Life During Wartime (46 page)

Ruy laughed. ‘And now you think the Beast exists?’

‘It’s a seductive truth,’ said Blackford. ‘And like any truth, it’s most complicated in its efficacy. Consider that in all the years since Ludens’s death, no one has tested the legend by spending a night below. I would encourage you to test it, but what would that prove one way or another? Your survival wouldn’t diminish the legend; the Beast might be otherwise occupied. And your death wouldn’t more firmly establish belief. The only real test of a truth is whether or not it serves its adherents. And who could deny that the Beast serves us? Hasn’t he kept us from war? Hasn’t he inspired us to create this pleasant environment? His philosophical presence alone is enough to sustain belief.’ Blackford smiled. ‘You ask if I believe in his existence. I am his existence. All this you see is the geometry of his secret form, the precinct of his wish. If you’re asking me, Does he howl, does he rend and tear? my answer is, Listen. Find your own answer. I’ve found mine.’

Sleep came hard for Mingolla that night. He lay awake listening to the rustling leaves, the myriad sounds of the high canopy. Watching the dark figures of the others. Near midnight, one of those figures got stealthily to its feet and draped what looked to be a bulky shadow over its arm: the combat suit. It was Blackford. He moved to the edge of the platform, stepped into the cage of planking that was used for an elevator. The cage vanished, the ropes to which it was attached thrummed. Mingolla crept to the edge of the platform and peered over the side. Saw Blackford disembarking from the cage at the foot of the tree, clearly visible in the fall of moonlight. Blackford stripped off his shorts and shirt, and stepped into the combat suit. He put the helmet on, fastened the seals; then he walked off among the pillarlike columns of the mahogany trunks and was lost to view.

Mingolla crept back over to his pallet and lay down beside Debora, trying to make sense of what he had witnessed; after he had made a sort of sense out of it, he tried to decide whether Blackford’s actions were the mark of madness or were exemplary of an elusive and remarkably clearsighted form of sanity. Maybe,
he thought, there was no difference between the two states. From the depths of the wood came a guttural wail that Mingolla recognized as the distress signal of a combat suit. It sounded three times and fell silent.

‘What was that?’ said Debora, clutching his arm. ‘Did you hear?’

‘Yeah.’ He pushed her back down gently. ‘Go to sleep.’

‘What was it?’

‘I don’t know.’

He held her until she had fallen asleep again, but he stayed awake, listening to the signal that sounded every so often, the roar of the Beast making its rounds.

On the border of war stood a work of art, both a memorial to the way things had once seemed and an indictment of how they had really always been. The work of art was a sequence of murals painted on the stucco walls of a ruined village less than an hour’s drive from the front lines; it occupied the lower slope of a pine forested hill, and from the checkpoint on the road below, Min-golla could make out its bright colors through the trunks. It’s that guy, y’know, what’s he called … the War Painter,’ said the corporal who had just passed Mingolla and Debora through the checkpoint, believing them to be intelligence operatives. ‘Some museum asshole’s standin’ watch over the son of a bitch, but y’can scope it out if you want. We’ll give ya escort to headquarters when you’re ready.’

‘Maybe we’ll do that.’ Mingolla climbed out of the Bronco; he glanced inquiringly at Ruy, Corazon, and Tully in the backseat.

‘We hang out here,’ said Tully. ‘I don’t need to see no damn paintin’ ’bout war.’

Ruy, who was in a foul mood, having been shot down again that morning by Debora, offered no comment.

‘Take your rifles,’ said the corporal. ‘We get snipers ’round here sometimes.’

