The Vanishing of the Mona Lisa

by Martin Caparros

  “Furious?”

  “Well, I don’t know; that’s what I thought then. And I couldn’t stay in Paris. I couldn’t find any work. Paris was full of good copyists; there was nothing for me in that terrible place. I decided to emigrate.”

  Ivanka was running a duster across the shop window and appeared engrossed in her work. But I had the impression that she wanted to hear the story that her husband had never told her. Chaudron didn’t look at her. Or me. His eyes were fixed on a distant point, as if he needed to look far, very far, to see what he was telling me.

  “Why Argentina?”

  “What do you mean, why? Have you ever emigrated? You know how these things happen, Mr. Reporter? It’s not like you sit down and think and figure out where you’re going to go. Or like you read about different places in guides and magazines and then, after careful consideration, choose one over another. How do I know why? Because I saw a picture in a magazine. Because someone you meet in a café tells you about this place where their cousin is doing real well.”

  “But—if you don’t mind my asking again—why Argentina in particular?”

  “Don’t you know anything? Lots of people were going there then. Or do you think the place just appeared now? Even then, almost forty years ago, you could see it was going to be big.”

  Chaudron arrived at the port of Buenos Aires in 1898. He was twenty-five.

  Ivanka had stopped pretending. She stared at us now, the duster idle in her hand, her eyes as big as saucers. I realized that Chaudron was using me to talk to her. Maybe he wanted to comfort her: telling the story of his emigration was a way of telling her that he had also been through humiliation like hers.

  “And it was there that you met him?”

  “No, not then. Years went by.”

  “What happened in those years?”

  “That I’m not going to tell you.”

  “Go ahead, tell me. We have plenty of time.”

  “I don’t think I will.”

  Now Chaudron was looking at her, too. He had stopped looking at me and spoke directly to her, although in a very quiet voice, causing her to lean toward him to hear what he was saying. When he’d stopped talking, he directed his gaze at the ceiling for a bit. Then he turned again to me.

  “You’re not going to remember me.”

  “What do you mean? How can you say—?”

  “Listen to me; I know how it is—I’ve been learning my whole life. You won’t remember me. No one ever remembers me. Maybe you’ll remember this house, or my wife, or this chair, but not me. No one ever remembers me. Maybe you’ll even remember these words I’m saying. We can prove it: remember this now, and in a few days, maybe next week—whenever it is—try to remember my face, or one of my gestures. I’m telling you, no one ever remembers me. That’s how I could be so many others: Falaise, Ribera, Zurbarán. That’s how I could even be Leonardo.”

  Having said this, Chaudron fell silent. I fell silent, too: it was a stupid duel of silences. He won—I asked him again if that was when he met Valfierno. But I suspected that he was right, that I would need to write down all my impressions of him as soon as I left that house.

  “So. You want me to tell you how I met him.”

  “Please.”

  “I can’t tell you. But I’d like to explain who Valfierno was then: he was a panderer. What do you call it?—he was a pimp.”

  Chaudron looked at me with the hint of a smile on his face: the player who launches an attack from an unexpected corner of the board. I didn’t know whether to believe him, or rather, I didn’t believe him at the time. Valfierno had not told me this—and I still believed his version of the story. Moreover, Chaudron had every reason to be angry, to resent him.

  “But I don’t want to say bad things about that son of a bitch. When all is said and done I owe this house to him. If it hadn’t been for the whole business of the Mona Lisa, I could never have bought it. Really in the end I owe him everything,” he said, and then fell silent. It was clear that he didn’t know. If they hadn’t seen each other in all these years, he had no reason to know that Valfierno was dead.

