The Flanders Panel (18 page)

“Look who’s talking.” Menchu grimaced. “If it isn’t our own private Sophocles. Or do I mean Seneca? I mean the one who used to touch up young men as he sipped his hemlock.”

Cesar leaned his head back and closed his eyes melodramatically.

“The path the artist must follow, and I’m talking to you, my young Alcibiades, or Patroclus, or perhaps even Sergio… the path involves dodging obstacle after obstacle until finally you’re able to peer deep inside yourself. A difficult task if you have no Virgil by your side to guide you. Do you understand the subtle point I’m making, young man? Thus the artist at last comes to drink deep of the sweetest of pleasures. His life becomes one of pure creation and he no longer needs miserable external things. He is far, far above the rest of his despicable fellow men. And growth and maturity build their nests in him.”

This was greeted by a certain amount of mocking applause. Sergi0 looked at them, smiling but disconcerted. Julia burst out laughing.

“Take no notice of him. I bet he stole that from someone else. He always was a crook.”

Cesar opened one eye.

“I’m a bored Socrates. And I indignantly deny your accusation that I steal other people’s words.”

“He’s really quite witty, isn’t he?” Menchu was talking to Max, who had been listening with furrowed brow, while she helped herself to one of his cigarettes. “Give me a light,
condottiere mio.”

The epithet caught Cesar’s malicious ear.

“Cave canem,
sturdy youth,” he said to Max, and Julia was possibly the only other person present who knew that in Latin
canem
can be both masculine and feminine. “According to the history books, the people the
condottieri
really had to watch were those they served.” He looked at Julia and made an ironic bow; drink was beginning to have its effect on him too. “Burckhardt,” he explained.

“Don’t worry, Max,” said Menchu, although Max did not seem in the least upset. “See? It wasn’t even his idea. He crowns himself with other people’s bay leaves… or is it laurels?”

“You mean acanthus,” said Julia, laughing.

Cesar gave her a hurt look.

“
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.”

Julia could never remember the exact moment when she’d discovered that Cesar was homosexual. Perhaps she came to the realisation little by little, from minor details, intuition. But one day, when she’d just turned twelve, she went into his shop after school and found Cesar touching a young man’s cheek. That was all; he just brushed the youth’s cheek with his fingertips. The young man walked past Julia, smiled at her and left. Cesar, who was lighting a cigarette, gave her a long look, then set to work winding the clocks.

Some days later, while she was playing with the Bustelli figurines, Julia formulated the question:

“Cesar, do you like girls?”

He was sitting at his desk, going over his accounts. At first he seemed not to have heard. Only after some moments did he raise his head and let his blue eyes rest calmly on Julia’s.

“The only girl I like is you, Princess.”

“What about the others?”

“What others?”

That was the last either of them said about it. But that night, as she went to sleep, Julia had thought about Cesar’s words and felt happy, No one was going to take him away from her; there was no danger. He would never go far away from her, as her father had, to that place from which there is no return.

Then came the times of long tales told in the golden light of the antiques shop; Cesar’s youth, Paris and Rome all mixed up with history, art, books and adventures. And there were the shared myths and
Treasure Island
read chapter by chapter amongst the old chests and rusty weapons. The poor sentimental pirates who, on moonlit Caribbean nights, felt their stony hearts melt when they thought of their old mothers. Because pirates had mothers too, even such refined riffraff as Captain Hook, who revealed his true self in his vile behaviour, but who at the end of every month despatched a few doubloons of Spanish gold to ease the old age of the woman who gave him life. And between stories Cesar would take a pair of old sabres from a trunk and show her how the filibusters used to fight - on guard and retreat, the aim is to scar, not to slit your opponent’s throat — and the best way to throw a grappling iron. He’d get out the sextant and teach her how to navigate by the stars. There was the stiletto with the silver handle, made by Benvenuto Cellini, who, in addition to being a goldsmith, had killed the Constable of Bourbon with a shot from his harquebus at the time of the sack of Rome; and the terrible dagger of mercy, long and sinister, that the Black Prince’s page used to pierce the helmets of the French knights fallen at Crecy…

The years passed, and Julia’s character began to come to life. Now it was Cesar’s turn to be silent, while he listened to her confidences. First love at fourteen. First lover at seventeen. He listened without passing judgment. He would simply smile, just once, when she finished speaking.

