The Painter of Battles

  “It was days after you took my photograph,” the man continued. “You weren't aware that I was there, but I was on the Borovo Naselje road that afternoon. When I heard the explosion I thought it was one of ours. . . . As I went by I saw you kneeling in the ditch, beside the . . . body.”

  He had hesitated an instant before that last word, as if pondering whether to choose “corpse” or “body” . . . and had chosen the latter. Well, that was interesting, Faulques decided, that half courteous, half old-fashioned way of searching for a word, pausing as he weighed their relative merits. Now, finally, the visitor held the glass to his lips, still with his eyes on his host. They both stood a little longer in silence.

  “I'm sorry,” said Faulques. “That I didn't remember you.”

  “Only natural. You seemed deeply affected.”

  “I'm not talking about the incident on the Borovo Naselje road, but about the photo I took several days before that. Your face was on the cover of several magazines, and since then I have seen it hundreds of times. I do now, of course. Now that I know it was you, it's easier. But you've changed a lot.”

  “Well, you said it earlier, eh? Bad times . . . And then a lot of years have gone by.”

  “How did you find me?”

  Asking around, the visitor replied, again focusing on the painting. Here and there. You are a well-known man, señor Faulques, even famous, he added, distractedly wetting his lips with the cognac. And even though you've been retired for some time, a lot of people remember you. I can assure you of that.

  “How did you get out of there?”

  The visitor shot him a strange look. I suppose you're referring to Vukovar, he replied. I was wounded two weeks after you shot the photograph. Not the wound in the hand that you see in the image, of course—look, I still have that scar—a different one, more serious. It happened when the Chetniks hadn't as yet cut off the path through the cornfields. I was evacuated to a hospital in Osijek.

  He touched his left side, indicating the exact spot. Not with a finger, but with his open hand, from which Faulques deduced that the wound had been serious. He nodded with faint sympathy.

  “Shrapnel?”

  “A 12.7 bullet.”

  “You were very lucky.”

  He didn't mean lucky that his visitor hadn't died of the wound, but that it had happened while it was still possible to get the wounded out of Vukovar. When the Serbs had also sealed that path, no one could get out of the walled city. And when it fell, all the prisoners of combat age were killed. That included the wounded, who were dragged out of the hospital, shot dead, and thrown into huge common graves.

  When he heard the word “lucky,” the visitor looked at Faulques with a strange expression. For some time. At last he set the glass on the table and his eyes again made the slow circuit of the room.

  “A curious place you have here. But I don't see any mementos of other times.”

  Faulques pointed to the painting: the shadowy citadel backlighted against a fire that suggested the eruption of a volcano, the metallic reflections off modern weapons, the steel-clad troops spilling through the breached wall, the faces of women and children, the hanged men swinging like clusters of fruit from the trees, the ships sailing away on the gray horizon.

  “These are my mementos.”

  “I'm talking about photos. You're a photographer.”

  “I was.”

  “You were, that's true. And photographers tend to hang photos on their walls. Photos they've taken. Especially when they've won important prizes. You're not ashamed of your photos, are you?”

  “They just don't interest me anymore. That's all.”

  “Of course.” The visitor smiled his strange smile. “That's all.”

  Now he was studying the images of the mural close up, frowning.

  “So ancient wars also form part of your memories? Troy and places like that?”

  Now it was Faulques' turn to half smile.

  “That's what it's about. Places like that are always the same place.”

  That must have interested the visitor because he said nothing, his eyes fixed on the mural, pondering what he had just heard. The same place, he replied in a low voice. He stepped closer, examining the details. Suddenly he seemed uncomfortable.

  “I don't understand painting,” he said.

