Arturo Perez-Reverte - The Flanders Panel

“We could ask Alvaro.”

Menchu raised her eyebrows and said at once that the very idea left her petrified, or saltified or whatever the word was, like Noah’s wife, or was it Lot’s? Anyway, like the wife of that twit who got so fed up with life in Sodom.

“It’s up to you, of course,” she said, her voice growing hoarse with expectation. She could sense strong emotion in the air. “After all, you and Alvaro…”

She left the phrase hanging and adopted a look of exaggerated concern, as she did whenever the topic of conversation turned to the problems of others, whom she liked to think of as utterly defenceless when it came to affairs of the heart.

Julia held her gaze, unperturbed, and said only: “He’s the best art historian we know. And this has nothing to do with me, but with the painting.”

Menchu pretended to be considering the matter seriously and then nodded. It was up to Julia, of course. But if she was in Julia’s shoes, she wouldn’t do it. In dubio pro reo, as that old pedant Cesar always said. Or was it in pluvio?“

“I can assure you that as regards Alvaro, I’m completely cured.”

“Some illnesses, sweetie, you never get over. And a year is nothing. As the song says.”

Julia couldn’t suppress a wry smile at her own expense. A year ago Alvaro and she had finished a long affair, and Menchu knew all about it. It had been Menchu who, quite unintentionally, had pronounced the final verdict, which went to the very heart of the matter, something along the lines of: In the end, my dear, a married man invariably finds in favour of his legal wife. All those years of washing underpants and giving birth always prove to be the deciding factor. “It’s just the way they’re made,” she had concluded between sniffs, her nose glued to a narrow white line of cocaine. “Deep down, they’re sickeningly loyal.” Another sniff. “The bastards.”

Julia exhaled a dense cloud of smoke and slowly drank the rest of her coffee, trying to keep the cup from dripping. That particular ending had been very painful, once the final words had been said and the door slammed shut. And it went on being painful afterwards. On the two or three occasions when Alvaro and she had met by chance at lectures or in museums, both had behaved with exemplary fortitude: “You’re looking well.”

“Take care of yourself.” After all, they both considered themselves to be civilised people who, quite apart from that fragment of their past, had a shared interest in the world of art. They were, to put it succinctly, mature people, adults.

She was aware of Menchu watching her with malicious interest, gleefully anticipating the prospect of new amorous intrigues in which she could intervene as tactical adviser. She was forever complaining that since Julia had broken up with Alvaro her subsequent affairs had been so sporadic as to be hardly worth mentioning: “You’re becoming a puritan, darling,” she was always saying, “and that’s deadly dull. What you need is a bit of passion, a return to the maelstrom.” From that point of view, the mere mention of Alvaro seemed to offer interesting possibilities.

Julia realised all this without feeling the slightest irritation. Menchu was Menchu and always had been. You don’t choose your friends, they choose you, and you either reject them or you accept them without reservations. That was something else she’d learned from Cesar.

Her cigarette was nearly finished, so she stubbed it out in the ashtray and smiled wanly at Menchu.

“Alvaro’s not important. What concerns me is the Van Huys.” She hesitated, searching for the right words as she tried to clarify her idea. “There’s something odd about that painting.”

Menchu shrugged distractedly, as if she were thinking about something else.

“Don’t get worked up about it, love. A picture is just canvas, wood, paint and varnish. What matters is how much it leaves in your pocket when it changes hands.” She looked across at Max’s broad shoulders and blinked smugly. “The rest is just fairy tales.”

Throughout her time with Alvaro, Julia had thought of him as conforming to the most rigorous of professional stereotypes, a conformity that extended to his appearance and style of dress. He was pleasant-looking, fortyish, wore English tweed jackets and knitted ties, and, to top it all, smoked a pipe. When she saw him come into the lecture hall for the first time – his subject that day had been “Art and Man” – it had taken her a good quarter of an hour before she could actually listen to what he was saying, unable as she was to believe that anyone who looked so like a young professor actually was a professor. Afterwards, when Alvaro had dismissed them until the following week and everyone was streaming out into the corridor, she’d gone up to him as if it were the most natural thing in the world, knowing full well what would happen: the eternal repetition of a rather unoriginal story, the classic teacher-student plot, and Julia had simply assumed this, even before Alvaro, who was on his way out of the door, had turned round and smiled at her for the first time. There was something inevitable about the whole thing – or at least so it seemed to Julia as she weighed the pros and cons of the matter – a suggestion of a deliciously classical fatum, of paths laid by Destiny, a view she’d keenly espoused ever since her schooldays, when she’d translated the brilliant family dramas of that inspired Greek, Sophocles. She hadn’t been able to bring herself to mention it to Cesar until much later, and he, who had acted as her confidant in affairs of the heart for years – the first time, Julia had still been in short socks and pigtails – had simply shrugged and, in a calculatedly superficial tone, criticised the scant originality of a story that had provided the most sentimental plots, my dear, for at least three hundred novels and as many films, especially – and here he’d pulled a scornful face – French and American films: “And that, as I’m sure you’ll agree, Princess, sheds a new and truly ghastly light on the whole subject.” But that was all. Cesar had never gone in for reproachful remarks or fatherly warnings, which, as they both well knew, would never have helped anyway. Cesar had no children of his own, nor would he ever have, but he did possess a special flair when it came to tackling such situations. At some point in his life, Cesar had realised that no one ever learns from anyone else’s mistakes and, consequently, there was only one dignified and proper attitude to be taken by a guardian – which, after all, was what he was – and that consisted in sitting down next to his young ward, taking her by the hand and listening, with infinite kindness, to the evolving story of her loves and griefs, whilst nature took its own wise and inevitable course.

“In affairs of the heart, Princess,” Cesar used to say, “one should offer neither advice nor solutions… just a clean hanky when it seems appropriate.”

And that was exactly what he’d done when it had all ended between her and Alvaro, that night when she’d turned up at Cesar’s apartment, like a sleepwalker, her hair still damp, and had fallen asleep with her head on his lap.

But that had happened long after that first encounter in the corridor at the university, when there were no notable deviations from the anticipated script. The ritual proceeded along well-trodden, predictable paths, which proved, nonetheless, unexpectedly satisfying. Julia had had other affairs, but never before – as she had on the afternoon when, for the first time, she and Alvaro lay down together in a narrow hotel bed – had she felt the need to say “I love you” in quite that painful, heart-wrenching way, hearing herself say the words with joyous amazement, words she’d always refused to say, in a voice she barely recognised as her own, more like a moan or a lament. And so, one morning when she woke up with her face buried in Alvaro’s chest, she had carefully brushed the tousled hair from her own face and studied his sleeping profile for a long time, feeling the soft beat of his heart against her cheek, until he too had opened his eyes and smiled back at her. In that moment Julia knew, with absolute certainty, that she loved him, and she knew too that she would have other lovers but never again would she feel what she felt for him. Twenty-eight months later, months she had lived through and counted off almost day by day, the moment arrived for a painful awakening from that love, for her to ask Cesar to get out his famous handkerchief. “The dreaded handkerchief,” he’d called it, theatrical as ever, half in jest but perceptive as a Cassandra, “the handkerchief we wave when we say good-bye for ever.” And that, in essence, had been their story.