Faulques looked at his hands stained with red paint, and then studied the mural encircling him. Forms changed when touched with color. The white spaces, the charcoal sketch on the white plaster, no longer seemed empty to him. Under the intense light of the halogen bulbs, everything fused in his brain the way Impressionist paintings do: colors, spaces, volumes that blended into the desired representation only on the viewer's retina. The completed figures and landscapes were as real, as true—only the artist is truthful came to mind—as those barely hinted at, forms foreshadowed on the wall, the meticulous brushwork and heavy lines, still-wet paint applied with his fingers over figures already painted or over white spaces. A long road. There was an underlying schema, a perspective as fabulous and endless as a Möbius strip that ran around the circle of the mural without ever stopping, integrating each of the elements, weaving together the ships sailing away in the rain, the burning city on the hill, the refugees, the soldiers, the raped woman and boy executioner, the man about to die, the woods with hanged men like clusters of fruit, the battle on the plain, the struggling men slashing at each other in the foreground, the caballeros about to join the combat, the confident, sleeping city amid its steel, concrete, and glass towers. The visible universe and the conceivable immensity of nature. Everything he had wanted to paint was there: Bruegel, Goya, Uccello, Dr. Atl, everything that had prepared Faulques' eyes and hands to express the things that during his life had penetrated the viewfinder of his camera and been imprinted on the Plato's cave of his retina—the photographic film and paper played only secondary roles—explained at last, combined in the geometric formula whose beginning and final result converged in the triangle presiding over everything: the black, brown, gray, red volcano. The symbol of the cryptogram, stripped of sentiments and implacable in its symmetries, its cracks of lava spreading out like a spider web whose net encompassed the cipher of the universe, the fissures in the wall of the old tower serving to sustain it all, the dawn of the day that soon would be seeping through the windows, the man waiting outside while the painter of battles completed his work.
Only one thing was left to do. Suddenly it seemed so obvious that his lips twisted in a smile. Olvido Ferrara, were she there, would have laughed herself sick: he imagined her throwing back her head of wheat-colored hair, mocking him with her liquid, green eyes. It's more a question of imagination than of optics, Faulques. The photograph lies, and only the artist . . . and so on and so on.
He went to the table and picked up the magazine cover with the photo of Ivo Markovic: a blond young man with drops of sweat on his face, eyes vacant and expression weary, very different from the man waiting out by the cliff. Lorenz butterflies and broken razors were active in that image, which at the moment of being imprinted on the negative was still unaware of its consequences, and which had lasted into the present: Faulques looking at that photo in the old tower above the sea. Truth is in things, not in people, he remembered. But it needs us to be manifest. Olvido would still have been laughing, he thought, if she could see him at that moment, magazine cover in his hand, scrabbling among the painting materials, the empty and filled tubes and jars, brushes, books piled on the table. He remembered her lying on the floor for hours trimming photos in which the only living thing was a blurry smear of humans fading like fleeting ghosts. Collages and trouvés. Of course. At last he found a large, nearly full pot of acrylic medium. With a thick, clean brush he soaked the back of the page and then turned to the wall, looking for a good place to put it. He chose a white space situated between the volcano and the confident modern city and pasted it there, smoothing it onto the slightly irregular surface of the wall. Then as he studied what he'd done, never taking his eyes off it, he felt for the bottle of cognac. He grasped it in fingers growing stiff from the acrylic beginning to dry on his hands, lifted the bottle to his mouth, and took such a long swig that it brought tears to his eyes. I have it now, he said to himself. Now everything is where it should be. Then with various tubes of pure color in his left hand, he went back to the mural and began to apply paint in thick strokes, first curves and then both straight and spontaneous lines, wet over wet, using his fingers as palette knives until the photo of Ivo Markovic was integrated into the whole, joined to the wall and to the rest of the mural with a polyhedral frame of ochres, yellows, and reds that he finished with a slash as dark and long and phantasmal as a shadow, destined to remain there when the deteriorating wall had eaten the pasted-on page.
The painter of battles left his tubes of paint on the floor and washed his hands in the basin. He felt strangely relaxed. Empty as a nutshell, he thought suddenly. Slowly he dried his hands, reflecting on his thoughts and feelings. It was strange to see himself as if he were painted into the mural, almost at the end of the journey. He dropped the rag on the table, looked for the box of tablets, put two in his mouth and swallowed them with another sip of cognac. That would prevent the pain from reappearing at an inappropriate moment. Then he picked up the knife and slid it in the back of his belt. Equipped for combat, he thought suddenly, and smiled slightly. Olvido liked that: she enjoyed the moment of preparing to leave, the tension of waiting, as she silently reviewed her equipment in some hotel room before they started off to some difficult place. Checking cameras and film, filling her pack and pockets with necessities: medicine kit, maps, water, notepad, pens. Only what she could carry and would not impede walking, running, surviving, before she closed the door on everything superfluous. I look like a little girl playing dress up, she'd said once. Ready to be someone else. Don't you think, Faulques? Or not to be anyone. In any case, each time I leave behind an old skin, like a weary serpent.