  Then he went over to the knapsack he'd set beside the door and pulled out a notebook, from which he took a sheet of paper folded in half. Old paper that bore signs of frequent handling: the page of a magazine. The cover of Newszoom, the photograph taken ten years before. He brought it back to the table, laid it beside the brushes and paint jars, and both men contemplated it in silence. It truly was a unique photo, Faulques told himself. Cold, objective. Perfect. He had seen it many times, but he never failed to take pleasure from the invisible—visible to an attentive viewer—geometric lines that supported it as if on a coarse canvas: foreground, the exhausted soldier, the lost gaze that seemed to form part of the lines of that road that led nowhere, the nearly polyhedral walls of the ruined house peppered with the pox of shrapnel, the distant smoke of the fire, vertical as a black, baroque column, without a breath of a breeze. All of that, framed through a viewfinder and imprinted on a 24 x 36 millimeter negative, was more the fruit of instinct than of calculation, although the jury that awarded the prize to the image emphasized that what seemed random was relative. It is not only its perfection, one member of the Europa Focus committee had declared, it is our certainty that the point of view, the eye of the man who took it, has been formed by intense experience, and that the image is the final sediment, the culmination, of a long personal, professional, and artistic process.

  “I was twenty-seven,” said the visitor, smoothing the page with the palm of his hand.

  He said it in a neutral tone, without nostalgia or melancholy, but Faulques was not paying attention. The word “artistic” was vibrating in his memory, producing a retrospective malaise. In our profession, Olvido had once said—sitting in a gutted chair, cameras in her lap, rewinding film before the body of a headless man whose shoes were the only thing she had photographed—the word “art” has always suggested hoax and half measures. Better to be amoral than immoral. Don't you think? And now, please, kiss me.

  “It's a good photograph,” the visitor continued. “I look tired, don't I? And I was. I suppose that exhaustion is what gives my face that dramatic flair. Did you choose the title?”

  It was precisely the opposite of art, thought Faulques. The harmony of lines and forms had no object other than to reach the innermost keys to the problem. Nothing to do with aesthetics, nor with the ethics other photographers used—or said they used—to filter their objectives and their work. For him, everything had been reduced to moving about the fascinating grid of the problem of living and its collateral damage. His photographs were like chess: where others saw struggle, pain, beauty, or harmony, Faulques saw only coalescing enigmas. The same was true of the vast painting he was working on now. Everything he was trying to resolve on that circular wall was located at the antipodes of what people ordinarily called art. Or maybe what was happening was that once he had passed a certain ambiguous point of no return where ethic and aesthetic were dispassionately left behind, art would be converted—and perhaps the operative words were “once again”—into a cold and possibly effective formula. An unemotional tool for contemplating life.

  He was slow to realize that his guest was waiting for him to answer. He made an effort to remember. The title, that was it. He had asked about the title of the photo.

  “No,” he said. “The magazines did that, the newspapers and agencies, on their own. It didn't come from me.”

  “The Face of Defeat. Very appropriate. What do you remember about that day, señor Faulques? About that defeat?”

  He was observing Faulques with curiosity. Perhaps a too formal curiosity, as if the question were motivated less by interest than by courtesy. The painter of battles shook his head.

  “I r
emember that houses were burning and your squad was retreating. Little else.”

  That wasn't entirely true. He remembered other things, but didn't say so. He remembered Olvido walking in silence along the other side of the road, camera resting on her chest and her small pack on her back, her wheat-colored hair combed into two braids, her long, slim legs sheathed in jeans, her white tennis shoes crunching over the gravel of the road chewed up by mortar shells. As they neared the front, and the combat sounded close by, her step seemed livelier and firmer, as if without realizing it she was pushing herself to be on time for the inescapable rendezvous that awaited her three days later on the Borovo Naselje road. As they climbed a slope that left them in the open, when the curved lines became tangential to hostile straight lines and the ziaang, ziaang of two stray bullets passed over their heads, at the limit of their range, Faulques had watched her stop, crouch slightly, and look around with the caution of a hunter close to his prey, before she turned toward him and smiled with an almost ferocious tenderness, slightly distracted and absorbed, nostrils flared, eyes shining as if they were on the verge of weeping adrenaline.

  The visitor picked up his glass from the table, and, after holding it a moment, set it down where it had been, without tasting it.

  “Well, I remember very well when you took the photo.

