The Flanders Panel (9 page)

“It could be him,” said Menchu, comparing the features of the knight in the book with those of the chess player in the painting.

“And it could just as easily not be,” said Cesar. “Although, of course, there is a certain resemblance.” He turned to Julia. “What’s the date of this painting?”

“1462.”

“That’s nine years before
The Game of Chess
was painted. That could explain it. The horseman accompanied by the Devil is much younger.”

Julia said nothing. She was studying the reproduction.

“What’s wrong?” Cesar asked.

Julia shook her head slowly, as if afraid that any sudden move would frighten away elusive spirits that might prove difficult to summon up again.

“Yes,” she said, in the tone of one who has no alternative but to acknowledge the obvious. “It’s too much of a coincidence.” And she pointed at the page.

“I can’t see anything unusual,” said Menchu.

“No?” Julia was smiling. “Look at the knight’s shield. In the Middle Ages, every nobleman decorated his shield with his particular emblem. Tell me what you think, Cesar. What’s painted on that shield?”

Cesar sighed as he drew a hand across his forehead. He was as amazed as Julia.

“Squares,” he said unhesitatingly. “Black and white squares.” He looked up at the Flemish painting, and his voice seemed to tremble. “Like those on a chessboard.”

Leaving the book open on the sofa, Julia stood up.

“It’s no coincidence,” she said, picking up a powerful magnifying glass before going over to the painting. “If the knight Van Huys painted in 1462 accompanied by the Devil is Roger de Arras, that means that, nine years later, the artist chose the theme of his coat of arms as the main clue in a painting in which, supposedly, he represented his death, given the floor of the room in which he placed his subjects is chequered in black and white. That, as well as the symbolic nature of the painting, confirms that the chess player in the centre is Roger de Arras. And the whole plot does, indeed, revolve around chess.”

She knelt down in front of the painting and peered through the magnifying glass at the chess pieces on the board and on the table. She also looked carefully at the round convex mirror on the wall in the upper left-hand corner of the painting, which reflected the board and the foreshortened figures of both players, distorted by perspective.

“Cesar.”

“Yes, love.”

“How many pieces are there in a game of chess?”

“Urn… two times eight, so that’s sixteen of each colour, which, if I’m not mistaken, makes thirty-two.”

Julia counted with one finger.

“The thirty-two pieces are all there. You can see them really clearly: pawns, kings, queens and knights… Some on the board, others on the table.”

“Those will be the pieces that have already been taken.” Cesar had knelt down by her and was pointing to one of the pieces not on the board, the one Ferdinand of Ostenburg was holding between his fingers. “One knight’s been taken; only one. A white knight. The other three, one white and two black, are still in the game. So the
Quis necavit equitem
must refer to that one.”

“But who took it?”

Cesar frowned.

“That, my dear, is the crux of the matter,” he said, smiling exactly as he used to when she was a little girl sitting on his knee. “We’ve already found out a lot of things: who plucked the chicken and who cooked it. But we still don’t know who the villain was who ate it.”

“You haven’t answered my question.”

“I don’t always have brilliant answers to hand.”

“You used to.”

“Ah, but then I could lie.” He looked at her tenderly. “You’ve grown up now and are not so easily deceived.”

Julia put a hand on his shoulder, as she used to when, fifteen years before, she’d ask him to invent for her the story of a painting or a piece of porcelain. There was an echo of childish supplication in her voice.

“But I need to know, Cesar.”

“The auction’s in less than two months,” said Menchu. “There’s not much time.”

“To hell with the auction,” said Julia. She was looking at Cesar as if he held the solution in his hands. Cesar gave another slow sigh and brushed lightly at the carpet before sitting down on it, folding his hands on his knees. His brow was furrowed and he was biting the tip of his tongue, as he always did when he was thinking hard.

“We have some clues to begin with,” he said after a while. “But having the clues isn’t enough; what’s important is how we use them.” He looked at the convex mirror in the painting, in which both the players and the board were reflected. “We’re used to believing that any object and its mirror image contain the same reality, but it’s not true.” He pointed at the painted mirror. “See? We can tell at a glance that the image has been reversed. The meaning of the game on the chessboard is also reversed, and that’s how it appears in the mirror as well.”

