The Flanders Panel

by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

  There were a lot of people at Stephan's. The first one she recognised was César, sitting on a sofa with Sergio. The young man was nodding, looking charming, his tousled blond hair over his eyes, as César whispered something to him. César was sitting with his legs crossed, smoking. The hand holding the cigarette rested on his knee; he waved the other in the air as he spoke, close to his protege's arm but never quite touching it. As soon as he saw Julia, he got up and came to meet her. He didn't seem surprised to see her there at that hour, with no make-up on and wearing jeans.

  "She's over there," he said, pointing to the interior of the club with a neutral look on his face that revealed, nonetheless, a certain amused anticipation. "On one of the sofas at the back."

  "Has she been drinking a lot?"

  "Like a fish. And I'm afraid she's oozing white powder from every orifice. She's been making suspiciously frequent visits to the Ladies; she can't need to pee that often." He regarded the ash on his cigarette and gave a wicked smile. "She made a scene a while ago at the bar: she slapped Montegrifo. Can you imagine, my dear? It was really"–he savoured die idea like a connoisseur, before uttering the word out loud–"delicious."

  "And Montegrifo?"

  César's expression became cruel.

  "Fascinating, darling, verging on the divine. He left in that stiff, dignified way of his, with a very attractive blonde on his arm, a bit common but well-dressed. She was so embarrassed, the poor thing, as well she might be. You couldn't really blame her." He smiled with intense malice. "I have to admit, Princess, that the chap has style. He took the slap very coolly, without batting an eyelid, like tough guys in the films. A very interesting man, that auctioneer of yours. I must admit he behaved impeccably. Cool as a cucumber."

  "Where's Max?"

  "I haven't seen him tonight, I'm sorry to say." Again that perverse smile appeared. "Now that really would have been fun. The icing on the cake."

  Leaving César, Julia walked into the club. She greeted several acquaintances without stopping to talk, and saw her friend Menchu sitting slumped on a sofa, alone. Her eyes were glazed, her short skirt was hitched up and she had a grotesque tear in one leg of her tights. She looked ten years older.

  "Menchu."

  She looked at Julia, barely recognising her. Mumbling incoherently, she shook her head and let out the short, uncertain laugh of the drunk.

  "You missed it," she said after a moment, her voice slurred. "That bastard–standing right there he was, half his face bright scarlet." She pulled herself up and rubbed her reddened nose, oblivious to the inquisitive, scandalised looks of people at nearby tables. "Stupid arrogant sod."

  Julia felt everyone's eyes on her; she could hear muttered comments and she blushed.

  "Do you think you can manage to stand up and get out of here?"

  "I think so. But first, I must just tell you ..."

  "Tell me later. Let's go."

  Menchu struggled to her feet, clumsily pulling down her skirt. Draping Menchu's coat over her shoulders, Julia got her to walk towards the door in a relatively dignified manner. César came over to them.

  "Everything OK?"

  "Yes. I think I can manage."

  "Are you sure?"

  "Yes. I'll see you tomorrow."

  Out in the street Menchu swayed, and someone yelled an obscenity at her from the window of a passing car.

  "Take me home, Julia. Please."

  "Yours or mine?"

  Menchu looked at her as if she had some difficulty recognising her. She was moving like a sleepwalker.

  "Yours," she said.

  "What about Max?"

  "It's all over with Max. We had a row. It's finished."

  They got a taxi and Menchu hunched up in the back seat. Then she burst into tears. Julia put an arm around her trembling shoulders. The taxi stopped at a traffic light and a brilliant shop window lit up Menchu's ravaged face.

  "I'm sorry. I'm a ..."

  Julia felt embarrassed, uncomfortable. It was just grotesque. Damn Max, she said to herself. Damn the lot of them.

  "Don't be silly," she said, interrupting.

  She saw the taxi driver observing them curiously in his rear-view mirror, and when she turned back to Menchu she caught an unusual look in her eyes, a brief flash of unexpected lucidity, as if there was still a place inside untouched by the fumes of alcohol and drugs. She was surprised to see something of infinite depth, of dark significance. It was a look so inappropriate to the state Menchu was in that Julia felt disconcerted. When Menchu spoke, her words were even stranger.