The morning was fresh, cool, the sunlight shining clear and whitish gold, glinting in the dew-hung pine needles, like a late September morning back in New York. As he and Debora made their way through the pines, he could see that the village was small, no more than fifteen or twenty houses, most roofless, and all missing at least one wall; but on coming out into the clearing where the village stood, he found that the poignancy of the
painted images caused him to forget the damage. The exteriors of the walls were covered with scenes of daily life: a plump Indian woman balancing a jug on her head; three children playing in a doorway; some farmers walking to the fields, bandannas around their heads and machetes on their shoulders. The colors were pastellike acrylics, and the men and women were rendered in a representational style that deviated from the photo-real by its accentuation of the delicacy of feature, the balletic edge given to the villagers’ postures. Looking at them, Mingolla felt the artist had been trying to capture the moment when their fate first made itself known, when they first became aware of the whistle of incoming, before their expressions could register alarm or astonishment, before their bodies could react other than to begin to tense, to perfect their last unfearful poses. They were bright ghosts, still alive yet dead already, with not even the knowledge of death fully lodged in them. Wall after wall, each biting to the eye, and in their cumulative effect most difficult to bear. There appeared to be other murals painted on the interiors of the walls, and Mingolla was about to investigate these, when a fruity voice behind him said, …Isn’t it fantastic?’

Walking toward them was a thin, tall man in his late twenties, with olive skin and brown hair and a kind of pinched handsomeness to his features; he was dressed in jeans and a plaid shirt, and accompanying him was an older mestizo man, who was operating a video camera.

‘My name’s Craig Spurlow,’ said the tall man. ‘Metropolitan Museum. Hope you don’t mind if we record your visit … we’re keeping a record of the piece while it’s still in its natural environment.’

Mingolla introduced himself and Debora, said he didn’t mind. He doubted Spurlow had caught their names: the museum official was lost in contemplation, hands on hips, chin up, his stance conveying pride of possession.

‘Just amazing,’ Spurlow said. ‘We lost two men defusing the booby traps. And I suppose we could lose more once we start breaking it down for shipment. Who knows if we’ve found all the traps. But God! It’s almost worth it to have finally saved one. I know everyone up there’ – he nodded toward the checkpoint –
‘thinks it’s ludicrous to save it, what with everything.’ His sad smile and outspread hands seemed to offer apology for the condition of ‘everything,’ to define that condition as hopeless, and to deny that it was his fault. But you have to try to hold onto human values, don’t you? Simply because there’s a terrible war, you can’t pretend it doesn’t produce works of great beauty and power.’ He sighed, the aesthetician confronted by some essential boorishness that he felt to the quick. ‘And this one, this one’s special. Even the artist must have thought so … it’s the only one he ever titled.’

‘What’s it called?’ Mingolla asked.

‘ “;The Mechanics Underlying Superficial Reality,” ’ Spurlow said, savoring each word.

‘That doesn’t seem very appropriate,’ said Debora.

‘Really, I …’ Spurlow smacked his forehead. ‘You haven’t been inside, have you? Come on! I’ll show you around. Believe me, I think you’ll find the title’s most apt.’

He ushered them through the door of the nearest house. Tall weeds and nettles grew from the dirt floor, dragonflies with zircon wings wobbled up among the long green stems, and the sunlight cut a sharp angle across one wall, but – because of the nature of the murals, because the walls seemed to be shedding cold – the light did not have much effect. They depicted a grotesque machinery worthy of Bosch or Breughel. Complex and filling every inch of paintable surface. Spurs of yellow ivory bone for gears; pulleys of unraveled heart muscle; ropes of tendons for string; weird assemblages of gristle. And in the darkly crimson interstices between the joints and corners of the machines were gnarled gnomish faces like those formed by grooved tree bark: it was difficult to tell whether the faces were productions of the paint or inadvertent contrivances of warping and shadow. Each time Mingolla turned his head, the machines appeared to shift into different alignments. He was reminded of jogging along a country road near his uncle’s farm one night, with fireflies fanned out across the cornfields; he’d been noticing the patterns they formed from second to second, jars and crescents and whatever, and – exhausted from his run – he’d become irrationally annoyed that these patterns were being imposed on him; he had tried not to see
them, and just when he thought he had succeeded, a firefly had winked on right in front of him, and he had inhaled it. That was how these horrid machines affected him: he thought he would choke on each new pattern that came clear.

‘Do you feel it?’ Spurlow asked. ‘The commitment in the paint, the luminous presence of the artist, his eyes watching us.’ His own eyes flicked to the side, to make sure of the cameraman’s diligence.

