The Flanders Panel

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 Munoz 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. All 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.