The Vanishing of the Mona Lisa

by Martin Caparros

  “Even for what?”

  “For what I want him to do.”

  “Which is…?”

  Valfierno reaches over and grasps her hand—the one with the costume jewelry resting on the tablecloth—but lets her question hang in the air. He feels the way her fingers contract out of either nervousness or disgust.

  “You know what I remember, Marqués?”

  “I’d rather not think.”

  “I remember the time I asked you what the strangest thing you’d ever faked was. Do you remember what you said?”

  “Yes.”

  “You didn’t say anything. You acted all proper. And I thought you were even faking that. But now you can’t do that. I’m the one who told you Perugia worked in the Louvre. I’m the one who came up with the idea that we could get up to something with him. Don’t think now that you’re going to give me the shove!”

  “I would never trick you, Valérie, if that’s what you’re talking about.”

  “My love, you know I could find out so easily…”

  Not only does he know, but he guesses that she has already found out. That she is pretending to ask him these questions but already has all the answers from Perugia. He would like to know what kind of relationship she has with the Italian.

  He is calmer now. He’s decided that it doesn’t bother him if Valérie thinks she is using him; he doesn’t care. As long as she behaves and he can use her, he doesn’t care. As long as I can let off steam with her, he thinks, and the phrase sticks: let off steam. But there are moments when he’s not convinced. He should stop seeing her, forget her once and for all, just forget. And above all not get her mixed up in this. That will be difficult.

  “It’s better for you not to know anything, Valérie.”

  “Better why? For who?”

  “Better for you. And for me.”

  “So you’re going to keep me out?”

  “Out of what?”

  “Marqués Eduardo de Valfierno, or whoever you are, I’m young, and it’s useful for me that people like you think I’m not smart, but I am. And I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to treat me as if I wasn’t.”

  There’s something in her tone that annoys Valfierno. He wipes his mouth with the white napkin, coughs, and lifts his head. And says what he hadn’t planned to:

  “In that case let’s be clear. From now on we’re going to stop seeing each other. It’s not working, neither for you nor for me, and it’s not helping us, either. You’re to stay out of this business. Leave it to me. Of course, I recognize your contribution and I’ll make a pledge to you: if everything goes well you will get from me an extraordinary gift, more than you ever dreamed.”

  “Valfierno, you can’t keep me out of this. You can’t leave me, either, Valfierno, that’s stupid!”

  Valfierno looks at her with something close to tenderness. He asks himself if it’s true that he’s just left her.

  “It’s for your own good,” he tells her, but he worries. Valérie is a child; she has nothing to lose and she doesn’t know the way things work. She could make trouble.

  “You don’t know who you’re playing with,” she says and bares those teeth.

  9

  “SO YOU DIDN’T SEE VALÉRIE again?”

  “Who?”

  “Valérie. Valfierno’s woman friend. The one who helped him…”

  “Ah, her name was Valérie.”

  “Did you forget? From everything I’ve heard, she wasn’t the type of woman you forget easily,” I said. Chaudron looked toward the kitchen before he replied. For the moment, Ivanka was nowhere to be seen, but she could have been behind the kitchen door, and he needed to know.

  “You said ‘wasn’t,’ Becker. Is she dead?”

  “I don’t know. I was hoping you could tell me something. I haven’t been able to find her anywhere. But if you don’t even remember her name…”

  “Remember? I never met her. He never introduced us. Divide and conquer was one of the Marqués’s specialties, you know.” He smiled to himself as he said this and drew his hand down his face as if he was tired. The way he said “Marqués’s” sounded strange.

  “There I go again, letting him have his way. I would never say ‘divide and conquer.’ That was the way he talked, always so pompous: ‘divide and conquer.’”

  “Then if you don’t mind my asking, why do you care whether she’s alive or dead?”

  “I don’t. Of course I don’t. Why would I?”

