The Flanders Panel

by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

  "Here you are," he said, and Julia clung to the sound of his voice like a drowning woman to a piece of wood, knowing, with relief, that she couldn't do two things at once: remember him as he was then and listen to him now. With no regret, her feelings of nostalgia were immediately left behind, and the relief on her face must have been so patent that he looked at her, surprised, before turning his attention back to the page of the book.

  Julia glanced at the title: Switzerland, Burgundy and the Low Countries in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries.

  "Look." Álvaro was pointing at a name in the text. Then he transferred his finger to the photograph of the painting she had placed on the table. " FERDINANDUS OST. D. is the identifying inscription of the chess player on the left, the man dressed in red. Van Huys painted The Game of Chess in 1471, so there's no doubt about it. It's Ferdinand Altenhoffen, the Duke of Ostenburg, Ostenburguensis Dux, born in 1435, died in ... yes, that's right, in 1474. He was about thirty-five when he sat for the painter."

  Julia had picked up a card from the table and was pointing at what was written there.

  "Where was Ostenburg?... In Germany?"

  Álvaro shook his head and opened a historical atlas.

  "Ostenburg was a duchy that corresponded, more or less, to Charlemagne's Rodovingia ... It was here, inside the Franco-German borders, between Luxembourg and Flanders. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Ostenburg dukes tried to remain independent, but ended up being absorbed, first by Burgundy and then by Maximilian of Austria. In fact, the Altenhoffen dynasty died out with this particular Ferdinand. If you like, I can make you some photocopies."

  "I'd be very grateful."

  "It's no trouble." Álvaro sat back in his chair, took a tin of tobacco from a drawer in the desk and started filling his pipe. "Logically, the lady by the window, with the inscription BEATRIX BURG. OST. D. can only be Beatrice of Burgundy, the Duke's consort. See? Beatrice married Ferdinand Altenhoffen in 1464, when she was twenty-three."

  "For love?" asked Julia with an enigmatic smile, looking at the photograph. Álvaro responded with a brief, rather forced smile of his own.

  "As you know, very few marriages of this kind were love matches ... The wedding was an attempt by Beatrice's uncle, Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, to create closer ties with Ostenburg in an alliance against France, which was trying to annex both duchies." Álvaro looked at the photograph and put his pipe between his teeth. "Ferdinand of Ostenburg was lucky though, because she was very beautiful. At least, according to what the most important chronicler of the time, Nicolas Flavin, said in his Annales bourguignonnes. Your Van Huys seems to have thought so too. It appears she'd been painted by him before, because there's a document, quoted by Pijoan, which states that Van Huys was for a time court painter at Ostenburg. In 1463, Ferdinand Altenhoffen assigned him a pension of £100 a year, payable half at the feast of St John and the other half at Christmas. The same document contains the commission to paint a portrait, bien au vif, of Beatrice, who was then the Duke's fiancee."

  "Are there any other references?"

  "Loads. Van Huys became quite an important person." Álvaro took a file out of a cabinet. "Jean Lemaire, in his Couronne Margaridique, written in honour of Margaret of Austria, Governor of the Low Countries, mentions Pierre de Brugge (Van Huys), Hughes de Gand (Van der Goes) and Dieric de Louvain (Dietric Bouts), together with the person he dubs the king of Flemish painters, Johannes (Van Eyck). The actual words he uses in the poem are: 'Pierre de Brugge, qui tant eut les traits utez', which translates literally as 'he who drew such clean lines'. By the time that was written, Van Huys had been dead for twenty-five years." Álvaro carefully checked through some other cards. "And there are earlier mentions too. For example, inventories from the Kingdom of Valencia state that Alfonso V the Magnanimous owned works by Van Huys, Van Eyck and other painters, all of them now lost. Bartolomeo Fazio, a close relative of Alfonso V, also mentions him in his De viribus illustribus liber, describing him as 'Pietrus Husyus, insignis pictor'. Other authors, particularly Italians, call him 'Magistro Piero Van Hus, pictori in Bruggia'. There's a quote in 1470 in which Guido Rasofalco mentions one of his paintings, a Crucifixion, which again has not survived, as 'Opera buona di mano di un chiamato Piero di Juys, pictor famoso in Fiandra.' And another Italian author, anonymous this time, refers to a painting by Van Huys that has survived, The Knight and the Devil, stating that 'A magistro Pietrus Juisus magno et famoso flandesco fuit depictum.' He's also mentioned by Guicciardini and Van Mander in the sixteenth century and by James Weale in the nineteenth century in his books on great Flemish painters." He gathered up the cards and put them carefully back into the file, which he returned to the cabinet. Then he sat back in his chair and looked at Julia, smiling. "Satisfied?"

