The Vanishing of the Mona Lisa

by Martin Caparros

  He is working feverishly on the ledgers—one of which keeps track of the sex; it was hard in the beginning to get used to thinking of it as just another unit of measurement—in order to fill out a chart showing, beneath each girl’s name or nickname, how much they’ve earned at the end of each week, after deducting the costs for food, lodging, laundry, medical services, and salaries, his own included, of course.

  He barely lifts his head when his boss tells him that Señor Chaudron is going to rest there awhile in the armchair, if that’s not inconvenient. It isn’t, or at least his position doesn’t allow him to say if it is. In the distance, he can hear unusual music, a playful combination of violins and guitars. As soon as she leaves them, Bonaglia returns to working on his charts.

  “This looks like great work for a man,” says Chaudron.

  Bonaglia doesn’t respond.

  “Yes,” presses Chaudron, “a job where a man could have some fun.”

  “Sure, if you say so,” replies Bonaglia, to shut him up, but Chaudron keeps on:

  “Yes, sir, all these women around!”

  Bonaglia feels it necessary to tell him that the women are only for the clients.

  “Surely you don’t mean to tell me…”

  “No,” replies Bonaglia, and pointedly resumes working on his accounts. Business is getting better all the time, he thinks. He is responsible for that. He likes the feeling of efficiently dispatching a job that is of no real importance. All the rest is for idiots.

  I happened to be there but I could have been anywhere. I wouldn’t have cared whether they were selling meat or funerals; it was all the same to me. I didn’t care about anything, and Doña Anunciación protected me. One day I made a mistake and confused two accounts, and she told me that I should know that my job there was a gesture of goodwill on the part of a woman who was, above all, always good to others. I remembered then what my mentor in the prison, the Frenchman Daván, had said: that there were two kinds of people, those who like to think of themselves as good and those who choose to believe that they are by nature bad. And that neither group is better than the other, though the people who choose to believe they are good usually hold goodness in higher esteem than evil, since no one would define themselves by what they despise. No one would define themselves as a bad person if they didn’t value or admire or envy wickedness even a little. And those who call themselves good probably aren’t, though they at least prefer goodness, consider it better for some reason. To me, of course, none of that mattered.

  Those were peaceful months. Very peaceful. Time in the present, that’s the secret.

  “So that’s what happened. Who knows what my life would have been like if I hadn’t had a couple of drinks that night.”

  “Probably not that different, Chaudron.”

  “Now there’s a lack of imagination, Mr. Becker. But I would also venture to say, what would his life have been like?”

  “Whose?”

  “Please, Mr. Becker!”

  As soon as I had finished doing the accounts I started over again—revised them, let’s say—so that it wouldn’t look as if I was doing nothing and so my guest, or refugee, wouldn’t pester me. People seem to feel that they’re supposed to say all kinds of stupid things out of some misguided notion of good manners. What was strange was that in the end I was the one who started talking to him. I suppose I suffered a moment of vanity, and also, I wanted to see if reading Conan Doyle had served me at all—as I said before, I read a lot.

  “You wouldn’t by any chance be a painter, would you?”

  “Me?”

  My silence obliged him to answer the question.

  “Yes, I am. Why do you ask?”

  I didn’t tell him that between the paint stains on his fingers, which he hadn’t been able to get rid of completely, and the smell of turpentine that still came through over all the other smells—the undigested alcohol, sweat, cheap perfume, and what might have been vomit—it was fairly clear.

  Stranger still, he then began to tell me that he indeed painted portraits, but only from photographs or other portraits, and that if I wanted he could do mine for a reasonable price, and strangest of all, I didn’t mind his offer, it piqued my curiosity and we both agreed to meet again. I never did things like that. But I suspect that it was more vanity, and that surprised me—I’d sworn to myself then that I had no vanity. That I, Bonaglia, had none.

  “I had never seen myself. It’s hard to believe, but I had never had a photograph taken, much less a portrait painted.”

  “Never, really?”

  “I don’t think you understand what my life had been like up until then, Newspaperman.”

  “Believe me, I’m trying.”

  “I had never really seen myself; it was quite a shock. The face I saw in the painting seemed to be part of a world that was completely different from my own. I wondered, when I saw myself, just how much I didn’t know.”

  He tells him that he doesn’t understand why, with that incredible talent for copying, he hasn’t put it to better use. He says “better use” so he won’t sound too crude. Chaudron just smiles and says, “Who knows?” He learns later that in fact Chaudron has been using his talent for years, but now all he gets is that ambiguous response and the smile, both of which seem to be intended to put him off. But without knowing why, without thinking about it, Bonaglia presses him.

  Did he ever think, say, of copying any famous paintings, he asks, and for a moment Chaudron is interested and replies yes, why not, that he’s thought of selling reproductions of some paintings before, and he stops talking so Valfierno will reply. And Valfierno looks for a way to say no, I wasn’t really talking about reproductions exactly. For a while he searches for a way, hesitating, afraid to cross that line of convention and wondering how it occurred to him to cross it in the first place, and not crossing it until finally Chaudron seems to take pity on him and says, “You know, Bonaglia, that forgery carries some dangers.”

