Muñoz stopped playing with the ball of bread he was rolling about on the tablecloth, but he didn't look up.
"She didn't actually get that far. I mean, she didn't shoot him," he said in a calm, low voice. "The car drove off first."
"Of course it did." César reached for his glass of rosé wine. "The light had changed to green."
Julia dropped her knife and fork on her barely touched plate of lasagne, making a noise that earned her a pained look from César over the top of his wine glass.
"Listen, stupid. The car was already parked there before the light turned red, when the street was empty ... Right opposite the gallery."
"There are hundreds of cars like that." César put his glass gently down on the table, dabbed at his lips and composed a sweet smile before adding, in a voice lowered to a sibylline whisper, "It might Well have been one of your virtuous friend Menchu's admirers. Some heavily muscled would-be pimp, hoping to oust Max."
Julia felt a profound sense of irritation. At moments of crisis César always slid into his vicious viper mode, aggressively slanderous. But she didn't want to give way to her ill humour by arguing with him, least of all in front of Muñoz.
"It might also," she replied, feigning patience after mentally counting to ten, "have been someone who, on seeing me come out of the gallery, decided to make himself scarce."
"It seems very unlikely to me, my dear. Really it does."
"You probably would have thought it unlikely that Álvaro would turn up with his neck broken, but he did."
César pursed his lips as if he found the allusion an unfortunate one, at the same time indicating Julia's plate.
"Your lasagne is getting cold."
"I don't give a damn about the lasagne. I want to know what you think. And I want the truth."
César looked at Muñoz, but the latter, utterly inscrutable, was still kneading his ball of bread. César rested his wrists symmetrically on either side of his plate, and stared at the vase containing two carnations, one white, one red, that adorned the centre of the tablecloth.
"Maybe you're right." He arched his eyebrows as if the sincerity demanded of him and the affection he felt for Julia were waging a hard-fought battle. "Is that what you wanted to hear? Well, there you are; I've said it." His blue eyes looked at her calmly, tenderly, stripped of the sardonic mask they'd worn before. "I must admit that the car's being there does worry me."
Julia threw him a furious look.
"May I know then why you've spent the last half-hour playing the fool?" She rapped impatiently on the table with her knuckles. "No, don't tell me. I know already. Daddy didn't want his little girl to worry, right? I'd be far better off with my head buried in the sand like an ostrich. Or like Menchu."
"You won't solve anything by hurling yourself on people who just happen to look suspicious. Besides, if your fears are justified, it might even be dangerous. Dangerous for you, I mean."
"I had your pistol."
"I hope I don't come to regret giving you that derringer. This isn't a game, you know. In real life, the baddies have pistols too. And they play chess."
As if Muñoz were doing a stereotyped impression of himself, the word "chess" seemed to breach his apparent apathy.
"After all," he murmured to no one in particular, "chess is essentially a combination of hostile impulses."
César and Julia looked at him in surprise. What he'd just said had nothing to do with the conversation. Muñoz was staring into space, as if he'd not quite returned from some long journey to remote places.
"My dear friend," said César, somewhat peeved by the interruption, "far be it from me to doubt the blazing truth of your words, but we'd be most grateful if you could be more explicit."
Muñoz continued rolling the ball of bread round and round in his fingers. Today he was wearing an old-fashioned blue jacket and a dark green tie, but the ends of his shirt collar, crumpled and none too clean, curled upwards as usual.
"I don't know what to say." He rubbed his chin with the back of his fingers. "I've spent the past few days going over and over it all." He hesitated for a moment, as if searching for the right words. "Thinking about our opponent."
"As has Julia, I imagine. As have I. We've all been thinking about the wretch."
"It's not the same thing. Calling him a 'wretch' presupposes a subjective judgment ... That won't help us at all, and it could even divert our attention from what is really important. I try to think about him through the only perspective we have at the moment: his chess moves. I mean..." He passed a finger over the misted surface of his wine glass, from which he had drunk nothing, as if the gesture had made him lose the thread of his brief speech. "The style of play reflects the personality of the player. I think I've said that to you before."
Julia leaned towards him, interested.
"You mean that you've spent the past few days seriously studying the murderer's personality? Do you think you know him better now?"
The vague smile appeared, fleetingly, on Muñoz's lips. But Julia saw that he was deeply serious. He was never ironic.
"There are many different types of player." His eyes were looking at something in the distance, a familiar world beyond the walls of the restaurant. "Apart from style of play, each player has his own peculiarities, characteristics that distinguish him from other players: Steinitz used to hum Wagner while he played; Morphy never looked at his opponent until the final moment of the game ... Others mutter in Latin or in some invented language. It's a way of dispelling tension, of keeping alert. A player might do it before or after moving a piece. Almost everyone does something."
"Do you?" asked Julia.
Muñoz hesitated, embarrassed.
"I suppose I do."
"And what's your peculiarity as a player?"
Muñoz looked at his fingers, still kneading the ball of bread.
"We're off to Penjamo, one j no aitches."
"We're off to Penjamo, one j no aitches?"
"Yes."
"And what does 'We're off to Penjamo, one j no aitches' mean?"