  "Very." She'd noted everything down and was now taking stock. After a moment, she pushed her hair back and looked at Álvaro curiously: "Anyone would think you'd had it all prepared. I'm positively dazzled."

  The professor's smile faded a little, and he avoided Julia's eyes. One of the cards on his desk seemed suddenly to require his attention.

  "It's my job," he said. And she couldn't tell if his tone was simply distracted or evasive. Without quite knowing why, this made her feel vaguely uncomfortable.

  "Well, all I can say is, you're still extremely good at it." She observed him with interest before returning to her notes. "We've got plenty of references to the painter and to two of the people in the painting." She leaned over the reproduction and placed a finger on the second player. "But nothing about him."

  Álvaro was busy filling his pipe and didn't reply at once. He was frowning.

  "It's difficult to say with any exactitude," he said between puffs. "The inscription RUTGIER AR. PREUX isn't very explicit. Although it's enough to come up with an hypothesis." He paused and stared at the bowl of his pipe as if hoping to find in it confirmation of his idea. "Rutgier could be Roger, Rogelio, Ruggiero, all of them possible forms–and there are at least ten variants–of a name common at the time. Preux could be a surname or a family name, in which case we'd come to a dead end, because there's no mention of any Preux whose deeds would have merited an entry in the chronicles. However, PREUX was also used in the high Middle Ages as an honorific adjective, even as a noun, with the sense of 'valiant', 'chivalrous'. The word is applied to Lancelot and Roland, to give you but two famous examples. In France and England, they would use the formula 'soyez preux' when knighting someone, that is, 'be loyal or brave'. It was a very exclusive title, used to distinguish the crème de la crème of the knighthood."

  Unconsciously, out of professional habit, Álvaro had adopted the persuasive, almost pedagogical tone that he tended to slip into sooner or later whenever a conversation touched on aspects of his speciality. Julia noticed it with some alarm; it stirred up old memories, the forgotten embers of an affection that had occupied a place in time and space and in the formation of her character as it was now. The residue of another life and other feelings that a relentless war of attrition had succeeded in deadening and displacing, the way you relegate a book to a shelf to gather dust, with no intention of ever opening it again, but which is still there, despite everything.

  Confronted by such feelings, she knew that she had to resort to other tactics: keep her mind on the matter in hand; talk, ask for further details, whether she needed to know them or not; lean over the desk, pretending to concentrate hard on taking notes; imagine she was standing before a different Álvaro, which, of course, she was; act, feel, as if the memories belonged not to them, but to two other people someone had once mentioned to her and whose fate was a matter of indifference.

  Another solution was to light a cigarette, and Julia did so. The smoke filling her lungs helped reconcile her and lend her a small measure of detachment. She looked at Álvaro, ready to continue.

  "What's your hypothesis then?" Her voice sounded quite normal and that made her feel much calmer. "As I see it, if Preux wasn't the surname, then
the key might lie in the abbreviation AR."

  Álvaro nodded. Half-closing his eyes against the smoke from his pipe, he leafed through the pages of another book until he found a name.

