The Vanishing of the Mona Lisa

by Martin Caparros

  The man walks along that street and does not think of himself as a father.

  “And is it true that you hate Italy? That you hate everything Italian?”

  “Why would I hate Italy, Newspaperman?”

  “Because of what happened to your father; your father’s death.”

  “Who told you anything about my father? Didn’t I tell you a million times that I don’t have a father?”

  He had read when he was in Buenos Aires that there have always been forgeries. That the Egyptians made precious stones with pieces of colored glass. That the Romans kept on carving Greek statues, and that the first Christians made fortunes selling pieces of the cross, the bones of martyrs, the spikes that had held Jesus up. That anything worth anything gets forged, and that nothing worth nothing does. That to forge something is an act of homage. That to reproduce nature itself was a sign of man’s greatness, a way of showing nature that its power could be matched. And that to forge art is a form of humility, of showing that the value of a human creation is an illusion—one convention among infinite possibilities.

  And that everything that man does is either a copy or a forgery—that man’s only original invention has been the right angle, something nature never came up with. In other words, he tells himself, the only thing that is definitely not fake, the only thing you can know to be genuine, is the right angle, a rectangle, any corner. Which really doesn’t get you very far.

  The man walks along that street very differently from the way he’s walked down the same street so many times before. On this walk, important things could be decided.

  Despite the fact that he is facing a moment that could prove to be critical for him, an act whose consequences would be irreversible, we imagine that this man—GianFelice Bonaglia, born in Pescara, on the twenty-fourth of June, 1844, a Monday, the feast of St. John, a textile dyer by profession, married to Annunziata Perrone and with a son named GianMaria—does not seem fully convinced of what he is about to do.

  He asks himself why he is doing it but does not come up with an answer that satisfies him. Let us say that in spite of this, he cannot think of a way out—he thinks it would be even more difficult to find a satisfactory answer to the question of why or how not to go ahead, and so he keeps walking.

  Or let us say that he does not think that what is about to happen is of such great consequence; that if he could anticipate what was about to happen he would find—would certainly find—a way to retreat.

  We can say then that he is about to become the victim, as much as anything, of a poor imagination. We can postulate that bravery is often more than anything a failure of the imagination. Or a surfeit of reality—a confidence in the insistence of reality. Men who tell themselves that since fearsome things do not usually occur, there is therefore no reason to fear that they will occur now.

  Valfierno does not want to see anyone that night. He goes to his room and tells himself that he must come up with some alternatives. He has always told himself that the most important thing is to anticipate the various possibilities, all the potential developments, at the beginning of any endeavor. But tonight he has had enough. The situation seems incredible to him, and he concludes that if he were to think about it he would understand it less and it would disturb him more.

  Today, he—his men—stole the Mona Lisa. He has finally achieved something he’s been contemplating for years. He’s done what no one else has been able to do, he has stolen the most famous painting in the world, and the story is not in the newspapers. He pours himself a generous cognac and tries not to think but cannot help himself. He wants to get dressed and go and see Chaudron, who is the only one he can tell about this, but he can’t. It would be a mistake, he warns himself.

  He makes himself another drink. He knows that La Joconde is no longer in the Louvre, he knows they took her, he’s quite sure that he has just seen her, and yet there is nothing in the papers. Without the story in the papers, his plan is worth nothing; the paintings—nothing. Without the news, his own story crumbles. If those poor guys knew that he had sent them to steal the Mona Lisa just so that the story would be in the papers!

  He tries not to think, then tries to guess what could be happening. The museum does not want the story to come out. The police don’t want the story out yet—they know something that he doesn’t know, something they don’t want anyone else to know; they’re about to figure everything out and they don’t want the story to come out until they’ve wrapped it all up. They’re on their way to pick him up now. They have no clues, there is no way they can know anything. The painting was a copy that they had on display in case it was ever stolen.

  He had stolen a copy.

  Valfierno breathes deeply and gets very still, his eyes staring at the closed window, his neck tight: he has stolen a copy. He’s fallen right in the trap. They’ve given him a taste of his own medicine. He has fallen into their trap.

  He tries to console himself, telling himself that if he’d been sure everything was going to work out perfectly there would never have been any point in doing it. He considers this for a moment, as if he’d just found a way out, then: Utter stupidity! he thinks, annoyed. Just the Marqués’s sophistry!

  Now he thinks that it isn’t possible, the Louvre could never put a false painting on display, they couldn’t bring themselves to do it, they have patrons who would notice, and he smiles bitterly to himself, the small consolation of disdain in the midst of his downfall. He knows better than anyone that there are few, if any, who would know. He has stolen a fake, he thinks, and in the face of this theory all the others fade. He fell for his own trick. He has just begun to relax—to turn his head, to reach for a cigarette, to look around the room—when it occurs to him that he can bring down many others in his fall—he is going to tell everything. The newspapers are going to hear that the painting hanging in the Salon Carré was a copy, that the Louvre lies to the public, that everything is a fake.