  3

  HE DISCOVERS THAT WHEN FATHER Franco rubs him hard it’s not the same as when his prick gets hard for no reason. He discovers that it’s also different when he himself takes hold of it in his hand and squeezes it and strokes it and goes faster and faster until he explodes. He discovers—actually, a neighbor tells him—that you can lose it in another person’s flesh, and it scares him, at first it really scares him. He tells him that a piece of his body has to go into the body of a near stranger, and that scares him, too. For months he shies away from the invitations from the other guys in his class to go out with them to the Mecha Ranch and become a man. Though they are just brutes, he has to do something; he knows that it can’t continue like this. He is fourteen now and once again the target of ridicule from the boys who say the most savage things that come into their heads. They say that Father Franco has convinced him, that now he’s one of those. They warn him: be careful, he’ll do us all! They tell him he’s a real, first-class, ass-class fag now. He doesn’t believe them, but he starts to question himself, and he delays—he’s still scared of losing that part of himself in someone else’s body. Until finally Ruano takes pity on him: “Juanma, don’t be an idiot, it’s not a big deal, Juanma!” “I don’t know, Ruano—how do I know that? I don’t know anything!” And Ruano—out of mercy? out of scorn? out of pride?—offers him an out: “You know I’m having it with Dorita, right? Next time I take her out to the field you follow us—dead quiet, and slow—and you’ll see everything. You’ll see—you won’t be scared no more.”

  He feels as if he’s walking on a tightrope. A branch snaps, and he shrinks back, but they go on, unaware, occupied only with each other, with their rubbing against each other as they go, tasting what’s to come. They stop and hide themselves behind a berry bush, and him on the other side and the two of them on the ground, and her on the ground and Ruano on top of her and he’s pulling down her slip and unbuttoning his pants, and he grabs his dick and with his hand around his dick he searches between her legs for her opening. Juan María watches them, afraid to breathe, afraid to miss any vital detail. He watches while Ruano finds her opening and starts in, moving rhythmically, like the rhythm of the hand but with his whole body, forward and backward and forward and then suddenly harder, more roughly, more quickly, forward and backward and forward, and watching, his eyes get bigger, are like two saucers, moons, tits—eyes straining to get everything, to learn everything push by push, so that later, alone, he can replay for himself every single movement, sound, face.

  Quiet again—later that night, in his own bed and quiet once again—he thinks he will be able to do it himself. And that Sunday he goes with the boys to the Mecha Ranch and they come back one stronger; he comes back one of them.

  4

  HIS HEAD LIES DEEP IN a pillow of goose down, his body on the soft mattress. His lips are apart, his eyes half-closed, and his blue silk robe open. Valérie, on all fours, plays with his cock. She leans on her elbows and knees, her ass high and ripe, milky-skinned, splayed with its pores and tiny blue veins; juicy. From it, her back swoops down and then up in a great curve to her head—a tumble of dark hair like thick waves—which is buried between Valfierno’s thighs.

  She goes to work on his cock, cradling it in her left hand, squeezing it with her lips, licking it with her tongue—great loud wet licking. In a low voice, Valfierno groans and watches, especially the quivering of those tits, which hang low now like an udder, suspended from the chest; her slight belly hanging down as well.

  Her ass sticking up, her tits hanging down, two and two, flesh and flesh, white and white, a balance to be broken over and over. Valfierno watches her ass rise up as her head descends further. Being sucked off is sex without working, he thinks, without effort—either a pure gift or a business transaction, and his eyes close as her lips close on his cock. As he closes his eyes, he gives himself ove
r for a moment to ecstasy, the promise of ecstasy, but no—he grabs a handful of her hair and pulls her head away from him and covers himself with the robe.

  “Wait, wait.”

  Valérie straightens up and wipes the back of her hand across her mouth; she looks at him, her lips full and swollen.

  “What is it? What do you want?”

  “Not me—I want to know what it is you want.”

  “Marqués: isn’t it obvious?”

  “No, I mean from me. What is it you want from me?”

  Valérie remains looking at him, her mouth agape. He can see her teeth, crooked, yellowing. Valfierno tries not to look.

  “You sound like something out of a cheap magazine, or more like one of those naughty posters you can get for fifteen centimes!” she tells him, forcing a smile.

