The Painter of Battles by Arturo Perez-Reverte

Author:Arturo Perez-Reverte
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781588366719
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2008-01-08T05:00:00+00:00

11.

THE BREEZE WAS BLOWING OFFSHORE toward the sea and the night was very warm. Despite the bright moonlight, Faulques could see nearly all the constellation Pegasus. He was still outdoors, hands in his pockets, surrounded by the shrilling of the cicadas and the fireflies flickering beneath the black mass of the pines that stood out with each flash from the distant lighthouse. He was thinking about Ivo Markovic, his words, his silences, and the woman the Croatian had mentioned as he left. What was there between you two, Señor Faulques? he'd asked, already on his feet and on his way to the door with the empty beer can in his hand, looking for a place to put it down. I mean, what was really in that last photograph? He had said it in an off-hand way, making some vague gesture, sure that he would not have an answer. Then he'd crushed the can in his hand and deposited it in a cardboard box filled with trash, and shrugged. The photo in the ditch, he repeated as he walked away. That strange photograph that was never published.

Faulques slowly returned to the tower, its dark mass rising from the cliff. It served no purpose to remember, he thought. But it was inevitable. Between the two points determined by chance and time, the Mexican museum and the ditch on the Borovo Naselje road, Olvido Ferrara had loved him, he had no doubt. She had done so in her deliberate, vital, and self-centered manner, with a sediment of intelligent sadness in the pauses. Faulques had always moved with supreme caution around the subtle melancholy latent in the depths of her gaze and her words, like a prudent plunderer trying not to provide a reason to make the latent explicit. Flowers just keep growing, detached and sure of themselves, she had once said. We're the fragile ones. Faulques was worried about the eventuality of confronting aloud the reasons for the hopeless resignation that coursed through her veins, as precise as the healthy and regular beating of her heart that could be perceived, as if it were an incurable illness, in the pulse at her wrists, at her throat, in her embraces. In her impulses and in that peculiar jubilation of hers—she was capable of laughing boisterously, like a happy child—that she shielded herself behind the way other humans tend to do with a book, a glass of wine, or a word. Olvido was similarly cautious in her relationship with Faulques. During the time they were together, she always observed him from afar, or rather, from the outside, perhaps fearing to penetrate the surface and discover that he was like other men she had known. She never asked about women, about years past, about anything. Nor about the nomadic rootlessness he used as defense in a territory that from the time he was young he had decided to consider hostile. And sometimes, when in moments of intimacy and tenderness he was on the verge of confiding a memory or an emotion, she would put her fingers to his lips.

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