asked. Why I chose that target and not another? Faulques, who was measuring the light with his meter, did not want to know. My camera didn't photograph that, he said, so it doesn't exist. The Serb stared at him without a word, barely smiled, and then turned very serious. He asked if two days ago Faulques had driven by the Masarikov bridge at the wheel of a white Volkswagen with a shattered windshield and the words Press-Novinar taped with red adhesive over the hood. For an instant Faulques froze, then he put the light meter into his canvas bag and answered with another question whose answer he could guess. The Serb softly patted the Zeiss telescope on his rifle. Because I had you, he answered, in these sights for fifteen seconds. I had only two bullets left, and after thinking about it I told myself, I'm not going to kill that glupan today. That asshole.

  14.

  WHEN THE PAINTER OF BATTLES finished telling the story of the sharpshooter, Ivo Markovic sat thinking for a while, without commenting. They were inside the tower, drinking the Croatian's beer. Markovic on the lower steps of the spiral staircase and Faulques in a chair beside the table that held his paints.

  “As you see,” he said, “the uncertainty corresponds with the player, not the rules. Of the infinite possible trajectories of a bullet, only one happens in reality.”

  The Croatian nodded between sips. He was looking at the scar on his hand.

  “Hidden and terrible laws?”

  “Yes. Including the microscopic origin of irreversibility.”

  “I'm amazed that you claim to know about that.”

  Faulques again shrugged his shrug.

  “ ‘Know’ isn't the right word. Imagine a guy who doesn't know anything about chess but who goes every evening to the café to watch games . . .”

  “Right. Sooner or later he will learn the rules.”

  “Or at least, learn they exist. What he will never be able to know on his own, even if he watches all his life, is the number of possible games: one followed by one hundred and twenty zer
os.”

  “I understand. You're talking about a game in which the rules are not the line of exit but the point of arrival . . . Isn't that so?”

  “Damn. To be frank, that definition is very good.”

  Markovic set his beer can on the floor and took out a cigarette. He felt his pockets, looking for a match, and Faulques threw him a plastic lighter that was on the table. Keep it, he said. The Croatian caught it on the fly.

  “So,” he concluded through a mouthful of smoke. “I think I know now what you're doing here. In truth I suspected something like that but I wasn't capable of thinking it through that far. Although when I saw this”—he pocketed the lighter and gestured toward the mural—“I should have foreseen the ultimate consequences.”

  Faulques was hungry. If his strange visitor hadn't been there, he would have cooked a little pasta on the gas ring he had on the upper floor of the tower. He went upstairs, stepping between Markovic and the books, to look in the trunk where he kept clothing, tins of preserves, and the shotgun. There wasn't much left. Soon he would have to go to the village for supplies.

  “And you think there isn't any way out?” the Croatian asked from below. “That we're governed by inevitable laws? The hidden rules of the universe?”

  “It sounds extreme, put that way. But it's what I believe.”

  “Including the tracks that allow the hunter to follow the animal?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Leaning over the railing, Faulques showed Markovic a tin of sardines and a loaf of cellophane-wrapped bread, and the Croatian nodded. After picking up another tin, two forks and two plates, the painter of battles came back down and set everything on paper napkins on a free corner of the table. The two men ate standing up, washing down the sardines with the remaining two, still cold, beers Markovic had brought.

  “I respect tracks and hunters,” Markovic emphasized between mouthfuls. “Maybe that sharpshooter, in his own way, is an artist, too.”

  Faulques laughed.

  “Why not? In questions of art, the original work of the ego has greater social importance than philanthropy. Or that's what they say.”

  “Can you repeat that?”

  The painter of battles said of course I can, and did. His guest mulled that over for a while and nodded with his mouth full, seeming almost to savor the idea. An artist, he repeated thoughtfully. Right for the times he lives in. The truth is that it would never have occurred to me to think of it in that way, señor Faulques.

  “Well, or me,” Faulques admitted. “It's taken me a few years to see it that way.”

  Halfway through his tin of sardines, the painter of battles felt the warning stabs of pain. Taking his time, he looked for tablets, swallowed two with a sip of beer, excused himself, and went outside, into the sun, where he leaned against the tower wall and waited for the pain to pass. When he went back in, the Croatian observed him with curiosity.

  “Trouble?”

  “At times.”

  They exchanged looks without commenting. Later, when they had finished eating, Faulques went to the upper level to brew coffee and returned with a steaming cup in each hand. The visitor had lighted another cigarette and was studying the mural at the place where the column of refugees was fleeing the burning city under the eye of the heavily armed guards, with their look of being halfway between medieval warriors and Futurist soldiers.

  “There's a crack in the wall, up there,” said Markovic.

  “Yes, I know.”

  “What a shame,” the Croatian shook his head, disturbed. “Damaged before it's finished. Although, at any rate . . .”

