The Flanders Panel

“Et tu, Bruta?” He turned to Sergio. “Do you understand the tragic nature of the matter, Patroclus?” After another long drink of gin-and-lemon, he looked dramatically about, as if searching for a friendly face. “I really don’t know what you’ve got against other people’s laurels, my dears. In truth,” he added after thinking about it, “no laurels can be said to belong to just one person. I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but pure creation simply doesn’t exist. We are not, or, rather, you are not, since I am not a creator… Nor are you, Menchu, my sweet. Perhaps you, Max… Now don’t look at me like that, my handsome condottiere feroce. Perhaps you are the only person here who truly does create something.” He sketched a weary, elegant gesture, expressive of profound tedium, brought on perhaps by his own line of argument, his hand coming to rest, apparently by chance, close to Sergio’s knee. “Picasso – and I regret having to mention that old fraud – is Monet, is Ingres, is Zurbaran, is Brueghel, is Pieter Van Huys… Even our friend Munoz, who doubtless at this very moment is bent over a chessboard somewhere, trying to exorcise his demons, at the same time freeing us from ours, is not himself, but Kasparov and Karpov. He’s Fischer and Capablanca and Paul Morphy and that medieval master, Ruy Lopez… Everything is merely a phase of the same history, or perhaps the same history constantly repeating itself; I’m not altogether sure about that. And you, my lovely Julia, have you ever stopped to think, when you’re standing before our famous painting, just exactly where you are, whether inside it or outside? I’m sure you have, because I know you, Princess. And I know too that you haven’t found an answer.” He gave a short, humourless laugh and looked at them one by one. “In fact, my children, parishioners all, we make up a motley crew. We have the cheek to pursue secrets that, deep down, are nothing but the enigmas of our own lives.” He raised his glass in a kind of toast addressed to no one in particular. “And that, when you think about it, is not without its risks. It’s like smashing the mirror to find out what lies behind the mercury. Doesn’t that, my friends, send a little shiver of fear down your spine?”

It was two in the morning by the time Julia got home. Cesar and Sergio had walked her to her street door. They wanted to accompany her up the three flights to her apartment but she wouldn’t let them and kissed each of them good-bye before going up the stairs. She walked up slowly, looking about anxiously. And when she took the keys from her pocket, her fingers brushed reassuringly against the cold metal of the gun.

As she turned the key in the lock, she thought with surprise that, despite everything, she was taking it calmly. She felt a pure, precise fear, which she could evaluate without recourse to any talent for abstraction, as Cesar would have said, parodying Munoz. But that fear did not provoke in her any humiliating feelings of torment or a desire to run away. On the contrary, it was percolated by an intense curiosity, in which there was a strong dash of personal pride and defiance. It was like a dangerous, exciting game, like killing pirates in Never-Never-Land.

Killing pirates. She’d grown familiar with death at an early age. Her first childhood memory was of her father lying utterly still, with his eyes closed, on the mattress in the bedroom, surrounded by dark, sad people talking in low voices, as if they were afraid to wake him. She was six at the time and that image, incomprehensible and solemn, remained forever linked with that of her mother, all in black and less approachable than, ever, whom, even then, she never saw shed a single tear; and with that of her mother’s dry, imperious hand on hers as she forced Julia to plant final kiss on the dead man’s forehead. It was Cesar, a Cesar whom she remembered as much younger, who had picked her up in his arms and taken her away from there. Sitting on his knee, Julia had stared at the door behind which the undertakers’ men were preparing the coffin.

“It doesn’t look like him, Cesar,” she’d said, trying not to cry. You must never ever cry, her mother used to say. It was the only lesson she could recall having learned from her. “Papa doesn’t look the same.”

“Well, no. It isn’t Papa any more,” came the answer. “He’s gone somewhere else.”

“Where?”

“That doesn’t matter now, Princess. But he won’t be coming back.”

“Never?”

“Never.”

Julia gave a childish frown and remained thoughtful.

“I don’t want to kiss him again. His skin is cold.”

Cesar had looked at her in silence for a while, then hugged her hard, Julia could remember the warmth of his embrace, the subtle smell of his skin and his clothes.

“Well, you can come and kiss me any time you like.”