The Flanders Panel

From the moment Julia had noticed something familiar about the face of the young man staring into the photographer’s camera with all the seriousness of his fifteen or sixteen years, she had guessed that the final act would be more or less like this and how it would end. She looked at her two favourite characters as she sat on Cesar’s comfortable sofa and let her thoughts drift lazily. She would never have got such a perfect seat in a theatre. Then a memory came back to her, a recent memory. She’d already had a glance at the script. It had been only a few hours before, in Room 12 of the Prado: the painting by Brueghel, beating drums providing a background to the annihilating breath of the inevitable, sweeping away as it passed the last blade of grass on earth, and everything subsumed into one last, gigantic pirouette, into the sound of a loud belly laugh from some drunken god recovering from an Olympian hangover somewhere behind the blackened hills, the smoking ruins and the glow of the fires. Pieter Van Huys, that other Fleming, the old master of the court of Ostenburg, had explained it all too, in his own way, perhaps with more delicacy and subtlety, more hermetic and sinuous than the brutal Brueghel, but with the same aim. In the end all paintings were paintings of the same painting, just as all mirrors gave the reflection of the same reflection, and all deaths were the death of the same Death:

“Tis all a Chequer-board of Nights and Days

Where Destiny with Men for Pieces plays…

She murmured these words to herself, looking at Cesar and at Munoz. Everything was ready. They could begin. The yellow light from the English lamp created a cone of brightness that wrapped itself about the two main characters. Cesar inclined his head a little and lit his cigarette. As if that were the signal for the dialogue to start, Munoz nodded slightly and spoke:

“I hope you have a chessboard to hand, Cesar.”

Not the most brilliant of openings, thought Julia, nor even the most appropriate. An imaginative scriptwriter would doubtless have come up with some better words to place in Munoz’s mouth. But, she thought disconsolately, the writer of the tragicomedy was, after all, as mediocre as the world he’d created.

“I don’t think a chessboard will be necessary,” replied Cesar, and with that the dialogue improved. Not because of the words, but because of the tone, which was perfect, particularly that hint of boredom Cesar gave to the phrase. It was a tone typical of him, one he might use were he observing a distant scene from a garden chair, a wrought-iron one painted white, with a very dry martini in one hand. Cesar had his decadent poses down to a fine art, as he did his homosexuality, his perversity, and Julia, who had loved him for that too, could appreciate the value of that rigorous, precise attitude, so perfect in every detail. And the most fascinating thing was that he had been deceiving her for twenty years. Although, to be fair, the person responsible for the deceit was not him, but her. Nothing had changed in Cesar. Now he was feeling no remorse or disquiet for what he’d done. She knew this with absolute certainty. He appeared to be as distinguished and correct as he had when Julia heard from his lips beautiful stories about lovers and warriors, about Long John Silver, Wendy, Lagardere, Sir Kenneth, the Knight of the Couchant Leopard. Yet he was the one who had dumped Alvaro under the shower, rammed a bottle of gin between Menchu’s legs. Julia savoured her own bitterness. If he is himself, she thought, and it’s clear that he is, then the one who has changed is me. That’s why I see him differently tonight, with altered eyes: I see a blackguard, a fraud and a murderer. And yet I’m still here, hanging on his every word, fascinated. In a few seconds, instead of telling me a tale of adventures in the Caribbean, he’s going to tell me that he did it all for me or some such thing. And I’ll listen to him, as I always have, because this is better than all Cesar’s other stories. It surpasses them all in imagination and horror.

She removed her arm from the back of the sofa and leaned forwards a little, not wanting to miss the slightest detail of the scene. That movement seemed the signal to resume the dialogue. Munoz, his hands in his pockets, his head on one side, looked at Cesar.

“Just clarify something for me,” he said. “After the black bishop takes the white pawn on a6, White decides to move his king from d4 to e5, discovering the check of the white queen on the black king. What should Black do next?”

Cesar’s eyes seemed to be smiling independently of his impassive features.

“I don’t know,” he replied after a moment. “You’re the master, my dear. You should know.”

Munoz made one of his vague gestures, as if brushing aside the title Cesar had bestowed on him.

“I insist,” he said slowly, dragging out the words, “on knowing the authorised version.”

Cesar’s lips became infected by the smile that until then had been restricted to his eyes.