The Vanishing of the Mona Lisa

by Martin Caparros

  Don Eduardo de Valfierno. I was born on the twenty-ninth of May, 1861, in San Juan, where we owned some land. I am forty-five years old. A little before I turned two, my father moved us to Valparaiso to take over the family business, the principal shipping company there, which his uncle had left him. Of course, his uncle had been born in Genoa. My father was the first generation of Valfiernos to be born in Argentina, and he kept up the customs and traditions of his homeland. Because of this, among other things, when it was time to marry he decided to find a young lady from a good Genovese family, whom he courted by letter and who arrived in Valparaiso when she was barely twenty-one to give herself to this man, who was just a little younger then than I am now.

  That girl, my mother, expected the worst. She had few illusions about her future. She knew that her family had sent her to this South American isolation to forge closer bonds with the powerful Valfierno family. She also knew that she would be nothing if she disobeyed. And as this girl, my mother, had expected the worst, I could imagine her relief when she instead found a man who was devoted and respectful, still young, and who tried to make her exile bearable.

  In those days, Valparaiso was the busiest port on the South American Pacific coast, and it was there that I grew up. My parents spoke Italian to me, my governess French, and the maid, of course, the peculiar Spanish of that region. I lived there happily, without incident, until I was eighteen. I recall a protected and solitary infancy, my first boyhood games, the jet black hair of that maid, whom we called Nena.

  Then that year the war with Bolivia broke out. As all maritime commerce was now interrupted, my father decided to move us to Mendoza, where we waited for over a year for things to change. I saw nothing to attract me in that small, arid settlement, recently rebuilt after its terrible earthquake, and I celebrated when my father, disheartened by the unexpected duration of the war, announced that we would take advantage of this interruption in our lives by going to visit our families in our own land. My mother was delighted; it was the cruelest irony that she died on the Atlantic crossing. My father and I were now alone.

  My father refused to return to South America. Over the years, the Genoa family house was the setting for our discussions. He meant for me to continue in the Valfierno tradition of commerce, but I did not honestly feel my heart to be in it, as much as I tried. When I was twenty-five, the death of my mother’s father left me with a respectable inheritance, and I wasted little time in deciding that France would be the best place to spend it. I won’t tire you by describing those years—you can imagine what it is to be in one’s twenties, to have some money, and to take full advantage of what Paris offers. I enjoyed that life until I was thirty-seven; if only it could have gone on forever.

  But then my father chose this moment to die. He had married again, and though they had had no children, his widow managed to get much of what he had, though by then his finances were not in such robust shape. I nonetheless received a fair legacy and of course the title, which I admit I had forgotten about. My father was by rights the Marqués Valfierno but had never liked to flaunt it. On this point I follow his advice: in a republic like this, an aristocrat can be at quite a disadvantage. In Paris, of course, it was different.

  I stayed on in Paris for a few years, though in all honesty, my income no longer allowed me the life I had become used to, and on top of that the city was becoming a refuge for decadent bohemians and opportunists without scruples. I no longer considered it a suitable place for a decent man.

  People said then that Buenos Aires was the future, though without any contempt for tradition or the old customs. There, they said, a gentleman was still shown the respect he deserved. I have to admit that I had also been thinking of settling down, and that I recalled from my youth the beauty of the women there, and of course the bounty of the land. And that’s how I came to return home, and I assure you, I’ve never regretted it.

  “A marqués, Bonaglia? Isn’t that a bit much?”

  “Who’s this Bonaglia, Chaudron?”

  His mother, everyone who has ever changed their country, Quixote, Monsieur Jourdain, Sarmiento, the girls in the ledgers, Monte Cristo…

  It was only later—much later—that he came up with the perfect justification: that he’d always wanted to tackle what was undoubtedly the most difficult of all works of art—a life. And that in order to make a work of art of a life, one had to make it up. That to be the child of one’s parents was nature, and that to remain so was simply to resign oneself to nature. That to be a work of art, a life had to be invented.

  The justification came much later, though without realizing it, he’d been doing it all along.

  “I am Valfierno. I am the Marqués Eduardo de Valfierno.”

  2

  IT HAD IRRITATED HIM AT first, but now the fact that she has delivered Perugia to him has become another of his victories, a prize. It’s obvious to everyone, he thinks, that she’s not with him for his looks but rather for something else, most likely his money. But he likes the arrangement, it’s like wearing a good suit or having a diamond in one’s ring—even if people have the wrong idea. And it’s not because of that, even if he still doesn’t know why it is, even if his attempts to stop seeing her have quietly failed.

