Interview with Patrick Bernauw: The Ghent Altarpiece

A letter from Hubert Lampo to Patrick Bernauw

Interview with Patrick Bernauw: The Ghent Altarpiece

Patrick Bernauw describes himself as a magical realist. And when we ask him where this fascination stems from, the answer is short and sweet: Hubert Lampo . From the beginning of his writing career, he was inspired by the author of the renowned novel The Coming of Joachim Stiller , who subtly intertwined the mundane with the mysterious in his stories, often through “meaningful coincidences.” But it took a while for Bernauw to truly embrace that magical quality. Today, he shares how he gradually translated his admiration for Lampo into his own writing voice, and how one day, unexpectedly, he himself experienced a moment of synchronicity.

You’ve always been inspired by Hubert Lampo’s magical realism, even to start writing yourself. How did you find your own voice in that magical realism?

As a teenager, and later as an adolescent, I started writing stories. I always wrote under the influence. Not of alcohol or drugs, of course, but of writers like Hubert Lampo. His interest in ideas surrounding the collective unconscious—as once described by Carl Jung —and especially his experiences with synchronicity, so-called “meaningful coincidences,” left a deep impression on me. I found his assertion that “in magical realism , the key word is realism” particularly intriguing: the supernatural only truly works when it is credibly embedded in reality.

Only… I remained a mere fascinated spectator, because I had never experienced synchronicities myself.

Until I was working on two books simultaneously: a children’s book about the theft of the Righteous Judges and an adult book about the hidden meanings behind the Ghent Altarpiece. I believed it wasn’t just a religious work of art, but also an esoteric tableau full of alchemical and Cathar symbolism. I thought Jan van Eyck was telling the story of the Grail in it—not as a cup from the Eucharist, but as the symbol for the Holy Blood. That Holy Blood supposedly arrived in Bruges via the Knights Templar . Some even saw it as a reference to a hidden bloodline of Jesus and Mary Magdalene—long before Dan Brown based his bestseller, The Da Vinci Code, on it.

 

Van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece. In the lower left corner is the stolen panel of the Righteous Judges.

The book I was writing for adults was to be a form of literary nonfiction: six possible scenarios about the secret history and hidden meanings of the Ghent Altarpiece, and about the theft of the panel The Righteous Judges, each based on substantiated hypotheses, but told as a novel.

Only: I had no ending. And without an ending, no story…

Until I thought I’d discovered a new possible hiding place for the stolen panel: a spot five minutes from St. Bavo’s Cathedral, with fixed opening hours, as described in Arsène Goedertier ‘s extortion letters . The location was known in Ghent as the Van Eyck Brothers House and was right next to Goedertier’s local pub. Everything seemed to add up… but I had no tangible proof. The book remained unfinished.

And then it happened.

One day in Aalst, I happened to walk into a comic book store that also sold used books. I wanted to browse. Behind the counter, I saw a stack of books on the stairs. On top of the stack was a small book: ” Het geheim van de dubbel muur” (The Secret of the Double Wall) by Valère Depauw – a detective story from the 1960s based on fact. I’d seen it in the library and had already used it as source material. Ideal for my collection, I thought, especially if I ever want to give lectures on this subject. I bought it, put it somewhere at home, and forgot about it.

When I finally picked it up again one day and opened it, I discovered something strange. The book was empty! From the outside, it looked like a regular novel, but inside were blank pages. A dummy , as they call it. Publishers used to make them to physically test a book: weight, size, paper quality. But inside this dummy book, quite unexpectedly, was something handwritten. A poetic diary of a girl of about eighteen, from the seventies. Flower Power, Che Guevara, “Make love, not war”… it was all there.

The fact that that particular book surfaced—with a title that alluded to a hidden space and the unexpected emptiness of a dummy book—connected almost symbolically with the story I was writing. And at that moment, I thought: this is a synchronicity. A coincidence that fits so perfectly that it almost couldn’t be a coincidence.

Suddenly, I had my final piece. I asked my wife (because my own handwriting would be too recognizable) to write a coded message at the end of the diary. I based this code on an old French detective novel containing a secret message strongly reminiscent of Arsène Goedertier’s mysterious fourteenth letter. Some researchers suspect that Goedertier was inspired by that very novel for the theft and the blackmail letters. With my literary trick, I wanted to give a nod to this: a fictional code, based on a real novel, embedded in a mysterious diary.

Whoever cracked the code received the following clues:

1) “It’s a short day under Saint Bavo” – a reference to the Korte Dagsteeg (Short Day Alley).

2) “Where cow and bird meet…” – the intersection of Koestraat and Vogelmarkt, exactly where that mysterious double wall lies between Café Mokka and Van Eyck’s house.

It was a joke. A literary mystification. I say literally in the book’s preface, “Never trust a writer 100 percent.” After all, what writers take as truth is often carefully constructed fiction. And conversely, what we think of as fiction can sometimes be surprisingly true. Consider Heinrich Schliemann, who found Troy through the Iliad reading, a story considered pure myth for centuries. That tension between fact and fiction eventually became my version of magical realism as well. And I wanted to show that by adding a little fiction (the coded message) to a “fact” (an existing dummy book).

Only… that story took on a life of its own. Then I was invited to Luc Appermont’s talk show. I sat next to a paratrooper who had fallen from a helicopter and survived. A typical television format, so to speak. Of my six historical screenplays about the theft of The Righteous Judges, no one seemed particularly impressed. All the attention was focused on that one element: the dummy and the code. Suddenly, I’d become something of a curiosity. Even the reviews always revolved around that ending: “That ending, with the dummy and the code – now that’s exciting!” What had actually started as a literary device ultimately became the heart of the book.

I remember thinking at the time: okay, that’s it – you only experience synchronicity like that once.

But the following year it happened again….

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