"It doesn't mean anything. It's just something I say under my breath, or else think, whenever I make an important move, just before I actually pick up the chess piece."
"But that's completely irrational."
"I know. But however irrational your gestures or idiosyncrasies are, they reflect your way of playing. They tell you about the character of your opponent too. When it comes to analysing a style or a player, any scrap of information is useful. Petrosian, for example, was a very defensive player, with a great instinct for danger. He would spend the whole game preparing defences against possible attacks, before his opponents had even thought up such attacks."
"He was probably paranoid," said Julia.
"You see how easy it is? The way someone plays might reveal egotism, aggression, megalomania. Just look at the case of Steinitz. When he was sixty, he was convinced he was in direct communication with God and that he could beat Him, even if he gave away a pawn and let Him play White."
"And our invisible player?" asked César, who was listening attentively, his glass halfway to his lips.
"He's good," replied Muñoz without hesitation, "and good players are often complicated people. A chess master develops a special intuitive feel for the right move and a sense of danger about the wrong move. It's a sort of instinct that you can't explain in words. When he looks at the chessboard he doesn't see something static; he sees a field crisscrossed by a multitude of magnetic forces, including the forces he himself contains." He looked at the ball of bread on the tablecloth for some seconds before moving it carefully to one side, as if it were a tiny pawn on an imaginary board. "He's aggressive and he enjoys taking risks. For example, the fact that he didn't use his queen to protect the king. The brilliant use of the black pawn and then the black knight to keep up the pressure on the white king, leaving the tantalising possibility of an exchange of queens. I mean that this man..."
"Or woman," put in Julia.
"I don't know about that. There are women who play chess well, but not many. In this case, the moves made by our opponent, male or female, show a certain cruelty and, I would say, an almost sadistic curiosity. Like a cat playing with a mouse."
"So, summing up," Julia said, ticking the points off on her fingers, "our opponent is very probably a man and far less probably a woman, someone with plenty of self-confidence, aggressive and cruel by nature and a kind of sadistic voyeur. Is that right?"
"Yes, I think so. And he enjoys danger. That much is obvious from his rejection of the classic approach whereby Black is always relegated to a defensive role. What's more he has a good intuitive sense of what his opponent's moves might be. He's able to put himself in someone else's shoes."
César puckered his lips, gave a silent whistle of admiration and looked at Muñoz with renewed respect. The latter now had a distant air, as if his thoughts had again drifted far away.
"What are you thinking about?" asked Julia.
Muñoz took a while to answer.
"Nothing special. On a chessboard, the battle isn't between two schools of chess, but between two philosophies, between two world-views."
"White and Black, isn't that it?" César said, as if he were reciting lines from an old poem. "Good and evil, heaven and hell, and all those other delightful antitheses."
"Possibly."
Muñoz shrugged. Julia looked at his broad forehead and at the dark shadows under his eyes. Burning in those weary eyes was the little light that so fascinated her and she wondered how long it would be before it flickered out again, as it had on other occasions. When that light was there, she felt a genuine desire to delve into his inner life, to know the taciturn man sitting opposite her.
"And what school do you belong to?"
He seemed surprised by the question. His hand moved towards his wine glass but stopped halfway and lay motionless on the tablecloth. His glass had remained untouched since the beginning of the meal.
"I don't think I belong to any school," he replied quietly. He gave the impression that talking about himself represented an intolerable violation of his sense of modesty. "I suppose I'm one of those who sees chess as a form of therapy. Sometimes I wonder what people like you, people who don't play chess, do to escape from depression and madness. As I told you once before, there are people who play to win, like Alekhine, Lasker and Kasparov, like nearly all the grand masters. Like our invisible player, I suppose. Others, like Steinitz and Przepiorka, concentrate on demonstrating their theories and making brilliant moves."
"And you?" asked Julia.
"Me? I'm neither aggressive nor a risk-taker."
"Is that why you never win?"
"Inside, I believe that I can win, that if I decided to win, I wouldn't lose a single game. But I'm my own worst enemy." He touched the end of his nose, tilting his head slightly to one side. "I read something once: man was not born to solve the problem of the world, merely to discover where the problem lies. Perhaps that's why I don't attempt to solve anything. I immerse myself in the game for the game's sake and sometimes when I look as if I were studying the board, I'm actually daydreaming. I'm pondering different moves, with different pieces, or I go six, seven or more moves ahead of the move my opponent is considering."
"Chess in its purest state," said César, who seemed genuinely, albeit reluctantly, impressed.
"I don't know about that," Muñoz said. "But the same thing happens to many other people I know. The games can last for hours, during which time, family, problems, work, all get left behind, pushed to one side. That's common to everyone. What happens is that while some see it as a battle they have to win, others, like myself, see it as an arena rich in fantasy and spatial combinations, where victory and defeat are meaningless words."
"But before, when you were talking to us about a battle between two philosophies, you were talking about the murderer, about our mystery player," said Julia. "This time it seems that you are interested in winning. Is that right?"
Muñoz's gaze again drifted off to some indeterminate point in space.
"I suppose it is. Yes, this time I do want to win."
"Why?"