  And on this day, Valérie is radiant. Her gossamer white dress, a sea of lace, hugs her form. Her necklace sparkles in her cleavage, glinting as it moves with her. She wears a wide-brimmed hat and insouciantly perches a pale pink parasol on her shoulder. Her jet black hair is full and lustrous. Valfierno knows that they envy him, then it suddenly occurs to him that they might instead see him with scorn: another middle-aged man caught in the trap. The idea upsets him.

  “Eduardo, listen.”

  Valfierno looks at her and tries to think of something else. He tells himself he’s done a good job with her. He has taught Valérie to hide that vulgar side he finds so exciting so she can be the kind of young lady one can take out occasionally to a place like the Chantilly Hippodrome. Though she still sticks her nose in where it’s not wanted:

  “Eduardo, I have to ask you a favor.”

  Valfierno looks around him, imagining all the elegant men and women looking at him. It’s occurs to him often, this idea that he is under scrutiny, that he must present himself as if he were on stage. Just in case, he decides to attempt some gallantry.

  “Apart from my name and a ring, everything I have is yours.”

  “Anything real?” she replies, and she smiles with those teeth and everything falls apart. She just doesn’t know, can’t manage it, and she goes on talking as if she were the same person she was a moment ago, that glorious picture.

  “You, I suppose. The only real thing, my dear, is you,” he says, playing the fool.

  “If that were true we wouldn’t keep on seeing each other,” she replies, and Valfierno hates her then: she could at least be grateful. It doesn’t have to be love, or tenderness, just a little gratitude. Gratitude for supporting her, for taking her out, for playing the fool with her. Why couldn’t she play the fool, too? After all, he thinks, that’s what arrangements like these are all about—playing the fool together. Valérie passes her tongue slowly across her red lips, pink on red; she knows he can’t resist this.

  “Really, Eduardo, I want you to keep Perugia out of this whole business. He’s too stupid.”

  At least she doesn’t say Vincenzo, he thinks. She’s trying to be careful.

  “Now you tell me.”

  “I’ve always said that, Valfierno.”

  “What do you mean you’ve always said that? You’ve always said the opposite!”

  “Never mind, don’t complicate things. I want you to leave him out of it. He’s a fool, he’ll wreck the whole thing.”

  “I didn’t realize you were so in love with that imbecile,” says Valfierno, his voice becoming sharp. In contrast, Valérie replies in a throaty whisper:

  “Me, in love? Who do you think I am, darling?”

  A sea of people advances toward th
e grandstand as the starting bell rings. Valérie and Valfierno remain by the course, holding on to the rail. The horses’ hooves thunder past them on the turf.

  “I had a friend who fell in love once. You have no idea what a fool she turned into, or what stupid things she did. I could tell you…Make no mistake, I’m serious—if you go ahead with the Italian he’ll ruin everything.”

  “Valérie, you know that without him the whole thing is impossible.”

  “No, Marqués, I don’t know that. Or have you forgotten that you haven’t told me a single detail?”

  “Why do you want to know details?”

  “Because, Marqués, without me none of this could have happened.”

  “I know that, my dear, and you will be rewarded.”

  The horses come into the straightaway and the roar of the crowd suddenly swells. Valfierno marvels at how wonderful it must be to have enough money to be able to gamble on something as uncontrollable as some horse’s pace. A luxury he will one day allow himself. Perhaps very soon. Yes, very soon.

  “Marqués, I insist. That poor guy is a dolt; he’ll ruin everything. You have to replace him.”

  “I don’t want us to talk about this anymore, my dear, but take my word for it: without him, this whole thing is impossible. It’s that simple. It can’t be done without him.”

  “It can. We just have to find another way.”

  She speaks to him—she always does this—as if she knew something he didn’t. How to handle a man, for example.

  “We have to? Valérie, the person who needs to be out of this once and for all is you. All the more so if you don’t have faith in your Italian. Think: if he falls, you can fall, too. He knows everything about you: where you live, where you work—everything.”

  “And not about you?”

  “He knows nothing about me. We’ve met here and there a couple of times. He doesn’t know my name, he doesn’t know anything. You, on the other hand…”

  “Yes, of course he knows about me. But don’t forget—I know everything about you. Absolutely everything.”

  Valfierno thinks she might be right, though it doesn’t matter. But tells her anyway that there is no way, to forget it.

  “Whatever you say. But just remember: if he gets caught, you will, too. I’ll make sure of it.”

  “Who’s going to believe a whore?”

  “A what?” screams Valérie. He is already regretting it, but it’s late for that.

  3

  I’M SCARED. I DIDN’T WANT to be something I wasn’t; I didn’t need to. I didn’t think I needed anything anymore. And now I’m scared.

  “Don’t you worry, there’s no rush. Let’s take our time.”