  “Don’t play around, Valérie. Women only suck men for love or money, and with me, love is too much and the money’s too little.”

  “Did you ever consider that I might like it?”

  “Don’t be stupid, Valérie. We all know how this works.”

  Valérie looks at him and sees that he’s struggling to control his hatred. Valfierno knows he picked the worst moment to come out with this, but for days now it has nagged at him, bothered him. In the beginning, his nights with Valérie were like so many others, often much better than the others. But lately he has noticed a change: she attends to him too much. It is no longer the equal exchange of two willing bodies; she has become his slave, an awkward geisha, and Valfierno’s suspicions are aroused.

  Very slowly, he repeats: “I ask you again, Valérie: what is it you want from me?”

  Suddenly, he understands, though “understanding” is not the word. He knows, in that inexplicable way that one knows certain things, that he is old for her, soft and affected; a prissy, middle-aged fool. He knows too, that that ass is looking for something in particular. That he was stupid to think that because he had no money to give her she wanted nothing from him. How stupid he was; how could he have believed that?

  “Nothing, Marqués. Nothing you can’t give me. Nothing that’ll cost you even a penny, don’t worry,” she tells him, teasing now. Valfierno’s own fears prevent him from taking the high ground.

  “Don’t screw around, Valérie,” he says, unable to come up with better.

  “I already told you: I’d like us to work together.”

  “You’re just being ridiculous.”

  “No, listen—at least listen. There’s a lot of money in it.”

  “You’re completely insane.”

  “No more than you. And this is the sanest thing I’ve ever said. Maybe the only sane thing.”

  “And what makes you think that anything like this would interest me?”

  Right away Valfierno comes up with an answer he doesn’t want to consider: what would interest me is that it could be a way to keep her. But I mustn’t love, I don’t want to love. If she uses me I can use her, too, for my own ends, he thinks, though he knows it’s not that easy. He wishes she would desire him; he wishes he wouldn’t desire her. It’s not that easy. She goes on talking to him with his cock in her hand, his defused cock.

  “Come on. Marqués, don’t say anything, just listen for a moment. Listen like you were listening to some silly girl’s story.”

  “That I can do.”

  “If that makes you feel better.”

  “My love…”

  “Your love. Perhaps more, Marqués. It’s very simple: do you remember my telling you about that man the other day, the one who works at the Louvre?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “Don’t pretend, Marqués, I saw that you paid attention. It’s quite simple: I have the in, and you have the contacts. All we need is a plan.”

  “A plan for what?”

  “Marqués, please,” she says, and takes his spent cock in her mouth. Valfierno looks up at the ceiling. He feels himself hardening and tries to resist. He will show her that she cannot make him do anything he doesn’t want to. Valfierno extricates himself from her mouth, gets up from the bed, and ties his robe. He understands now why he has never let himself undress completely in front of her. Him so old, close to fifty. How could he have been such an idiot?

  “Don’t you realize? This could be the chance of our lives.”

  “Our lives?”

  “My life. Your life.”

  Valfierno forces a smile. The best way to get through a bad moment is to move to the next one.

  “Do you really think your friend could be useful?”

  “Not for many things, it’s true, but yes—for some things that you don’t much care about, and also maybe for taking a couple of paintings.”

  “And what on earth makes you think that I’d be interested in, as you say, ‘taking a few paintings’?”

  “Valfierno, please. Don’t. Are you interested or not? You don’t have to tell me now, but think about it, please. Don’t be silly. A chance like this comes only once in your life.”

  Perrone

  1

  IT COST ME DEARLY TO stop being Bollino—Juan María, too. And still more, later, to understand why I’d done it. Back then, I still wanted that kind of thing—reasons, I mean.

  A father can be either a path or an obstacle for a man, but not both. If he passes his own achievements on gently, he can be a path, but if his history becomes a burden, then he will be an obstacle. He will be a path if his own failures offer the secrets to their avoidance, an obstacle if they loom still as dangers. The burden can be to do what the father wanted to do but couldn’t, or to do what you think the father wanted you to do, or to become your father to take on his dreams.

