The Flanders Panel

She had an hour before meeting Cesar again, in a small cafe on the square, between a shop selling nautical instruments and a second-hand clothes shop that specialised in army surplus. Below the balustrade, sitting on the edge of a stone fountain full of fruit peel and empty beer cans, a young man with long blond hair and a poncho was playing Andean melodies on a rudimentary flute. She listened to the music as she let her gaze drift over the market. After a while she went back down the steps and stopped at the shop window full of dolls. Some were clothed, others were naked; some were dressed in picturesque peasant costumes or complicatedly romantic outfits complete with gloves, hats and parasols. Some represented girls and others grown women. The features of some were crude, others were childish, ingenuous, perverse. Their arms and hands were frozen in diverse positions, as if surprised by the cold wind of all the time that had passed since their owners abandoned or sold them, or died. Girls who became women, thought Julia – some beautiful, some plain, who had loved or perhaps been loved – had once caressed those bodies made of rags, cardboard and Porcelain. Those dolls had survived their owners. They were dumb, motionless witnesses whose imaginary retinas still retained images of scenes long since erased from the memories of the living: faded pictures sketched amongst mists of nostalgia, intimate moments of family life, children’s songs, loving embraces, as well as tears and disappointments dreams turned to ashes, decay and sadness, perhaps even to evil. There was something unbearably touching about that multitude of glass and porcelain eyes that stared at her unblinking, full of the Olympian know-ledge that only time possesses, lifeless eyes embedded in pale wax or papier-mache faces, above dresses so darkened by time that the lace edgings looked dull and grubby. And then there was the hair, some combed and neat, some dishevelled, real hair – the thought made her shiver – that had belonged to real women. By a melancholy association of ideas, a fragment of a poem surfaced in her mind, one that she’d heard Cesar recite long ago:

If they had kept all the hair of all the women who have died…

She found it hard to look away from the window, the glass of which reflected the heavy grey clouds darkening the city. And when she did turn round, ready to walk on, she saw Max, wearing a heavy navy blue jacket, his hair, as usual, tied back in a ponytail. He was looking down the steps as if fleeing from someone whose proximity troubled him.

“What a surprise!” he said, and gave her that handsome, wolfish smile that so enchanted Menchu. They exchanged a few trivial remarks about the unpleasant weather and the number of people at the market. He gave no explanation for his presence there, but Julia noticed that he seemed jumpy, slightly furtive. Perhaps he was expecting Menchu, since he mentioned that they’d arranged to meet near there, some complicated story about cheap frames which, once restored – Julia had often done it herself – could be used to set off canvases on display at the gallery.

Julia didn’t like Max, and she attributed to this the discomfort she always felt with him. Quite apart from the nature of his relationship with her friend, there was something that displeased her, something she’d sensed the first moment they met. Cesar, whose fine, feminine intuition was never wrong, used to say that, beautiful body aside, there was an indefinable, mean-spirited quality about Max that surfaced in his crooked smile and in the insolent way he looked at Julia. Max’s gaze could never be held for long, but whenever Julia forgot it and then looked back at him again, she would find his gaze stubbornly fixed on her, crafty and watchful, evasive yet insistent. It wasn’t one of those vague glances, like Paco Montegrifo’s, that wander about before calmly returning to rest once more on the object or person claiming his attention; it was the kind of glance that turns into a stare when the person thinks no one is looking and grows shifty the moment he feels he’s being observed. “It’s the look of someone intent, at the very least, on stealing your wallet,” Cesar had said once about Menchu’s lover. Julia had simply responded to Cesar’s spiteful remark with a disapproving frown, but she had to admit that he was absolutely right.