16.
HE DIDN'T SEE IVO MARKOVIC in the village or on the way back to the tower. He left his bike beside the shed and took a look around, suspicious: the small stand of pines, the edge of the cliff, the loose rocks on the slope that led down to the cove and the pebbled beach. Not a sign of the Croatian. The sun, already past its apogee in the early hours of the afternoon, cast on the ground the motionless shadow of the painter of battles, who couldn't decide whether or not to go inside the tower. Something in his old professional instinct, trained to move through hostile territory, told him to be careful where he set his feet. Again he looked all around, alert to signs of danger. He was near—Markovic himself had warned him the day before—the dark line.
The inside of the tower smelled of tobacco. Of snuffed-out butts. That was strange, for the windows were open and before he left Faulques had emptied the mustard jar his visitor used as an ashtray. He was sure of that, he decided, perplexed, looking at the remains of the three cigarettes. He leaned over to sniff them and frowned. Smoked only recently. The alarm sounded louder in his brain. He was moving with caution, slowly, as if Markovic might be hiding there. That wasn't reasonable, he thought as he went up the spiral stairway. It wasn't Markovic's style. Nevertheless, until he was upstairs and certain he was alone in the tower, the painter of battles was not comfortable. He sat down on his cot and looked for further signs of the Croatian. He had been there, no doubt about that, while Faulques was down in the village. A sudden thought made him get up and open the trunk where he kept the shotgun. It wasn't there, nor were the shells. Besides poking around as he pleased, Markovic had taken precautions. And hadn't even taken the trouble to hide it.
The pain came, still slight, with no treachery this time. It affirmed itself gradually, loyal to a certain point, warning him in advance of the stabs that soon would follow. And along with the pain, or its prelude, also came the right dose of indifference. To hell with it, Faulques concluded as he came down the stairs. Everything had its good side and its bad: a street, a ditch, a pain. That, specifically, condemned him to certain things and put him on his guard for others. Markovic was becoming just one more element in the landscape. A question of priorities. Of time and time left. And when the true, the intense pain finally struck with a spasm that numbed his waist, the painter of battles had already shaken two tablets from the box and swallowed them with a glass of water. All that remained was to wait. So he squatted down, back against the wall—the dog chewing on a cadaver, sketched in charcoal and still unpainted, was just behind his head—gritted his teeth, and waited, patient, as the shooting pains reached their climax then grew further apart, and weaker, until they disappeared. And in the meantime, with his gaze absorbed by the part of the mural in front of him—Hector bidding Andromache farewell before the combat, painted at the left side of the door—he remembered something he'd heard Olvido say in Rome: Taci e riposa: qui se spegne il canto.
He slowly shook his head as he repeated those words in a low voice, through clenched teeth, never taking his eyes from the mural. Be quiet and rest: the song ends here. It was the first line of a poem by Andrea de Chirico that Olvido liked a lot. She had first mentioned it in an apt place—Andrea was the brother of Giorgio de Chirico—and at that moment Olvido and Faulques had been visiting the painter's home in Rome. They walked through the Piazza di Spagna, a few paces from the steps of the Trinità dei Monti, and at number 31—an old palace converted into apartments—she stopped, looked up toward the windows of the fourth and fifth floors, and said: My father brought me here when I was little to visit the elderly don Giorgio and Isabella. Let's go up. The house, under the direction of a foundation, had not yet been turned into a museum, but the porter showed himself vulnerable to Olvido's smile and a tip, and for half an hour they had the pleasure of exploring: high ceilings with stains of moisture, parquet floor creaking beneath their feet, a little cart with dusty bottles of grappa and Chianti, the dining room with still lifes on the walls—stilleben, Olvido murmured, silent lifes—the television where de Chirico had sat for hours watching images with no sound. Beside paintings from the neoclassical period were disturbing, faceless mannequins whose shadows lengthened among melancholy greens, ochres, grays, empty spaces that little by little had been growing smaller, as if over time the painter had begun to fear the shiver of the absurd and the nothingness he himself evoked. And before a 1958 canvas that reproduced the red glove he'd painted forty-four years before in Enigma of Fatality—although any question of time was suspect in an artist who sometimes falsified the dates of his own works—Olvido, pensively contemplating the painting, murmured in Italian the line about quiet and rest, and the song ends here. Of your life. Of the ancient lament. Then she looked at Faulques with deeply sad eyes, and in the white, ghostly Roman light illuminating the house, told him that it hadn't looked like that back then, that there had been more furniture and old paintings in the salon, and upstairs in the studio, a kind of automaton or enormous, sinister mannequin like the ones the artist painted in his early period, that had frightened her when she was young. She said that nodding her head, and added, Yes, I'm serious, Faulques. That night after my father brought me here—we usually stayed at the Hassler, near here—I couldn't sleep. Every time I closed my eyes I saw those manichini, like someone who discovers a cruel smile on the face of a wooden doll. Maybe that's why I never liked Pinocchio. After she'd said that, Olvido stood back from the canvas and paused to look all about her, deep in thought. There are two of de Chirico's paintings, she suddenly commented, that are special. I'm sure you know them, or you should, because one of them reminds me of your photographs: it's filled with rulers, triangles, and drafting tools, and it's called Melancholy of Departure. Do you know the one I mean? Of course you do. It's in the Tate in London. The other one is called Enigma of Arrival. Interesting, don't you think? She was very serious as she said that, and she reached up to stroke Faulques' face with affection, but said nothing. Later she'd walked alone through the rooms as he followed behind, watching her, spying on the image of a little girl who had moved through that house holding her father's hand and passing a strange and motionless ancient of days sitting in front of a television with no sound.
