The Vanishing of the Mona Lisa

by Martin Caparros

  “It’s unbelievable the way these punks try to be heroes. Imbeciles! Hurry up with that maté, Ramirez, we’re waiting!”

  The flames of the lamps flicker and the youth’s mouth trembles. He’s afraid that once again they’ll yell the same things and hit him the same way, and he can’t think anymore, not even about his cockroach, he is too terrified now even to envy it.

  “Me, Señor? I already told you everything. I placed the bomb. I did it. I placed it, I told you: the twenty-second, Sunday, at six in the morning, right after the watchman made his rounds.”

  “Do you take us for retards, you little scum? You think we don’t know you couldn’t have done it on your own? What’s going on with that maté, Ramirez, the maté! You’re not even really part of the group, are you, you little creep? You hardly know them—we just grabbed you so you’d give up the German, you little moron! Fucking Ramirez!”

  “It was me, Señor, I put the bomb there. You don’t believe me but it’s true, Señor.”

  If only he could be convincing, thinks Juan María, if he could just sound like he believed what he was saying. He is afraid even of thinking the truth, of remembering details about what really happened, because he can’t believe that the police won’t hear him if he thinks it, and he doesn’t know if he can think in a voice low enough that he won’t be heard.

  His hands are crossed and tied behind the back of his chair. His eyes, cheeks, lips all burn with pain. The monster tells him that he’s going to ask him one more time, that he’s going to give him one more chance because he’s a good guy. Juan María considers not going on with his story—he doesn’t know if he can keep it up. He thinks he can, he hopes he can, but he doesn’t know, he can’t be sure and then the monster whips, snaps, smashes, crunches his head back, no word able to describe how his big hand demolishes his face, buries itself in his face and snaps his head backward like a whip, producing unimaginable pain.

  With extraordinary effort Juan María brings his head back upright and says once more, “I was the one who placed the bomb; I did it.”

  And the monster, “Fucking Christ! Tell me where the German is! Tell me what happened, don’t be a moron! You imbecile, don’t you realize that if you don’t, you’re going to get yourself killed?”

  He says “get yourself killed” as if he’s talking about an external force—death? simple gravity?—that operates inevitably beyond will or desire. The monster tells him, “You’re going to get yourself killed,” and he thinks that if he dies now his friends will know that he was strong and resisted until the end, that they can rely on him, that now for sure they’ll know that he’s trustworthy. And Don Manuel will know that he died fighting injustice and his class, and his mother will think he died like his father and she’ll hate him. Once again she won’t have understood anything, he thinks, once again. And how easy it would all be if I could just kill myself, if I knew how to do that, how easy…

  “Kid, I’m going to ask you one last time—Jesus, I’ve had it with this!”

  It would be easy if I could just kill myself, except that for that I’d have to think something important right before. If he knew he was going to die he would have to think of something important right before, he thinks, and once again he tells the man, “I did it, Señor, I already told you, I was the one who armed the bomb.”

  “Oh yes? Why don’t you tell us how you did that,” says the monster, willing to amuse himself now, and the youth spins a tale filled with holes and errors of fact, and the monster has fun asking him for details, which the youth makes up, in haste, badly, inventing sloppy details until the monster finally gets bored. “Ramirez, get me a cigarette, he’s boring me,” he says, and with a sudden, violent kick he sends the chair flying with the youth in it, and it crashes to the tiled floor, the uneven tiled floor, the sickening smack of those tiles against his side, and once on the floor, more kicks. “So you think you can just tell us any old crap, you little scum? What do you take us for?” And on the floor, with his bruised and beaten arms over his broken face, his injured, lacerated, broken face, he thinks—amazingly, he is still thinking of these things; incredible that he thinks of these things now—that it was strange that the best defense of liberty was to lie like a criminal. Though badly, like a stupid criminal; he would have to do better.

  “Were you ever in such a position of helplessness, Newspaperman? So vulnerable? So much at someone else’s mercy?”

