Mona Lisa

by Alexander Lernet-Holenia

  He cast a cursory glance at the Baroncelli Chapel. Here too, tombs, tapestries, shields. Yet as he turned back, it occurred to him that the wall between the chapel and the church proper was unusually slender. After he had entered the nave of the church, as far as he could tell, there could be no coffin in this thin wall to the left of the entrance. To the right, however, was Mona Lisa’s tomb.

  Still farther to the right, adjacent to the passageway which led to the sacristy, was yet another tomb from much earlier times, but set into the very substantial wall of the church. Ser Francesco’s wife was behind the plate of the tomb, though the wall was at most only one and a half cubits thick, with the chapel adjacent to it.

  Bougainville looked at this wall and could not comprehend how the corpse could have been accommodated within it; could it have been placed in an upright position, which was however most unlikely and would have gone against all accepted practice? Or perhaps the coffin was under the floor and only the memorial plate attached to the wall? But then the inscribed plate would have been in the floor too.

  Bougainville shuddered and his heart, as though someone had reached out and laid his hand on it, missed a beat. He took a couple of steps into the chapel, but turned back and his eyes ran desperately over the wall.

  It seemed impossible that a full-grown woman could have been buried there, for otherwise the wall would have had to be more than an arm’s length thicker. Otherwise there’d be no room for the deceased in it. But if not here, where else was she interred?

  It is reasonable that, spiritually disturbed as he was, he had dismissed the woman’s death from the very start and considered no other possibility than that she was still alive.

  “If someone,” a voice in him cried, “does not rest in the grave which properly speaking belongs to him but in which, due to its diminutive dimensions, he would not fit, it follows he is not dead! When an artist works on the portrait of a woman at the sight of which someone standing just two paces away has to gasp for breath at how real she looks, be the artist even as great as Leonardo, the likeness could not stem from the realm of the imagination alone, and it is therefore impossible that she’s been dead these past two years! When he says she no longer serves him as a model he lies, and when that Giocondo claims he’s put up a tomb for her it’s only to deceive everyone! I do not know on what grounds the two of them have decided to conceal the existence of this wonderful creature, I do not know why her husband is hiding her and where he’s hiding her. No doubt in some lair in his house in a state of unbecoming captivity. Why? She must have been unfaithful to him. A man who, instead of killing the wife who deceived him, punishes her by burying her alive, a man who is so cowardly as not to own to her and his own shame, but who repays her by tormenting her in secret—she had to deceive such a man as soon as she realized what type of person she was dealing with. There’s no other explanation. And he, ghoul that he is, is now seeking to avenge himself on the misguided creature for the calamity into which he himself had precipitated her!”

  He promptly decided to do all that was possible to liberate her. To confide his findings to the municipal authorities was not an option for him. Those people would not believe or comprehend the enormity of what had taken place before their very eyes, and would laugh in his face. And he was not inclined, especially after the painter himself had led him by the nose, to be the laughing stock of the world. He also rejected the idea of confiding in La Trémoille, who found himself entangled in the net of Italian politics. The best he could think of was simply to turn to his friends and, with their and their friends’ help, to break into Giocondo’s house and set the unfortunate woman free.

  Nevertheless, he said to himself that before he undertook this course of action he must be absolutely sure of his case, even more sure than he was already. There always was the chance, however slim, that she lay buried in the coffin.

  He therefore decided personally to put his conjectures to the test and in the night open up the tomb.

  He spent the afternoon in the grip of warring emotions, partly imagining the unfortunate circumstances of his beloved, partly in a state of euphoria that she was yet alive and that he would see and speak to her. Then again he was seized by the fear that her grave was in fact real. The day seemed to him to drag on for ever, and as soon as dusk descended he was already in Santa Croce, accompanied by two of his servants with the necessary tools concealed under their coats. The three of them stayed out of sight behind a side altar till the church was locked shut, then they came forth and proceeded to open the tomb.

