The Vanishing of the Mona Lisa

by Martin Caparros

  “You know what, Newspaperman? I was content. I’d venture to say that for the first time in my life I’d found my place. And I’d learned that anyone who blamed circumstances for not reaching his goals was just lying. That anyone with enough will can get what he wants, and that those who don’t are the weak, the ones who don’t measure up. That those who only get part of the way deserve it. That if you’re poor it’s because you don’t know how not to be, or because you want to be. And that there’s nothing worse than those who call themselves Socialists, who believe it’s good to be poor. Just like the priests, who comfort them and convince them that wretchedness is a blessing.”

  “Did you ever think about that, Eduardo?”

  “Well, sure I have, sometimes.”

  “And what did you think?”

  “Oh, nothing; I barely remember.”

  But neither did he feel like a great man. He thought that there might have been a moment when he was almost there, but that was much later, after the moment had passed. That’s how those moments are, he thought. Who could ever recognize them when they were right there in front of you, and not long after they’d gone? Who could ever really know them, savor them, grab hold of them?

  He thought that he’d become accustomed now to being who he was, and that you could only feel great in those rare, short moments when you passed from one state to another, those moments in which you grow, the way a river appears, he thought, or a word comes into being. And that now he would never feel that. He had let his one chance slip away. If only he could start everything again and be right at the beginning of it all.

  Now that he’d achieved it, he’d lost that chance.

  He is proud to have learned so much about art and paintings. He can now unfailingly tell the difference between a Murillo and a Zurbarán, for example, though he still cannot differentiate between a Murillo by Murillo and a Murillo by Chaudron. This comforts him.

  He is also proud of his library: all of Mercedes’ books, along with the books he bought during all those years and the books about art that he buys now under the pretext of needing them for his work. He only wished he had more time to read them; building his life is a project that takes a great amount of energy.

  And he is proud because, from time to time, he realizes he has recovered an idea that he had had before, and hated then—the idea that things would go on being the way they were now. Unlike then, he now finds this a most comforting thought.

  There are times when he forgets just how new his life is, or that some would not consider it his.

  Once in a while he gets the idea—if you can call it an idea—that there might still be time for him to have a child. At one point he’d wondered about Amelia, but worries—whose child would this be? Eduardo de Valfierno? A false child. Then he tells himself that everyone is like that: the child of someone, but who can always say of whom?

  But most of all, how strange to think of this now, to want it. That more has changed than he expected. He thinks he likes it but he can’t be sure.

  No, not sure.

  Sometimes he thinks that in spite of everything, Valfierno can never be sure.

  “I have a great many friends, you see? That’s what makes all the difference—having or not having friends. Being a part of things, or not. And I have many friends; we’ve all known each other forever. We can’t even remember when we met since we’ve just always been friends. These are the kind of friends you can ask for almost anything. They are decent people, these friends of mine—most of them.”

  “Of course. I, too, have some friends, but as I lived so many years abroad…”

  “Exactly. As I was saying, my friends are decent people, though in fact some of them are not. You have to have friends like that, too.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “No. I don’t think you do. The thing is, I had some of these friends find out about you. I know all about you, Bonaglia.”

  “What? What are you talking about?”

  “Don’t play the fool, Bonaglia. And above all don’t take me for a fool. You don’t get to where I am by being a fool. You must have thought we were all idiots, that you could just appear out of nowhere and say that you were a marqués and that you’d come from Paris—without even knowing where to find the paintings that you claimed you had seen, Bonaglia. The Milkmaid in the Louvre? You have a long way to go. If you’ll excuse my saying so, Bonaglia, the only idiot here is you.”

  “But—”

  “No, Bonaglia, no buts. I’ve already listened to you too much—now you listen to me. I would, if I were you, if I wanted to survive. If you care about surviving, if it matters to you. Very simply—either you give me all the paintings or you’ll go to jail for false identity, and that’s just the beginning. That’ll get you a few years in prison. After that, if you’re lucky, you’ll be deported. And we’ve got more in store, you can bet we have more in store for you.”

  “Excuse me, but I don’t know what you are saying to me.”

  “You know very well, Bonaglia. Far too well.”

  I was sweating. A few days earlier, Mariano de Aliaga had said that he was interested in a Ribera I’d mentioned and we’d left it that I would bring it over to his house. I noticed that he’d tried to insist on coming to my house instead, and I had some difficulty persuading him that I should come to his house. Finally, he assented, and that afternoon, I appeared with the painting under my arm. It was a painting of a Franciscan friar done in chiaroscuro, his cheeks rosy with wine, an almost degenerate smile on his face. Chaudron had done an extraordinary job. He had outdone himself; the friar’s portrait was not a copy of an existing painting but an original—an original José de Ribera by Chaudron.

  And Aliaga had been elated, thought it incredible—or so he had said. Ribera could paint the decadence of man like no one else, perhaps he did it to emphasize the glory of our Lord, but there really was no one like him for being able to bring degradation and loss to life in a painting. He was the painter this world deserved—if he’d been alive and painting today, he’d have been condemned for being too dangerous, too corrosive, too much of a wild element. Aliaga was exultant—he examined the painting carefully, an expression of joy on his face, the way a stallion looks at a filly. His eyes shone.

