The Painter Of Battles by Arturo Perez Reverte

Author:Arturo Perez Reverte
Language: eng
Format: epub

The Painter Of Battles

tographed was wars. It is war in a way, he replied: now those paintings

and that place are also part of a war. So they rented a car and traveled

south until one winter day at dusk, in the silence of winding dirt roads

bordering ravines and mountains of mineral slag, demolished towers and

collapsed houses, walls without roofs, old strip mines open to the sky, re-

vealing their brown, red, and black guts, ochre oxide lodes, exhausted

veins, enormous buddies where cracked gray mud had escaped through

crumbled walls and carpeted the bottom of the ravines, creeping among

dead prickly pears and dry fig trees like tongues of old, solidified lava.

It looks like a dormant volcano, Olvido murmured with awe when

Faulques stopped the car; he picked up the pack with his cameras, and

they walked through the landscape of somber beauty, hearing the crunch

of stones beneath their feet in the absolute silence of the vast wasteland

abandoned by the hand of man for nearly half a century; wind and rain,

however, had continued to erode it into capricious forms, flumes, criss-

crossing gullies, landslides, collapses. You might think that a gigantic

and chaotic hand had wielded powerful implements to strip the earth

until mineral and stone had been torn from its viscera and then left it to

time to work on the scene like a demented artist in a chaotic workshop.

Then the sun, which was about to set behind slag heaps that stretched to

the nearby sea, peered out for an instant from beneath the layer of leaden

clouds, and a brilliant red splendor burst over the water and spilled like

an eruption of incandescent lava across the tormented land, over the

eroded tops of the buddies, the deep gullies of slag, and the ruined mine

towers silhouetted in the distance. And as Faulques lifted the camera to

photograph it, Olvido stopped rubbing her hands together to keep

warm; her eyes opened wide beneath the wool tam, she struck her fore-

head with her open palm, and said, Of course! My God! Thats exactly

what happens. It isnt the pyramid of Giza, or the Sphinx, its whats left

of them after time, wind, rain, and sand storms have done their work. It

wont be the real Eiffel tower until the iron structure, finally rusted and

crumbling, rises over a dead city like a specter in its watchtower. Noth-

ing will truly be what it is until the unfeeling Universe wakes like a sleep-

ing animal, stretches its legs, stirring the skeleton of the Earth, yawns,

and takes a few random slashes. Do you realize that? Yes, of course you

do. Now I understand. Its a question of geological amorality. Of pho-

tographing the useful certainty of our fragility. Of keeping a sharp eye

on the roulette of the cosmos, the wheel spinning on the exact day that,

yet again, the mouse of the computer fails to work, Archimedes triumphs

over Shakespeare, and a disconcerted humanity pats its pockets, confirm-

ing its fear that it has no change for the boatman. Photographing not

man, but the traces of man. The naked man descending a staircase. But I

had never seen it that way before. It was only a painting in a museum.

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