The Flanders Panel

“Yes. With the difference that music doesn’t consist of images, the positioning of chess pieces or, in this case, of vibrations in the air, but of the emotions that those vibrations produce in the brain of each individual. You’d run into serious problems if you tried to apply to music the investigatory methods you used to solve the game in the painting. You’d have to find out which particular note provoked which emotional effect. Or which combinations of notes. Doesn’t that strike you as much more difficult than playing chess?”

Munoz thought about it carefully.

“I don’t think so,” he said at last. “Because the general laws of logic are the same for everything. Music, like chess, follows rules. It’s all a question of working away at it until you isolate a symbol, a key.” One half of his mouth seemed to twist into a smile. “Like the Egyptologists’ Rosetta Stone. Once you have that, it’s just a question of hard work and method. And time.”

Belmonte blinked mockingly.

“Do you think so? Do you really think that all hidden messages can be deciphered? That it’s always possible to reach an exact solution just by the application of method?”

“I’m sure of it. Because there’s a universal system, general laws that allow one to demonstrate what is demonstrable and to discard whatever is not.”

The old man made a sceptical gesture.

“Forgive me, but I really can’t agree with you there. I think that all the divisions, classifications, categorisations and systems that we attribute to the universe are fictitious, arbitrary. There isn’t one that doesn’t contain within it its own contradiction. That’s the opinion of an old man with some experience of these things.”

Munoz shifted a bit in his seat and looked round the room. He didn’t seem very happy with the turn the conversation had taken, but Julia had the impression that he didn’t want to change the subject either. She knew he was not a man to waste words and concluded that he must be after something. Perhaps Belmonte was one of the chess pieces Munoz was studying in order to solve the mystery.

“That’s arguable,” Munoz said at last. “For example, the Universe is full of demonstrable infinites: prime numbers, the combinations in chess.”

“Do you really think so? That everything is demonstrable, I mean? Allow me to say, as the musician I once was, or, rather, despite all this,” he indicated his useless legs with a kind of calm disdain, “as the musician I still am, that every system is incomplete. That demonstrability is a much weaker concept than truth.”

“The truth is like the perfect move in chess: it exists, but you have to look for it. Given enough time, it’s always demonstrable.”

Hearing that, Belmonte smiled mischievously.

“I would say, rather, that the perfect move you talk about, whether you call it that or whether you call it the truth, may exist. But it can’t always be demonstrated. And that any system that tries to do so is limited and relative. Try sending my Van Huys to Mars or to Planet X, and see if anyone there can solve your problem. I’d go further: send them the record you’re listening to now or, to make it still harder, break the record and send them the pieces. What meaning will it contain then? And since you seem so keen on exact laws, I’d remind you that the angles of a triangle add up to one hundred and eighty degrees in Euclidian geometry, but to more in elliptic geometry and to less in hyperbolic. And that’s because there is no one system, there are no universal axioms. Systems are disparate even within themselves. Do you enjoy resolving paradoxes? It isn’t only music, painting or, I imagine, chess that are full of them.” He picked up pencil and paper from the table, wrote a few lines and showed them to Munoz. “Have a look at that, will you?”

The chess player read it out loud:

“The sentence I am now writing is the one that you are now reading.” He looked at Belmonte in surprise. “So?”

“That’s all there is. That sentence was written by me a minute and a half ago and you read it only forty seconds ago. That’s to say, my writing and your reading correspond to different moments in time, but on that piece of paper ‘now’ and ‘now’ are undoubtedly the same ‘now’. Therefore, on the one hand the sentence is true, but on the other hand it lacks all validity. Or is it the concept of time that we’re failing to take into account? Don’t you think that’s a good example of a paradox? I can see you have no answer to it. Well, you’ll find the same problem with the enigmas posed by my Van Huys or by anything else. Who’s to say that your solution to the problem is the correct one? Your intuition and your system? Fine, but what superior system can you count on to demonstrate that your intuition and your system are valid? And what other system can you call on to corroborate those two systems? As a chess player, I imagine you’ll find these lines interesting.”

Pausing between each line, Belmonte recited:

The player too is captive of caprice

(The words are Omar’s) on another ground