  Although our circumstances were different, he added. For Faulques it was just another job, of course. Professional routine. But for him it was the first time he'd been involved in anything like that. He'd been recruited only a few days before, and had ended up among comrades as frightened as he was, facing Serbian tanks with a rifle in his hands.

  “Listen, they wiped us out. Literally. Of the forty-eight of us who started, fifteen came back. The ones you saw along the road.”

  “They didn't look too good.”

  “I wonder why. We'd run like rabbits across the fields until we regrouped on the outskirts of Petrovci. We were so scared that our officers ordered us to fall back toward Vukovar . . . That was when you and the woman came across us. I remember that I was surprised to see her. She's a photographer, I thought. A correspondent. She passed us on our side of the road, walking rapidly, as if she didn't see us. I stood looking at her, and when I turned I found you right in front of me. You were focusing on me, or framing, or whatever you say, taking the photograph. Yes. Your camera clicked and you kept right on going, without a wave or a hello. Nothing. I think you'd already stopped thinking about me; you didn't even see me once you'd lowered your camera.”

  “That's possible,” Faulques conceded uncomfortably.

  The visitor waved vaguely toward the photograph. You can't imagine, he said then, the number of things I've thought about through the years, looking at it. All I've learned about myself, about others. From studying my face for so long, or rather the face I had then, I've come to see myself from the outside. Do you understand that? You might say that the person looking is a different man. Though the truth, I suppose, is actually that the person looking now is a different man.

  “But you,” he concluded, slowly turning toward the painter, “you haven't changed much.”

  His tone was strange. Faulques gave him a suspicious, questioning look and watched as the man lifted a hand slightly, as if that unformulated question lacked meaning. Nothing in particular. I was passing by and I wanted to say hello, the gesture said. What else do you want me to want?

  “No,” the visitor continued after a long pause. “The fact is that you haven't changed. Not much at all. The gray hair, maybe. And more wrinkles on your face. Even so, it hasn't been easy to find you. I went to a lot of places, asking about you. I went to your photography agencies, to magazines. I knew a few things about you but, as I found out a little more, I learned that you were a famous photographer. One of the best, they say. That you almost always worked in war zones and won a lot of prizes . . . That one day you left everything and disappeared. At first I thought that the woman's death had something to do with it, but then I found that you continued to work a few years after that. You didn't retire until after the business of Bosnia and Sarajevo. Isn't that right? And something in Africa.”

  “What do you want from me?”

  Impossible to know whether his visitor smiled or not. The eyes seemed to be doing their own thing, cold and detached from the benevolent curve of his lips.

  “You made me famous. I decided I wanted to meet the person who had made me famous.”

  “What is your name?”

  “That's funny, isn't it?” The unwelcome guest's eyes were still cold and staring, but his smile widened. “You took a photograph of a soldier you crossed paths with for a couple of seconds. A soldier you knew nothing about, not even his name. And that photograph traveled around the world. Then you forgot that anonymous soldier and took other photos. Of other people whose names you also didn't know, I imagine. Maybe you made them famous the way you did me. It's a strange profession, yours.”

  He fell silent, perhaps reflecting on the uncommon aspects of Faulques' former profession. He stared absently at the glass of cognac, which was sitting beside the photograph. Then he seemed to notice it, and picked it up and took a sip.

  “My name? Ivo Markovic.”

  “Why have you come looking for me?”

  The visitor had put the glass down and was wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

  “Because I'm going to kill you.”

  For a moment the only sound was the whirring of the cicadas outside in the brush. Faulques closed his mouth—it had dropped open when he heard those words—and looked around. His heart was beating slowly and arrhythmically. He felt it jumping in his chest.

  “Why?” he asked.

  He moved, slowly, only a few centimeters. With great caution. Now he was turned to one side, with his left shoulder to the visitor. The closest thing to hand was a wide palette knife ending in a point; its handle jutted up among the cans and glass jars. He reached toward it but Markovic made no comment, and showed no alarm.

  “Yours is a difficult question to answer.” The visitor was looking, thoughtfully, at the palette knife in Faulques' hand. “After so many years of turning it over and over in my mind, planning each step and each situation, the matter is more complex than it appears.”