  “As I say, it’s very simple: either you give me the paintings or you go to jail.”

  “What are you talking about, Aliaga? What paintings?”

  “This one, to begin with.”

  Chaudron had told me that to copy a painting was a stupid idea, that what interested him more and more was to create a painting. Not to forge a painting but to reproduce the actions, the process of its creator, he said. And to reproduce certain days from his life—the days that he’d spent thinking about the painting’s themes, doing sketches for it, finishing it. That what he wanted was to recreate a painter’s painting, to do everything the painter would have had to do in painting it. Not what he did, not what he could have done—what he had to have done. “To create paintings of his that were better than his own paintings because I now know,” Chaudron told me, “I now know what he could have done but never did.” He frightened me sometimes. His pride would be his downfall.

  “I know there are others, Bonaglia. You’ll leave me this one for now.”

  “But why would you want it if it’s a fake?”

  “You still think I’m an idiot? I want this painting and all the others. I’m not going to let a fraud like you continue to wreak havoc on decent folk.”

  “But—”

  “No buts. It’s your life. I won’t ask where they come from, where you steal them. Right now I don’t care; it’s not my problem. You’re going to give them all to me. I want them all here in one week; every one right here. I’ll make sure they go where they need to.”

  He has walked for hours, all over the city. He comes to Chaudron’s house at one in the morning and wakes him by shouting outside his window.

  “They’ve found us out! We’ve got to leave!”<
br />
  “What? How? What happened? Tell me what happened. What are you saying?”

  “There’s no time, we have to leave now!” says Valfierno, extremely agitated. Later, as he calms down, he tells him: “If we don’t leave Buenos Aires now we’ll end up in jail.”

  “Aliaga?”

  “Yes, Aliaga.”

  Chaudron tells Valfierno that he’d always given him a bad feeling, that prig, that he’d never wanted to say anything before, but that he’d never liked him. He tells Valfierno to calm down, to wait, to sit and have a glass of wine and think it through. But Valfierno tells him there’s nothing to think about, that they have to disappear as soon as possible, it’s the only way out. Perhaps they can go to Mendoza, he says, and see what they can do there. Perhaps to Chile, who knows; the main thing is to get far away from here. Chaudron remains silent for a few minutes. Valfierno has his eyes closed, trying not to look at all the canvases piled up against the wall, his treasures, now rapidly becoming his accusers, the collapse of his new life, just as it was beginning.

  “There’s a ship leaving for Le Havre in three days.”

  “What good does that do us?”

  “What do you mean, ‘what good’? We can be on it. We can escape to France.”

  “France?”

  “Sure. Isn’t France where you lived for all those years?”

  “Not now, Chaudron.”

  “Seriously, Enrique. I don’t think we have a lot of choice. And with the money we have now we can get by for a few months in Paris. We should be able to figure something out in that time, don’t you think?”

  “What I think, Chaudron, is that you don’t understand anything. What the hell are we going to do in Paris? What in God’s name am I going to do in Paris?”

  8

  ANYONE WHO SEES HIM IS going to know that it’s not his jacket, he thinks, and see how out of place he is in the straw hat, black jacket, and blue tie. And even though the suit he has on is old and slightly rumpled, it still doesn’t look as if it’s his, and he imagines that everyone going by is looking at him, and noticing, and that one of them is bound to suspect.

  In that short walk, Vincenzo Perugia has to tell himself several times that it’s not true, that no one is looking, that luckily—for once it is lucky—he’s the kind of guy no one looks at twice, and that Valérie was right to say she didn’t want to see him anymore; what had been unexpected was that she’d fallen for him like that in the first place. What happened afterward—well, that wasn’t unexpected. But she had looked at him twice, and for that she was special. Sweat drips from his hat.

  “Tickets! Buy your tickets here! Line up over there to go inside!”

  It’s three in the afternoon on Sunday, and it’s punishingly hot, even for August, though all the papers had said that this summer of 1911 would make history. Vincenzo Perugia crosses the Louvre’s main courtyard and slips through the Denon entrance into the cool interior air. He is surprised to see so many people there—it still amazes him that there are so many people in the world, all of them so different, and he’s even gone so far as to ask himself why.

  This afternoon he is surprised by the hundreds of people entering the museum through the main door on either side of him. They must all be seeking the cool of those enormous dark galleries, he thinks, but then he changes his mind: that young couple there—him in a white shirt and her in a white dress—look like they’ve come to grope each other. And that group of Germans in their seventies, who are listening intently to what their guide is reading them, must love art and paintings. And that mustachioed father with his four children probably just had to get out of the house. And those two American ladies in their forties must be looking for men.

  So many people, and all of them out without a care, thinks Perugia. They are at the museum just as they could be anywhere, knowing that in an hour the museum will close and they will all go home—all except for him. Rather than envy, he feels a kind of solitude, a strangeness. It doesn’t occur to Perugia that to anyone looking at him, he, too, looks like he’s just out for the afternoon, and that any one of them, like him, could also be hiding any number of things, secret desires.

