The Painter of Battles

by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

  The woman from the tourist boat came out of the office and started toward the terrace, on her way to the parking lot. Faulques observed that she stopped to talk with the port watchman, and that she said hello to all the waiters. She seemed talkative, and she had a pretty smile. Her hair, very blond and long, was pulled into a ponytail. Attractive despite being plump, carrying an extra kilo or two of weight. When she walked by the table where he was sitting, the painter of battles looked at her eyes. Blue. Sunny.

  “Hello,” he said.

  The woman stared at him, at first surprised, then curious. About thirty, Faulques calculated. She said “Hello” in return, looked as if she was going to walk on, but hesitated, undecided.

  “Do we know each other?” she asked.

  “I know you.” Faulques had got to his feet. “At least I know your voice. I hear it every day at exactly one o'clock.”

  She looked at him more closely, confused. She was almost as tall as he. Faulques waved his hand toward the tender and the coast in the direction of Cala del Arráez. After an instant, she smiled a big smile.

  “Of course!” she said. “The painter of the tower.”

  “A well-known painter who is embellishing an entire interior wall with a large mural. I would like to thank you especially for the words ‘well-known’ and ‘embellishing.’ In any case, you have a pleasant voice.”

  The woman burst out laughing. She smelled slightly of sweat, Faulques noticed. Clean sweat, from the sea and the sun. Part of her job, he imagined, from entertaining tourists from ten o'clock in the morning.

  “I hope I haven't caused you any problems,” she said. “I'd be truly sorry if I've bothered you . . . But we don't have many local celebrities we can show off to visitors.”

  “Don't worry. The road to my place is long, inconvenient, and uphill. Almost no one comes.”

  He invited her to sit down and she did. She ordered a Coca-Cola from the waiter, lit a cigarette, and told Faulques a few details of her job. She was from a city inland and she took care of the office in Puerto Umbría during the tourist season. In the winter she worked as an interpreter and translator for consulates, embassies, courts, and immigration offices. She was divorced and she had a five-year-old daughter. And her name was Carmen Elsken.

  “You're German by birth?”

  “Dutch. I've been living in Spain since I was a little girl.”

  They chatted for fifteen or twenty minutes. A courteous, inconsequential conversation, not overly interesting to Faulques, except for the fact that this woman was the owner of the voice he had been hearing every day for a long time. So he let her talk, maintaining a relative silence from which he emerged only to ask polite questions. At any rate, it was inevitable that their chat would eventually turn to him and to his work in the tower. They say in the village that it's original, Carmen Elsken commented. Very interesting. An enormous painting that covers the whole inside wall and that you've been working on it for nearly a year. It's a shame that it can't be visited, but I understand why you would prefer to be left alone. Even so—she observed him with renewed curiosity—I would really like to see that painting someday.

  Faulques hesitated a moment. Well, why not, he said to himself. She was pleasant. Her compatriot Rembrandt would not have hesitated to paint her as a bourgeois woman with warm flesh and promising neckline. Her hair was pulled back tight and smooth at her forehead and temples, in nice contrast with her skin. The painter of battles had nearly forgotten what it felt like to have a woman close by. The image of Ivo Markovic flitted through his head. There's not much time left, the Croatian had said. You should go down to the village. A time-out to reflect. A truce before the final conversation. The painter of battles studied the blue eyes across the table. It was his nature to be observant, and he noticed a spark of interest in them. He put his right hand on the table and noticed that she looked at it when he set it down.

  “Starting tomorrow, I have things to do, but this afternoon might be possible . . . If you want to make the climb, you'll see the tower. But a car can go only halfway. The rest has to be done on foot.”

  Carmen Elsken hesitated about four seconds. Yes, she would come up, with great pleasure. Would sometime around five be all right? The tourist office closed then.

  “Five is perfect,” Faulques replied.

  The woman stood, and he stood up as well, shaking the hand she offered. A warm, frank clasp. He noticed that the spark of interest was still in her blue eyes.

  “Around five,” she repeated.

  He studied her as she walked away, the blond hair, the white skirt of her dress swishing over her broad hips and tanned legs. Then he sat back down, ordered another beer, and looked around, suspecting that he might see Ivo Markovic standing somewhere nearby, grinning from ear to ear.