  He walks. GianFelice Bonaglia is not yet thirty—between twenty and thirty—broad and almost tall, with bulging legs, his rough head crowned with a mass of black hair that tumbles beyond control. Trying to tame that hair has always seemed to him like a waste of time, a prissy concern for rich young men. His face would certainly be a concern for such a young gentleman: a square jaw, a nose that looked as if it had been hacked out, the thick eyebrows sitting above dark sunken eyes like narrow slits, the mouth without flesh, more like a puncture.

  It is summer. GianFelice Bonaglia is wearing a dirty white shirt open at the chest, and black corduroy breeches—his only pants—which go down only as far as his midcalf. The modest clothing of a humble textile dyer. It is summer, and GianFelice Bonaglia does not think of his wife or his son, he just walks on, sweating. Walking beside him are hundreds more men of similar description. It doesn’t occur to Bonaglia—or at least it wouldn’t occur to him, were he to think about it—to consider those hundreds around him similar. Not a man among them would think such a thing. Not even walking all together along the Roman streets, under the Roman sun, with others who have come out because they believe they are all the same and believe, or think they believe, in the same things.

  That to copy a work of art is to recognize its value, whereas to forge it is to recognize its price. That a forger is an easy bastard, a whore, high-priced or otherwise, who doesn’t do what he thinks he should do, what he has no choice but to do, or what he ought to do, but rather what someone else has done, and what he thinks others want and will buy.

  That he was an idiot. That he deserved what he got.

  These are the final days of something that has been building for a long time. The men march, having come out of their factories that afternoon, they march, lured by the rumor that the great Garibaldi is arriving to put an end once and for all to the papists’ power. They walk along the narrow, shady streets of the outlying districts toward the wall. Some of them carry knives, one or two even a musket, but you couldn’t really say that they are armed; they are unwilling t
o believe that it will be necessary to raise arms to defeat those who are already defeated.

  Every now and then a shout rings out—a man bolstering his courage, the courage of those around him. They shout out “Viva Garibaldi, Viva Italia,” “Death to the Papists,” and several shutters swing closed as they pass. They might begin to wonder if they are not mistaken in believing that this march will be just that, with a peaceful triumph awaiting them at the end. Perhaps, in the face of those closing shutters and the women who cross themselves and that silence, they might begin to suspect that it won’t be like that, that they are mistaken. But those men are not marching because they believe they are mistaken.

  In the morning they brought him all the newspapers he had requested and the story wasn’t in any of them, only the same trivialities, and so he has stayed in his room until two in the afternoon. In certain moments he savors his anticipated revenge of telling everyone the truth; in others, the idea seems stupid. Sometimes he delights in it and savors the details—which newspaper, which reporter, what he’ll say, what he won’t say—but then he realizes that his life is ruined, and that it’s all just a way of trying to forget that he has lost his one big bet.

  So it has taken a tremendous effort for him to bathe, to shave, to comb and dress himself and to prepare to go out. He doesn’t know what to do. As deeply as he remembers feeling anything, Valfierno does not know what to do next. There have been many times in his life when he hasn’t known what to do next, even in important situations that were to define his life. These were moments in which he faltered, and he remembers them as experiences at the edge: when he decided to join the anarchists’ group in Rosario; when, unable to make any decision, he had ended up in the shop in San José de Flores; when he decided that only by leaving Buenos Aires might he have a chance to make it. He remembers these as moments of extreme stress, the most difficult, but realizes now that they weren’t; there was something about them that was kinder. Then, he had only the pressure of having to choose among a few options, whereas now there were no such options, only pure discomfort, perfect incomprehension, the despair of realizing that events that had been counted on to go a certain way had not. The feeling of not understanding what is happening, or what to do, or even what not to do. He wants to surrender himself to something, to God, to some kind of fate, but he finds none, and he doesn’t know what to do. It has taken all his will to bathe and dress and go down to the lobby and into the street.

  “La Joconde! Read all about it! The Mona Lisa has disappeared!” shouts a paper boy. And another yells:

  “Ladies and gentlemen, La Joconde has escaped!”

  Others, too, are running with front pages that declare in mammoth letters: “Inexplicable!” “Incredible!” “Shocking!” and many more. Valfierno rushes to buy one of each of them before he realizes that he is doing what he has dreamed of thousands of times, that the wondering and the faltering are over, that these newspapers—that all the world’s newspapers—were talking about him.

  The men pour out into a wide piazza, in which there are two oak trees, flaking ocher walls, and a battalion of Swiss Guards in two rows. The first row is down on one knee holding rifles up to their shoulders and the second row stands behind them at the ready. Seeing the Swiss Guards, the men at the head of the great mass of men slow their pace. They turn for a moment, looking to either side for a way out, or at least a way to stall their advance. The men behind, who have not yet seen the Swiss Guards, push forward. The men at the front yell out. Bonaglia is among them. They look to either side, raise their arms, and shout two words before turning once more to face forward, where the standing guards are lifting their rifles to their shoulders.

  “And would you say that this really happened?”