“You’re giving me a terrible headache,” moaned Menchu. “This is all too complex for my feeble encephalogram. I’m going to get myself a drink.” She poured herself a generous measure of Julia’s vodka, but before picking up the glass, she took out of her pocket a smooth polished piece of onyx, a silver tube and a small box, and set about preparing a thin line of cocaine. “The pharmacy’s open. Anyone interested?”

No one answered. Cesar seemed absorbed in the painting, indifferent to everything else, and Julia merely gave a disapproving frown. With a shrug, Menchu bent over and took two short, sharp sniffs. She was smiling when she stood up, and the blue of her eyes seemed more luminous and absent.

Cesar moved closer to the Van Huys, taking Julia by the arm, as if advising her to ignore Menchu.

“We’ve already fallen into the trap,” he said, as if only he and Julia were in the room, “of thinking that one thing in the picture could be real, whereas another might not be. The people and the board appear in the picture twice, once in a way that is somehow
less real
than the other. Do you understand? Accepting that fact forces us to place ourselves inside the room, to blur the boundaries between what is real and what is painted. The only way of avoiding that would be to distance ourselves enough to see only areas of colour and chessmen. But there are too many inversions in between.”

Julia looked at the painting and then, turning round, pointed to the Venetian mirror hanging on the wall on the other side of the studio.

“Not necessarily,” she replied. “If we use another mirror to look at the painting, perhaps we can reconstruct the original image.”

Cesar gave her a long look, silently considering her suggestion.

“That’s very true,” he said at last, and his approval was translated into a smile of relief. “But I fear, Princess, that both paintings and mirrors create worlds that contain too many inconsistencies. They’re amusing perhaps to look at from the outside, but not at all comfortable to inhabit. For that we need a specialist; someone capable of seeing the picture differently from us. And I think I know where to find him.”

The following morning, Julia telephoned Alvaro, but there was no answer. She had no luck when she tried to phone him at home either, so she put on a Lester Bowie record, started the coffee, stood under the shower for a long time and then smoked a couple of cigarettes. With her hair still wet and wearing only an old sweater, she drank the coffee and set to work on the painting.

The first phase of restoration involved removing the original layer of varnish. The painter, no doubt anxious to protect his work from the damp of cold northern winters, had used a greasy varnish, dissolved in linseed oil. It was the correct solution, but over a period of five hundred years no one, not even a master like Pieter Van Huys, could have prevented it from yellowing and thereby dimming the brilliance of the original colours.

Julia, who had tested several solvents in one corner of the painting, prepared a mixture and concentrated on the task of softening the varnish by using saturated plugs of cotton wool held between tweezers. With great care, she began working where the paint was thickest, leaving until last the lighter and more delicate areas. She paused frequently to check for traces of colour on the cotton wool, to make sure that she wasn’t removing any of the painted surface beneath the varnish. She worked all morning without a break, stopping for a few moments every now and then to look at the painting through half-closed eyes to judge how things were progressing. Gradually, as the old varnish disappeared, the painting began to recover the magic of its original pigments, most of which were almost exactly like those the old Flemish master had mixed on his palette: sienna, copper green, white lead, ultramarine… With reverential respect, as if the most intimate mystery of art and life were being revealed to her, Julia watched as the marvellous work came to life again beneath her fingers.

At midday, she phoned Cesar, and they arranged to meet that evening. Julia took advantage of the interruption to heat a pizza. She made more coffee and ate sitting on the sofa, looking closely at the craqueiure that the ageing process, exposure to light and movement of the wooden support had inevitably inflicted on the painted surface. It was particularly noticeable in the flesh tints and in the white-lead colours, less obvious in the darker tones and the blacks. That was especially true of Beatrice of Burgundy’s dress, which seemed so real Julia felt that, if she ran her finger over it, it would have the softness of velvet.

