Painter of Battles (eBook)

He swam one hundred and fifty strokes out to sea and the same number back, as he did each morning, until he felt the round pebbles of the shore beneath his feet. He dried himself, using the towel he'd hung on a tree trunk that had been swept in by the sea, put on his shirt and sneakers, and went up the narrow path leading from the cove to the watchtower. There he made coffee and began, mixing blues and grays that would lend his work the proper atmosphere. During the night--each night he slept less and less, and that only a restless dozing--he had decided that cold tones would be needed to delineate the melancholy line of the horizon, where a veiled light outlined the silhouettes of warriors walking beside the sea. Those tones would envelop them in reflections from the waves washing onto the beach that he had spent four days creating with light touches of Titian white, applied pure. So in a glass jar he mixed white, blue, and a minimal amount of natural sienna, until they were transformed into a luminous blue. Then he daubed some of the paint on the oven tray he used as a palette, dirtied the mixture with a little yellow, and worked without stopping the rest of the morning. Finally he clamped the handle of the brush between his teeth and stepped back to judge the effect. Sky and sea were now harmoniously combined in the mural that circled the interior of the tower, and although there was still a lot to be done, the horizon was now a smooth, slightly hazy line that accentuated the loneliness of the men--dark strokes splashed with metallic sparks--dispersed and moving away beneath the rain.

He rinsed the brushes with soap and water and set them to dry. From the foot of the cliff below came the sound of the motors and music of the tourist boat that ran along the coast every day at the same hour. With no need to look, Andrs Faulques knew that it was one o'clock. He heard the usual woman's voice, amplified by the loudspeaker system, and it seemed even stronger and clearer when the boat drew even with the inlet, for then the sound reached the tower with no obstacle other than the few pines and bushes that despite erosion and slides were still clinging to the cliff face.

This place is known as Cala del Arrez. It was once the refuge of Berber pirates. Up there on the top of the cliff you can see an old watchtower that was constructed at the beginning of the eighteenth century as a part of the coastal defense, with the specific purpose of warning nearby villages of Saracen incursions . . .

It was the same voice every day: educated, with good diction. Faulques imagined the woman to be young, no doubt a local guide who accompanied the tourists on the three-hour tour the boat--a sixty-five-foot tender painted blue and white that docked in Puerto Umbra--made between Ahorcados Island and Cabo Malo. In the last two months, from atop the cliff, Faulques had watched it pass, its deck filled with people armed with film and video cameras as summertime music thundered over the loudspeakers, so loud that the interruptions of the woman's voice came as a relief.

A well-known painter lives in that tower, which stood abandoned for a long time, and he is embellishing the entire interior wall with a large mural. Unfortunately, it is private property and no visitors are allowed . . .

This time the woman was speaking Spanish, but on other occasions it might be English, Italian, or German. Only when the tickets were bought with francs--four or five times that summer--did a masculine voice relieve her, in French. At any rate, Faulques thought, the season was almost over, with every trip there were fewer tourists on board the tender, and soon those...