  Giving Markovic his full attention, the painter of battles calculated lines, angles, and volumes: open spaces, distance to the door, physical qualities. To his profound surprise, he didn't feel alarmed. It remained to be seen whether that was because of the visitor's tone and attitude, or whether it was his own way of looking at things.

  “Is that right. More? It already seems extremely complex to me. Provided that you are actually sane.”

  “Pardon?”

  “That you're not out of your mind. Crazy.”

  The other nodded, almost solicitously. I understand perfectly your reservations, he said in a completely normal voice. But what I mean to say is that earlier, at the beginning, I fancied that everything would be extremely simple. At that point I would have been able to kill you without saying a word. With no explanation. But time doesn't go by for nothing. You think and think. I've had time to think. And to kill you straight off no longer seems enough.

  “Do you intend to do it here? Now?”

  “No. I've just come to talk with you about it. I've already told you that I can't just kill you. I need for us to talk first; I need to know you better, to be sure that you realize certain things. I want you to learn and understand . . . After that, I'll be able to kill you.”

  After his amazing pronouncement, the man stood staring at Faulques with an almost timid air, as if he wasn't sure he'd been courteous enough in explaining himself, or if he had used the proper syntax. Faulques let out the air he'd been holding in his lungs.

  “What is it you want me to understand?”

  “Your photograph. Or, better put, my photograph.”

  Both men were looking at the palette knife in Faulques' right hand. Suddenly the tool seemed ridiculous t
o the painter. He put it back in its place. When he looked up, he read sober approval in the visitor's eyes. Then the painter of battles smiled a slight, crooked, smile.

  “Has it occurred to you that I can defend myself?”

  Markovic blinked. He seemed disturbed that this man he was talking with would think he hadn't considered that. Of course it has, he replied. We all deserve a chance. You, as well. Naturally.

  “Or that I might . . .” Faulques hesitated a second, for the words seemed absurd, “run?”

  His visitor was slow to answer. He had raised both hands, as if to show that he had nothing hidden, or that he was not ready to wield a weapon, before going to his pack and taking out a dog-eared book of photographs. As he walked toward him, Faulques recognized the English edition of one of his collected works: The Eye of War. Markovic laid the open book on the table, beside the cover of Newszoom.

  “I don't think you'll run away.” He leafed through pages, indifferent to the fact that Faulques wasn't looking at the album, but at him. “I've been studying your work for years, señor. Your photographs. I know them so well that sometimes I think I've come to know you. That's why I know that you won't run, or do anything for the moment. You will stay here while we have our conversations. One day, several . . . I still don't know. There are answers you need as much as I do.”

  3.

  IN THE BLACK DOME OF the sky, the stars were slowly wheeling to the left, around the fixed point of the Pole. Sitting at the tower door, back against stone eroded by three hundred years of wind, sun, and rain, Faulques didn't have a view of the sea, but he could see the flashes from the distant Cabo Malo lighthouse and hear the roar of the high tide hammering the rocks below, at the foot of the cleft on which canted pines, leaning out like indecisive suicides, were silhouetted against a waning yellow moon.

  In his hands he held the glass of cognac he had refilled after his visitor had marched off without saying good-bye, as if his leaving were an insignificant pause, a technical displacement of no consequence in the complex affair that both—Faulques himself recognized now that this was something that affected them both, no question about that—would have to deal with. At one moment in the conversation that had lasted beyond nightfall, his singular visitor had interrupted himself in the middle of a sentence, when he was describing a landscape: a fenced area and a rocky, barren mountain that the fence defined like an ironic and perverse frame, or a photograph. And with that word, “photograph,” on his lips, the visitor had stood up in the dark—Faulques and he had been talking a long time, two dark shapes sitting face-to-face with no light but the moon at the window—and after groping to find his knapsack had stood stock-still at the open door for a moment, as if hesitating between leaving without a word or saying something first. Then, unhurriedly, he had walked to the path that wound down to the village. Faulques got up and went outside after him, in time to see the white blotch of his shirt moving away through the shadows of the pine grove.