"Instinct. I'm a chess player, a good one. Someone is trying to provoke me, and that forces me to pay close attention to the moves he makes. The truth is, I have no choice."
César smiled mockingly, lighting one of his special gold-filter cigarettes.
"Sing, O Muse," he recited, in a tone of festive parody, "of the fury of our grieving Muñoz, who, at last, has resolved to leave his tent. Our friend is finally going to war. Until now he has acted only as an outside observer, so I'm pleased at last to see him swear allegiance to the flag. A hero malgré lui, but a hero for all that. It's just a shame," a shadow crossed his smooth, pale brow, "that it's such a devilishly subtle war."
Muñoz looked at César with interest.
"It's odd you should say that."
"Why?"
"Because chess is, in fact, a substitute for war and for something else as well. I mean for patricide." He looked at them uncertainly, as if asking them not to take his words too seriously. "Chess is all about getting the king into check, you see. It's about killing the father. I would say that chess has more to do with the art of murder than it does with the art of war."
An icy silence chilled the air around the table. César was looking at Muñoz's now sealed lips, screwing up his eyes a little, as if troubled by the smoke from his cigarette. His look was one of frank admiration, as if Muñoz had just opened a door that hinted at unfathomable mysteries contained within.
"Amazing," he murmured.
Julia seemed equally mesmerised by Muñoz. However mediocre and insignificant he might appear, this man with his large ears and his timid, rumpled air knew exactly what he was talking about. In the mysterious labyrinth, even the idea of which made men tremble with impotence and fear, Muñoz was the only one who knew how to interpret the signs, the only one who possessed the keys that allowed him to come and go without being devoured by the Minotaur. And there, sitting before the remains of her barely touched lasagne, Julia knew with a mathematical, almost a chess player's certainty that, in his way, this man was the strongest of the three of them. His judgment was not dimmed by prejudices about his opponent, the mystery player and potential murderer. He considered the enigma with the same egotistical, scientific coldness that Sherlock Holmes used to solve the problems set him by the sinister Professor Moriarty. Muñoz would not play that game to the end out of a sense of justice; his motive was not ethical, but logical. He would do it simply because he was a player whom chance had placed on this side of the chessboard, just as–and Julia shuddered at the thought–it could have placed him on the other side. Whether he played White or Black, she realised, was a matter of complete indifference to him. All that mattered to him was that, for the first time in his life, he was interested in playing a game to the end.
Her eyes met César's and she knew he was thinking the same thing. It was he who spoke first, in a low voice, as if fearing, as she did, to extinguish the light in Muñoz's eyes.
"Killing the king..." César put the cigarette holder slowly to his lips and inhaled a precise amount of smoke. "That's very interesting. I mean the Freudian interpretation of the game. I had no idea chess had anything to do with such unpleasant things."
Muñoz, his head slightly to one side, seemed absorbed in his own thoughts.
"It's usually the father who teaches the child his first moves in the game. And the dream of any son who plays chess is to beat his father. To kill the king. Besides, it soon becomes evident in chess that the father; or the king, is the weakest piece on the board. He's under continual attack, in constant need of protection, of such tactics as castling, and he can only move one square at a time. Paradoxically, the king is also indispensable. The king gives the game its name, since the word 'chess' derives from the Persian word shah meaning king, and is pretty much the sa
me in most languages."
"And the queen?" asked Julia.
"She's the mother and the wife. In any attack on the king, she provides the most efficient defence. The queen is the piece with the best and most effective resources. And on either side of the king and the queen is the bishop: the one who blesses the union and helps in the fight. Not forgetting the Arab faros, the horse that crosses the enemy lines, the knight. In fact, the problem existed long before Van Huys painted his Game of Chess; men have been trying to solve it for fourteen hundred years."
Muñoz paused, and seemed about to say more, but instead of words, what appeared on his lips was that brief suggestion of a smile.
"Sometimes," he said at last, as if it were an enormous effort to formulate his thoughts, "I wonder if chess is something man invented or if he merely discovered it. It's as if it were something that has always been there, since the beginning of the universe. Like whole numbers."
As if in a dream, Julia heard the sound of a seal being broken and, for the first time, she was properly aware of the situation: a vast chessboard embracing both past and present, Van Huys and herself, even Álvaro, César, Montegrifo, the Belmontes, Menchu and Muñoz. And she suddenly felt such intense fear that she had to make an almost physical effort not to express it out loud. The fear must have shown in her face because both César and Muñoz gave her a worried look.
"I'm all right," she said, shaking her head as if that might help calm her thoughts. Then she took from her pocket the list of different levels that existed in the painting, according to Muñoz's first interpretation. "Have a look at this."
Muñoz studied the sheet of paper and passed it to César without comment.
"What do you think?" asked Julia.
César was hesitant.
"Most disturbing," he said. "But perhaps we're being too literary about it." He glanced again at Julia's diagram. "I can't make up my mind whether we're all racking our brains over something really profound or something absolutely trivial."
Julia didn't reply. She was staring at Muñoz. He placed the piece of paper on the table, took a pen from his pocket and added something and passed it back to her.
The Flanders Panel Page 18