  He fell silent, and Faulques could see his profile, all his attention absorbed by what he was contemplating, face upturned, chin unshaved, cigarette dangling from his lips, gray, attentive eyes running over the images on the wall, stopping on the beach where the ships were sailing away in the rain, and where, in the foreground, the boy contemplated his mother, who lay faceup, her thighs stained with blood. Aside from the painter of battles' professional memories, that woman owed a lot, in terms of composition, to a painting by Bonnard: The Indolent Woman. Although for the woman in Faulques' mural, “indolent” was not the right description.

  Markovic was still studying the figure.

  “Will you allow me a rude question?”

  “Of course.”

  “Why is everything so geometrical, with so many diagonals?”

  Faulques handed Markovic his cup of coffee, and drank a sip from his own.

  “I believe that diagonals do a better job of establishing order. Every structure has its own code of movement. Its own traffic signals.”

  “Including war?”

  “Yes. This painting is how I see it. It's a question of form, of law, or principle, or whatever we want to call it, set against disintegration into periods and commas, into blobs . . . Set against the disorder of color and of life. A fellow named Cézanne was the first one to see that.”

  “I don't know this Cézanne.”

  “Doesn't matter. I'm talking about painters. People I used to know nothing about, or scorned, and who with time I came to understand.”

  “Famous painters?”

  “Old and modern masters. Some of their names are Piero della Francesca, Paolo Uccello, and Picasso, Braque, Gris, Boccioni, Chagall, Léger . . .”

  “Oh, of course . . . Picasso.”

  Markovic stepped a little closer to the painting, leaning to get a better view of the details, cigarette in one hand and coffee cup in the other. I seem to remember, he said, that Picasso, too, had a big painting about war. Guernica, he called it. Although in fact it can't really be called a war painting. At least, not like this one. Isn't that right?”

  “Picasso never saw a war in his life.”

  The Croatian looked at the painter of battles and nodded gravely. That he could understand. With intuition that surprised Faulques, he turned toward the hanged men in the trees, in the part drawn in charcoal on the white wall.

  “And that other compatriot of yours, Goya?”

  “That one did. He saw it and he suffered.”

  Again Markovic nodded, carefully studying the sketches. He paused for a long time at the dead child beside the column of refugees.

  “Goya drew good illustrations of war, I think.”

  “His are the best engravings that have ever been made. No one saw war as he did, nor came as close to the darkness of the human condition . . . And finally he lost respect for all mankind and all academic conventions; not even the rawest photograph has gone that far.”

  “Then why is this painting so big?” Markovic's eyes were still on the dead child. “Why paint something that someone did better before you?”

  “Each person has to paint his own thing. What he saw. What he sees.”

  “Before he dies?”

  “Of course. Before he dies. No one should go without leaving a Troy blazing behind him.”

  “A Troy, you say?”

  Markovic, who was now moving slowly along the wall, smiled pensively.

  “You know something, señor Faulques? Thanks to you I no longer believe in the certainties held by people who have a house, a family, friends.”

  His smile revealed the gap in his teeth as he stopped beside the group of warriors waiting to enter the combat, the area Faulques had been working on the day before. The afternoon light, as the sun began to descend, was pouring through the window, giving the scene an extraordinary clarity, making the armor shine as if it truly were metal, although that effect was owed to the fine lines of titanium white over a neutral gray, and to the repetition, in soft, slightly lighter touches, of the tones of burnished metal.

  “They say that before you die,” the Croatian commented, “you should plant a tree, write a book, and have a child. Once I had a child, but I don't have him now. And they burned the trees I had planted . . . Maybe I should paint that, señor Faulques. Do you think I would be capable of painting that?”

  “I don't see why not. Ever
yone works things out the best way he can.”

  “And capable of collaborating on this one?”

  “Yes, you can if you want.”

  The Croatian adjusted his glasses, and put his face close to the painting. He studied the weapons, the details of the helmets and gauntlets. Then he took one step back, looked around the entire wall, looked at the painter of battles, and gestured timidly toward the table with the brushes, tubes, and jars.

  “May I?”

  Faulques smiled a little, and nodded.

  “Help yourself.”

  Markovic hesitated, set down his cup and cigarette, and finally pointed to the two men struggling on the ground, looking for chinks in the armor bristling with screws and nuts that made them look like robots. Faulques went to the table, opened one of the tightly sealed jars in which he kept small quantities of mixed paint, and put a little bluish-white paint on a number 6 brush.

  “Let's make one of those knives gleam,” he suggested. “All it takes is a fine line along the edge. You can brace yourself against the wall, the paint is dry.”

  He indicated the spot, handed the brush to Markovic, who, kneeling on the floor, and after studying the metal already painted with the white, traced a line along the edge of the knife one of the combatants held high above his head. He worked slowly and with great concentration, applying what was on the brush. After a while he stood up and handed the brush back to Faulques.

  “What do you think?” he asked.

  “Not bad. If you stand over here, you'll see that now the blade looks more dangerous.

  “You're right.”

  “You want to paint something else?”

  “No, thank you. That's enough.”

  Faulques washed the brush and set it to dry. The Croatian's attention was concentrated on the wall.

  “Your soldiers look like machines, don't you think? With so many screws and all that metal.” He turned toward the painter of battles as if he'd just been asked a question and was thinking about the right answer. “Killing machines?”