Tonight Julia would have given anything to see that smile, a smile that instilled courage in her and at the same time made things seem less important, cutting them down to their real size in the great scheme of things and in the inevitable course of one’s life. But Cesar wasn’t there, and she had to fend for herself. As he would have said, we can’t always choose our companions or our fate.

She busied herself preparing a vodka-on-the-rocks and suddenly smiled in the dark as she stood in front of the Van Huys. She had the odd feeling that if anything bad was going to happen, it would happen to someone else. Nothing bad ever happened to the hero, she remembered as she drank her vodka and felt the ice clink against her teeth. Only other people died, secondary characters, like Alvaro. Still vivid in her memory were the hundreds of such adventures she had experienced and from which she had always emerged unscathed, praise God. How did that other expression go? God’s teeth!

She looked at herself in the Venetian mirror, just a shadow amongst other shadows, the slightly paler smudge of her face, the vague profile, two large, dark eyes, Alice through the looking glass. She looked at herself in the Van Huys too, in the painted mirror reflecting another mirror, the Venetian one, reflection on reflection on reflection. And she felt the same dizziness she’d felt before. The thought occurred to her that at that time of night, mirrors and paintings and chessboards can play strange tricks on the imagination. Or perhaps it was just that concepts like time and space were, after all, becoming so relative as to be barely worth worrying about. She took another sip of her drink and again felt the ice clink against her teeth. She thought that if she stretched out her hand, she would be able to set the glass down on the table covered by green cloth, on the very spot where the hidden inscription lay, between Roger de Arras’s unmoving hand and the chessboard.

She moved closer to the painting. Beatrice of Ostenburg was seated near the lancet window, her eyes lowered, absorbed in the book that lay in her lap. She reminded Julia of the virgins painted by the early Flemish masters: fair hair sleeked back, caught up beneath the almost transparent toque. White skin. Solemn and distant in that black dress, so different from the usual cloaks of crimson wool, the cloth of Flanders, more precious than silk or brocade. Black, Julia realised with sudden clarity, was the symbol of mourning, and the black widow’s weeds in which the Duchess had been dressed by Pieter Van Huys, the genius who so loved symbols and paradoxes, were not for her husband, but for her murdered lover.

The oval of her face was delicate, perfect, and every nuance, every detail, reinforced the resemblance to Renaissance virgins. Not a virgin like the Italian women honoured by Giotto, who were maids and nursemaids, even mistresses, nor like the Frenchwomen who posed as virgins but were often mothers or queens, but a bourgeois virgin, the wife of a municipal representative or of a noble landowner ruling over undulating plains scattered with castles, mansions, streams and belfries like the one painted there in the landscape outside the window. This one looked rather haughty and impassive, serene and cold, the embodiment of that northern beauty
a la maniera ponentina
that enjoyed such success in the countries of the south, in Spain and Italy. And the blue eyes - at least it could be assumed they were blue — their gaze turned away from the onlooker, apparently intent on her book, were nonetheless alert and penetrating, like the eyes of all the Flemish women depicted by Van Huys, Van der Weyden and Van Eyck. Enigmatic eyes that never revealed what they were looking at or wanted to look at, what they were thinking or feeling.

Julia pushed back her hair and touched the surface of the painting with her fingers, tracing the outline of Roger de Arras’ lips. In the golden light that surrounded the knight like an aura, the steel gorget almost had the gleam of highly polished metal. He was resting his chin on the thumb of his right hand, which was slightly tinged by the surrounding glow, and his gaze was fixed on the chessboard that symbolised both his life and his death. Judging by his profile, like a profile stamped on an ancient medal, Roger de Arras appeared unaware of the presence of the woman sitting reading behind him. But perhaps his thoughts were not of chess at all; perhaps they flew to that Beatrice of Burgundy at whom he did not look, out of pride, prudence or possibly merely out of respect for his master. In that case, only his thoughts were free to devote themselves to her. At that same moment, perhaps the lady’s thoughts were unaware of the pages of the book she held in her hands and her eyes were contemplating, with no need actually to look in their direction, the knight’s broad back, his calm, elegant features, the memory of his hands and his skin, or merely the echo of contained silence, the melancholy, impotent gaze she once aroused in his loving eyes.