  By the light of some candle stumps which they took from one of the altars, they wrenched the memorial plaque from the wall and behind it exposed the bricked-in entrance to the tomb. They hacked at it, shoved the rubble aside and shone a light into the interior.

  Bougainville had not been wrong. The tomb was empty.

  IT IS POSSIBLE that in times gone by it had contained the body of a stillborn child or one that had died soon after birth, because the space was no more than a cubit deep. Ser Francesco had purchased the tomb and had made it known to all that it was the resting place of his wife. Amid the universal panic which then raged on account of the plague, and since no one would have dared to witness the interment, the deception went unnoticed and no suspicions were aroused.

  However, Bougainville, who wanted to play it completely safe, ordered even the flagstones in front of the tomb to be lifted and the ground turned over. But nothing was found.

  After he had restored everything more or less as it was originally, his flunkeys turned to one of the doors of the church and began to force it open. People of their ilk could put their hand to anything, and in no time at all the lock gave way.

  When Bougainville emerged into the purple of the night on the great square before the church, it was about ten o’clock. He went straight to Leonardo’s.

  The house was locked shut; it took quite a lot of banging before the door was finally opened. The artist had already retired for the night. Leonardo’s father, the old notary, and the artist’s stepmother Lucrezia, his half-brothers and their wives as well as the always idle Francesco da Vinci, who also resided in the house, having been roused from their early slumbers by the commotion, emerged half dressed in the entrance hall in the light provided by the servants, and took Bougainville, who rushed past them to Leonardo’s room without taking the slightest notice of them, for a complete and utter lunatic. Leonardo came to the very same conclusion when Bougainville declared to him that he was no less of a scoundrel than Ser Francesco, because Mona Lisa was not dead but was kept prisoner in inhuman conditions. Sitting up in bed and rubbing his eyes in bewilderment, Leonardo stared at the young man, who seemed to be beside himself, asking Bougainville again and again as to what led him to such an outlandish conclusion.

  “First-hand evidence!” Bougainville cried out. “First-hand evidence that I procured personally! You, Messer Leonardo, are a gallows-bird and a liar to boot! Because you wanted to make me believe that Mona Lisa was dead. But not a bit of it. It hasn’t even entered her head to be dead!”

  “She is not dead?” Leonardo exclaimed. “Pray tell me, what is she then?”

  “She’s alive!” Bougainville cried. “What else can she be! She’s not in her tomb!”

  “Ah,” Leonardo exclaimed, “she’s not in her tomb! How do you pretend to know that?”

  “I’ve opened it!” Bougainville bellowed.

  “You did what?” Leonardo said. “You opened her tomb?”

  “That’s right! And it was empty. So, tell me where she is! Tell me the dreadful plot of which she is the victim! Tell me all or by God,” he cried, drawing his dagger, “I’ll stab you right away in your own bed!”

  After a moment Leonardo threw his blanket aside, got up and, his eyes fixed on Bougainville, approached him directly. He was, according to how people slept at the time, completely naked; his massive beard hid his chest, but the rest of his body exposed an unusually well-developed muscular frame. Bougai
nville involuntarily took a step back.

  “Young man,” Leonardo said, “just a moment!” And with a swift, very gentle movement he raised Bougainville’s right eyelid.

  “What was that for?” Bougainville exclaimed.

  “Nothing,” Leonardo said, reached for a dressing gown, which lay across a chair, and put it on. “Nothing at all, young man. Put that thing away! So, you are convinced you know that Ser Francesco’s wife is not in her tomb? Where would she be then?”

  “That,” Bougainville cried, “is what I came to ask you! Where is she? You know it! You must know it, because before she vanished off the face of the earth you painted her! Is she still in Ser Francesco’s house? Why is he hiding her? Or perhaps she wants to remain hidden herself? I don’t think so! So why does Giocondo conceal her existence? Has she been unfaithful to him, but he lacked the courage to kill her and is tormenting her instead? Who was her lover? Out with it! Out with it, I say!”