  “No, I don’t believe I ever was, Marqués.”

  “I trust it never happens to you. Except now, perhaps. Now that you have to listen to everything I’m telling you and you don’t know what to make of it.”

  “Is that how it seems to you?”

  “What about you? How does it seem to you?”

  One thing kept occurring to him afterward—actually two. First, that not once throughout his entire interrogation did he think about the famous cause of liberty, but rather about the admiration, or at least the respect that he would earn in the eyes of his few accomplices, whom he considered his friends, who were defending that famous cause in the Argentine city of Rosario in 1884. He thought a little about Don Manuel and his kind of people, but most of all he thought about his father—that if his father had been able to see him in that moment he would have been proud. It surprised him to think this. He’d never thought much about his father before—his real father, a man now dead whom he never knew—as someone who might have thought about him, had feelings about him: pride, disdain, sorrow. He’d always thought of him as someone who thought and felt only about himself, until that night, and from then on. And one other thing: that he could never again let them catch him so unprepared.

  Even then I knew that one day I would have trouble remembering all of that. That I would try very hard to forget it, and then one day I would try again to remember it. I suppose memory is something you can manage; I’m sure that later it gets away from ordinary men—those who don’t know how to manage their memories. I knew that even then, though I had not finished understanding it all.

  “I don’t believe that it is possible to become rich without being ruthless; a reasonable man will never make a fortune. In order to get rich, you must be fixated on one single, immutable idea: the desire to make a fortune. And to make that fortune you have to be a usurer, a shark, obsessed, tough—a killer. To bully in particular the weak and the small. And when you have amassed your mountain, you can climb to the top and from your peak survey the valley of the miserable that you have made,” reads the youth, alone in his cell with the candle flickering, and he is visited with a rare smile.

  Sullen—you have to appear sullen.

  He learns that the German has also been arrested. A thief from Rosario tells him this, not one of his supposed colleagues. A thief who took pity on him, who also tells him that the anarchists are in no doubt about who gave the German up. He knows that the only way to prove to them that it wasn’t him is to show them who did do it, and he vows to try. He has a suspicion and wonders how he can prove it. He knows it will be difficult, but also that if he doesn’t his life will not be worth living.

  He learns to seem sullen. In the public areas—the cafeteria, the yard where prisoners spend two hours in the morning and two hours in the afternoon—he gets in the habit of appearing sullen. He walks with his back very straight, his legs extended, erect, trying to make himself taller. Later, he will remember this as ridiculous, but at the time his main preoccupation was his bearing.

  For several days he is determined to figure out what he has to do. It takes him that long to realize that he no longer makes decisions, and that for a long time he will make almost no decisions at all. He despairs. His muscles tense up by themselves, the effort of relaxing them making them tenser still. He is in despair. He must appear sullen.

  The prison he’s been taken to—the National Penitentiary—is too big. In the suburbs of Buenos Aires, it is a huge building, recently inaugurated, with battlements and towers and all the latest prison advances. When he first s
aw it—the only time, when he could look at it from a distance as he arrived in the horse-drawn wagon, surrounded and guarded—he had a moment of contentment at the idea of living inside this great medieval castle that looked so much like the photographic plates Father Franco used to show him. Immediately afterward, as soon as the great metal gates opened and then closed, the castle became a series of corridors, yards, and his cell, above all his cell. Prison is no more than the reduction of possibilities to the minimum possible. A form of perfect concentration, where the outside world can’t distract you. In prison—as he came to think much later—the world becomes something each inmate can invent as he wishes, according to whim and personal taste, something that does not present a threat or impose any unnecessary reality. In prison, reality is so small, so spare that there is a lot of room left over. Prison, and especially his cell, is the ultimate framework, the model for all invention. In that cell, the youth—though he wouldn’t realize it until many years later—began to construct the person he would later become: his persona.