It was odd, she thought, how quickly modern paintings became crisscrossed with cracks, often soon after they were finished, the craqueiure and blistering being caused by the use of modern materials or artificial drying methods, whereas the work of the old masters, who took almost obsessive care, using skilled techniques of preservation, resisted the passage of the centuries with far greater dignity and beauty. At that moment, Julia felt intense sympathy for old, conscientious Pieter Van Huys, whom she imagined in his medieval studio, mixing clays and experimenting with oils, in search of the exact shade he needed for a glaze, driven by the desire to set the seal of eternity on his work, beyond his own death and the death of those he depicted on that modest oak panel.

After lunch, she continued removing the varnish from the lower portion of the painting, the part concealing the inscription. She worked with enormous care, trying not to damage the copper green, which was mixed with resin to prevent darkening with age. Van Huys had used it to paint the cloth covering the table, the cloth whose folds he’d later extended, using the same colour, to hide the Latin inscription. As Julia well knew, quite apart from any normal technical difficulties, this posed an ethical problem too. If one wanted to respect the spirit of the painting, was it legitimate to uncover an inscription that the painter himself had decided to cover up? To what extent should a restorer be allowed to betray the desires of an artist, desires made evident in his work with the formality of a last will and testament? And then there was the value of the painting; once the existence of the inscription had been established by X-ray and the fact made public, would the price be higher with the words covered or uncovered?

Fortunately, she concluded, she was only a hireling. The decision lay with the owner, with Menchu and the man from Claymore’s, Paco Montegrifo. She would do whatever they decided. Although, when she thought about it, given the choice, she would prefer to leave things as they were. The inscription existed, they knew what it said, and it was therefore unnecessary to reveal it. After all, the layer of paint that had covered it for five centuries was part of the painting’s history too.

The notes from Lester Bowie’s saxophone filled the studio, cutting her off from everything else. Gently she ran the solvent-soaked cotton wool along Roger de Arras’s profile, near his nose and mouth, and once more she immersed herself in her scrutiny of those lowered eyelids, the fine lines betraying slight wrinkles near his eyes, their gaze intent on the game. She gave her imagination free rein to pursue the echo of the ill-fated knight’s thoughts. The scent of love and death hung over them, the way the steps of Fate hovered over the mysterious ballet performed by the black and white pieces on the squares of the chessboard, on his own coat of arms, pierced by an arrow from a crossbow. And in the half-light a tear glinted, a tear shed by a woman apparently absorbed in reading a book of hours (or was it the
Poem of the Rose and the Knight
?)
,
a tear shed by a silent shadow next to the window, recollecting days of sunlight and youth, of burnished metal and tapestries, recalling the firm footsteps on the flagstones of the Burgundy court of the noble-browed warrior, with his helmet under his arm, at the height of his strength and fame, the haughty ambassador from that other man, whom she was advised, for reasons of state, to marry. And the murmur of court ladies and the grave faces of courtiers, her own face blushing when his calm eyes met hers and when she heard his voice, tempered in many battles, full of that singular assurance found only in those who know what it is to cry out the name of God, their king or their lady as they ride into battle against an enemy. And the secret that lay in her heart in the years that followed. And the Silent Friend, her Final Companion, patiently sharpening his scythe, standing near the moat by the East Gate preparing to fire his crossbow.

The colours, the painting, the studio, the sombre music of the saxophone filling the room seemed to circle her. She stopped working and sat with her eyes closed, feeling dizzy, trying to breathe deeply, steadily, to shake off the momentary panic that had run through her when, confused by the perspective in the picture, she began to feel that she was actually inside the painting. It was as if the table and the players had suddenly shifted to her left and she had been thrust forward across the room reproduced in the painting, towards the window next to which Beatrice of Burgundy sat reading; as if she had only to lean out a little over the window ledge to see what lay below, at the bottom of the wall: the moat at the East Gate, where Roger de Arras had been shot in the back by an arrow.

It took her a while to regain her composure, and she only really did so when she lit a match and held it to the cigarette she had in her mouth. She found it hard to hold the match steady, for her hand was trembling as if she’d just touched the face of Death.