  "Look at this. Roger de Arras, born in 1431, the same year in which the English burned Joan of Arc at the stake in Rouen. His family were related to the Valois, the reigning dynasty in France at the time, and he was born in the castle of Bellesang, very near the duchy of Ostenburg."

  "Could he be the second chess player?"

  "Possibly. AR would be exactly right for the abbreviation of Arras. And Roger de Arras appears in all the chronicles of the time. He fought in the Hundred Years' War alongside the King of France, Charles VII. See? He took part in the conquest of Normandy and Guyenne to win them back from the English. In 1450 he fought in the battle of Formigny and three years later at the battle of Castillon. Look at this engraving. He might well be one of those men; perhaps he's the knight with his visor down, offering his horse in the midst of the fray to the King of France, whose own horse has been killed, but who continues to fight on foot..."

  "You amaze me, Professor," Julia said, looking at him with open astonishment. "I mean that picturesque image of the warrior in the battle. You were the one who always said that imagination is the cancer of historical rigour."

  Álvaro burst out laughing.

  "Consider it poetic licence, in your honour. How could I forget your fondness for going beyond the mere facts? I recall that when you and I..."

  He fell silent, suddenly uncertain. His allusion to the past had caused Julia's face to darken. Recognising that memories were out of place just then, Álvaro hurriedly back-pedalled.

  "I'm sorry," he said in a low voice.

  "It doesn't matter," Julia replied, briskly stubbing out her cigarette in the ashtray and burning her fingers in the process. "It was my fault really." She looked at him more calmly. "So what have you got on our warrior, then?"

  With visible relief, Álvaro plunged back into familiar terrain. Roger de Arras, he explained, had not only been a warrior, he'd been many other things besides. For example, he was a model of chivalry, the perfect medieval nobleman. In his spare time he'd been a poet and musician. He was much admired in the court of the Valois, his cousins. So the word "preux" fitted him like a glove.

  "Did he have any links with chess?"

  "There's no mention of any."

  Julia was taking notes, caught up in the story, but she stopped suddenly and looked at Álvaro.

  "What I don't understand," she said, chewing the end of her pen, "is what this Roger de Arras would be doing in a picture by Van Huys, playing chess with the Duke of Ostenburg."

  Álvaro fidgeted in his seat with apparent embarrassment, as if suddenly gripped by doubt. He sucked on his pipe and stared at the wall behind Julia's head, with the air of someone waging an inner battle. Finally, he managed a cautious smile.

  "I've no idea what he's doing there–apart from playing chess, that is." Julia was sure that he was looking at her with unusual wariness, as if he could not quite put into words an idea that was going round and round in his head. "What I do know," he added at last, "and I know this because it's mentioned in all the books on the subject, is that Roger de Arras didn't die in France, but in Ostenburg." After a slight hesitation, he pointed to the photograph of the painting. "Have you noticed the date of this painting?"

  Puzzled, Julia said: "Yes, 1471. Why?"

  Álvaro slowly exhaled some smoke and uttered something that sounded like an abrupt laugh. He was looking at Julia as if trying to read in her eyes the answer to a question he could not quite bring himself to ask.

  "There's something not quite right there," he said finally. "That date is either incorrect or the chronicles are lying, or else that knight is not the Rutgier Ar. Preux of the painting." He picked up a mimeographed copy of the Chronicle of the Dukes of Ostenburg and, after leafing through it for a while, placed it in front of her. "This was written at the end of the fifteenth century by Guichard de Hainaut, a Frenchman and a contemporary of the events he describes, and it is based on eyewitness accounts. According to Hainaut, our man died at Epiphany in 1469, two years before Pieter Van Huys painted The Game of Chess. Do you understand, Julia? Roger de Arras could never have posed for that picture, because by the time it was painted, he was already dead."

