The Flanders Panel (11 page)

“We need your help,” Julia said in a low voice. “It really is important, I can assure you, important to me and to my work.”

Munoz put his head on one side and looked at her, or, rather, at her chin, as if he feared that looking directly into her eyes would establish between them a commitment he was not prepared to make.

“I really don’t think it would interest me,” he said at last.

Julia leaned over the table.

“Think of it as a game that would be different from any game you’ve played before. A game which, this time, would be worth winning.”

Cesar was growing impatient.

“I must admit, my friend,” he said, his irritation evident in the way he kept twisting the topaz ring on his right hand, “that I find your peculiar apathy incomprehensible. Why do you bother to play chess?”

Munoz thought for a while. Then he looked straight into Cesar’s eyes.

“Perhaps,” he said calmly, “for the same reason that you are homosexual.”

It was as if an icy blast had blown over them. Julia hurriedly lit a cigarette, terrified by the tactless remark, which Munoz had uttered unemphatically and without a hint of aggression. On the contrary, he was looking at Cesar with a kind of polite attention, as if, in the course of a perfectly normal dialogue, he was awaiting the response of a worthy conversational partner. There was a complete lack of malice in that look, Julia thought, even a certain innocence, like that of a tourist who, with the ineptness of the foreigner, unwittingly offends against local custom.

Cesar merely leaned a little towards Munoz, with an interested look on his face and an amused smile on his pale, thin lips.

“My dear friend,” he said gently, “from your tone of voice and the expression on your face, I deduce that you have nothing against what your humble servant here might or might not represent. Just as, I imagine, you had nothing against the white king or against the man you were playing a short while ago at the club. Isn’t that right?”

“More or less.”

Cesar turned to Julia.

“You see, Princess? Everything’s fine; no need to be alarmed. This charming man merely wished to explain that the reason he plays chess is because the game is part of his very nature.” Cesar’s smile grew brighter, kinder. “Something deeply bound up with problems, combinations, illusions. What’s a prosaic checkmate beside all that?” He sat back in his chair and looked at Munoz, who was still observing him impassively. “I’ll tell you: Nothing.” He held out his hands palms uppermost, as if inviting Julia and Munoz to verify the truth of his words. “Isn’t that so, my friend? Just a desolate full stop, an enforced return to reality.” He wrinkled his nose. “To real life, to the routine of the commonplace and the everyday.”

Munoz remained silent for a while.

“It’s funny,” he said at last, screwing up his eyes in a suggestion of a smile that never quite reached his lips, “but I suppose that’s exactly what it is. It’s just that I’ve never heard anyone put it into words before.”

“Well, I’m delighted to be the one to initiate you into the matter,” replied Cesar, not without a certain malice, and with a little laugh that earned him a reproving look from Julia.

Munoz seemed somewhat disconcerted.

“Do you play chess too?”

Cesar gave a short laugh. He was being unbearably theatrical today, thought Julia, as he always was when he had the right audience.

“Like everyone else, I know how to move the pieces. But as a game I can take it or leave it.” He gave Munoz a look of sudden seriousness. “What I play at, my esteemed friend, and it is no small thing, is getting out of the everyday checkmates of life.” He gestured towards both of them with one delicate hand. “And like you, like everyone, I have my own little ways of getting by.”

Still confused, Munoz glanced at the door. The lighting in the bar made him look weary and accentuated the shadows under his eyes, making them appear even more deeply sunk. With his large ears, sticking out above the collar of his raincoat, his big nose and his gaunt face, he looked like a thin, ungainly dog.

“All right,” he said. “Let’s go and see this painting.”

And there they were, awaiting Munoz’s verdict. His initial discomfort at finding himself in a strange place in the presence of a pretty young woman, an antiquarian of uncertain proclivities and a painting of equivocal appearance seemed to disappear as the game of chess in the painting took hold of his attention. For the first few minutes he had studied it without saying a word, standing quite still, his hands behind his back, in exactly the same posture, thought Julia, as that adopted by the spectators at the Capablanca Club as they watched other people’s games unfold. And, of course, that was exactly what he was doing. After some time, during which no one said a word, he asked for paper and pencil, and after a further brief period of reflection, he leaned on the table in order to make a sketch of the game, looking up every now and then to check the position of the pieces.

“What century was it painted in?” he asked. He’d drawn a square on which he’d traced a grid of vertical and horizontal lines that divided it into sixty-four smaller squares.

“Late fifteenth,” said Julia.

Munoz frowned.

