The Flanders Panel (27 page)

The Blue Car

“That was a dirty trick,” said Haroun… “Show me another… one that is honest.”
Raymond Smullyan

Beneath the brim of his hat, Cesar arched a peevish eyebrow as he swung his umbrella and looked about with the disdain, tempered by the most exquisite boredom, in which he usually entrenched himself when reality confirmed his worst fears. The Rastro, it must be said, did not look terribly welcoming that morning. The grey sky threatened rain, and the owners of the stalls set up along the streets occupied by the market were taking precautions against a possible downpour. In some places, walking became a tortuous process of dodging people and skirting the canvas and grimy plastic with which the stalls were hung.

“In fact,” he said to Julia, who was looking at a pair of battered brass candlesticks displayed on a blanket on the ground, “this is a complete waste of time. I haven’t found anything decent here for ages.”

This wasn’t quite true, and Julia knew it. From time to time, thanks to his expert eye, Cesar would unearth from the pile of discarded junk in the old market - drawn from that vast cemetery of dreams swept out into the street on the tide of many an anonymous shipwreck - some forgotten pearl, some tiny treasure that chance had chosen to conceal from the eyes of others: an eighteenth-century crystal tumbler, an antique frame, a diminutive porcelain
objet d’art.
Once, in a shabby little shop selling books and old magazines, he’d found two beautiful chapter headings delicately and skillfully illuminated by some nameless thirteenth-century monk, which, once restored by Julia, he had sold for a small fortune.

They slowly made their way to the upper part of the market, to the short row of buildings with peeling walls and gloomy inner courtyards connected by alleyways with wrought-iron gates, that were home to those specialist antiques shops more or less worthy of the name -although Cesar wore a look of prudent scepticism when he spoke of them.

“What time did you arrange to meet your dealer?”

Cesar shifted his umbrella - a very expensive piece with a beautifully turned silver grip - to his other hand, pushed up his cuff and studied the face of his gold watch. He was looking very elegant in a light brown felt hat with broad brim and silk band, a camel’s-hair coat draped over his shoulders and a handsome cravat at the open neck of his silk shirt. He always dressed perilously close to the limits of good taste, though without ever overstepping the mark.

“In about fifteen minutes.”

They browsed amongst the stalls. Under Cesar’s mocking gaze, Julia picked up a painted wooden plate showing a yellowing landscape rather crudely done, a rural scene with an ox cart moving down a path edged by trees.

“Surely you’re not going to buy that, my dear?” Cesar said, enjoying his own disapproval. “It’s revolting. Aren’t you even going to haggle?”

Julia opened her shoulder bag and took out her purse, ignoring Cesar’s protests.

“I don’t know what you’re complaining about,” she said as the plate was being wrapped for her in a few pages from an illustrated magazine. “You’ve always said that people,
comme il faut,
never discuss the price of anything: you pay on the nail and walk away with your head held high.”

“That rule doesn’t apply here.” Cesar, looking about with an air of professional detachment, wrinkled his nose at the plebeian sight of junk-laden stalls. “Not when you’re dealing with people like this.”

Julia put the package into her bag.

“Even so you might have had the decency to buy it for me. When I was a child, you bought me anything I fancied.”

“I spoiled you horribly when you were a child. Anyway, I refuse to pay good money for trash like that.”

“You’re getting mean in your old age, that’s your problem.”

“Be silent, viper!” The brim of his hat cast a shadow over his face as he bent to light a cigarette outside a shop crammed with dusty old dolls. “One more word and I write you out of my will.”

Julia watched him climbing the flight of steps as he left for his meeting. He did so with great dignity, keeping the hand that held the ivory cigarette holder slightly raised, and wearing the half-disdainful, half-bored air of one who does not expect to find very much at the end of the road, but who, for aesthetic reasons, takes pains to walk that road as elegantly as possible. Like a Charles Stuart climbing to the scaffold almost as if he were doing so as a favour to the executioner, with his already rehearsed “Remember” on his lips and in the hope that he would be beheaded in profile, as he appeared on the coins struck in his image.

Clutching her bag, as a precaution against pickpockets, Julia threaded her way amongst the stalls. There were too many people in that part of the market, so she decided to go back to the steps and the balustrade overlooking the square and the market’s main street, where people were milling about beneath endless rows of awnings and plastic sheets.

