"A frivolous supposition on your part, my dear. Have you ever actually seen me play?"
"Never. But everyone has a vague idea how to play."
"In this case, you need something more than a vague idea about how to move the pieces. Have you had a good look at the board? The positions are very complicated." He sat back melodramatically, as if exhausted. "Even I have certain rather irritating limitations, love. No one's perfect."
At that moment someone rang her bell.
"It must be Álvaro," said Julia, and ran to the door.
It wasn't Álvaro. She came back with an envelope delivered by a messenger. It contained several photocopies and a typed chronology.
"Look. It seems he's decided not to come, but he's sent us this."
"As rude as ever," mumbled César, scornfully. "He could have phoned to make his excuses, the rat." He shrugged. "Mind you, deep down, I'm glad. What's the rotter sent us?"
"Don't be nasty about him," Julia said. "It took a lot of work to put this information together."
And she started reading out loud.
Pieter Van Huys and the Characters Portrayed in "The Game of Chess":
A BIOGRAPHICAL CHRONOLOGY
1415: Pieter Van Huys born in Bruges, Flanders, present-day Belgium.
1431: Roger de Arras born in the castle of Bellesang, in Ostenburg. His father, Fulk de Arras, is a vassal of the King of France and is related to the reigning dynasty of the Valois. His mother, whose name is not known, belonged to the ducal family of Ostenburg, the Altenhoffens.
1435: Burgundy and Ostenburg break their vassalage to France. Ferdinand Altenhoffen is born, future Duke of Ostenburg.
1437: Roger de Arras brought up at the Ostenburg court as companion in play and studies to the future Duke Ferdinand. When he turns seventeen, he accompanies his father, Fulk de Arras, to the war that Charles VII of France is waging against England.
1441: Beatrice, niece of Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, is born.
1442: Around this time Pieter Van Huys painted his first works after having been apprenticed to the Van Eyck brothers in Bruges and Robert Campin in Tournai. No work by him from this period remains extant until...
1448: Van Huys paints Portrait of the Goldsmith Guillermo Walhuus.
1449: Roger de Arras distinguishes himself in battle against the English during the conquest of Normandy and Guyenne.
1450: Roger de Arras fights in the battle of Formigny.
1452: Van Huys paints The Family of Lucas Bremer. (His finest surviving work.)
1453: Roger de Arras fights in the battle of Castillon. The same year he publishes his Poem of the Rose and the Knight in Nuremberg. (A copy can be found in the Bibliothèque National in Paris.)
1455: Van Huys paints Virgin of the Chapel. (Undated, but experts place it at around this period.)
1457: Wilhelmus Altenhoffen, Duke of Ostenburg, dies. He is succeeded by his son Ferdinand, who has just turned twenty-two. One of his first acts would have been to call Roger de Arras to his side. The latter is probably still at the court of France, bound to King Charles VII by an oath of fealty.
1457: Van Huys paints The Money Changer of Louvain.
1458: Van Huys paints Portrait of the Merchant Matteo Conzini and His Wife.
1461: Death of Charles VII of France.
Presumably freed from his oath to the French monarch, Roger de Arras returns to Ostenburg. Around the same time, Pieter Van Huys finishes the Antwerp retable and settles in the Ostenburg court.
1462: Van Huys paints The Knight and the Devil. Photographs of the original (in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam) suggest that the knight who posed for this portrait could have been Roger de Arras, although the resemblance between the character in this painting and that in The Game of Chess is not particularly marked.
1463: Official engagement of Ferdinand of Ostenburg to Beatrice of Burgundy. Amongst the embassy sent to the Burgundy court are Roger de Arras and Pieter Van Huys, the latter sent to paint Beatrice's portrait, which he does this year. (The portrait, mentioned in the chronicle of the nuptials and in an inventory of 1474, has not survived.)
1464: The Duke's wedding. Roger de Arras leads the party bringing the bride from Burgundy to Ostenburg.
1467: Philip the Good dies and his son, Charles the Bold, Beatrice's cousin, takes over the duchy of Burgundy. French and Burgundian pressure intensifies the intrigues within the Ostenburg court. Ferdinand Altenhoffen tries to keep a difficult balance. The pro-French party back Roger de Arras, who has great influence over Duke Ferdinand. The Burgundian party relies on the influence of Duchess Beatrice.
1469: Roger de Arras is murdered. Unofficially, the blame is laid at the door of the Burgundy faction. Other rumours allude to an affair between Roger de Arras and Beatrice of Burgundy. There is no proof that Ferdinand of Ostenburg was involved.
1471: Two years after the murder of Roger de Arras, Van Huys paints The Game of Chess. It is not known whether the painter was still living in Ostenburg at this time.
1474: Ferdinand Altenhoffen dies without issue. Louis XI of France tries to exercise his dynasty's former rights over the duchy. This only worsens the already tense relations between France and Burgundy. Charles the Bold invades the duchy, defeating the French at the battle of Looven. Burgundy annexes Ostenburg.
1477: Charles the Bold dies at the battle of Nancy. Maximilian I of Austria makes off with the Burgundian inheritance, which will pass to his nephew Charles (the future Emperor Charles V) and ultimately belong to the Spanish Habsburg monarchy.
1481: Pieter Van Huys dies in Ghent, whilst working on a triptych intended for the cathedral of St; Bavon, depicting the Descent from the Cross.
1485: Beatrice of Ostenburg dies in a convent in Lieges.
For a long while, no one dared speak. They looked from one to the other and then at the painting. After a silence that seemed to last forever, César shook his head and said in a low voice, "I must confess I'm impressed."
"We all are," added Menchu.
Julia put the documents down on the table and leaned on it.
"Van Huys obviously knew Roger de Arras well," she said, pointing to the papers. "Perhaps they were friends."
"And by painting that picture, he was settling a score with the murderer," said César. "All the pieces fit."
Julia walked over to her library, consisting of two walls covered with wooden shelves buckling beneath the weight of untidy rows of books. She stood there for a moment, hands on hips, before selecting a fat illustrated tome, which she leafed through rapidly. Then she sat down between Menchu and César with the book, The Rijksmuseum of Amsterdam, open on her knees. It wasn't a very large reproduction, but a knight could clearly be seen, armour-clad, head bare, riding along the foot of a hill on top of which stood a walled city. Next to the knight, engaged in friendly conversation, rode the Devil, mounted on a scrawny black horse, pointing with his right hand at the city towards which they seemed to be travelling.
"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 César. "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?" César 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 shie
ld with his particular emblem. Tell me what you think, César. What's painted on that shield?"
César 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. Even 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.
"César."
"Yes, love."
"How many pieces are there in a game of chess?"
"Um ... 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." César 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?"
César 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, César."
"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 César as if he held the solution in his hands. César 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. César 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.
César 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."
César 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 Álvaro, 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 César, 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 craquelure 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 craquelure 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 Montcgrifo. 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.
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