  It’s another invitation. He doesn’t use the normal phrase and say that it carries many dangers, which would close off that avenue. No—he says that it carries some dangers, forgery carries some dangers, as if inviting him to weigh these, to take each of them into account in order to think of ways to avoid them. “What dangers, for example, if I might ask?” And Chaudron explains to him that the main danger is in picking the wrong clients. They have to be cultured enough to be able to appreciate and want to own certain paintings. They also have to be harmless enough not to be dangerous if they find out they’ve been tricked; conceited enough not to want to see anything untoward; and just dishonest enough, he says, smiling, to think that in buying the painting for such a low price they, the buyers, are the ones putting one over on the sellers, and not the other way around. It’s important, Bonaglia, for the client to think that he is getting the better of you, even if only a little, says Chaudron, and he seems for a moment like a different person: firm, confident, able to do anything. Not a guy who looks like he’s already old and who can’t paint anything that hasn’t been painted already. Not this Frenchman with the shifting gaze who’s all skin and bones, for whom he now pours a glass of wine and looks at in the light from the one bulb that illuminates his office.

  Who says to him, “Don’t you believe it, don’t believe it for a second: no matter what anyone will tell you, it’s the seller who makes the rules.” Who tells him that he could paint almost anything, but that he could never sell it, that to be able to sell you have to seem as if you don’t want to, that you don’t need to. That the seller has to be doing the buyer a favor by selling to him—a favor, he repeats, just to sell him the painting; he’ll deign to sell it if the buyer insists. He tells him that he couldn’t do this, that he wanted to but he couldn’t, because he’s the sort of person people forget, he leaves no memory. But if he were to find someone who was willing, then he, Chaudron, would also be very willing to set up an arrangement that could be quite fruitful. “Don’t you think Bonaglia? What do you say? Just for
argument’s sake, what do you think?”

  “Imagine what I felt. Here I was, in my forties, having decided or at least resigned myself to what I had, little as it was, and to not seek anything more.”

  “It’s a little difficult for me, Valfierno, to recognize you in that sad description.”

  “No, try to understand, at least this once. I’m not saying this for sympathy; on the contrary, I’m telling you so you can see how far I traveled afterward. So you can understand just how a man can create himself. So you can see the path.”

  “You mean me?”

  “Yes, of course. I mean you. You could do it.”

  “But tell me, who’s going to buy a painting from someone who works for Doña Anunciación?”

  “No one. Not from that person, that’s what I mean. You’d have to be the kind of person who people would want to buy things from. An amiable fool, easily cheated. A rich man who’s come from somewhere else, a wealthy but distant province, something like that. You could be that, Bonaglia, I know you could.”

  As if that were his mission in life. I took another look at this man, so ardent, so sure. As if he’d been born to create me.

  My life was so peaceful. A life in the present.

  “No, Chaudron, I’m fine the way I am. If you want to do that, go ahead, but do it yourself. As I said, I’m fine like this.”

  14

  HE WANTED THAT CALM SEA to last forever. If only it would never end, he thinks—so snugly covered by the red blanket, so well secured to the deck of the ship, so definitively not in any one place, so far outside of any laws, so secure—then he wouldn’t have to set off down that slippery course waiting for him, down that dangerous path. If only he didn’t have to go past this moment now, or at least if he did, if only it could be without the knot squeezing his stomach and his legs shaking. Without the impulse to run, no questions asked.

  The drizzle, the noise, the movement, the confusion—he is not bothered by any of these, nor is he intimidated by the arrival in New York. In fact, he tells himself for encouragement, he was there just last summer when he arranged for the sale of the paintings, and everything went smoothly. But he knows that in the next few minutes he will gamble his future. A chain of events is beginning in which he will bet everything on one card not just once but two, three, six times in the next few months. He has been told that this is the easiest part, but he doesn’t believe it.

  “Eduardo de Valfierno, is that right?”

  “Yes, indeed, that’s correct.”

  “Do you have anything to declare?”

  “No, I don’t, nothing of value,” he says in hopelessly bad English as the customs officer begins to go through his bags.

  Valfierno wears a suit bought especially for the occasion, sober and very expensive, of an elegance that shows him to be someone for whom none of this is of any interest. With it he wears a short cape of ivory silk and a smart felt hat. The suitcases now being opened by the customs agent are of that kind of fine, light-colored leather so delicate that they can only survive on the better liners, the first-class compartments of trains, and the grands hôtels. The investment required for these, along with the cabin on the Mauritania and what he will spend in America, will bring him close to the end of his funds. But he is not worried. In a few months, when he has finished, he will never have to think about money again. That will be very strange.

  “That’s a nice painting.”

  “Indeed, an excellent copy.”

  “It looks familiar. What do they call it?”

  “The Mona Lisa.”