She had an hour before meeting Cesar again, in a small cafe on the square, between a shop selling nautical instruments and a second-hand clothes shop that specialised in army surplus. Below the balustrade, sitting on the edge of a stone fountain full of fruit peel and empty beer cans, a young man with long blond hair and a poncho was playing Andean melodies on a rudimentary flute. She listened to the music as she let her gaze drift over the market. After a while she went back down the steps and stopped at the shop window full of dolls. Some were clothed, others were naked; some were dressed in picturesque peasant costumes or complicatedly romantic outfits complete with gloves, hats and parasols. Some represented girls and others grown women. The features of some were crude, others were childish, ingenuous, perverse. Their arms and hands were frozen in diverse positions, as if surprised by the cold wind of all the time that had passed since their owners abandoned or sold them, or died. Girls who became women, thought Julia - some beautiful, some plain, who had loved or perhaps been loved — had once caressed those bodies made of rags, cardboard and Porcelain. Those dolls had survived their owners. They were dumb, motionless witnesses whose imaginary retinas still retained images of scenes long since erased from the memories of the living: faded pictures sketched amongst mists of nostalgia, intimate moments of family life, children’s songs, loving embraces, as well as tears and disappointments dreams turned to ashes, decay and sadness, perhaps even to evil. There was something unbearably touching about that multitude of glass and porcelain eyes that stared at her unblinking, full of the Olympian know-ledge that only time possesses, lifeless eyes embedded in pale wax or papier-mache faces, above dresses so darkened by time that the lace edgings looked dull and grubby. And then there was the hair, some combed and neat, some dishevelled, real hair - the thought made her shiver - that had belonged to real women. By a melancholy association of ideas, a fragment of a poem surfaced in her mind, one that she’d heard Cesar recite long ago:

If they had kept all the hair of all the women who have died…

She found it hard to look away from the window, the glass of which reflected the heavy grey clouds darkening the city. And when she did turn round, ready to walk on, she saw Max, wearing a heavy navy blue jacket, his hair, as usual, tied back in a ponytail. He was looking down the steps as if fleeing from someone whose proximity troubled him.

“What a surprise!” he said, and gave her that handsome, wolfish smile that so enchanted Menchu. They exchanged a few trivial remarks about the unpleasant weather and the number of people at the market. He gave no explanation for his presence there, but Julia noticed that he seemed jumpy, slightly furtive. Perhaps he was expecting Menchu, since he mentioned that they’d arranged to meet near there, some complicated story about cheap frames which, once restored - Julia had often done it herself - could be used to set off canvases on display at the gallery.

Julia didn’t like Max, and she attributed to this the discomfort she always felt with him. Quite apart from the nature of his relationship with her friend, there was something that displeased her, something she’d sensed the first moment they met. Cesar, whose fine, feminine intuition was never wrong, used to say that, beautiful body aside, there was an indefinable, mean-spirited quality about Max that surfaced in his crooked smile and in the insolent way he looked at Julia. Max’s gaze could never be held for long, but whenever Julia forgot it and then looked back at him again, she would find his gaze stubbornly fixed on her, crafty and watchful, evasive yet insistent. It wasn’t one of those vague glances, like Paco Montegrifo’s, that wander about before calmly returning to rest once more on the object or person claiming his attention; it was the kind of glance that turns into a stare when the person thinks no one is looking and grows shifty the moment he feels he’s being observed. “It’s the look of someone intent, at the very least, on stealing your wallet,” Cesar had said once about Menchu’s lover. Julia had simply responded to Cesar’s spiteful remark with a disapproving frown, but she had to admit that he was absolutely right.

There were other murky aspects to him. Julia knew that those glances contained something more than mere curiosity. Confident of his physical attraction, Max often behaved, in Menchu’s absence or behind her back, in a fashion that was both calculated and suggestive. Any doubts she’d had about that had been dispelled during a party at Menchu’s house, in the early hours of the morning. Conversation had been flagging, and her friend had left the room to get more ice. Leaning towards the low table where the drinks were, Max had picked up Julia’s glass and raised it to his lips. That would have meant little if he hadn’t then replaced it on the table, looked at her, licked his lips and smiled with cynical regret that circumstances prevented him intruding further upon her person. Needless to say, Menchu was completely unaware of this, and Julia would have cut out her tongue rather than report something that would merely have sounded ridiculous when put into words. So she had adopted the only attitude she could with Max: an evident disdain on occasions when she found speaking to him unavoidable and a deliberate arm’s-length chilliness whenever they met face to face without witnesses, as now, in the Rastro.