Before he turned out the spotlights and went outside into the night, the painter of battles took one last look at his work. It would look better, he thought, when the natural light fell through the east window and, as it did every day, lent its characteristic golden tone to the effects of light painted in the mural. Then, as the rays of the sun moved along the wall, the fire in the city would be redder, the volcano more somber, and the rain more gray. Even though it wasn't a masterpiece, he said serenely. He tipped his head, reflecting. Absolutely not. Strange, Ivo Markovic and Carmen Elsken had called it. All those angles, and on and on. With an absorbed smile, Faulques wondered what Olvido Ferrara would have said. What would people in the future who came to see his mural think . . . as long as the tower was standing?
It wasn't a good painting, he concluded. But it was perfect.
19.
HE CLOSED AND LOCKED THE DOOR and slowly walked toward the black outlines of the pines, which the distant flashes from the lighthouse revealed at intervals beneath a star-filled sky. The calm was absolute; even the soft breeze had died down. Faulques heard only his own footsteps, the shrilling of crickets in the undergrowth, and the long, muffled, almost human death rattle of pebbles being dragged by the tide. As he neared the woods, he stopped a moment, surrounded by the luminous dots of the fireflies. He was tranquil, his mind clear. Serene in memory and intentions. He felt no apprehension or fear. With the effects of the sedative, his heart was beating regularly. Precisely. It didn't change when a shadow emerged from the trees and the beam from the lighthouse shone for an instant on Ivo Markovic's shirt.
“You've moved fast,” the Croatian said. “It's still an hour till dawn.”
“I had all the time I needed. You were right.”
“I don't understand.”
“My work was almost finished, and I didn't know it.”
They were silent. After a while, Markovic's dark silhouette moved a little. The next flash from the lighthouse revealed him sitting on a boulder. The painter of battles squatted down near him.
“Have you come armed, señor Faulques?”
“To a point.”
“Then don't come too close.”
There was another long pause. It seemed as if the Croatian was laughing to himself, quietly, but it may have been the sound of the sea below.
“Am I to believe that yo
u are satisfied with your painting?”
Faulques shrugged his shoulders in the darkness.
“I think so.” He shook his head. “No, I'm sure. It's the way it should be.”
Markovic said nothing. The tiny dots of the fireflies danced between the two motionless shadows.
“Without you I would never have been capable of seeing it,” the painter of battles continued. “I would have kept working for days and weeks, until the entire wall was covered. Moving away from the moment . . . from the exact stopping point.”
“I'm pleased that I've been useful.”
“You've been more than that. You made me see things I hadn't seen before.”
A pause. Maybe Markovic was mulling over the words he'd just heard. Faulques shifted a little until he was sitting against the trunk of a pine. From there he admired the flashes from the lighthouse, the luminous tapestry of the housing developments creeping up the side of the mountains beyond Puerto Umbría, and, toward the horizon, the black dome riddled with stars.
“Tell me the truth, am I in the painting?” the Croatian asked abruptly.
His interest seemed real. Sincere. Faulques smiled to himself.
“I already told you. You, me . . . we're all in it.”
Markovic was slow to speak again.
“Symmetries, no?”
“That's it.”
“All those painted lines and angles.”
“Yes.”
Markovic lighted a cigarette. In the glow of the match reflected on the lens of his spectacles, Faulques could see the lowered head, the eyes closed against the glare of the flame. It was a good time, he thought. Five seconds of blindness would be enough to use the knife and finish the whole thing. His skilled instinct calculated angles, volumes, distance. He considered, dispassionately, the most convenient approach, the move that would put things in their place. At that point in his story, Faulques knew too well that between the act of taking a photograph—that mechanical ballet on the chessboard that brought the hunter closer to the prey, or the prey to the hunter—and the act of killing a human being stood only minimal technical differences. But he had to douse that thought. He sat indolently propped against the tree, his back sticky with resin. He was soiling, he thought absurdly, his last clean shirt.
“Is there a conclusion, señor Faulques? In the movies there is always someone who sums things up before the dénouement.”
The painter of battles focused on the motionless tip of the cigarette. Fireflies flitted around them, fleeting, golden. Their larvae, he thought, fed in the viscera of living snails. Objective cruelty: fireflies, whales. Human beings. In millions of years, few things had changed.
“The conclusion is there,” he pointed toward the dark mass of the tower, aware that Markovic couldn't see his gesture. “Painted on the wall.”
“As well as your feeling about what you did to me?”
That irritated Faulques.
“I didn't do anything to you,” he rebutted harshly. “I have nothing to be sorry for. I thought you'd understood that.”