  “That? I wouldn’t even call that a story. Much later, I understood that all of it had happened, and then, even later, I also understood that none of it mattered in the least.”

  “So why did you tell me?”

  “At last, Newspaperman—a question!”

  The guards open fire. The man—the father—flees.

  He finds it exceedingly strange to be reading these stories that, without their knowing it, are about him. He is sitting in a café, next to the window, and watches as more and more excited newspaper vendors go by with late editions, the breaking story, and customers pull the papers out of their hands, the heat no longer important, Nijinsky sliding—the world now just a manifestation of his idea.

  “What audacious criminal, what magician, what maniacal collector, what hysterical fan has committed this act of outrageous thievery?” he reads. “Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa has disappeared! An event that overwhelms our own imaginations,” he reads, and he sits up taller, proud now, and cocky.

  He reads on, learning that on that morning, Tuesday morning, an amateur painter who wanted to paint a copy of the painting had asked a guard why the Mona Lisa wasn’t in her usual place. The guard had told the painter to wait, that they’d probably taken her to be photographed, or some such thing. The painter had waited until eleven and then returned to ask again, whereupon finally they had spread the alarm and begun to search through the various departments—photography, restoration, cleaning—and that, still not having found her, there had been complete confusion as they had tried to determine where she might be.

  Finally, just before noon, they had realized that she was not to be found and had called the Chief of Police, who called the Minister of the Interior, who called the President of the Republic. And that then panic had given way to scandal. That they did not know when the painting had been taken. That since yesterday—Monday—the museum had been closed, no one had noticed anything. A museum employee had said that he had noticed on Monday morning that La Joconde was not hanging in her usual place, but that since she was always being taken away for one thing or another, he said, he hadn’t given it any thought. And that this was why it had taken thirty hours for the theft to be discovered, reads Valfierno, and he cannot believe it. Such idiots! Pure incompetence. If he’d only known.

  “Clearly the thief or thieves had all the time they needed to complete their task, the details of which, at the moment, are a mystery to us as well,” the Chief of Police told one reporter. “But we will catch him. The thief always makes a false move.”

  “A false move,” reads Valfierno, wondering what his might be.

  2

  I WAS NOW, WITHOUT DOUBT, the Marqués de Valfierno. I had won my title in battle, like the medieval knights who were made noblemen by the king as the sounds of battle died away.

  I had won it doing what no one had ever been able to do, and what many had wanted to. Or perhaps I had really won it doing what no one had wanted to do, since no one had ever been able to imagine it. I was finally the person I had wanted to be—though I didn’t notice much of a difference.

  The world was changing even more than I had. War threatened. This threat can in some ways be worse than the war itself: days in free fall when it seems to makes sense to believe that anything could happen, including what makes no sense. There is nothing more terrifying than that feeling that there are no longer any limits. Though when what we fear begins to happen, what actually happens—while momentous—is always less than it could be. I know that when the event finally happens, including catastrophes, terrible things, it can be a relief.

  We expected a war; the world had changed a great deal. The looming threat put men in strange moods, and everything seemed to be moving toward crisis without any particular course. In spite of this, the general instability did not prevent me from concluding the sale of the paintings.

  I could say that it was no more than a simple transaction, but that wouldn’t be quite accurate. What I can say with certainty is that I saw six people who thought they already owned virtually everything achieve the joy of acquiring something so rare that no one can or should possess it. They had taken the art of possession to an extraordinary level, to the height of absurdity. That autumn after the theft I dedica
ted myself to distributing the six copies of La Joconde around the United States.

  It was cold on that afternoon in November when I presented myself—at five o’clock on the dot, as we had agreed—at Colonel Gladstone Burton’s Fifth Avenue mansion. The butler, having sized me up in the doorway, seemed to approve of what he saw. He took my mink coat and the tan leather case with gold fittings that I was carrying and led me through a series of grand rooms. Standing in his study, the Colonel appeared far too anxious to waste any time on greetings or formalities.

  “Let’s see. Do you have it there?”

  I replied that of course I did, and then kept quiet. It was amusing to watch his embarrassment. This man, who had inspired fear in entire regiments and in legions of workers, didn’t know how to conduct a transaction which, after all, should have been simple for him.

  I looked at him. The colonel frowned and appeared to remember something.

  “Oh, excuse me: here is your money.”

  He pointed to a black leather case resting on his Imperial-style mahogany desk. Asking his permission, I opened it and saw that it was filled with one-hundred-dollar bills. To count it, I thought, would be in very poor taste. Looking it over, I calculated that it was right: the agreed-upon three hundred and fifty thousand dollars appeared to be there. I said that I assumed he’d read the newspapers. The casual tone came out perfectly.

  “Of course! I’ve been waiting since I saw it,” he said, without taking his eyes from the tan case.

  “It was not easy, though it might have sounded it.”

  I was enjoying the moment. Though the poor old man was dying of impatience, he had to listen to me allude to the source of his new pleasure, to the fact that he was an accomplice in a huge theft. It was important for him not to forget this.