In the morning we arrived at the port of Malacca. The sun was shining, and there was a pleasant breeze. Amidst the smells and shouts from the docks, Captain Burton gathered us on the deck and said a few words about our courage and a well-earned extra week of shore leave. I suspect he needed it as much as anyone, and more important, that he wanted the crew to have the chance to drink enough to forget his cowardly conduct in the face of danger. Perhaps this way he could recover some measure of his authority. He never did, but that’s another story.
As soon as we got ashore I attended to the essentials. A small Hindu girl cost me little and attended to me for a couple of hours. Afterward, I took a turn through the town. You probably don’t know it—what’s good about Malacca is that hardly anyone does. But Malacca is a labyrinth of tiny streets that would surprise you. By that point I’d stopped in at a great number of ports, and after a while they all resemble one another.
I took a room at a pension, bought myself two bottles, and passed the next few days that way. The hardest thing for a sailor coming ashore is the journey back to becoming human; some never manage it. I ate, I drank, I listened, and I told those tales that sailors tell and twist and turn into fiction. There was an old man at the inn who must have been German or Scandinavian, who was in the final stages of delirium tremens, and who, for the price of three or four bottles, sold me his last possession, his sea trunk. Don’t think that I bought it out of any interest; I didn’t imagine I’d find anything useful in it. I merely felt like helping him. This happened to me from time to time. As it turned out, the trunk held nothing of interest except for a uniform that more or less fit me.
The next afternoon, I rose, bathed, and put it on to go out again around the town. The streets were empty, or so I remember them, strange and quiet. I didn’t know what I was looking for—probably nothing. But my attention was caught by an establishment with a sign filled with Chinese characters. No one is more disposed to passing time than a sailor in a distant port, and I was no exception. On the contrary, passing time has always been one of my favorite occupations.
The Chinese who greeted me spoke to me in a form of English, and I replied in another. He looked at my uniform, called me Captain, was deferential, and led me to a room that, he told me, was reserved for those of my position. You know how these people are, all they have to do is see a white man wearing a cap and they treat him like their master. I’m sure you’ll tell me that we’re no different. Perhaps, but sometimes you need a little distance to allow you to see what’s in front of you. The more I traveled the more I became convinced of how easy it was to become someone else.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. The room was barely illuminated by a couple of kerosene lanterns with tortoiseshell shades, and with every breath there was that unmistakable smell. Chinese girls wrapped tightly in silk ran among six or seven cots hung with tapestries. In most of these, men lay sprawled with long pipes dangling from their hands. As you have no doubt guessed, this was an opium den. I had been in similar places before; I must confess that I didn’t find it an entirely disagreeable way to pass the time. But I had never had opium like this.
I cannot say how many hours I passed in that den. During that long night, I was a fat woman who tried to get up but couldn’t, and fell under her own weight. I was a father who was looking for his son and got lost each time just as he was about to find him. I was a dog—I believe I was a dog. I was an earnest Italian who planted a bomb in a confessional which then exploded—then afterward, I was the bomb. And interminably I was a man whom every new interlocutor called by a different name.
A French serving girl spoke to me in a German that I tried to understand. An American banker called me Count and told me he knew my country, especially Florence, trying to sell me shares in a railway. A Basque priest advised me to be wary of men, and I in turn remember telling him something terrible that I tried to forget but that kept returning to me. A Japanese fisherman yelled at me in a language I did not know but that I understood perfectly. He admonished me for the fact that my Chinese ancestors had invaded his bay with their marauding junks. And there was more. It isn’t difficult to recount, but in fact the journey lasted an eternity and was strewn with traps, pleasure, despair, and tedium. I was on the point of speaking to myself—of saying something out loud to myself so that I would discover my true language—when I awoke. Or perhaps I did not awaken, but rather the opium’s waves ceased carrying me along and produced that effect—the illusion of an ending.
Afterward, I slept for an entire day, perhaps longer. When I managed to get up and eat something I was able vaguely to remember some of the scenes I’ve just described to you. It took a great effort later to reconstruct them all. I went for a long walk through the streets of Malacca. There were street peddlers selling chicken with rice, Malays tottering under huge and impossible loads, Muslims without their veils, and everywhere that insistent odor. I couldn’t identify it.
I walked until I thought I finally understood something—without words, without knowing exactly how. The way I had understood, as a young boy, that what Father Franco had fondled was not really me. This was a revelation. I had known from the beginning that I would not always be a sailor, but I had supposed that chance would carry me from one place to the next, from one profession to the next. That morning, I decided that I would be that chance—I would decide all the places, I would do what was needed always to be someone else. And also that I needed to choose who to be, and dedicate myself to being that person, since it is nothing but cowardice to keep being the person you drew in the first lottery. I decided that morning that there is no better enterprise than to build the person that one is going to be.
I never returned to my English ship. I had some friends in Malacca. First I traded in gemstones from Borneo, later in other, less prestigious goods. I had various women; I sold some of them. I made money and bought myself a reputation. The years were going by. Life was calm and pleasant, but with time I was beginning to need something more. I didn’t wish to end up a rich colonial of dubious origins, tucked away in some lost corner of the world. I traveled, started new ventures, made more money. You’ll excuse me for not being any more specific, but there are some things I’d rather not tell.