When the pain was gone, the sedative, as always, left its residue of gentle lucidity. Faulques got to his feet, eyes still fixed on Hector and Andromache. He went to the table, prepared his brushes and paints, and set to work on that part of the mural. He went from darkness to light; brilliant natural light through the open door—sun illuminating the inside of the tower, reflected from the bright golden rectangle creeping across the floor—was falling on the distant reddish light from the erupting volcano slightly to his left, on the other side and above the battlefield where the caballeros were engaged with their lances or awaiting the moment to enter the fray. Between those two lights, in the upper background, cooled with layers of blue and gray with a whitish glaze that accentuated the effect of distance, rose the steel-and-glass towers of the modern city, the new Troy before which, in the foreground, life-size images—Priam, his son, and his wife—were making their farewells. And you, Andromache, bathed in tears—the painter of battles murmured to himself—you will be carried away by some Achaean in bronze armor. For this scene, Faulques had studied to the point of obsession; first in person in the church of San Francesco de Arezzo, and then in what books he could find the figures of the two young people at one side of the Death of Adam painted by Piero della Francesca on the upper right part of the main chapel. Like the paintings of Paolo Uccello, those fifteenth-century frescoes had a direct relation to his work in the tower; especially Constantine's Dream—Hector's weapons were to some degree inspired by those of one of the guards—the Battle of Heraclitus, and Constantine's Victory over Maxentius. Faulques' Andromache was inspired by the young girl in the painting by Piero della Francesca—bared shoulder and breast, the child in her arms, the clothes in geometrical disorder, as if she'd only recently risen from her couch, and especially the sad gaze fixed on
something beyond the warrior's shoulder. That expression seemed to run the length of the battlefield to the stream of refugees abandoning the burning city, as if the woman could, before the fact, recognize herself in the other women: the conqueror's booty. And before her, fearsome with gun and an array of ancient and modern armament, steel helmet, segmented gray armor somewhere between medieval and Futurist—what's given, you take; Orozco and Diego Rivera again unmercifully pillaged—Hector was raising a metal gauntlet toward the frightened boy child struggling in his mother's arms. And on the ground, the blending of three imperfect shadows formed a single shadow as dark as a presage.
Faulques took a few steps back with the brush in his teeth, weighing the result. It would do, he told himself with satisfaction. And the light at that hour of the afternoon did the rest. He washed the brush, set it to dry, chose another, broader one and, mixing his paints directly on the wall, worked on Hector's face, applying white and blue over sienna to intensify the foreshortening in the lower part, darkening the shadow of the helmet on the neck. That reinforced the warrior's air of stoic strength, the cold tones contrasted to the warm, harmonically graduated values of the body and face of the woman, the resigned, rigid, almost military mien of the man constrained by rules. For I say, the painter of battles whispered again, there is no man who has evaded his destiny. Faulques knew that better than anyone. One of his early photographic images of war was in fact related: the son of Priam and his wife transcended the scholarly translations of classical Greek; they had faces, voices, authentic tears, and, with precise symmetry—coincidence was impossible—they also spoke the tongue of Homer. The first time Faulques had heard the true lament of Andromache was when he was twenty-three, in Nicosia. That day, at the beginning of a war, beneath a sky filled with Turkish paratroopers descending over the city as the radio crackled Report to your barracks, Faulques had photographed hundreds of men telling their women good-bye before rushing to the recruitment centers. One of those photos was on magazine covers halfway around the world: in violently contrasting tones in the horizontal, early morning, light, a Greek with a tormented face, unshaven, shirt barely tucked into his trousers, was hugging his wife and children while a second man with similar features, perhaps his brother, tugged at his arm, urging him to hurry. In the middle distance was a car with its doors open, a distant column of smoke, and an old man with a large white mustache aiming his hunting gun toward the sky, firing futile shots at the Turkish fighter-bombers.
Carmen Elsken presented herself at five-fifteen. Faulques heard her coming. He washed his hands, put on a shirt, and went out to meet her. She was admiring the view, looking over the cleft in the cliff above the cove to see from there the place the tender passed every day. Her hair was loose on her shoulders, she was wearing an ankle-length dress with spaghetti straps, and the same sandals she'd had on in the morning. Pretty place, she said. Calm and very pretty. Then she smiled. I think I envy you, she added. At least a little. Living here would be unique. The painter of battles considered the nuances of the word. Yes, he replied finally. Maybe so. He looked at the sea, looked at her again, and saw that she was studying him with the same curiosity she had shown on the terrace of the bar. He also noted that she was wearing light makeup on her eyes and lips. He turned toward the pines, pensive, speculating whether Ivo Markovic might be around. Then he took Carmen Elsken inside the tower, to the large mural where, after her eyes adjusted from the light outside, she froze. Overwhelmed.