  Faulques continued to scan the sea and the distant line of the coast toward Cabo Malo, while Carmen Elsken slowly faded from his thoughts. The sun was beginning to descend in the sky and the intense light gave objects a precise clarity, a special beauty, like a glaze that instead of making colors more dense, clarified them, gave them incomparable transparency. Beauty, he said to himself, returning to his memories; that was one of the possible words, but only one of them. He had also reflected on that once or twice with Olvido, in a different time. Beautiful landscapes didn't always signify light and life, or a future beyond five o'clock in the afternoon—or any other hour humans set with inexplicable optimism. Faulques' thoughts again turned to Ivo Markovic and his lips twisted in a brief, cruel grimace. He and Olvido had had that conversation as they stood before some Turner watercolors in the Tate Gallery in London: Venice at dawn, looking toward San Pietro de Castello or from the Hotel Europa, could be an idyllic scene when viewed through the eyes of a mid-nineteenth-century English painter, but could also be the blurred line—the watercolor with its ambiguous tones was perfect for that—between the beauty of a dawn and the representation in art that the varied palette of the Universe, the fascinating chromatic specter of horror, placed at the disposition of any observer standing in the right spot. Lines of clouds could streak across the sea on the eastern horizon of the morning like the announcement of a perfect new day of light and shapes; but they could also be like the smoke that, blown by an offshore breeze, carried the smell of death from a devastated city—smell of war, Olvido used to say, touching her clothing with a horrified smile: I'll carry this scent to my death. In the same vein, the red, orange, and yellow light bathing the campanile of San Marco at the first explosion of day seemed to a retina previously imprinted with other, similar conflagrations closer to the fleeting splendor of cannon fire than to the slow, delicious affirmation—not always exact, in the experience of the now painter of battles—that following night comes the day, and beauty. There were nights without a dawn, the last shadows that were the end of everything, and days painted with a palette of shadows.