  "You don't understand anything," she said, shaking her head in pain, like a wounded animal. "But whatever happens ... I want you to know..."

  She stopped abruptly, as if biting back the words, and her gaze became lost once more in the shadows, leaving Julia perplexed. It was too much for one night. All she needed now, she thought, feeling a vague apprehension that augured no good, was to find another card by the entry bell.

  ***

  But there was no card that night, and she could devote herself to looking after Menchu, who seemed to be moving in a fog. Julia gave her two cups of coffee before putting her to bed. Feeling like a psychiatrist seated by her couch, she gradually managed, with great patience, to reconstruct out of the incoherent babblings exactly what had happened. At the worst possible moment, Max, ungrateful Max, had got it into his head to go off on a trip, some stupid story about a job in Portugal. She was having a bad time and his going off like that seemed a selfish dereliction of duty. They'd argued, and instead of resolving the problem in bed, as they usually did, he'd slammed the door on her. Menchu didn't know if he intended to come back or not, but she didn't give a damn either way. Determined not to be alone, she'd gone to Stephan's. A few lines of coke had helped to clear her head, leaving her in a state of aggressive euphoria. With Max forgotten, she sat in her corner drinking very dry martinis and eyeing a gorgeous guy who'd noticed her. Then the mood of the night suddenly changed. Unfortunately for Paco Montegrifo, he turned up too, accompanied by one of those bejewelled bitches he was seen with from time to time. The matter of the percentages was still fresh in her mind and she thought she detected a certain irony in the way he greeted her. As they say in novels, it was like a knife being turned in the wound. She delivered a single slap, thwack, a real humdinger, that caused a great stir amongst the clientele. A huge uproar ensued, end of story. Curtain.

  Julia put a blanket over Menchu and sat by her for a while. She finally got to sleep at about two in the morning. Sometimes she flailed about and uttered unintelligible words, her lips pressed together, her hair all over her face. Julia looked at the lines around her mouth and lips, at the black smudges where tears and sweat had made her make-up run. It gave her a pathetic look: the look of an ageing courtesan after a bad night. No doubt César would have drawn some scathing conclusion, but Julia didn't feel like thinking about César. She found herself praying to life to give her the necessary spirit of resignation to grow old with dignity when her turn came. It must be terrible, at the moment of shipwreck, not to have a solid raft on which to save oneself. She realised that Menchu was old enough to be her mother, and felt ashamed at the thought, as if in some way she'd taken advantage of her friend's sleep in order to betray her.

  She drank what remained of her coffee, cold now, and lit a cigarette. The rain was once more beating down on the skylight, the sound of solitude, she thought sadly. It reminded her of that other rainy night, a year ago, when she'd ended her relationship with Álvaro and knew that something had broken inside her for ever, like a faulty mechanism beyond repair. And she knew too that, from then on, the bittersweet solitude that filled her heart would be her one sure companion as she walked what roads were left for her to follow, beneath a heaven in which the gods were slowly dying amidst great gales of laughter. That night she had crouched beneath the shower, steam curling about her like scalding mist, her tears mingling with the water falling in torrents on her drenched hair and her nak
ed body. That clean, warm water had washed Álvaro away a year before his physical and definitive death. And by one of those strange ironies of which Fate is so fond, that was how Álvaro had ended his life, in a bathtub, with his eyes wide open and his neck broken, beneath the shower, beneath the rain.

  She dismissed the memory, saw it vanish, amongst the shadows in her studio. Then she thought about César and moved her head slowly to the rhythm of a melancholy, imaginary music. At that moment, she would have liked to lean her head on his shoulder, close her eyes and breathe in the delicate smell of tobacco and myrrh that she'd known since she was little, the smell that meant César. And to relive with him all those stories in which you knew beforehand there would be a happy ending. How far away they seemed, those days of happy endings, incompatible with any kind of mature lucidity! It was hard sometimes to look at herself in the mirror and know that she was in eternal exile from Never-Never-Land.