  Leonardo looked at the young man and said at last, “Because you stand before me brandishing your dagger, you imagine you can make me talk. Be assured that it would be the simplest thing in the world to disarm you and send you head over heels down the steps. However, your state—not to mention the mental aberration of which you are a victim—excuses you to a degree. I could, for instance, answer your questions, provided of course you had the right to put them to me. However, it is hardly necessary that I should. You answer them yourself, and I couldn’t have made a better job of it myself even if I’d wanted to. Let me sum up briefly: you pay me a visit in the company of your Marshal. By chance you catch sight of the picture of a woman who does not exist, but with whom you nevertheless fall in love. You take this woman to be Ser Francesco del Giocondo’s wife, who died two years ago. However, you cannot reconcile yourself to the thought that she may be dead. You claim to have gone through her tomb and found it empty. As a result you conclude that she’s still alive. You make surmises as to her whereabouts from which it is plainly obvious that in your fevered imagination you’ve already settled that question. Would it be any use for me to try to explain to you that Mona Lisa is dead? That Giocondo is not hiding her? That I hadn’t painted her, that she had not deceived him? Come to think of it, she may really have been unfaithful to him. There are rumours about that her lover was Amerigo Capponi, the son of Ser Piero, to whom Florence owes so much. When your King Charles imposed unfair obligations on our city, which he had invaded, Ser Piero tore up the agreement and negotiated a more advantageous one. But even this, I fear, is only grist to your mill. Because you will obviously take it as given that the, in your eyes, most beautiful woman in Florence had no other friend save the son of the foremost Etruscan nobleman. In truth, however, what is there for you in it? The matter is years old. Still, you’re as unlikely to believe me in this as in anything else. Therefore, as far as I’m concerned you might as well stick to your version. She lives, her husband, whom she’d deceived, keeps her hidden and I, I have painted her. Are you satisfied now?”

  “Your reasons,” retorted Bougainville, who had listened to him with sparkling eyes, “for confirming my surmises—what am I saying? My convictions!—are of no interest to me, my dear sir! Whether you think I’m mad or not, you do not deny that Mona Lisa may still be alive, do you?”

  “What would be the point,” Leonardo said, “of me insisting on anything else?”

  “And is this Messer Capponi still her lover?”

  “I ought not,” Leonardo said, shrugging his shoulders, “have told you that. If, however, you can in the event persuade yourself that it is feasible for a woman, while being held in captivity by her husband, still to contrive to have a lover, have it your way. Women—you will concede—are very resourceful, and will use every ploy to achieve their ends, and the lovers of hapless women have it in them to be extraordinarily faithful. The two are still very much in love. And now, I’d be most grateful to you if you would be so good as to leave me. I still have a mind to snatch a couple more hours’ sleep. That apart, I’m pretty sure you will give me the pleasure of paying me another visit before too long. Don’t hesitate therefore to inconvenience me, but at least spare Giocondo and Capponi, on whom I have, incidentally, drawn a bill recently, or something of the kind. Speaking for myself, I’m used to being imposed upon. And so, goodbye!”

  Bougainville, who had put the dagger under his arm, stood still for a few more seconds, and it seemed he was about to say something.

  “I expected as much,” was all he finally muttered.

  And, without taking his leave, he turned sharp on his heels and left the house.

  WHEN BOUGAINVILLE RETURNED, a number of La Trémoille’s noblemen were still up. They sat in the house of a certain Fifante, drinking their fill in the company of a few girls and singing in full voice, “Mignonne, allons voir,” and, “Ha! belle blonde.”

  “Gentlemen,” Bougainville said, joining them, “please excuse me for interrupting your merrymaking. Only I need your help in a very important matter.”

  The singers fell silent, but one of the girls, just then being tickled by Monsieur de Pierredon, who hadn’t noticed Bougainville come in, screeched out. When, however, Pierredon realized that in the ensuing silence all eyes were turned on him he changed tack, and from being amiable turned vicious by delivering the girl a loud smack across her face. She sprang to her feet in a rage and dashed out of the room.