  He made a point of this. Up until then Yves Chaudron had seemed like someone who’d resist any kind of emphatic statement. The kind of person who worries that any assertion is going to get him into trouble. But now he was emphasizing too much. I was intrigued, but I hadn’t come there to get to the bottom of his relationship with Valérie Larbin, or whatever he used to call her.

  “Why do you say ‘divide and conquer’?”

  “You don’t know how he was!”

  “Who are you talking about?”

  “Him, Becker—Valfierno. Who do you think we’re supposed to be talking about?”

  “Valfierno, right. Sorry, Chaudron.”

  “Well, I think he was always worried that we’d gang up on him. It worried him. Stupid. Why would we have done anything like that?”

  “Why would you?”

  “I don’t know. To steal his ideas, I guess. That’s what he was afraid of: that we’d steal his ideas—as if he had any. He always believed that people around him couldn’t help envying him and that they would try to take whatever he had. Or maybe he was afraid we’d found out something about him, I don’t know. That he wasn’t what he said he was. That we didn’t really need him. The truth is, I don’t care. Don’t think that I care.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said, but Chaudron had already slipped away. The old man went back and forth between a friendly distance and complete absence.

  He was still now, his gaze on a painting that hung on the opposite wall of the little country house. The house was so cheesy, so French. It was funny to think that this elderly man had taken part in one of the great art cons of the century to furnish his house with fake country-rustic chairs and fake flowers. The painting seemed familiar: a Virgin on some rocks with a chubby infant, done in dark tones. It was a large painting with a gloomy and imposing kind of beauty, and I wondered to myself if it was one of his.

  “Yes, I did that one,” he said, without my asking. “I did it when I was Leonardo.”

  “What do you mean, ‘when I was Leonardo’?”

  “What I said. Do you think that the way you paint someone else’s painting is to grab a brush and try to copy each and every brushstroke? That’s what I thought when I started, when I studied with Professor Falaise in Lyon. You don’t know what it cost me to find out I was wrong. The truth is, I owe that to Valfierno. He showed me that if you want to do what someone does, you have to become that someone else. That’s what he was best at. Think about it—we talk about him now and we call him Valfierno.”

  “I don’t see your point.”

  “I could explain it if I weren’t so tired. Though I shouldn’t. The thing is, I’m not old enough yet to be this tired. But it’s what I said—to paint like Leonardo I had to be Leonardo. I had to study his writings, eat his food, feel his frustrations, live…”

  I didn’t dare ask him if he’d also adopted his sexual habits. Sunk there in his armchair with its flowered cover, he didn’t look like someone who would ever have been involved in such a thing. Perhaps he was right when he told me that no one ever remembered him, that he didn’t stay in people’s minds. His work was memorable, but he himself had no distinctive feature apart from that. I wondered how you could remember someone who had nothing memorable about them, but this was silly—I was wasting time on distractions. Ivanka bumped the kitchen door to let us know she was coming in. Without realizing what he was doing, Chaudron sat up and straightened himself in the chair.

  “Chéri, it’s time for your medicines.”

  “
Yes, dear.”

  I asked him if he was ill, and he looked as if he had expected the question. Then I asked him to tell me what had happened when he got to Buenos Aires, and he replied that he’d already said he wouldn’t give me any details.

  “That’s all right, I don’t need details—just give me a general idea of what happened.”

  Yves Chaudron asked his round Russian wife for water to wash down his medicines and told me that in the beginning, Buenos Aires had intimidated him as much as Paris had, only for different reasons—it was a jungle.

  “It was a completely wild place, where you could do anything, or so it seemed. You don’t know the energy that ran through the city. All those people who’d just arrived from somewhere, who had brought with them the force of their hunger or their hope and were poised, ready to leap at the first opportunity. Believe me. It wasn’t only me, it was a frightening place.”