  “That’s it! By an Italian, right?”

  “Yes—Leonardo. His name is Leonardo da Vinci. Was Leonardo da Vinci.”

  The Irish customs agent with the red sideburns stumbles over the pronunciation of “da Vinci” as he continues to lift the paintings out of the big suitcase: two small oils with flamenco themes, an eighteenth-century French landscape.

  “Here’s another one of those davinchies,” he says, placing the second Mona Lisa next to the first.

  “Yes, I love this painting. It makes a very good gift for the ladies,” says Valfierno, giving the man a knowing smile, which comes off as a leer.

  The customs agent seems well disposed and not surprised by Valfierno’s cargo of reproductions. Valfierno tries to remain impassive. Whoever had told him that it was common for rich tourists to bring back copies of the famous masters was right. That the Americans bought them by the armfuls and that the U.S. Customs didn’t pay any attention to them. That they were almost always just reproductions, and—according to the more conspiracy-minded—that the agent would let them pass even if he thought they weren’t, as a way to contribute to America’s cultural heritage. One way, anyway. This is what Valfierno had been told, and yet he’d had his doubts.

  “Is this French cheese?”

  “Yes, it’s for a friend. Is there a problem?”

  “There certainly is. We don’t allow foodstuffs into the United States that could be carrying disease or pests,” says the customs agent, whose demeanor has in seconds gone from that of a friendly official to a tiger closing in on a kill, all courtesy dispensed with as he smells his prey.

  “I’m sorry, but I’ll have to confiscate this.”

  “No, please, it’s a gift!”

  “I’m sorry, sir, but I have to. I have my job to do.”

  Valfierno makes a point of his annoyed expression, hoping it will prevent the huge smile he feels from breaking across his face. Later, in his hotel room, he’ll take out the two Mona Lisas from the suitcase, as well as another that the agent didn’t find, and hide them in the bottom of the clothes closet, wrapped up well in his dirty laundry. The next day, he goes to the offices of a shipping company on the corner of Fulton and Broadway and claims the parcel containing the remaining three paintings. And that evening, he reunites the six of them in his hotel room, leaning them side by side against the wall and staring at them for hours. Strangely, as well as seeing what he expects to see—six times three hundred thousand dollars, his life’s fortune, his future security—he sees other things, harder to define, harder to describe. Not only fear, or triumph, or evidence of his own brilliance, or danger. He can’t discern it. He wants to know what it is but he can’t make it out. He lets sleep overtake him and dreams—of that famous gaze repeated, that reserve, the pleasure of those six smiles.

  The next day he buys paper and twine, wraps up all six paintings with great care, and deposits them at a storage company on Houston Street, where they will lie in wait for the moment—in just a few months, if all goes well—when they will meet their destiny.

  Valfierno

  1

  MY MOTHER, EVERYONE WHO HAS ever changed their country, the girls in the ledgers—at first it was easy. Monsieur Jourdain, who realized he’d been speaking prose all that time and was happy to become that other person. Monte Cristo, who became a count to seek his vengeance. Garay, who went from swineherd to founder of Buenos Aires. Ulysses, who set off as an outcast and a beggar and arrived back where no one expected. Juliet, who asked, “What’s in a name?” but whose name killed her.

  My mother, everyone who has ever changed their country, Alonso Quijano, of course, Don Quixote. Jupiter himself, who seduced as cow, swan, rain, but not the night, no, not the night, which turns to day to turn back to night, and day, and night again, no. The greatest traitors—who knows?—Merceditas, Don Simón, the Frenchman in prison and far from his home, me—Bollino, poor little Bollino, imprisoned for so little and changed; my mother, the devastation of not knowing, Bollino changed but into what? Going on but without knowing what, changing, changing more, and then Sarmiento, above all Don Domingo Sarmiento; everyone who has ever changed their country.

  I had never thrashed about so much in my bed, never turned over so many times. I would think, then turn over again: where did I get the nerve to decide who I was going to be? I thought more. Turned over more. How do you decide who to be? And why? More thinking, more turns, mor
e questions. When I am already me, when I am already this person here.

  I had spells of calm toward dawn when I realized that I had already been others in my life, had already done many times what I didn’t want to do now. And also that I had not really done it because it had been automatic; I had been others without deciding who to be. I had simply gone from one name to the next, like a leaf blown in the wind, letting fate and certain names carry me along. This time it was different. This time I was deciding who and how to be. This time, a mistake could be disastrous—Juliet with poison, another name. I had made mistakes before, so many times. I kept turning. It wouldn’t be easy to keep being who I was, either. I wasn’t even who I was. Not easy. Who was I? What would I lose? Domingo Faustino and Monte Cristo. Filthy Ulysses, my mother of the ledgers. I would lose me, as I had before—not a lot to lose, but also everything. Everything is nothing—enough, for God’s sake! Garay, Garay. If I sleep then perhaps my dreams will know who it is that’s sleeping. Perhaps. Who knows? Who knows anything?