“Knowing the date is important. By then, the rules of chess were almost the same as they are now. But up to that point, the way some of the pieces could be moved was different. The queen, for example, used to be able to move only diagonally into a neighbouring square, and then, later on, to jump three squares. And castling was unknown until the Middle Ages.” He left his drawing for a moment to take a closer look at the painting. “If the person who worked out the game did so using modern rules, we might be able to resolve it. If not, it will be difficult.”

“It was painted in what is now Belgium,” Cesar said, “around 1470.”

“I don’t think there’ll be any problem then. Nothing insoluble at any rate.”

Julia got up from the table and went over to the painting to look at the position of the painted chess pieces.

“How do you know that Black has just moved?”

“It’s obvious. You just have to look at the position of the pieces. Or at the players.” Munoz pointed to Ferdinand of Ostenburg. “The one on the left, the one playing Black and looking towards the painter, or towards us, is more relaxed, even distracted, as if his attention were directed at the spectators rather than at the board.” He pointed to Roger de Arras. “The other man, however, is studying a move his opponent has just made. Can’t you see the concentration on his face?” He returned to his sketch. “There’s another way of checking it; in fact, it’s the method to use. It’s called retrograde analysis.”

“
What
kind of analysis?”

“Retrograde. It involves taking a certain position on the board as your starting point and then reconstructing the game backwards in order to work out how it got to that position. A sort of chess in reverse, if you like. It’s all done by induction. You begin with the end result and work backwards to the causes.”

“Like Sherlock Holmes,” remarked Cesar, visibly interested.

“Something like that.”

Julia had turned towards Munoz, impressed. Until now, chess had been only a game for her, a game with rules marginally more complex than those for Parcheesi or dominoes and requiring greater concentration and intelligence. But from Munoz’s reaction to the Van Huys it was evident that the planes represented in the painting: mirror, room, window - the backdrop to the moment recorded there by Pieter Van Huys, a space in which she herself had experienced the dizzying effects of the optical illusion created by the artist’s skill - presented no difficulties at all for Munoz, who knew almost nothing about the picture and hardly anything about its disquieting connotations. For him, it was a familiar space beyond time and personalities. It was a space in which he appeared to move easily, as if, by making everything else an abstraction, he was able at once to take in the position of the pieces and integrate himself into the game. The more he concentrated on
The Game of Chess,
the more he shed the perplexity, reticence and awkwardness he’d shown in the bar, and revealed himself as the confident, impassive player she had thought him to be when she saw him at the Capablanca Club. It was as if this shy, grey, hesitant man needed only the presence of a chessboard to recover his confidence and self-assurance.

“You mean it’s possible to play the game of chess in the painting backwards, right back to the beginning?”

Munoz made one of his noncommittal gestures.

“I don’t know about going right back to the beginning… but I imagine we could reconstruct a fair number of moves.” He looked at the painting again as if he’d just seen it in a new light and, addressing Cesar, he said: “I suppose that was exactly what the painter intended.”

“That’s what you have to find out,” replied Cesar. “The tricky question is: Who took the knight?”

“You mean the white knight,” said Munoz. “There’s only one left on the board.”

“Elementary,” said Cesar, adding with a smile, “my dear Watson.”

Munoz ignored this; humour was evidently not one of his strong points. Julia went over to the sofa and sat down next to Cesar, as enthralled as a little girl watching some thrilling performance. Munoz had finished his sketch now and he showed it to them.

“This,” he explained, “is the position of the pieces as they are in the painting.”

“As you see, I’ve given each square a coordinate, to make locating the pieces easier for you. So, seen from the perspective of the player on the right…”

“Roger de Arras,” said Julia.

“Yes, Roger de Arras. Looking at the board from that position, we number the squares on the vertical from one to eight and assign a letter, from a to h, to each of the squares on the horizontal,” he said, pointing to them with his pencil. “There are other more technical classifications, but that might just confuse you.”

“And each symbol corresponds to a chess piece?”

“That’s right. They’re conventional symbols, some black, some white. I’ve made a note, below, of what each one means.”

“That way, even if you know very little about chess, it’s easy to see that the black king, for example, is on square a4, and that on fl, for example, there’s a white bishop. Do you understand?”

“Perfectly.”

Munoz went on to show them some further symbols he’d drawn.

“Now, we’ve looked at the pieces actually on the board, but in order to analyse the game, it’s essential to know which ones are off the board too, the pieces that have already been taken.” He looked at the picture. “What’s the player on the left called?”

“Ferdinand of Ostenburg.”

“Well, Ferdinand of Ostenburg, who’s playing Black, has taken the following white pieces.”

“That is: a bishop, a knight and two pawns. For his part, Roger de Arras has taken the following pieces from his rival.”