  It took Chaudron a couple of weeks to find his first job: he was taken on by a Portuguese photographer to paint watercolor portraits of his subjects which they could have along with their photo for a reasonable sum. It was a good idea—he told me they came out better in the portraits than in the photos—and the Portuguese began to make good money while Chaudron had to content himself with a wage that barely covered his room and board. He wouldn’t have minded so much, he said, had he not been half in love with a Serbian seamstress who used to throw his poverty in his face. Across the room, Ivanka again interrupted her sewing to pay closer attention. She was sitting just below the big painting, and it occurred to me suddenly that the face of the fake Virgin looked a lot like Valfierno’s description of Valérie. Something prevented her from smiling.

  “I decided that I didn’t need the Portuguese, that I could do portraits for myself, and I had some cards made up offering my services. I thought it would be hard to get customers, but in those days in Buenos Aires everybody needed everything. The problem was when I went to paint their portraits. I’d get them to pose and try to paint them, but I could never get the portraits to come out looking like them. I had no trouble copying photographs, but when they posed for me I couldn’t make it work. I shouldn’t really have been surprised, it’s exactly what happened to me before I left France. I must have thought that by changing countries and starting a new life, I’d be able to paint models, but I found out that I couldn’t, that I was still me, just on a different continent. It was very dispiriting.”

  Chaudron then found another photographer with whom he could have the same deal he’d had with the Portuguese. It took him months to get things back to the way they’d been before his split, but then he resigned himself to it, working for years as a secondhand portraitist. He made enough to rent a small apartment, woo the Serbian girl, and even save a little. He had no great ambitions, and he thought his life would just go on like that for a long time.

  “Or forever. I really thought things would be like that always, but you know how it is, there are words that people like me don’t dare say.”

  I didn’t ask him what he meant by “people like me”; I was beginning to understand. The new century had just begun when he got a new job with more money and above all more stability—he heard that the Post Office was looking for an artist to design stamps.

  “I’d never done that before, imagine, but in those days the Argentines were still kind of naïve—they thought a Frenchman could do anything. I showed up and they hired me. After a while, I got hired by some other people to do the same thing.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What I said, Becker. Don’t be an idiot. There were other guys who paid me a lot more for the same designs.”

  “Collectors?”

  “Becker, please. I did it. I made good money. Maybe you just don’t know—there’s not much difference between working this side of the law or the other. Why would you know? Luckily, most people think there’s a big difference. If it wasn’t for that, the world would be a big mess.”

  “Excuse me, Chaudron, I don’t really understand what you mean.”

  “Makes no difference to me,” replied Chaudron, paying no attention to me now. Sometimes his humility would transform itself into a quiet contempt. For a few moments, it was clear that he wasn’t speaking to me, that he didn’t need me for anything.

  “The problem was, I was bored. I had a lot of time on my hands and I was bored. The Serbian girl had gone and married someone from her own country. I was grown up now and still alone, and I was bored. If it hadn’t been for that, I guess I would never have met him.”

  “Met who, Chaudron?”

  “Who are we talking about, Becker?”

  Ivanka had appeared silently—a benefit of wearing the plush slippers she wore in the house. She seemed to exaggerate her accent as she offered us dinner. I told her she shouldn’t go to any trouble, and she replied that it was no trouble, that it was all ready. Chaudron smiled.

  “Enjoy it, Becker. My wife cooks like an angel and isn’t usually so generous. She obviously likes you.”

  The table was in the kitchen. Ivanka served us dumplings that she called pirugies or pierogies, filled with something I couldn’t identify and smothered in cream; I had to struggle to finish them. We drank wine, and the talk wandered to the state of the world. The Russian woman didn’t say a word. Chaudron seemed to be well up on the effects of the crisis, unemployment, the dangers we faced. He ate as if he wasn’t paying attention, but he came back twice for another serving. Ivanka smiled. Chaudron spoke with his mouth full:

  “I don’t know what you think, Becker, being an American, but more and more people think that capitalism won’t make it through this crisis, that this time it’s finished.”