They moved from room to room, house to house, Debora and Mingolla silent, the cameraman tracking them, and Spurlow carrying on an inane lecture. Of course,’ he said, every tour of the complex has a different starting point, a different finish. But we think the artist intended this house and this particular wall to be the focal point.’

The wall indicated by Spurlow depicted a bed where lay a man, his face to the wall, only his black hair and tanned shoulders visible, and a young woman who greatly resembled Debora in the East Indian cast of her features. The sheet had ridden down to expose her breasts, and her brown left arm hung off the side of the mattress. There was an energyless abandon to the attitude of the bodies that communicated the fact that they were dead, that they had succumbed to the evil processes embodied by the cables and gears of the bloody human remnants that could be seen in the shadows beneath the bed.

‘End of story,’ said Spurlow. ‘Painting as narrative redefined for our age. And redefined with thrilling power.’

Perhaps it was the woman’s resemblance to Debora that ignited Mingolla’s rage, but it seemed to him then that his passage through the labyrinth of painted rooms had been like the progress of a flame along a coil of fuse, and that he was essentially carrying out the wishes of the artist, obeying the angry impulse that had created the work and designed its destruction, and that the match that had lit him was Spurlow’s adenoidal voice. He lifted his rifle and opened fire, ignoring Spurlow’s panic-stricken shouts. He tracked fire across the wall top to bottom, chips of painted stucco flying, the bursts echoing, and when the clip had at last been emptied, all that remained of the painting was the woman’s
brown arm hanging off the edge of the mattress. … Seeing it that way, isolated, Mingolla remembered that he had seen it before, the brief hallucination in Izaguirre’s office; the glimpse of a delicately rendered arm that had preceded the more detailed hallucination of the night street; and he became unnerved on realizing what that meant, how it ratified the sense of finality, of long years wound down into the future that had been implicit in the hallucination of pornographic America. With Spurlow still shouting at him, he went out of the room, out through a door and back into the street, where he breathed deeply of the clean sunlit air. Tully and a couple of the soldiers from the checkpoint came running through the pines. ‘What goin’ on?’ Tully yelled. ‘You all right?’

‘It’s okay … I just shot up the fucking painting!’

‘Didja, no shit?’ said one of the soldiers.

‘Yeah!’

The soldiers laughed. ‘Awright, man! Awright!’ They ran back up the slope to spread the news.

Debora moved up to stand beside him, to put a hand on his arm, as if accepting complicity, and behind him Spurlow was talking to the cameraman, saying, ‘Did you get it all?’ and then, ‘Well, at least that’s
something.’

He walked over to Mingolla and confronted him. ‘Mind explaining why you did that?’ There was bitterness in his tone, along with a tired sarcasm. ‘Did you feel that was something you just
had
to do, did it satisfy some barbarous impulse? God!’

Mingolla could hear the camera whirring. It felt right … what can I tell ya?’

‘Do you know,’ said Spurlow, his voice tightening, ‘do you know what we’ve gone through to preserve it? Do you …’ He waved in disgust. ‘Of course you don’t.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Mingolla said. ‘I mean you’ve got the statement down.’ He gestured at the camera. ‘This is better’n art, right?’

‘The loss …’ began Spurlow with pompous solemnity, but Mingolla – experiencing a surge of anger – cut him off by grabbing Decora’s rifle and training it on him.

‘You getting this?’ Mingolla asked the cameraman, and then said to Spurlow, ‘This is your big moment, guy. Any pronouncements on death as art, any last words on the creative process?’

Debora pulled at him, but he shook her off.

‘Don’t be actin’ dis way,’ Tully said. ‘De mon ain’t worth it.’

‘There’s no reason to get upset,’ said Spurlow. ‘We …’

‘There’s plenty of reason,’ said Mingolla. ‘All the reason in the world.’ He hadn’t been this angry for a long time, not since the Barrio, and although he didn’t quite understand the anger – something to do with the painting, with its validation of the sorry future – he liked the feeling, liked its sharpness, its unrepentant exuberance. He switched off the safety, and Spurlow blanched, backed away.

‘Please,’ he said. ‘Please.’