The Vanishing of the Mona Lisa

by Martin Caparros

  “If you want me to I’ll tell you the true story. But you’re going to see that if I do, you’ll miss these stories, you’ll see that the truth doesn’t do you any good. You know how this works: one of the most common ways to prove that a false story is true is to tell an even bigger lie and confess that the first story was a lie but that this new one now, this one I’m telling you now is the real truth. It’s the old trick, where you discover my trick and believe that there aren’t any more. Do you know any magic, Newspaperman?”

  “I thought I did.”

  He says that he spent several years trying to learn who he was. And that all those years he lived like what he was—an outcast, a poor kid from the provinces who couldn’t find his place or his identity.

  2

  THE MARQUÉS EDUARDO DE VALFIERNO arrives just as the Mass is finishing. He has never liked these religious ceremonies, and for years now he has carefully avoided them. But on this morning, the twenty-fifth of May, 1910, a glorious spring day, he needs to find someone without seeming to look. As he crosses the threshold of the basilica of Sacré-Coeur, on that highest of the Montmartre hills, and steps through those enormous doors, he respectfully removes his Panama hat. Valfierno walks with a straight back on his slightly elevated heels. There are days—like today—when he feels almost tall.

  “Ave María purísima,” he murmurs as he enters, and he wrinkles his nose. The church smells of construction: whitewash, cement, paint. Though it has been more than thirty years since the Bishop of Paris decided to build the church to thank God for the defeat of the Paris Commune, the construction continues. On this morning it is the Argentines of Paris who are adding their own contribution to the project, using the occasion of this Mass celebrating the first hundred years of their nation to unveil the great stained-glass window they have given to the basilica. Or perhaps they are using the occasion of the gift of the stained-glass window to have the basilica celebrate the first hundred years of their nation with a Mass. In either case, they are proud—they are leaving their mark on Paris’s most ambitious monument. Argentina is showing France her power.

  “Ite missa est,” intones the priest, and several dozen bejeweled women and aristocratic men rise and begin to walk toward the exit, greeting each other with hands, and arms, and the occasional cry of recognition. Most of them have known each other forever—they are among Argentina’s most wealthy, who spend the better part of the southern winter in the northern summer. Almost all of them have houses in Paris—and to say “house” here is to be modest. Valfierno greets four or five of his compatriots with smiles and nods; he has seen them recently at the embassy gathering, leaving the Opéra, at the Chantilly racetrack. But he is uneasy. He knows that every time he mixes with Argentines he runs the risk that one of them will know him from before, or that Aliaga will have talked. While he doubts it, he can never be sure. This morning he has no choice. If he wants to launch his operation, he has no choice.

  “Sebastián! Sebastián!” he calls out to a young man of thirty-some years, whose baby face shows exhaustion, his blond hair smoothed down with paste, blue eyes smudged with dark violet circles, creases in his fine cotton suit.

  “Eduardo! How good to see you!”

  “And the same to you, Sebastián. What a miracle that you should deign to appear here at such an hour!”

  “Miracle is the word, but I couldn’t escape it. If my father were to get wind of the fact that I wasn’t here to manage his part of the donation, he’d cut off the flow in a minute.”

  “So I imagine. In any case, it is good to see you. What do you say to lunch at Fouquet’s? Now don’t look at me that way—it’s my treat.”

  “It’s not that, Marqués. I still have something left. But, yes, I’d love to. Why not?”

  The lunch is long. The two Argentinos order English roast beef with a Pommard, and Sebastián recounts in unforgiving detail his stay in Deauville, his run of bad luck at the casino, the breasts of the harlot who ended up with his money, the subsequent arrival of his father, the harlot’s buttocks, and his father’s threats to cut off his allowance if he didn’t resume his studies or return to Argentina to manage some family land.

  “I wouldn’t go back under any circumstances, Marqués. As much progress as we Argentines may have made, there’s no comparison between life in Paris and the boredom of the pampa. And with what Father gives me I couldn’t do anything there.”

  “So I imagine, though it’s getting quite bad here as well. As soon as they know you’re an Argentine, they charge you double!”

  Valfierno is delighted with himself: he’s able to reproduce exactly the phrases of his companion and his friends. At times even he is surprised by how easy it is for him; at other times he doesn’t even notice it.

  “You see, Marqués? Chalk it up to the price of fame.”

  “If you want to call it that. I must say I am not at all tempted to return either. In fact, if business continues this well I’d consider staying in France forever.”

  Fouquet is one of those restaurants with a regimented style: armies of mirrors, mauve velvet curtains, the cutlery gleaming. The waiters dart like shadows, and one smells more cigars than one does cuisine.

  “Ah, how I envy you, Marqués! But of course a man of your station, with your experience, doesn’t need to go and rot in Buenos Aires. If I had your means…”

  “Now, Sebastián, don’t be modest.”

  “No, really. It’s true. By the way, we’re planning to go to Santiago’s Château with the Baron Longueville, his cousin d’Alemain, Colorado Lynch-Dubois, and maybe my cousin Calzadilla. Would you like to come? We’re going in the Baron’s voiture—a Daimler, you remember. We’d be there four or five days—who knows, perhaps a week.”