“I do understand. The wings of the butterfly aren't guilty, right? No one is.”
“Just the opposite. We are. You and I. Your wife and your son. We are all a part of the monster that moves us around the chessboard.”
Again silence. Then came Markovic's quiet laugh. This time it wasn't the murmur of the sea on the rocks below.
“Crazed moles,” the Croatian prompted.
“That's it.” Faulques grimaced. “You expressed it well the other day . . . The more obvious everything is, the less sense it seems to make.”
“There's no way out, then?”
“There are consolations. The prisoner running as they shoot at him believes he's free . . . Do you know what I mean?”
“I think I do.”
“At times that's enough. The simple effort to understand things. To get a glimpse of the strange cryptogram . . . In a certain way, a quiet tragedy more than a farce, don't you think? There are always temporary analgesics. With luck, they're enough to keep you going. And used wisely, they're good to the end.”
“For example?”
“Lucidity, pride, culture . . . Laughter . . . I don't know. Things like that.”
“Broken straight razors?”
“That, too.”
The tip of the cigarette glowed.
“And love?”
“Including love.”
“Even though it ends or is lost, like everything else?”
“Yes.”
The cigarette glowed three times before Markovic spoke again.
“I think I understand it all now, señor Faulques.”
To the east, where Ahorcados Island raised its dark peak then faded into the sea, the faint line of dawn began to show, intensifying the contrast between the still black water and the sky. The painter of battles was cold. Mechanically, he touched the handle of the knife in his belt, at his back.
“We need to finish things,” he said softly.
Markovic gave no sign that he had heard. He had put out his cigarette and lighted another. In the flame of the lighter the Croatian's cheeks looked sunken and the shadows beneath his eyes more dark.
“Why did you photograph the dead woman?”
More irritation was the first thing Faulques felt when he heard that. A restrained anger that coursed through his veins like a supplementary heartbeat. It was the second time Markovic had asked that question.
“That isn't your affair.”
Markovic seemed to reflect on whether it was or it wasn't.
“In a certain way it is,” he concluded. “Think it over and maybe you'll agree with me.”
Faulques thought. Maybe, he said to himself finally, I do agree with him.
“Because I need to tell you,” Markovic persisted, “that it was a real surprise . . . I was walking down the road with my companions, we heard the explosion, and some of us went to take a closer look. But we were in a zone with a lot of activity and our officer ordered us to keep going. A dead woman, someone said. Then I recognized the two of you. You'd photographed me three days before, when we were fleeing Petrovci . . . I couldn't see the woman very well, but I knew it was the same one. And as we passed by I saw you take up your camera and shoot the picture.”
There was a silence and the tip of the cigarette glowed. Faulques focused on that red dot similar to the countless red dots, darker and more liquid, that had spattered Olvido's body; she was motionless, unusually pale—her skin suddenly white, as if overexposed—on her back in the ditch, her right hand beside the camera at the level of her stomach, her left arm bent, the one with the wristwatch, palm turned upward and near her face, the earring in the shape of a little gold ball in the lobe of the ear from which a thread of red blood trickled, staining a braid and running down her cheek to her neck and mouth and around half-open eyes staring at the grass and the clumps of overturned dirt where a pool of blood was collecting. Kneeling beside her, with his cameras hanging loose, deafened and confused by the closeness of the explosion, Faulques, as Olvido's safari jacket and jeans grew dark with blood on the part of her body in contact with the ground, had reached out, first to look for a place where he might stanch the bleeding, and then to touch her neck, seeking a pulse already impossible to discern.
“Did you love her?” Markovic asked.
Faulques looked toward the east. There was not a breath of air and the horizon was noticeably lighter, showing blue and gray tones as the light of the stars dimmed.
“Maybe that was why you took the picture . . . Right? To make things seem normal.”
Even then, the painter of battles didn't speak. Before his eyes he saw, in the developing tray in his darkroom, the outlines and shadows of a photographic image emerging, the way the subtle line of the horizon in the distance was becoming more pronounced. The house where you are living is dark, he remembered. He had looked at Olvido, dead, through the viewfinder, first blurred and then clearer as he turned the focus ring from
infinity to 1.6 meters. The image in the viewfinder appeared in color, but the thing Faulques remembered above all others, the one that time and memory preserved—he had destroyed the only copy on paper and the negative lay buried among kilometers of archived film—was the gamut of grays as the fixative slowly brought out an image on the photographic paper, a slow materialization revealed in the red light of the darkroom. The little gold earring in Olvido's earlobe was the last thing to appear in the tray. Charon must have been satisfied with her offering.
“I saw the mine,” he said.
His eyes were still on the blue-gray line of the horizon. When at last he turned toward Markovic, the spark of the lighthouse outlined the Croatian for an instant.
“Do you mean,” he asked, “that you saw the mine before she stepped on it?”
“Yes. Or, to be more precise, I divined it.”