  But for the moment he only knows how to look sullen. It bothers him—suffocates, even scares him—the barely restrained energy he feels during the spells in the yard with dozens and dozens of other delinquents like him. Delinquents like him, he repeats to himself, tasting the sound of those empty words.

  In the yard he talks only to the Frenchman, who some call Bernardo Dasset, others León Daván, still others Juan Pablo. The Frenchman is about thirty, and is described by the police as “being in charge of all the French thieves in the city, who work as hotel waiters, painters, or coachmen, and act as his spies. He maintains several addresses to avoid becoming known to the police. He dresses elegantly, is well mannered, and has refined tastes.” He does seem to have refined tastes. He must have, to be able to enjoy Juan María’s various qualities—the shy look, delicate features, lean buttocks, that wariness caged animals have that makes them mistrust almost everything. Dasset/Daván doesn’t seem to care, or perhaps cares especially, perhaps it excites him. He takes advantage of his standing in the prison to visit Juan María in his cell three times a week—an hour or two, never more. The youth cares less about it all—his submission to the inmate, the inmate’s cock in his ass, the inmate’s saliva on his neck and shoulders, his cock in his mouth, having to bend to his desires—than he thought he would. He never reaches the point of enjoying it, but it doesn’t bother him. It’s one of the ways in which that sparse reality claims your rights without bothering to acknowledge them.

  Dasset/Daván visits him, guides him, forces him to submit—“submit” being, far too much, the word—and teaches him how good manners and the right name can be critical tools. He also teaches him to read his French books—this is their deal: in exchange for what I want and what you can’t refuse me, I’ll teach you French, what little use it is—to recognize some of his own overlooked qualities, and, no doubt without intending to, to simulate pleasure. Consequently, he comes to understand that there is nothing that can’t be faked; that you can feign anything.

  “So what? If it wasn’t me it would be someone else, someone who wouldn’t be as good to you as I am. Don’t be stupid—bête—chéri. In here, nothing is free. There are the protectors and the protected and nothing else, and you are nothing without a good protector. Now, enough words, chéri. The time for talking is over for today.”

  “Why? Who says?”

  “What is this ‘who says’? Your protector says—the only voice there is.”

  Almost every night in his cell his fantasies accompany his hand. Never about him, or the Frenchman, or María, always about Ruano and Dorita. Once in a while—by accident, without meaning to, immediately remorseful—he thinks of Mariana, who must by now be all grown up, a proper blonde. There is little room in prison for blondes.

  “There are natures that are purely contemplative and quite removed from action, but that can nonetheless be sparked into motion by some mysterious impulse, with a speed that appears quite alien. Like the man who, afraid of encountering bad news in his mail, paces fearfully for hours in front of his door before daring to go in. Or who will leave a letter unopened for two weeks, or who delays six months before finally resigning himself to doing what he should have done years ago—they are thrown abruptly into action by an irresistible force, like an arrow loosed from a bow. A friend of mine will light his cigarette next to a barrel of gunpowder just to see, to know, to tempt fate, just to spark his energy, to play, to know the pleasures of feeling anxiety, for nothing, whim, out of boredom,” he reads, alone in his cell with the candle flickering, and he finds again that rare smile. Perhaps it’s at that moment that he decides he doesn’t give a damn what all of those people—he says “those people”—think he is.

  His mother’s letters are few and say little—that her eyesight is weak, that she doesn’t feel well in general, that poor Antonio is drunk a lot, and why did he do what he did, what they say he did? From time to time he thinks of the necklace. And hopes there will be fewer letters. At last they stop.

  “You said that you learned a lot in jail.”

  “I learned that in order to change anything you first have to change yourself, to become someone who has the power to change things.”

  “Anything else?”

  “There were other things.”

  For his involvement in the attack on the offices of Rosario’s El Municipio newspaper, a man with the name Juan María Perrone served a four-year sentence in the National Penitentiary. When he was released, he was given a change of used but clean clothes by the Women’s League and a letter from his stepfather announcing the death of his mother. Newly free, he was twenty-three or perhaps twenty-four and was to learn, among other things, his real name.