  “I might. Let me see if I can cancel some appointments.”

  “Of course, you…”

  The waiter serves them their coffee in porcelain cups and offers liqueurs. Valfierno thinks that this is the moment but that he must go carefully. He pulls a strand of hair back from his forehead, worried that someone will notice it’s dyed.

  “Are you still buying paintings for your father’s collection?”

  “Yes, every now and then he has me buy something, though as little as he can—he says I get too attached to the cash…” Sebastián makes a gesture with his right hand as if he were trying to shake off something sticky. His polished fingernails have a pearly shine.

  “And the collection keeps growing?”

  “Yes, bigger, better, faster. A real painting Olympics, if you get what I mean.”

  “Of course. It’s one of the best collections I’ve seen.”

  “You’re familiar with it?”

  “Hadn’t I told you? Naturally, I’ve seen it a couple of times. The thing is, I may have a couple of paintings that I should sell…”

  “And you’d like to sell them to him.”

  “No, no, they’re not up to his standard. But I did think you might be able to put me in contact with any American buyers you might know of.”

  “Oof—Americans will buy anything.”

  “Not like us, so careful and selective,” said Valfierno, and he smiles.

  “Well, we do buy almost anything, but they’re even less cultured. They let themselves be taken like lambs all the time.”

  “That is not my intention,” says Valfierno, and the ensuing silence builds for a moment too long. Valfierno stares at his signet ring.

  “No, Marqués, please excuse me; it didn’t even occur to me. What I meant was that they’re so eager, so hungry,” Sebastián says, and he begins to recount in great detail the epic battles in the auction houses of London and Paris between his father and three or four American collectors.

  “And through all those battles, they call each other friends now. For years they’ve argued over paintings pound against pound, franc against franc, and my father does not always win, so you can imagine the caliber of these guys.”

  “Indeed I can. Do you think you could i
ntroduce me to a couple of them?”

  “Certainly, as long as…”

  “Of course if the negotiations are successful, you would be compensated, needless to say.”

  “No, no, I didn’t mean that, but since you insist…”

  “Please, I do insist. Some men are only generous when it serves them, but I assure you I’m not that way. As you’ll see.”

  3

  “WHAT SHALL I SAY ABOUT those years when nothing happened, when there was nothing to distinguish them except their numbers?”

  “Perhaps the problem is thinking that nothing was happening. Something is always happening.”

  “Oh, really? It’s clear that you were never Bonaglia, working for Don Simón in San José de Flores.”

  We now know—we’re fairly sure that we know—that upon his release from the National Penitentiary, Bollino, Juan María Perrone, became Enrique Bonaglia. There was no particular reason, or if there was, he didn’t know it. There was just the feeling that he had to leave behind everything he’d been—whatever it was that he had been—up until that point. This was accompanied by the feeling—even more confusing—that there was nothing in front of him. And it’s difficult to know—there are too many possible reasons—why, for this next journey, he took the name of a father who was virtually a fake.

  We know that he wandered through that strange city for several days without finding lodgings. It’s not clear just who directed him to Don Simón, but he seems to have been almost happy to be exiled in that way. There certainly wasn’t much else to encourage him, and it’s also true that he had little choice. Perhaps he didn’t think that he’d be able to leave prison behind overnight, but that he’d have to wean himself from it.

  Don Simón Coutiño was a Galician in his fifties who had worked every day of his life since he was ten or eleven to be able to have this shop that sold fabric, wool, and thread next to the main plaza in San José de Flores. The shop did respectably well, though it was still quite modest. The porteña women of Buenos Aires who summered in the town would bring their linens in, and the local farmworkers, peasants, and maids made up the rest of the clientele.

  Don Simón had just dismissed a man who worked for him, so when Enrique Bonaglia—twenty-four years old, with a clear attentive face, a smile still free of arrogance, and a certain intelligence—showed up and asked for the job, the shopkeeper saw no reason not to take him on. In fact, without wanting to say what it was, he saw a very good reason to do so.

  He didn’t ask any questions. In those days in Buenos Aires, no one checked anyone’s stories. One more, one less—everyone was from somewhere else. To Enrique’s relief, the position required thirteen hours a day of work, six days a week, meager pay, the right to two meals a day, and the use of the little room at the back of the shop for himself. Enrique Bonaglia told himself this was a good way to stop his seeking, and by then, that was all he wanted.

  It was very strange to be Bonaglia—some nights, it was terrifying. Bonaglia, my father’s name, being used for this: the refuge for a wretch no one was looking for, and who was looking for nothing.

  Clients whisper. When they come into Don Simón’s shop, and especially when they leave, they whisper. Shopping is one of the few diversions for the farmhands and peasants and maids of San José de Flores. They also have the choice of going to Mass, or to a dance once in a while, a stroll through the plaza in the late afternoon, an occasional roast on Sundays, but shopping is the activity that brings them closest to their masters, allowing them for a moment to see themselves as similar. The town doesn’t offer much to buy, and so it is not uncommon to see them at the shop, looking for a spool of thread, twenty centimeters of lace edging, some yarn.