  She switched off the light and sat on the carpet in front of the Van Huys, seeing the people in the picture in her imagination and hearing the distant rumble of the tides of their lives washing around the game of chess that had lasted throughout time and space and still continued to be played–like the slow, implacable mechanism of a clock that has defied the centuries–a game whose outcome no one could foresee. Then she forgot about everything–about Menchu, about her nostalgia for time past–and instead felt a now familiar shiver run through her, a shiver of fear, which was also obscurely, unexpectedly consoling. A kind of morbid expectancy. Like when she was a child and sat curled up against César to hear a new story. Perhaps Captain Hook had not disappeared into the mists of the past after all. Perhaps now he was simply playing chess instead.

  When she woke up, Menchu was still asleep. She dressed with a minimum of noise, left a set of keys on the table and went out, carefully locking the door behind her. It was almost ten o'clock, and the rain had given way to a murky mix of fog and smog that blurred the grey outlines of the buildings and made the cars driving along seem ghostly, the reflections from their headlights fragmenting on the asphalt into infinite points of light that wove an atmosphere of luminous unreality about her as she walked along with her hands in the pockets of her raincoat.

  Belmonte received her in his wheelchair, in the room with the mark left by the Van Huys. The inevitable Bach was playing on the gramophone and Julia wondered, as she took the dossier out of her bag, if the old man put it on deliberately each time she visited. He expressed regret at the absence of Muñoz, the mathematician-cum-chess-player, as he called him with an irony that did not go unnoticed, and carefully read the report Julia had brought, which gave all the historical facts about the painting, Muñoz's final conclusions regarding the enigma of Roger de Arras, photographs of the different phases of the restoration work and the colour brochure, just printed by Claymore's, giving details of the painting and the auction. He gave occasional satisfied nods and sometimes glanced up at Julia before immersing himself once more in the report.

  "Excellent," he said when he'd finished and closed the dossier. "You're a remarkable young woman."

  "It wasn't just me. As you know, a lot of people have worked on this ... Paco Montegrifo, Menchu Roch, Muñoz ..." She hesitated. "We also consulted art experts."

  "You mean the late Professor Ortega?"

  Julia looked at him, disconcerted.

  "I didn't know you knew about that."

  The old man gave a sly smile.

  "Well, as you see, I do. When his body was found, the police got in touch with my niece, her husband and me. An inspector came to see me; I don't remember his name ... He had a big moustache and he was fat."

  "His name is Feijoo, Inspector Feijoo." Julia looked away, embarrassed. Damn, she thought, useless bloody police. "But you didn't say anything about this last time I was here."

  "I was waiting for you to tell me. If you didn't, I assumed you must have your reasons."

  There was a note of reserve in his voice, and Julia understood that she was on the point of losing an ally.

  "I thought ... I mean, I'm sorry, really I am ... I was afraid I might upset you with such news. After all, you ..."

  "Do you mean because of my age and my state of health?" Belmonte clasped his bony freckled hands over his stomach. "Or were you concerned that it might influence the fate of the painting?"

  Julia shook her head, not knowing what to say. Then she smiled and shrugged, with an air of confused sincerity which, as she perfectly well knew, was the only response that would satisfy the old man.

  "What can I say?" she murmured, sure that she'd hit the target when Belmonte also smiled, accepting the climate of complicity she was offering him.

  "Don't worry. Life is difficult and human relationships even more so."

  "I can assure you that..."

  "You don't have to assure me about anything. We were talking about Professor Ortega. Was it an accident?"

  "I think so," Julia lied. "At least, so I understand."

  The old man looked at his hands. It was impossible to know whether he believed her or not.

  "It's still terrible ... don't you think?" He gave her a long, serious look in which vague disquiet was apparent. "That sort of thing, by which I mean death, always shocks me a little. And at my age it ought to be the other way round. It's odd how, against all logic, one clings to life in inverse proportion to the quantity of life one has left to look forward to."

