“And you didn't say anything?”
“I hesitated three seconds. That was all. Three. She was leaving, do you understand? She was already leaving me. Suddenly I wanted to know how far . . . I don't know. How she was leaving didn't depend on me. Maybe geometry had something to say on that subject.”
Markovic listened very quietly. If it weren't for the red tip of his cigarette, or the periodic flashes from the lighthouse that silhouetted the Croatian, Faulques would have thought he wasn't there.
“She took two steps forward,” he continued. “Exactly two. She wanted to shoot something there on the ground, a school notebook . . . I saw that the grass in the ditch was standing straight up. Tall, and untouched. No one had stepped on it.”
At that, Markovic clicked his tongue. Familiar with grass trodden and untrodden.
“I get it now,” he murmured. “You always have to be suspicious of that.”
“I thought . . . Well. She could stop where she was. You understand.”
Markovic seemed to understand very well.
“But she moved,” he said.
She moved. Faulques nodded. The way a piece moves on a chessboard. She'd taken one more step, this time to the left. Just one.
“And you were looking at all those lines and squares . . . Quiet, and fascinated.”
That was the exact word, the painter of battles conceded. Fascinated. Before she took that last step, she had raised the camera to take the photo. Only three seconds: a nearly imperceptible instant. Chaos and its rules, to put it that way, had had its chance. Then Faulques had thought that was enough, and had opened his mouth to tell her to stop. At that instant there was a flash, and Olvido collapsed.
“Do you remember the last thing she said? Didn't she look at you before or say anything to you?”
“No. She was walking along; she was going to shoot the picture and she stepped on the mine. That's it. She died without me, without any sense I was watching her. Without realizing she was dying.”
The glowing tip of Markovic's cigarette disappeared. The fireflies, too, had disappeared and the compact mass of the tower was slowly emerging where the sky was shaded from black to dark blue.
“She was leaving,” Faulques insisted.
He heard the Croatian. A quiet shuffling on the ground, a stirring in the bushes. The painter of battles touched the shaft of his knife but left it where it was, his fingers brushing over it but not pulling it out. Suddenly he was so tired that he could have dropped off to sleep right there. After all, he thought, what was going to happen had been happening for a hundred and fifty million years. Something as ordinary as life and the universe itself. Also, it was very late for everyone, he thought. Especially him.
Markovic's voice sounded quiet, brooding. Instead of conversing, he seemed to be expressing a thought aloud. Once again he stood out against the flare from the lighthouse. He stood taller than usual.
“When I came to look for you, señor Faulques, I thought I was going to kill a living man.”
The painter of battles rested his head against the tree trunk and waited calmly, his eyes open in the darkness. He was remembering other dawns, early mornings when he was readying equipment, following a precise routine, pausing at the threshold before closing the door to take a last look around and be sure that everything left behind was orderly and clean. Sitting in the taxi on the way to the airport, traveling through the deserted streets of a sleeping city, not sure whether or not he would be back.
“Well,” he said in a low voice, “you will have to make do with what there is.”
He didn't change his position or move his head from the support of the trunk as gray, then gold and orange light spread across the horizon. The black silhouette of the tower was backlighted against the first flush of dawn, then everything around it, trees, bushes, rocks, slowly took form. The distant flash of the lighthouse was extinguished just as a soft land breeze blew toward the cliff, where the sea was calm and he no longer heard the sound of pebbles moved by the undertow. Finally, Faulques looked toward the place Ivo Markovic had been, and saw only a half dozen cigarette butts on the ground.
The painter of battles sat where he was for a long time, never shifting position until the red disk of the sun had risen above the line of the sea near Los Ahorcados Island and its first horizontal rays warmed his skin and made him shut his eyes. Then he got to his feet, brushing pine needles from his trousers, and took a slow, three-hundred-and-sixty-degrees look around him. The gulls screeched as they swooped around the tower, its stone golden in the reddish light from the east. On the side opposite the horizon, the irregular coastline stood out in the soft morning mist, its points given perspective by varied shades of gray, from the darkest and nearest to the most hazy and distant. Like you see in old paintings.
It was, he decided serenely, a beautiful day.
He went down the narrow, steep path, and when he reached the beach, which was still in shadow, he looked out over the sea, quiet, immense, an enormous sheet of mercury the growing light was beginning to turn blue in the distance. He took off his sneakers and shirt and waded a little way into the water, carefully placing his bare feet among the rounded stones on the shore. The water was cold, as it was each morning before his usual one hundred and fifty strokes out and one hundred and fifty strokes back. Its coolness invigorated his muscles and cleared his head. He went back to the dead trunk, to leave, along with his shoes and shirt, the keys to the tower, the few coins from his pockets, and the knife still stuffed in the back of his belt. Then he looked up and smiled, bedazzled: the sun was peering above the cut in the cliff through the branches of the pines, its rays obliquely illuminating the small beach. At that instant Faulques felt a discomfort in his side, the notice of imminent pain returning once more, claiming its rights. The certainty made him shake his head, totally absorbed in the moment. This time, he told himself, it's too late.
Before he went back to the water, he picked up one of the coins he'd set on the dead trunk and put it in his mouth beneath his tongue. Then, now in water up to his waist, he noticed how his track through the pebbles was being erased, just like the sketches disappearing on the finally completed mural drying in the morning sun.
When the pain stabbed again, the painter of battles scarcely noticed. He was swimming with pure concentration, vigorous, moving out with good rhythm and precise geometry, in a straight line that cut exactly in two the semicircle of the cove. In his mouth, along with the savor of salt, he tasted the copper of his coin for Charon. He wondered what he would find beyond the three hundred strokes.
La Navata, December, 2005
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ARTURO PÉREZ-REVERTE'S bestselling books, including
The Club Dumas, The Flanders Panel, The Seville Communion,
and the Captain Alatriste series, have been translated into
thirty-four languages in fifty countries and have sold millions
of copies. Pérez-Reverte was born in 1951 in Cartagena,
Spain, and now lives in Madrid, where he was recently elected
to the Spanish Royal Academy. A retired war journalist, he
covered conflicts in Angola, Bosnia, Croatia, El Salvador,
Lebanon, Libya, Nicaragua, Romania, the Persian Gulf, and
Sudan, among others. He now writes fiction full-time.
Also by Arturo Pérez-Reverte
THE FLANDERS PANEL
THE CLUB DUMAS
THE SEVILLE COMMUNION
THE FENCING MASTER
THE NAUTICAL CHART
THE QUEEN OF THESOUTH
Captain Alatriste Series
CAPTAIN ALATRISTE
PURITY OF BLOOD
THE SUN OVER BREDA
The Painter of Battles is a work of historical fiction. Apart from the
well-known actual people, events, and locales that figure in the
narrative, all names, characters, places, and incidents are the products
of the author's imagination
or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to
current events or locales, or to living persons, is entirely coincidental.
English translation copyright © 2008 by Margaret Sayers Peden
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House,
an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks
of Random House, Inc.
Originally published in Spain by Alfaguara,
a division of Santanilla Ediciones Generales, S.L. in 2006,
as Pintor de Batallas. Copyright © 2006 by Arturo Pérez-Reverte.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Pérez-Reverte, Arturo.
[Pintor de batallas. English]
The painter of battles: a novel/Arturo Pérez-Reverte;
translated from the Spanish by Margaret Sayers Peden.
p. cm.
I. Peden, Margaret Sayers. II. Title.
PQ6666.E765P5613 2008
863'.64—dc22 2007016997
www.atrandom.com
eISBN: 978-1-58836-671-9
v3.0
The Painter of Battles Page 23