  Faulques drank another sip of beer, his eyes lost in the thin, distant gray line that disappeared into the sea. Those Venetian watercolors were also related in his memory with different circumstances. Among others, with the cold, diffuse light of an autumn dawn on the outskirts of Dubica, the old Yugoslavia, waiting for the moment to cross the Sava River with a group of soldiers. Olvido and he had spent the night shivering in the storeroom of an abandoned factory with a hundred and ninety-four Croatians on their way to fight, come dawn. At first Olvido was welcomed with the usual male deference—in that day there still was some—toward a woman who, of her own volition, found herself in the midst of a war. In the glare of their flashlights, the soldiers looked her over with curiosity. What are you doing here? you could read in their amazed smiles, in the low-voiced talk among themselves. Olvido and he had looked for a reasonably comfortable place to settle into, and some young men had given them, from their provisions, a can of pineapple packed in syrup. Then, as time went by, the soldiers sank back into their personal isolation, the self-absorbed silence of someone who is approaching a crucial encounter with fate a
nd destiny. Some thirty of them were nearly children; they were fifteen or sixteen years old and they had grouped around a teacher from their school with whom they had enlisted in a block. The teacher was a young man about twenty-eight who'd been promoted to officer status, and who, despite the steel helmets, weapons, and military belting stuffed with ammunition and grenades, moved among them with the look of the teacher he had been until only a few weeks before, a man whom the parents of those same boys had begged to look after them as he had in school. He went from one to the next, talking in a low, calm voice, checking their equipment, giving them cigarettes and, to the older ones, sips from a bottle of rakia, or with a felt-tip pen writing on a shirt, a helmet, or the back of a hand the blood type of those who knew it. Faulques and Olvido had spent the night lying very close together to keep warm, not opening their mouths even though the cold kept them from sleeping, sensing on their closed eyelids the beam of some flashlight illuminating them for an instant. The first light of dawn finally filtered through the holes in the roof and the broken windows of the storeroom, and in that ghostly darkness the soldiers began to get to their feet and go outside toward the dirty light that outlined their bodies like the silhouettes in Venetian watercolors, dozens of men and boys looking around like dogs sniffing the air before heading toward a horizontal line of fog, a slightly lighter gray that seemed to float just above the ground; moisture rising from the nearby river was in the indecision of dawn shading into a darker, somber, irregular smudge, a configuration of straight lines and surfaces broken into strange angles: the destroyed bridge over the Sava the soldiers had to cross, making use of its debris, and then climb a long slope between two hills and attack Dubica, invisible on the other side. Rubbing limbs stiff with cold, Faulques and Olvido started toward the river with the others, their cameras inside their camera bags since there wasn't enough light to shoot. It looks like one of those Turners, she'd said. Remember? Shadows in the dawn light. But the damned Englishman had forgotten to paint the cold. She had buttoned up the neck of her knee-length jacket, and after slinging the camera bag over her shoulder had smiled at Faulques. There will never, she said suddenly in the middle of that strange smile—and she said it with melancholy—be another war like this one. She kissed him on the cheek, repeated the word “never” in a lower voice, and set out after the soldiers. From those silhouettes that looked as if they were suspended above the mantle of fog covering the riverbank came, first only one, then two or three, and finally multiplied all around them, the sound of bolts being drawn on weapons, clic clac. There was a hint of orange and gold in the sky to the east as they waded into the waist-deep water and, with the help of the rope strung during the night, crossed the river on the twisted remains of the bridge. And on the other side, when they began climbing the slope between the two hills, soaking wet from the waist down, their feet squishing inside their boots, the bluish-gray light grew strong enough that Faulques, with the aperture of one camera open to the maximum—f 1.4 exposure on the lens and 1/60 shutter speed—could photograph the soldiers dividing into two groups, following their officers toward the hill on the right or the one on the left, stubborn, empty, brave, tense, expressionless, distrustful, distorted, cautious, terrified, uneasy, serene, indifferent faces. In sum, every possible variation among men confronting the same test in that light a watercolor painter would have classified as extraordinarily beautiful, light that like an anticipatory shroud wrapped men who were on the verge of death in subtle, delicate tones. Faulques looked for Olvido and saw her among the soldiers, walking four or five meters to his left, with her wet jeans pasted to her legs, the black, military-cut coat buttoned up high, rubber bands holding her braids, and her cameras still in the camera bag over her shoulder, as if shooting photos was the furthest thought from her mind, the excuse she didn't need in that dawn of equivocal and terrible beauty. And when they were farther up the slope and on the other side of the hills they heard the reverberation of shots and explosions, and the soldiers around them clenched their jaws and held the weapons they were carrying more tightly, crouching lower and lower as they neared the top, she began to look around her, to focus on the nearby faces with an intense and pitiless curiosity, as if she were seeking silent answers to questions that could be resolved only in an uncertain dawn like that one, in the medium of a cosmic watercolor in which each silhouette, including her own, was a miserable sketch. Then mortar fire burst from just behind the peak of the hill, and an officer—the last reflex of the male protecting the female before turning his back and crossing his own shadowy line—turned toward Olvido and said Stop, Stop, indicating with energetic gestures that she should stay where she was. She obeyed without protesting, kneeling down with her cameras still in her bag, her eyes fixed on the soldiers continuing forward, on the teacher who was climbing the slope with his boys, shoulders hunched and faces pale and contorted in the ambiguous morning light. She stayed where she was, on her knees, while Faulques, who also had halted, had changed his shutter speed and aperture as the sun crowned the hills that smoke from the explosions had encircled with a dusty, golden halo and was beginning to photograph the first men coming back from the peak, or being brought back by comrades, leaving long red streaks on the ground, limping, pressing dressings and bandages to their wounds, spattered with mud and blood and shredded by shrapnel, horrified, blinded men with their hands covering their faces, stumbling down the slope. And Olvido was still kneeling when Faulques got up and ran a little farther up the hill, crouched, and then ran another stretch in order to get a profile shot of the teacher with his arms around the shoulders of two of his boys who were dragging him along, his feet plowing two furrows in the wet grass and half of his chin torn away by shrapnel. And behind them came more of the boys, crying, screaming, or silent, wounded or untouched, some alone, with no weapons, some helping others covered with blood, more scarlet trails crisscrossing in the watercolor some meticulous landscape artist was composing with painstaking care at his Olympian easel. And when Faulques, rewinding his third roll of film, looked toward Olvido again, he saw that she had finally taken out her camera and with her back to the scene was photographing the deserted and destroyed bridge that had sunk to the bed of the lead-colored river, the precarious road they had left behind between the two banks, as if it were there, and not in the shattered men withdrawing from the hills, that she found the key image, the explanation she had come to look for. That was how Faulques knew that she was close to finding it, and that she would not be at his side much longer, because time, too, had its ancient rules. Arithmós kinesios. The arithmetic of movement according to the before and after. Especially after. And a photographer—she liked to repeat the phrase she had heard from Faulques' lips—never belongs to the group he appears to belong to. Until then, despite everything, he had held the absurd hope that with time she would become more fully his: sleepy eyes seen every morning, a body declining at his side, in his hands, day after day. A serene old age, remembering. But that morning, when he saw her turn her mud-spattered face toward the bridge and slowly raise the camera, seeking the image of the dangerous road they had left behind—the photograph of the before of the arithmetic of movement that had brought them to the riverbank where men were dying—Faulques in turn looked toward the after, and saw only his own past. That was how he learned that they would never grow old together, and that she would travel on to other places and other arms. A man, he remembered having heard more than once, believes he is a woman's lover, when in truth he is only her witness. Arithmós kinesios. Faulques was fearful when he thought of having to return to the solitude that awaited him in the words “before” and “after,” but he was even more fearful that Olvido would survive that last war.