  Bougainville, his eyes aflame, looked from one to the other.

  “Well, my dear sir,” the Vicomte de Châteaudun finally asked, “what is it all about? I hope you will have the goodness to tell us.”

  “A lady…” Bougainville began.

  “Naturally, a lady!” Monsieur de Chauvelin exclaimed. “Only what is the problem with this lady?”

  “She is being held captive in this city in demeaning conditions. Allow me to describe the circumstances which have led me to discover her unfortunate plight. It might suffice for you to know that this lady is very young, very beautiful and very unfortunate. I consider it my duty to come to her aid and I’m counting on your support, gentlemen. Let us break into the house, search it and free the lady!”

  Bougainville’s proposal was immediately taken up with exclamations of joy. The noblemen were in any case aware that they were regarded not as masters, like in the times of Charles VIII nine years previously, but were merely tolerated. Bougainville’s proposal offered a most welcome opportunity to change this state of affairs. “Monsieur de Bougainville,” the noblemen called out, “that is good! That is excellent, Monsieur de Bougainville! Your proposal is one of the best! It will be our pleasure to put our persons at your disposal! We are delighted to be of service to you! Long live Bougainville! Upon my honour, young as he is, he’s also one of the noblest men! He takes after Monsieur de Bonneval, his uncle! He follows completely in his footsteps!”

  They did not make any further enquiries as to the circumstances or even the name of the lady to whom they were ready to extend their help; instead they called for their arms and horses, and a little later the cavalcade, followed by servants, moved with noisy defiance towards Ser Francesco’s residence, Bougainville at the head. The entrance to the house and the windows within reach were bombarded with rocks and stones and the door was finally forced open. Shouting and alarm overwhelmed the whole neighbourhood. People, woken from their sleep, began to peer from all the windows, asking what the blazes was going on. A bell began to peal erratically.

  Ser Francesco confronted the intruders on the first floor. He was a man of about forty to forty-five years of age, of a respectable appearance, slightly greying, but still possessed of youthful charm. With hardly any clothes on, he was wielding a sword in his hand. Behind him were ranged his servants, armed with bats, rolling pins and skewering irons.

  “My dear friends of France,” he said, “what gives you the right to break into my house? How dare you break down the door? What do you want here?”

  “That, scoundrel that you are,” the Count of Jarnac ex
claimed, “you are about to find out!” In truth, he himself wasn’t sure. However, Bougainville planted himself in front of Giocondo and yelled, “Where’s your wife?”

  Ser Francesco looked at him in bewilderment.

  “That’s right!” Bougainville bellowed. “Your wife! Where is she? We want to know!”

  “Gentlemen,” Ser Francesco said, “who are you that you assume the right to enquire after her? I no longer have a wife. I had three, but they all died.”

  “That’s just not true!” Bougainville insisted. “What I mean is, Mona Vanna and Mona Bice are dead, but not Mona Lisa!”

  “How do you know that?” Giocondo exclaimed. “Or, more to the point, what gives you that idea? Did you know her? And besides, how is it you are informed about my family’s affairs?”

  “As a matter of fact,” Bougainville retorted, “I’m excellently well informed! Besides, I’ve also uncovered things of which others are quite ignorant, for instance that your wife is not at all buried in Santa Croce. What say you to that, my Italian friend, well?”

  Giocondo took a couple of steps back; he went red and appeared to have been touched to the quick. “What on earth do you mean?” he finally asked.

  “I mean what I mean!” Bougainville bellowed.

  “But what makes you so certain?”

  “Because I’ve verified it all myself!”

  “What?” Giocondo exclaimed. “You would have…”

  “That’s right! Not only would I have, I indeed have as a matter of fact! So tell me, where is that wife of yours? Tell me immediately if you don’t want me to seek out with the tip of this blade where you’ve hidden your secret—you villain, that you should have had the audacity to keep such a delightful creature from the eyes of the world, to torment her and even to have her portrait painted!”