  Later—that same night—he’ll think that if he hadn’t been such an idiot, if he’d only had a little more imagination that afternoon it could have occurred to him to go right back to his pension, and he might still have done it. But there, on that hot afternoon, it does not occur to him, and he keeps walking.

  As he walks he is jostled by the crowd, and he realizes suddenly that the crush of people is lucky for him. Everyone is talking. Perugia thinks it strange how the whispers of so many people, saying of course-tomorrow-boat-painting-oh Paris-my sister-no question, can converge to become such a roar. He thinks that it’s strange, and that in itself is strange, for he never usually thinks about such things. He hopes this will not last long, for now the noise is bothering him; he is a little nervous. No, he tells himself, I am not nervous, but he’s not sure. Perhaps he should be—he does not know which is better.

  Then he is standing by the enormous, sweeping staircase. Once again—it is months now since he’s been here—he tells himself how magnificent it is: the staircase, the ceiling, the columns, the marble, and the mirrors, most of all the mirrors. Perugia looks around him and imagines the impression this must be having on those people. Not so much on him, for he has seen it before, but certainly on all those people: “They must be amazed. Luckily I’ve seen it, and even so I’m impressed—me, an Italian from the land of emperors and painted churches, and I’m impressed. I hope the brothers don’t get scared,” he thinks. He is sure that they never come here. “I hope they show up.”

  “Excuse me, sir, could you tell me where to find the Venus de Milo?”

  “How should I know? Why don’t you ask one of the guards.”

  Perugia turns to the staircase that leads up to the second floor and as he does so he has the impression that one of the guards is looking at him. He is worried, not because the guard might recognize him but because he notices that the guard is wearing a yellow badge in his lapel, and he knows only too well that yellow is the most unlucky color of all, and he slips his left hand into his pocket to touch his left testicle without anyone seeing. He exhales, slightly calmer, though it’s true that the guard could recognize him. Even though Perugia doesn’t recognize him, the guard might know him from when he worked there the year before. It’s unlikely, and would be terrible luck, he thinks, deciding to reject the notion.

  It had happened purely by chance: his boss at the time had been hired to install panes of glass over the museum’s more famous paintings. It was pure luck, and this surprised him, for he was never lucky. He knows this. He doesn’t like to think of it but it’s true: he’s never been lucky in his life, that’s why he has to try to pay attention to everything. If only he could have just a little of the Signore’s luck; he clearly has enough to go around.

  But it really had been pure good luck that his boss had got the job of installing the glass, except—but he doesn’t want to finish the thought. Just in case. It’s better not to think of these things, especially on a day like today. Pure luck that just then, alarmed by a gang of lunatics who were going around vandalizing paintings, as if there were nothing else to vandalize, the museum directors had decided to protect their most famous paintings behind panes of glass.

  What Perugia didn’t know, had no reason to know, was that the directors’ decision had caused a huge scandal. There was outrage in the elegant salons and letters to the newspapers over this unspeakable attack on classical art, and a young novelist had come with his brush and razor and shaved himself in the reflection of one of the panes.

  But Perugia is not aware of this. He knows only that his boss had told him to build the large wooden box frames for the paintings to be protected, and that every day for months he had gone to the museum to install them.

  He’d had plenty of time then to learn all about how that great palace operated, which is obviou
sly why the Signore chose him for this job, and why Perugia has dressed in his Sunday best, as the Signore instructed, though the jacket is uncomfortable. Perugia wonders briefly if it was a mistake to tell him to wear a jacket, and if perhaps the Signore has made other mistakes. Who really knows who he is, after all, this guy who has told him to do all these things, this man he’s trusting enough to take part in this charade with who knows what consequences? But then he looks around him and sees a number of people in jackets and realizes that the Signore was right, that if he’d shown up at the museum without a jacket he’d have attracted attention, and he adjusts his blue tie. The Signore was right.

  “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners…,” whispers Perugia, trying not to move his lips, and he is comforted by this as he enters the Duchâtel Room. “Now and at the hour of our d—,” he says and he stops short. Everybody knows you can’t say the word “death” in a situation like this; it’s better not to tempt fate.

  There are never many people in the Duchâtel Room, which is why Perugia and the Signore chose it—that, and because of the little room. As Perugia walks in he sees no guards, just another pair of youths, indifferent to their surroundings, three distinguished-looking older women, and, down at the end, by an enormous painting, the two Lancelotti brothers. Perugia breaths a sigh of relief and then immediately starts to worry again. The brothers have to remember that they are not to greet him or speak to him or make any sign of acknowledgment, just as he told them at the Bistro Berthe the previous night. He can’t be sure—the brothers are both thick as planks, but he had told them so many times that they may just have understood.

  “What if something happens?” they’d asked him.

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know, something might happen—anything. Like if they ask us what we’re doing, or if they grab you, or if there’s a guard there the whole time.”