The Flanders Panel

“You disappoint me, Princess. I hoped that you at least would not resort to cliches.” He looked thoughtfully at his ivory cigarette holder. “I assure you I’m completely sane. How else could I have constructed with such meticulous detail this whole beautiful story?”

“Beautiful?” She looked at him in stupefaction. “We’re talking about Alvaro and about Menchu… Beautiful story?” She shuddered with horror and disgust. “For God’s sake! What the hell are you talking about?”

Cesar held her gaze, unmoved, and then turned to Munoz as if for support.

“There are… aesthetic aspects,” he said, “there are some extraordinarily original factors that can’t be dismissed in such a superficial way. The chessboard isn’t just black and white. There are higher planes, from which you can view events. Objective planes.” He gave them a look of sudden and apparently sincere pain. “I thought you’d both realised that.”

“I know what you mean,” remarked Munoz. He had not moved from his position, and his hands were still in the pockets of his crumpled raincoat. At one corner of his mouth, the vague smile had appeared again, indefinable and distant.

“You do, do you?” exclaimed Julia. “What do you know about it?”

She clenched her fists indignantly, holding in the breath that echoed in her ears like that of an animal at the end of a long run. But Munoz did not react, and Julia noticed that Cesar gave him a quiet look of gratitude.

“I was right to choose you,” he said. “And I’m glad I did.”

Munoz didn’t respond. He simply glanced around at the paintings, the furniture, the objects in the room and nodded slowly, as if he were drawing mysterious conclusions. After a few moments he indicated Julia with a lift of his chin.

“I think she deserves to know the whole story.”

“So do you, my dear,” added Cesar.

“Yes, I do. Although I’m here only in the role of witness.”

There was no note of censure or menace in his words. It was as if the chess player were maintaining some absurd neutrality. An impossible neutrality, thought Julia, because, sooner or later, there will come a point when words will run out and we’ll have to make a decision.

However, numbed by a sense of unreality she couldn’t shake off, she felt that that moment still seemed far off.

“Let’s begin, then,” she said, and when she heard herself speak, she found with unexpected relief that she was regaining her lost composure. She gave Cesar a hard look. “Tell us about Alvaro.”

Cesar nodded.

“Yes, Alvaro,” he repeated in a low voice. “But first I should mention the painting.” A look of sudden annoyance crossed his face, as if he’d neglected some point of elementary courtesy. “I haven’t asked if you’d like a drink or anything… Unforgivable of me. Would you like something?”

No one replied. Cesar went over to the old oak chest he used as a drinks cabinet.

“The first time I saw that painting was when I was in your apartment, Julia. Do you remember? They’d delivered it a few hours before, and you were like a child with a new toy. For almost an hour I watched while you studied it in minute detail, explaining to me the techniques you thought you’d use to make it, and I quote, the most beautiful piece of work you’d ever done.” As he spoke, Cesar selected a narrow tumbler of expensive cut glass and filled it with ice, gin and lemon juice. “I was surprised to see you so happy, and the truth is, Princess, I was happy too.” He turned round with the glass in his hand and, after a cautious taste, seemed satisfied with it. “But what I didn’t tell you then… Well, even now it’s hard to put into words. You were delighted with the beauty of the image, the balance of the composition, the colour and the light. I was too, but for different reasons. That chessboard, the players and the pieces, the lady reading by the window, aroused a dormant echo of my old passion. Believing it to be completely forgotten, I felt it return like a bolt from the blue. I was simultaneously feverish and terrified, as if I’d felt the breath of madness on my cheek.”

Cesar fell silent, and the half of his mouth lit by the lamp curved into a wickedly intimate smile, as if he now found special pleasure in savouring that memory.

“It wasn’t just a matter of chess,” he continued, “but a deep, personal sense of the game as a link between life and death, between reality and dream. And while you, Julia, were talking about pigments and varnishes, I was barely listening, surprised by the tremor of pleasure and exquisite anguish running through my body as I sat next to you on the sofa and looked not at what Pieter Van Huys had painted on that Flemish panel but at what that man, that genius, had in mind while he was painting.”

“And you decided that you had to have it.”

Cesar looked at Julia with an expression of ironic reproof.