  But the farmhands and peasants are not ones to whisper. They are still very much criollos—creoles—which involves a way of being based on a kind of silence. The farmhands and peasants only go to Don Simón’s shop when they can say that they were sent by their wives, or their bosses. Even then, they wear an air of distance, distraction.

  On the other hand, the maids of the farm owners and their wives come eagerly, and they whisper. They ask each other—as they have many times—who this young man could be, so attentive and smart, though not that tall, who serves each of them as if she were the one woman in his life, but who looks delicately off into the distance when they each lower their eyes for him, or pout invitingly, or say something faintly provocative. Whenever they do that, the young Bonaglia seems to be in another world.

  After a bit of this, Don Simón’s female customers console themselves, whispering that that boy simply can’t be that much of a man. And that if Don Simón took him on hoping to marry off his daughter, as many suspect, then he’s picked the wrong horse.

  He says that he spent several years trying to learn just who he was, and that he still thought it was something he needed to learn. Or could learn.

  Little Mercedes Coutiño is now past twenty-four, the age, according to godmothers, when a girl ceases to be a girl and instead gets dangerously close to becoming a spinster. Mercedes Coutiño is not exactly pretty. Who can really say, since, as we know, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and it’s the eye that is the most capricious, but the young lady meets none of beauty’s usual requirements. She does not have the fresh skin of a new rose, nor the litheness of a willow by the river, nor breasts rounded like ripe fruit, nor the grace of a gazelle. She has instead a round face, not unlike a muffin, a single, imposing eyebrow, and a short, rotund body. She is a woman in the wrong vessel, her subtle spirit a prisoner in coarse flesh.

  This inadequacy has rendered her timid. When Enrique Bonaglia began working in her father’s shop, Mercedes feigned illness in order to spend the next two weeks in her own room on the top floor. Her mother had died years before. She was an only daughter and the only woman in the house, which she ran diligently, and her father hated—perhaps feared—the thought that they might be separated. Which is why he refused her utterly when, at eighteen, she told him that she wanted to become a teacher. No, he said: she was his only daughter. She was not to go off and do anything strange; she was to marry, and her husband would take over the running of the shop when Don Simón became too old. He never said, “When I die,” but always, “When I become too old.”

  As was her duty, Mercedes accepted her father’s decision. So that when Enrique Bonaglia showed up, she became quite alarmed, shutting herself up for those two weeks, but then had no choice but to come out. Now, the two young people greet each other politely every day, avoid each other quietly, and try to find a way to live together without any intimacy.

  “I see, Señorita, that your book is in French.”

  “Yes. I don’t read French very well.”

  “I could help you, if you like.”

  “Do you know French?”

  “Yes, well enough.”

  “Where did you learn it?”

  “Well, I spent a few years working on a ship and picked it up there.”

  For some reason of his own that he has not yet fully understood, Enrique has vowed to himself that he will lie to her as little as possible. The very idea of this surprises him, and he asks himself why it should even have occurred to him. There are degrees: his vow includes everything to do with work and domestic life but it does not—cannot—include his past. He—Enrique Bonaglia—has no past. What doesn’t exist cannot be measured according to whether it is true or a lie. Though he would not yet put it like this, he is learning unconsciously about the prerogatives some men assume for themselves in writing about their pasts.

  None of which gets in the way of his being a very good worker. Don Simón is delighted with his new charge and spends more and more time playing cards with his chums in Canedo’s café, long afternoons during which the two young people search for a way to be with each other; they do not find this easy. For a start, they are enveloped in the heady smell of the fabrics.

  It’s understood that Enrique should be the one to attend to customers. Unless
she is needed, Mercedes remains on the stool, where she embroiders or reads. When Enrique doesn’t know something, he asks her as respectfully as if she were the owner, otherwise, they might pass the entire day without speaking. To anyone else—to the whisperers, thinks Enrique—they look like an old married couple that had never been new.

  The truth, he thinks, is simpler. (He is still permitting himself to think about the “truth.”) She had rebuffed, that one time, his thinly disguised offer to teach her French, and he does not wish to make any more overtures. Something in her makes him feel that he can’t talk to her about the silly, day-to-day things about the shop or the town’s gossip. To him she seems to be above all that; it would be rude to bother her with it. She deserves better than to have to trifle with such petty things, yet he can’t think of what else to say to her.

  For her part, Mercedes does not think it proper to converse with a man with whom she has no formal relationship. Most afternoons, the silence is comfortable enough, but occasionally the tension spills over into surreptitious glances, meaningful coughs, an awareness of that heady smell. This is how their time passes.

  “I promise, dear friend, that I will mend my ways. I don’t wish to keep on, as I have until now, lingering over each tiny bitterness that life delivers. I will enjoy the present, and the past shall always be the past. How right you are! How much happier we would all be if, instead of dwelling forever on our slights and ills, we worked to make our mediocre present bearable,” says the book.

  Months go by before it occurs to Enrique to ask her what the book she is reading is about, though he thinks later that he must have wondered long before.