What I do know is that I was almost forty when I began to feel the pull of nostalgia. Perhaps it was something else. In any case, I wanted to be the man I’d wanted to be in Buenos Aires, where I had only been a convict before. Call it vengeance or a second chance, as you wish; for me it was now my main challenge. I believed—let us say that I believed—that the ultimate test of being who one wants to be is to be that person in the place where one began. Only there can one really be who one wants to be. In order to complete my project and build my persona, I needed my country, so in the month of June of 1903, I arrived at the port of Buenos Aires. I wore an impeccable white suit and had a trunk that contained many more, as well as some gemstones and documents showing my true name: Marqués Eduardo de Valfierno.
Valfierno related all this to me during the first conversation we had after he’d offered me the chance—asked me?—to tell his story. I believed him; I had no reason not to. We met again the following day. We were both having a glass of Cointreau when he asked me if I knew what it was like to be on a sailing ship in the Indian Ocean.
“Do you know, Newspaperman, what it is to be on a clipper in the middle of the Indian Ocean with menacing dark clouds beginning to gather in the western sky?”
“No, but I can imagine.”
“Sure, sure—you can imagine. So can I. That’s what I’m telling you, Newspaperman.”
“It is a fever, a convulsion of pleasure, the strangeness of the possessed, which ceases to govern the body’s movements and abandons itself to another soul, which performs these superhuman feats, undreamed of,” wrote Don Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, and which Valfierno might well have read. Though Sarmiento, as usual, was talking about a ballerina.
Sometimes I can still recall the shapes of thos
e clouds—the way they formed into different shapes. The way it seemed to be the wind that was molding them, only it wasn’t. How their outlines can disappear and yet remain in people’s eyes. How, as fluid as they are and as many shapes as they take on, the cloud is still a cloud—even in the clearest of skies, precisely by its absence. And how none of that matters.
“The truth, Newspaperman?”
“I don’t understand what you’re saying.”
“I’m asking if you want me to tell you the truth.”
“Yes, of course—why?”
“I don’t know. The truth is, I didn’t leave Argentina until 1908, when I went to Paris.”
“And all that about the sailing ship and the pirates and those opium dreams?”
“Exactly that.”
That when he left prison he was like a stray dog—lost and with nowhere to go. The streets of the capital are too much for a young fellow who has lived only in the provinces and in jail. He spent three days walking through those streets with the feeling that he was worse than a foreigner—he was nobody. He could walk and keep walking for years and neither the streets nor the people on the streets nor the owners of the houses on those streets would ever notice him, he was nobody—more than in the big house when he was a child, much more than in the streets of Rosario after they had thrown him out, more than in the school with the priest, much more even than in jail.
He went hungry those two or three days since he didn’t dare to beg, even though he saw lots of others do it; he didn’t want to think of himself as part of that ragged pack that ran up and down those streets as if they owned them. He wasn’t the type to beg, though he was hungry. He was better than that, even if he was a nobody. Hunger wasn’t the worst of it—he didn’t understand who he was, how to think of himself, what name to use.
And it was hot—it was high summer. He went down to the banks of the river and watched the movements of the washerwomen—not the women, but their movements—until he was ready to explode from hate, from distance, from disgust for his situation, not to mention for him, for himself. Then he scraped together the courage to play his one card.
That card was the name of a woman that the Frenchman Dasset had given him. He found his way to the boardinghouse she ran at the end of the Calle Bolívar, facing the Jesuit church. The smell of food made him sick, and he had to sit down on a bench. He thought they might be looking at him but maybe not. The lady, Berta, was almost as fat as his own mother, her arms probably even fatter. Armed like that, with her potato masher and her knives, she was a monument to the limited power of women, to the supremacy of woman over a dominion that men pretended not to want, and when he saw her he didn’t want to talk to her, something stopped him from talking to her. Maybe it was fear, though there wasn’t any reason, but he left; he couldn’t play his one card.
He went back to wandering—three days, four days—through those streets where he didn’t exist, thinking many times that it shouldn’t really be all that difficult to talk to the woman Berta, but not doing it, and he went on not doing it until finally his hunger caused him to oversleep in the vestibule of another church, where a beggar spotted him and told him that if he went down to the port he might be able to get one of the scraps of dried meat that sometimes fall from the carts taking them to the ships. He also told him that if he felt like it he might be able to sign on to a ship that had lost seamen in the bars—they were always losing sailors in the bars and were always looking for young lads who were willing to go to sea.
He went to the port and wandered for hours without finding a single scrap of meat and without daring to talk to the bosuns from any of the ships, and there in despair he finally worked himself up to ask the waiter at one of the inns that feed the day men and stevedores if he could give him something to eat, even just a scrap of bread, and the man told him that if he wanted it he’d have to work for it. So he went back to the lady Berta’s pension.