“I don’t have to meet Menchu until later,” he said, dangling before her that self-satisfied smile she so detested. “Do you fancy a drink?”

She looked at him hard then shook her head slowly, pointedly.

“I’m waiting for Cesar.”

Max knew full well that he was no favourite of Cesar’s.

“Pity,” he murmured. “We don’t often get the chance to meet like this. On our own, I mean.”

Julia merely arched her eyebrows and looked around as if Cesar were about to appear at any moment. Max followed the direction of her gaze and shrugged.

“I’ve arranged to meet Menchu over there in half an hour, by the statue of the soldier. If you want to, we could meet for a drink later on.” He left a long meaningful pause before adding: “The four of us.”

“I’ll see what Cesar says.”

She watched him as he walked off into the crowd, his broad shoulders swaying, until he’d disappeared from view. As on other occasions, she was left with the uncomfortable feeling of having been unable just to let things be, as if, despite her rejection of his offer, Max had again managed to violate her inner self. She was irritated with herself, although she didn’t know quite what she should have done. There were times, she thought, when she would give anything to be strong enough simply to punch Max in his handsome, self-satisfied stud’s face.

She wandered amongst the stalls for about a quarter of an hour before going to the cafe. She tried to distract herself with the comings and goings about her, with the voices of the sellers and the people round the stalls, but to no avail. Once she’d forgotten Max, the painting, and Alvaro’s death, the game of chess returned like an obsession, posing unanswerable questions. Perhaps the invisible player was also near at hand, in the crowd, watching her as he planned his next move. She looked about suspiciously and pressed her leather bag to her, the bag containing Cesar’s pistol. It was all terribly absurd, or perhaps it was the other way round, absurdly terrible.

The cafe had a wooden floor and old wrought-iron-and-marble tables. Julia ordered a cold drink and sat next to a misty window, trying not to think about anything, until Cesar’s blurred silhouette appeared in the street outside. She went out to meet him, in search of consolation, as seemed only fitting.

“You get lovelier by the minute,” said Cesar, affecting an admiring tone and standing ostentatiously in the middle of the street, with his hands on his hips. “How ever do you manage it, my dear?”

“Don’t be silly,” she said, taking his arm with a feeling of infinite relief. “It was only an hour ago that I left you.”

“That’s what I mean, Princess.” Cesar lowered his voice as if he were whispering secrets. “You’re the only woman I know capable of becoming more beautiful in the space of sixty minutes. If I knew how you did it, we could patent it. Really.”

“You’re an idiot.”

“And you, my dear, are gorgeous.”

They walked down the street towards Julia’s car. Along the way, Cesar brought her up to date on the success of the operation he’d just conducted:
a Mater dolorosa
which, to a fairly undiscerning buyer, could be safely attributed to Murillo and a Biedermeier writing desk signed and dated in 1832 by Virienichen, a bit battered but authentic, and nothing that a good cabinet-maker couldn’t put to rights. Two genuine bargains acquired at a very reasonable price.

“Especially the writing desk, Princess.” Cesar was swinging his umbrella, delighted with the deal he’d made. “As you know, there’s a certain social class, blessings be upon them, who cannot live without a bed that once belonged to Empress Eugenie or the desk where Talleyrand signed his perjuries. Well, now there’s a new bourgeois class of
parvenus
who, in their attempts to emulate them, feel they simply have to have a Biedermeier as the supreme symbol of their triumph. They come to you and ask you straight out, without specifying whether they want a table or a desk; what they want is a Biedermeier whatever the cost and whatever it is. Some even believe blindly in the historical existence of poor Mr. Biedermeier and are most surprised when they see that the piece of furniture is actually signed by someone else. First, they give me a disconcerted smile, then they nudge each other and immediately ask if I haven’t got another Biedermeier, a real one.” Cesar sighed, no doubt deploring the difficult times in which he lived. “If it wasn’t for their chequebooks, I can assure you that I’d be tempted to send a few of them
chez les grecs.”