  He walked her to the university car park and handed her the file containing the photocopies. Almost everything was in there, he said: historical references, an update on the catalogued works of Van Huys, a bibliography ... He promised to send a chronological account and a few other papers to her as soon as he had a free moment. He stood looking at her, his pipe in his mouth and his hands in his jacket pockets, as if he still had something to say but was unsure whether or not to do so. He hoped, he added after a short pause, that he'd been of some help.

  Julia nodded, feeling perplexed. The details of the story she'd just learned were still whirling round in her head. And there was something else.

  "I'm impressed, Professor. In less than an hour you've completely reconstructed the lives of the people depicted in a painting you've never studied before."

  Álvaro looked away, letting his gaze wander over the campus. Then he made a wry face.

  "The painting wasn't entirely unfamiliar to me," he said. Julia thought she detected a tremor of doubt in his voice, and it troubled her. She listened extra carefully to his words. "Apart from anything else, there's a photograph in a 1917 Prado catalogue. The Game of Chess used to be exhibited there. It was on loan for about twenty years, from the turn of the century until 1923, when the heirs asked for it back."

  "I didn't know that."

  "Well, now you do." He concentrated on his pipe again, which seemed about to go out. Julia looked at him out of the corner of her eye. She knew him, or, rather, she had known him once, too well not to sense that something important was preying on his mind, something he couldn't bring himself to say.

  "What is it you haven't told me, Álvaro?"

  He didn't move, just stood there sucking on his pipe, staring into space. Then he he turned slowly towards her.

  "I don't know what you mean."

  "I just mean that everything to do with this painting is important." She looked at him gravely. "I'm staking a lot on this."

  She noticed that Álvaro was chewing indecisively on the stem of his pipe. He sketched an ambivalent gesture in the air.

  "You're putting me in a very awkward position. Your Van Huys seems to have become rather fashionable of late."

  "Fashionable?" She became tense, alert, as if the earth might suddenly shift beneath her feet. "Do you mean that someone else has already talked to you about him, before I did?"

  Álvaro was smiling uncertainly now, as if regretting having said too much.

  "They might have."

  "Who?"

  "That's the problem. I'm not allowed to tell you."

  "Don't be ridiculous."

  "I'm not. It's true." He looked at her imploringly.

  Julia sighed deeply, trying to fill the strange emptiness she felt in her stomach; somewhere an alarm bell was ringing. But Álvaro was talking again, so she remained attentive, searching for some sign. He'd like, he said, to have a look at the painting, if Julia didn't mind, of course. He'd like to see her, too.

  "I can explain everything," he concluded, "when the time is right."

  It could be a trick, she thought. He was quite capable of creating the whole drama as a pretext for seeing her again. She bit her lower lip. Inside her, the painting was now jockeying for position with feelings and memories that had nothing whatever to do with it.

  "How's your wife?" she asked casually, giving in to a dark impulse. She looked up, mischievously, and saw that Álvaro had stiffened and seemed suddenly uncomfortable.

  "She's fine," was all he said. He was staring hard at the pipe in his hand, as if he didn't recognise it. "She's in New York, setting up an exhibition."

  A memory flitted i
nto Julia's head: an attractive blonde woman in a brown tailored suit, getting out of a car. Just fifteen seconds of a rather blurred image that she could only barely recall, but which had marked the end of her youth, as cleanly as a cut with a scalpel. She seemed to remember that his wife worked for some official organisation, something to do with the Ministry of Arts, with exhibitions and travelling. For a time, that had facilitated matters. Álvaro never talked about her, nor did Julia, but they felt her presence between them, like a ghost. And that ghost, fifteen seconds of a face glimpsed purely by chance, had ended up winning the game.

  "I hope things are going well for you both."

  "They're not too bad. I mean not entirely bad."

  "Good."

  They walked on a little in silence, not looking at each other. At last, Julia clicked her tongue, put her head on one side and smiled into the empty air.

  "Anyway, it doesn't much matter now," she said and stopped in front of him, her hands on her hips and a roguish smile on her lips. "How do you think I'm looking these days?"