The Flanders Panel

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.”