  “That’s just foolish.”

  “Don’t you believe it. Look at Germany here, right next door. The Communists are almost ready to take control, and then we really are finished. If somebody doesn’t stop them, the world we know will be over in a few years.”

  I couldn’t tell if this prospect scared or exhilarated him, and I didn’t want to investigate. It still seemed ludicrous to me. During the month I’d been in France I’d heard the same story a number of times—European hysterics, the nightmares of countries that had been weakened by complacency and a surfeit of ideas. When Ivanka offered us coffee, I asked Chaudron if we could have it in the sitting room so that we could return to our discussion before it got too late. She wasn’t happy about it but she said nothing.

  “So you were telling me that you met Valfierno because you were bored.”

  “In a sense, but yes, it’s true,” he said, and he lowered his voice. “I used to go to this whorehouse in the center of Buenos Aires, a modest place, nothing expensive. The girls would dance the tango, and then there was the rest of it. That’s where I met him.”

  “So you became friends because you were, how do I put it—partners in adventure?”

  “‘Friends’ is a bit strong. With him, ‘friends’ was always a bit strong. The Marqués isn’t the kind of guy who really knows how to have friends.”

  Chaudron was still talking about him in the present, and once again I wondered whether to tell him. It bothered me that I didn’t know whether he’d think it was good news or bad.

  “No, we weren’t friends. And anyway, he wasn’t there for fun; he worked there.”

  I don’t know if it was calculated, if he’d planned for the impact, but I had the impression that he enjoyed the effect his words had on me. I tried to hide my reaction, but I suspect I didn’t do a very good job.

  “What do you mean he worked there? Didn’t you say it was a whorehouse?”

  “Sure I did—it was Señora Anunciación’s brothel. Kind of a second-rate whorehouse. Just right for him.”

  10

  “YOU’RE GOING TO HAVE TO do six.”

  “Six?”

  “What’d I say? Three? Nine? Twenty-four?”

  “Steady, Marqués, don’t have a fit. And remember that you told me it would be five.”

  It�
��s ten in the morning. Valfierno has had nothing to drink but he paces nervously back and forth from one side of the studio to the other. He doesn’t have much room, perhaps three or four paces. He thinks it might be Chaudron’s studio that is making him nervous, the crammed little room, dingy in spite of the sun and fastidiously organized. Or perhaps it’s Chaudron himself—his quiet, and his increasingly timid look—these irritate him to a point that is frankly worrying. He has to control himself; he needs the painter.

  “Yes, you’re right, I did say five, Yves. But I just received a letter from Philadelphia: the last one has fallen! I thought he wasn’t interested but he writes that he is, to excuse his changing his mind, that he begs me…Don’t for a moment think that it’s not appealing to have the most powerful oilman in the United States of America begging you.”

  Chaudron wipes his hands on a rag soaked in turpentine, and the smell startles Valfierno. It’s cold. Though he’s at home, Chaudron wears a brown scarf around his neck over a paint-spattered smock. Valfierno has not removed his black woolen coat with its fur collar.

  “Three more copies, in that case. That could take months.”

  “We don’t have that long, Yves.”

  “I don’t care how long you say we have. I have a job to do and I’m going to do a good job. What do you think of these?” he asks Valfierno, showing him two identical Jocondes leaning on two easels. Chaudron knows that the question is purely rhetorical. In the last weeks Valfierno has been to the Louvre various times to see the original and he has it now in his mind. At first glance, Chaudron’s Jocondes are perfect. It occurs to him that there is a risk that they are too good, that they are more like the original than the original itself.

  “Astonishing, Yves, as always. I suppose you’re taking the same care with the details as you are with the way it looks?”

  “You know very well, Valfierno. Boards of the same kind of wood, well aged, the paints made according to the same methods, the same cracks…You know what my dream is? To have Leonardo himself come and try to tell the difference!”