  In fact, a man with the name Juan María Perrone shows up as having been arrested in Rosario for belonging to a group of anarchists some sources referred to as “Los Errantes”—the Wanderers. The police registry shows this Juan María Perrone to be nineteen, which coincides with the age of our man, as does the name, if we consider that he could still have been using his mother’s name then.

  The file gives few details about the circumstances, but we know that the arrests came in response to a bomb plot against the offices of the newspaper El Municipio. The homemade bomb exploded, dislodging the plaster around the door of the large house that served both as the newspaper’s offices and the home of the owner. The plot appeared to be linked to a demand to make Sunday a day of rest. Rosario’s stores and businesses were open every day of the year for fourteen to sixteen hours a day, and workers worked every one of those hours. The more activist unions—including most of the anarchists—were trying to get the workday shortened. But every attempt to reduce the length of the workday was opposed by the store owners—and by El Municipio—as an attack on commerce. The paper was a declared enemy of the unions and was also suffering its own financial difficulties. Some said that the owner had been trying to muster the support of his own kind—Rosario’s well-to-do bourgeoisie—by showing himself to be a victim of the anarchists. Many more saw the plot simply as another criminal attack by anarchists.

  For his alleged role in this attack, a Juan María Perrone was arrested, along with various accomplices. It seems likely that this is our man, though later, Perrone shows up as having died in 1888, which at the very least raises some doubts.

  “Was it you?”

  “What do you mean, ‘you’?”

  “Valfierno, please—don’t play dumb.”

  “Becker, we could go on like this forever. Just because you lack subtlety doesn’t mean that everyone else does.”

  According to him, he was dead, and it could be true. Actually, he claims that Juan María Perrone is dead, and that’s probably true, though he undoubtedly suffered for a few more years. There are deaths that last a lifetime; others are quicker, more definitive.

  The cockroach climbs up the flaking plaster of the wall. The youth tries to concentrate: up the flaking plaster of the wall. To climb up, to ascend, as Father Franco would have said, to climb, to scale, t
o mount, to reach great heights. He tries to become the cockroach, to imagine the cockroach without feelings, or meaning, to climb just because. He tries to think of the cockroach not suffering, to close his eyes and see the cockroach in his mind, to close his ears and hear in his mind the scratch of the cockroach’s climb up the flaking plaster wall and not the screams. “Worthless little crook, you’ll talk, everybody talks here. Miserable scum, wait till you see how you talk.” As if the screams were far away. As if the screams were just a memory. As if he could simply fall to the floor, a cockroach, or change direction or retrace his steps, a cockroach. “Little shit, you are going to talk.” To be a cockroach, just climbing.

  “Me, Señor? What do you want to know?”

  “There are some things you don’t need to understand, Newspaperman. Just hear.”

  “Which things?”

  “I thought that I had to be Bonaglia.”

  “Bonaglia?”

  “Bonaglia. Truly my father’s son.”

  It feels like the very end of the night, of what has been a very long night. The youth is bleeding from several wounds on his face. He is tied to a chair. His shirt is ripped, stained with blood, spittle, mucus. His black hair is matted, his eyes blackened by blows, the pain from his hand twisting his face in a grimace. “Everyone talks here, scum; you’ll talk too, little shit.” “Me, Señor? What do you want to know?” “Don’t play the moron—the same thing we’ve been asking you from the beginning,” says a monster of a man with stiff hair like horsehair, and he asks his henchman to bring him another cup of yerba maté. “Yes, sir, since the beginning of time,” he says, “or do you think this is going to go on forever, little shit?” He slurps the maté and then spits on the floor of uneven tile and greenish mucus. “I said a maté, Ramirez, not this crap.” The youth looks for his cockroach; he hasn’t seen it for a while. His neck hurts when he tries to move his head.