He couldn’t say why he decided then to go back there, but he talked to her and she told him that if he was a friend of the Frenchman—if this kid telling her his name was Enrique Bonaglia, was a friend of the Frenchman, and she said “friend” with a smile that he didn’t get and didn’t want to—why, then she’d be glad to give him a job in her kitchen and a cot in the attic. That evening he ate as if possessed and spent the whole night throwing up.
I no longer called myself Bollino. Or I should say, I only occasionally did. But no one else called me Bollino, or any of those other names.
He said that he didn’t stay too many months at the boardinghouse. Life was pulling him in a different direction, according to him. But he liked working at the stove. Berta’s house fed thieves, immigrants, whores, and thugs, and the food they served was not always in the best condition. He enjoyed learning to cook, or learning how to use the fat woman’s tricks to hide the taste of a rotting fish, the worms in a piece of meat, a lettuce that was too far gone. Learning to rescue something nature had given up on and bring it back into the circle of life. Learning to fight against time and beat it back, though he didn’t put it that way. While working at the inn he came to believe that nothing is what it seems, that what everything is really about is learning how to transform one thing into another.
One night, after a few months of this, the fat Señora Berta told him there was no reason that such a good kid like him should spend his whole life behind a bunch of dirty pans. He replied that he didn’t understand, and she smiled and told him not to worry, that she didn’t do that anymore, but that she had a friend who’d seen him there a few times and wondered—she’d seen him and wondered if he…she wanted to know if he would visit her at her house. This friend was a young widow—still quite young, she told him—and she’d know how to treat him right. Several days went by before he said that he would go, and he would never have believed it would be that easy. It took him a long time to find out that some things came easily to him.
He said he lived with the widow for a few years. That I’d be surprised to know who she was—someone well placed in society there, well respected. She gave him a room in her house and he never wanted for money and he didn’t have to go with her anywhere. She didn’t want him to; she didn’t want people to know about him. Out of respect, or shame, she said, she didn’t want anyone to know about him. She would just call on him some nights, not even that many, and in all that, somehow they got to be friends.
He learned there that it was never difficult to get a woman to give him money. All he had to do was to tell a good story, something that would let her tell herself that it wasn’t in exchange for the loving, but out of the goodness of her heart. He made good use of this lesson, and by knowing that he could cook up that loving as easily as the food he used to make at Señora Berta’s inn—the rottenness of the meat, the decay in a fish: time vanquished. And he realized that, seen from here—not then, perhaps, but from here—they were very good years.
“We could go on like this for quite a while.”
“But really, Valfierno—what did you do in those years?”
“What good would it do you to know, Newspaperman?”
“Well, isn’t that what we’re doing? Reconstructing the story of your life?”
“Do you really think it needs to be reconstructed? Whatever story I tell you—especially the real story—would be much more inane and trivial and boring than you or your readers could imagine. Believe me—much more.”
Buenos Aires in those days was impossible to describe: a city that was not the same from one day to the next; that every day, every minute endeavored to become something else, something new. A city to which thousands of men and women escaped from their own cities and towns, having heard that this would be the city they wanted, that it was there to be made, and that they could make it. A city that was already its own promise.
A city where the high and mighty who had lived there before when it was all so different—days before, a week before, twenty, fifty, seventy-seven years before—were looking for a p
lace for themselves, where they could escape the incoming hordes and the grime and the changes and the different languages. They moved on so that they could keep on being the same—just like all those other immigrants.
A city that was already starting to have paved roads, and on those roads, streetlights, and under those streetlights, dresses of organza. Jungle cats, a few madmen, its own accents, thieves, lawyers, prisons, covered wagons, fewer dogs. Its own hotels, restaurants, the beginnings of its own music, a tram, second stories paved entirely in French tile, rich men, millionaires, presidents, senators, ministers, perfumes and colognes, portrait photographers, an opera singer, choristers, writers, poets, more poets, policemen in uniforms with hats. Newcomers who considered themselves indigenous, newcomers who fought for their place, thinking it was theirs. Sailing ships, steamships, cows and more cows, walking to their sacrifice, tongues, mothers, memories of other worlds, a national flag, fewer churches, a profusion of inns, of beggars, even more cows and above all chaos, perfect confusion, a whirlwind; a night turning to dawn—so many believing that a new day was dawning, and dawning for them. Buenos Aires was a premonition, a hallucination. Buenos Aires, in those days, was the future made present.
“Man himself does not know what it is he pursues. He searches, he looks, he walks, he passes right by it, goes gently, takes detours, moves forward, and finally arrives—sometimes at the banks of the Seine, or some Boulevard, more frequently at the Palais Royal”—so again wrote Don Domingo, and each time it’s more likely that Valfierno knows this.
He says that no one cared what his name was; they called him Quique. They’d started to call him Quique at the inn, the boardinghouse, and the widow kept on calling him that, with her little bedroom variations. That he could have gone on like that for years—and for a few years he did—but something kept tugging at him. If I want him to, he can change his story. If I want it—he can change it.
The Vanishing of the Mona Lisa Page 8