“I wasn't expecting this.”
Faulques didn't ask what she had been expecting. He simply waited, patient. The woman crossed her bare arms, rubbing them a little, as if the place, or the painting, made her feel cold. I don't understand it too well, she said after a moment. But I think it's extraordinary. It's impressive, I promise you that. Very. Does it have a name?
“No.”
That was all the painter of battles said. She, too, said nothing, and after a while she walked along the circular wall, observing every detail. She stopped a long time before the woman with bloody thighs, and before the men on the ground stabbing each other. The city in flames also caught her attention, for she stood there a long while before turning toward Faulques. She seemed confused.
“Is this what you see?”
“What are you referring to?”
“I don't know. To whatever it is . . . To what you're painting.”
“It's just a mural. An old building decorated with history.”
“This isn't just historical, it seems to me. It's ancient and modern at the same time. It's . . .”
She interrupted herself, searching for the right word. Faulques waited. He looked at the woman's low neckline. Full, tanned breasts. Unconfined. The straps on her naked shoulders seemed a fragile support for that dress.
“Terrible,” she ventured finally.
Faulques smiled gently.
“It isn't terrible,” he said. “It's life, that's all. One part of it.”
The blue eyes now seemed very vigilant. Carmen Elsken studied his eyes and lips. Looking there for the explanation of the images painted on the wall.
“You must have lived a strange life,” she said suddenly.
The painter of battles smiled again, this time inside. In fact he had. The Ivo Markovics and the Faulqueses, their retinas imprinted, could not appreciate that point of view. This was how people who hadn't been there were going to see it. Or more precisely, he rectified, looking at the half-painted cement-and-glass towers—those who thought, mistakenly, that they hadn't.
“No stranger than yours, or anyone's, really.”
She reflected on what he'd said, surprised, and shook her head. She seemed to be rejecting an intolerable hypothesis.
“I never saw this.”
“The fact that you haven't seen it doesn't mean it isn't there.”
Carmen Elsken's lips were parted, her eyes still smiling but a little disconcerted. The full skirted cotton dress, Faulques noticed, favored her too broad hips.
“Have you always been a painter?”
“Not always.”
“And what did you do before that?”
“Photographs.”
She asked what kind of photographs, and he pointed to The Eye of War, which was still on the table among the painting materials. She leafed through a few pages and looked up, surprised.
“Are these yours?”
“Yes.”
She turned more pages. Then slowly she closed the book and stood with her head lowered, thinking. Now I understand, she said. She gestured toward the mural and looked inquisitively at Faulques.
“I'm painting,” he said, “the photo I was never able to get.”
She had moved to the wall. She stopped in front of the woman at the head of the line of refugees opening her mouth to scream, her face contorted under the icy stare of the soldier.
“You know what? There's something about you I don't like.”
Faulques smiled judiciously.
“I think I know what you're referring to.”
“That's what I don't like. The fact that you know what I'm referring to.”
She was staring at him intently, unblinking, and her eyes didn't look sunny any longer. After a time she turned back to the painting.
“There's something evil here.”
She was referring to the scene of the boy crying beside his raped mother. An inverted pietà, Faulques thought suddenly. He'd never caught that before, not even while he was painting it. Maybe it had taken a woman's presence—a real flesh-and-blood woman—for the image to take on its full meaning. Like that time in the Prado when a visitor standing right beside him had had a heart attack in front of van der Weyden's Deposition, and with the milling crowd, the doctor, the sanitation workers who came to take away the corpse, the stretcher, and the oxygen apparatus, the room had all of a sudden had a different feel, as if it were a Wolf Vostell happening.
“Please understand. It isn't that I don't find you likeable,” Carmen Elsken was saying. “Ju
st the opposite. You're an interesting man. A handsome man, besides, if you'll allow me. How old are you . . . ? Fifty?”
Faulques didn't answer. The painted images on the wall were absorbing his attention. Intuited symmetries that were suddenly taking on substance. A precise network on which he had placed each brushstroke, each moment of his memory, each angle of existence. The child's face suggested the features of the soldier-executioner guarding the refugees. The mother lying on the ground was repeated to infinity in the line. Cursed be the fruit of your womb. And Carmen Elsken was right. Evil as landscape. Whoever had called it Horror, with a capital “H”—too much literature on the subject—was merely intellectualizing the simplicity of the obvious.
“Why did you speak to me in the port?”
Faulques came back with difficulty. The woman was right before him. Her shoulders naked beneath the fine straps of her dress. She had a peculiar odor, he was suddenly aware. An intimate, nearly forgotten scent. Of a strong and healthy woman.