“That’s arguable,” Munoz said at last. “For example, the Universe is full of demonstrable infinites: prime numbers, the combinations in chess.”

“Do you really think so? That everything is demonstrable, I mean? Allow me to say, as the musician I once was, or, rather, despite all this,” he indicated his useless legs with a kind of calm disdain, “as the musician I still am, that every system is incomplete. That demonstrability is a much weaker concept than truth.”

“The truth is like the perfect move in chess: it exists, but you have to look for it. Given enough time, it’s always demonstrable.”

Hearing that, Belmonte smiled mischievously.

“I would say, rather, that the perfect move you talk about, whether you call it that or whether you call it the truth, may exist. But it can’t always be demonstrated. And that any system that tries to do so is limited and relative. Try sending my Van Huys to Mars or to Planet X, and see if anyone there can solve your problem. I’d go further: send them the record you’re listening to now or, to make it still harder, break the record and send them the pieces. What meaning will it contain then? And since you seem so keen on exact laws, I’d remind you that the angles of a triangle add up to one hundred and eighty degrees in Euclidian geometry, but to more in elliptic geometry and to less in hyperbolic. And that’s because there is no one system, there are no universal axioms. Systems are disparate even within themselves. Do you enjoy resolving paradoxes? It isn’t only music, painting or, I imagine, chess that are full of them.” He picked up pencil and paper from the table, wrote a few lines and showed them to Munoz. “Have a look at that, will you?”

The chess player read it out loud:

“The sentence I am now writing is the one that you are now reading.” He looked at Belmonte in surprise. “So?”

“That’s all there is. That sentence was written by me a minute and a half ago and you read it only forty seconds ago. That’s to say, my writing and your reading correspond to different moments in time, but on that piece of paper ‘now’ and ‘now’ are undoubtedly the same ‘now’. Therefore, on the one hand the sentence is true, but on the other hand it lacks all validity. Or is it the concept of time that we’re failing to take into account? Don’t you think that’s a good example of a paradox? I can see you have no answer to it. Well, you’ll find the same problem with the enigmas posed by my Van Huys or by anything else. Who’s to say that your solution to the problem is the correct one? Your intuition and your system? Fine, but what superior system can you count on to demonstrate that your intuition and your system are valid? And what other system can you call on to corroborate those two systems? As a chess player, I imagine you’ll find these lines interesting.”

Pausing between each line, Belmonte recited:

The player too is captive of caprice

(The words are Omar’s) on another ground

Where black nights alternate with whiter days

God moves the player, he in turn the piece.

But what god beyond God begins the round

Of dust and time and sleep and agonies?

“The world is just one vast paradox,” the old man concluded. “And I defy you to prove the contrary.”

Julia glanced at Munoz and saw that he was shaking his head slightly, and his eyes had grown dull again. He seemed disconcerted.

Filtered by the vodka she’d drunk, the music – gentle jazz with the volume turned down to a tenuous murmur that seemed to blossom from the shadowy corners of the room – surrounded her like a warm caress, soft and soothing, that was transformed into calm lucidity. It was as if everything, night, music, shadows, even the comfortable feeling of the arm of the leather sofa under her neck, blended into a perfect harmony; everything, down to the tiniest object in the room, down to the most fleeting of her thoughts, had found its precise place in her mind and in space, fitting with geometrical exactitude into her perceptions and her consciousness.

Nothing, not even the gloomiest of memories, could have shattered the calm that reigned in her spirit. It was the first time she’d managed to recover that sense of balance, and she plunged into it with absolute abandon. Not even the ring of the telephone, as it announced one of those threatening, by now almost familiar, silences, could break the spell. With her eyes closed, moving her head gently to the rhythm of the music, Julia allowed herself a warm, secret smile. At times like this it was so easy to live in peace with oneself.

She opened her eyes lazily. In the shadows, the polychromed face of a Gothic virgin was smiling too, her gaze lost in the stillness of the centuries. Leaning against the table leg, on the paint-stained Shiraz carpet, was a painting in an oval frame, its layer of varnish only half removed, a romantic Andalusian landscape, nostalgic and peaceful, that depicted the river in Seville flowing quietly past leafy green banks, with a ship and some trees in the background. And in the middle of the room – in the midst of sculptures, frames, bronzes, paintings, bottles of solvent, canvases, a half-restored baroque Christ, art books piled up next to records and ceramics – at the strange intersection, random but undeniable, of lines and perspectives, The Game of Chess presided solemnly over the orderly disorder reminiscent of an auction room or an antiques shop. The dim glow from the hallway cast a narrow rectangle of pale light on the painting, enough to bring the surface to life and for every detail, although steeped in deceptive chiaroscuro, to be clearly visible from where Julia was reclining, her feet and legs bare below her baggy black woollen sweater. Rain was pattering on the skylight but the radiators kept out the cold.

The golden letters of the newly uncovered inscription gleamed from the shadows. It had been a difficult, painstaking task, interrupted often to photograph each phase of the process as she removed the top layer of copper resinate and as the orpiment of the Gothic lettering was gradually revealed, five hundred years after Pieter Van Huys had covered it up, the better to conceal the mystery.

Now it was there before her: Quis necavit equitem. Julia would have preferred leaving the inscription hidden beneath the original layer of pigment, given that the X-rays proved its existence. Montegrifo, however, had insisted on uncovering it; according to him, it would excite the morbid curiosity of clients. Soon the painting would be open to the gaze of everyone: auctioneers, collectors, historians. The discreet privacy it had enjoyed until now, apart from its brief spell in the Prado, would be over for ever. Soon The Game of Chess would come under the scrutiny of experts; it would become the subject of polemical debates, and newspaper articles would be written about it as well as erudite theses and specialised texts such as the one she was preparing. The old Flemish master, its creator, could never have imagined that his painting would achieve such fame. And should Ferdinand Altenhoffen ever learn of it, his bones would doubtless tremble with pleasure beneath his dusty gravestone in the crypt of some abbey in Belgium or France. His name would at last be cleared, and a few lines in the history books would have to be rewritten.

She looked at the painting. Almost all of the top layer of oxidised varnish was gone, and with it the yellowish surface that had dulled its colours. Unvarnished and with the inscription uncovered, there was a luminosity about it and a perfection of colour that was apparent even in the near darkness of the room. The outlines of the figures could be seen in all their extreme precision, perfectly clear and succinct, and the sense of balance that characterised the domestic scene – paradoxically domestic, thought Julia – was so typical of a certain style and period that the painting was sure to fetch an astonishing price.