  I was searching. I know I did things that I wish I could forget, but I remember them—far too much. What’s the point of forgetting things that are easy to forget?

  2

  “WHAT DO YOU KNOW ABOUTLa Joconde?”

  “What?”

  “You heard me, Yves. What do you know about the Mona Lisa?”

  “That’s not what I heard—Joconde, Mona Lisa…”

  “You know the strangest thing about all of this, Yves? It’s that from time to time I find myself almost liking the way you believe your role in life is to annoy your fellow man. I’ve come to think that perhaps this will end up being my role, too.”

  “What an honor, Marqués. As you yourself say: you become your neighbor.”

  “Enough of this, Yves. Now I’m serious—what do you know about the Mona Lisa?”

  “The same as everyone else.”

  They speak to each other in Spanish. Yves Chaudron’s accent mixes French r’s and a Río Plata lilt. Eduardo de Valfierno blends the pure Argentine with a Frenchified rhythm.

  “Which is?”

  “Nothing.”

  Yves Chaudron never knows anything—on principle. It has been some time now since he decided on a path of ignorance, and he has stuck to this scrupulously. Especially since he became executor of Valfierno’s schemes and ideas, a partnership that affords him the ability to be, as never before, the hand—and a most able one—directed by another’s mind. The perfect situation for him.

  “You’ll need to find out soon enough.”

  “About the Mona Lisa?”

  “What do you think we’re talking about?”

  “If you won’t tell me…”

  Chaudron tails off and then does something that for him seems like an abrupt gesture—he wipes each joint of his fingers with a rag soaked in turpentine. Valfierno wrinkles his nose at the smell. Centuries could pass, he thinks, resignedly, and the smell of turpentine will still always remind him of that priest who was not what he seemed. Chaudron dries his hands on his white painter’s smock and looks at him for a moment before speaking.

  “Eduardo, we need to do something. Since we’ve been in Paris, the business…”

  “Let me remind you that you were the one who convinced me to come.”

>   “Me?”

  Chaudron looks around him with an expression of Who, me? To come here? The studio is bright in the morning light but very small and crowded: half a dozen half-finished paintings—mostly religious scenes in the Spanish baroque style of Ribera or Zurbarán—two easels, palettes, little knobs of paint, three small tables crowded with brushes and more paint, a tottering bookcase with a few books on art, and a narrow cot in the far corner.

  “That is something we are not going to talk about.”

  “Right. It’s not worth it.”

  “Valfierno—I’m worried.”

  “Have you ever been anything else?”

  “Please, Valfierno. I am really worried. We need to do something. Have you seen how the world is now? It’s unbelievable: streetcars, the Métro, electric light in houses, phonographs, automobiles. Soon we won’t be able to do anything.”

  “Have you been drinking already? It’s morning! What do aeroplanes have to do with us?”

  “It’s obvious, Señor Marqués. You should be the first one to see it. Soon they’re going to have machines that will analyze paintings, the materials, I don’t know what. We’re not going to be able to do this anymore. We have to do a big one before it becomes impossible, Eduardo. Progress is going to kill us—we’ll end up in a museum.”

  “What was that?”

  “We’re going to end up in a museum.”

  “That’s not a bad idea. I have to think about that. In a museum.”

  “I’m serious, Eduardo.”

  “So am I.”

  Valfierno loosens his black bow tie and takes a look at the paintings Chaudron is working on. They are perfect, copies that cannot be improved, and once again it surprises him that his copyist could be so unambitious for himself, that someone of his ability should be content just to be Valfierno’s hands. And once again he asks himself why. It has to be because he is a copyist, that is the word. I am the forger, he thinks, and smiles to himself. Occasionally Chaudron asks himself the same question, and the answers he gives himself alarm him, and he tries to forget them.