  For a moment, Julia was on the point of entrusting him with the rest of the story: the existence of the invisible player, the threats, the dark feelings weighing her down, the curse of the Van Huys, whose mark, an empty rectangle beneath a nail, watched over them from the wall like an evil omen. But that would mean providing explanations she didn't feel strong enough to embark upon. She was also afraid of alarming the old man still further, and needlessly.

  "There's no need to worry," she lied again, with aplomb. "That's all under control. Like the painting."

  They smiled at each other, but it was forced this time. Julia didn't know whether Belmonte believed her or not. He'd leaned back in his wheelchair and was frowning.

  "There was something about the painting that I wanted to tell you." He stopped and thought a little before going on. "The other day, after you and your chess-playing friend visited me, I was thinking about the Van Huys. Do you remember our discussion about a system being necessary in order to understand another system and that both would need a superior system, and so on indefinitely? And the Borges poem about chess and which god beyond God moves the player who moves the chess pieces? Well, I think there is something of that in this painting. Something that both contains itself and repeats itself, taking you continually back to the starting point. In my opinion, the real key to interpreting The Game of Chess doesn't follow a straight line, a progression that sets out from one beginning. Instead, this painting seems to go back again and again, as if turned in upon itself. Do you understand what I mean?"

  Julia nodded, listening intently to his words. What she'd just heard was a confirmation of her own intuition, but expressed in logical terms and spoken out loud. She remembered the list she had made, amended by Muñoz to six levels containing each other, of the eternal return to the starting point, of the paintings within the painting.

  "I understand better than you might think," she said. "It's as if the painting were accusing itself."

  Belmonte was puzzled.

  "Accusing itself? That goes some way beyond my idea." With a slight lift of his eyebrows, he dismissed her apparently incomprehensible remark. "I was talking about something else." He pointed to the gramophone. "Listen to Bach."

  "We always do."

  Belmonte gave her a conspiratorial smile.

  "I hadn't planned to be accompanied by Johann Sebastian today, but I decided to evoke him in your honour. It's the French Suite No. 5, and you'll notice that this composition consists of two halves, each of which is repeated. The tonic note of the first half is G and it ends in the key of D. A
ll right? Now listen. Just when it seems that the piece has finished in that key, that trickster Bach suddenly makes us jump back to the beginning, with G as tonic again, and then slides back again to D. And, without our knowing quite how, that happens again and again. What do you think?"

  "I think it's fascinating." Julia was following the musical chords intently. "It's like a continuous loop. Like those paintings and drawings by Escher, in which a river flows along, then becomes a waterfall and inexplicably goes back to the beginning. Or the staircase that leads nowhere, only back to the start of the staircase itself."

  Belmonte nodded, satisfied.

  "Exactly. And it's possible to play it in many keys." He looked at the empty rectangle on the wall. "The difficulty, I suppose, is to know where to place oneself in those circles."

  "You're right. It would take a long time to explain, but there is something of that going on in the painting. Just when it seems the story has ended, it starts again, but goes off in another direction. Or apparently in another direction. Because perhaps we never actually move from the spot we're in."

  Belmonte shrugged.

  "That's a paradox to be resolved by you and your friend the chess player. I lack the necessary information. As you know, I'm only an amateur. I wasn't even capable of guessing that the game could be played backwards." He gave Julia a long look. "Unforgivable of me really, considering what I've just said about Bach."

  Julia pondered these new and unexpected interpretations. Threads from a ball of wool, she was thinking. Too many threads for one ball.

  "Apart from the police and me, have you had any other visits recently from anyone interested in the painting? Or in chess?"

  The old man took a while to reply, as if trying to ascertain what lay behind the question.

  "Neither the one nor the other. When my wife was alive, people often came to the house. She was more sociable than me. But since I was widowed I've kept in touch with only a few old friends. Esteban Cano, for example. You're too young to have known him when he was a successful violinist. But he died, two years ago now. The truth is that my small circle of friends has gradually been disappearing." He gave a resigned smile. "There's Pepe, a good friend. Pepín Pérez Giménez, retired like me, who still goes to the club and drops by from time to time to have a game of chess with me. But he's nearly seventy and gets terrible migraines if he plays for more than half an hour. He was a great chess player once. And there's my niece."