  “Our time?”

  “Yes, Valfierno, we have to go bit by bit.”

  “But you said ‘our time’?”

  I’m pretty sure that at the beginning, he thought he would work on me as if I were a painting. He would find a model, understand its parts, come up with a sketch, color it in, refine every line, and savor the result. I’m quite sure he thought at first that I’d be another of his works.

  “That’s what I said.”

  The forger—as I discovered later—is a sort of ascetic, almost a saint. The kind of person who will make big sacrifices, who is willing to renounce all manner of things. There is nothing more dangerous than an ascetic—they think their sacrifice gives them all kinds of authority, all kinds of rights. On the whole, they do the same things as anyone else, just more so. Every creator disappears to some extent behind what he creates. But the forger disappears completely; his existence—and subsistence—depend on his not leaving even the smallest trace. We only know about forgers who have failed. The others—the successful ones—disappear entirely in their works. The one condition of their existence is that they not exist, that they be no one, unidentifiable, having no characteristics: that they pass perfectly as someone else.

  I would also have to do this now, to dissolve myself, but into my new life, not a work of art. Though at that moment Chaudron believed that my life was his work of art.

  “Our time…”

  I think—I hope—that there will come a day when I no longer recognize my own face in the mirror. Though the notion is flawed—who would not know who that was in the mirror? For then whose would the face be, and whose the one not recognizing? Of course you’d know the face was yours! Wouldn’t you? And me? Would I? Or which one would I be?

  Feeling excitement. Still afraid. I’m not a boy anymore.

  “Don’t you think it was strange to have believed that you could become someone else?”

  “Yes, Newspaperman, from this remove it seems like madness.”

  “And isn’t it?”

  “Who is it you’re talking to now?”

  “But where did you get the energy, the confidence to think you could be someone that different?”

  “I never had it. I was lucky enough not to know what I was doing.”

  He asks himself: what will I have to forget? Not: what things will I need to learn or to copy, which gestures or faces or voices will I need to put on, but what things will I have to forget in order to become someone else?

  Now, close to being Valfierno, Bonaglia spends his last three months at the brothel preparing, carefully reading about places where he’ll say he has lived, studying the lives of the great masters, and poring over reproductions of their most famous paintings. He escapes to the theater whenever he can to learn manners and graces. He spends hours with Who’s Who, learning about the people who will be his new peers. He listens to Chaudron’s stories of Paris, hones his prison French, practices poses and accents in front of the mirror. As if all of this, he thinks—the watching and reading and listening—could be enough to make him another person. As if anything could be.

  Many nights I felt like a fool. I feared I wouldn’t be able to do this, I wouldn’t be able to pull it off.

  He takes down the mirror. He unhooks that cracked, badly silvered mirror from the wall of his bedroom-office so that he won’t look at himself until he sees someone else. He says this out loud—“until I see someone else”—but in truth he takes it down for fear of seeing no one.

  Then one night in that room—where he continues to work for the time being until his transformation is complete and he will finally have to leave it as someone else—he realizes that he’s been preparing for this for years, though he didn’t know it before. That his early years in the big mansion, all his reading, his days in the shop, his long nights of imaginings, his deciding to stop imagining were all preparation, though he hadn’t known it at the time. Seeing now that everything was leading to this, he is overjoyed. He has at last discovered some meaning for all those years. Everything justified at last, he thinks, and he wonders who or what he can thank for this gift.

  Everything comes together now, and this coming together fills him with a new energy. Like being born into a new world, he thinks.

  “Did you really feel like that, Valfierno?”

  “Yes, I really did.”

  “It must be wonderful to believe that everything has a meaning, a purpose.”

  “It’s humbling. Looking back, I realize that I still had a lot of work to do at that point, a lot of effort before me. For the moment, I was still the same.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “It’s not surprising, but try. There’s nothing more fundamentally human than the satisfaction of following what you believe is your destiny. Can you see how humbling that is?”

  “On the contrary. As I said, I envy you.”

  “Of course, that’s why you do what you do; I don’t blame you for that. It took me a while to realize that the life I was about to begin was not in fact my destiny at all, but my choice. It was the exact opposite of going along with someone else’s decision. It was, ultimately, my own work.”

  I was going to become someone else because that’s what I wanted. All that would be left of my old self would be not wanting to be him.


  He grows his beard and tints his few early grey hairs. He has put back the mirror. If he could have remembered the person he’d been before, he’d have said that he no longer looked much like him. He tries to forget all about him, but can’t.

  “I think it’s time now.”

  “You do? I’m not so sure.”

  “How much longer?”

  “Just a few days?”

  He dreams—it’s actually a daydream, but he likes to think of it as a dream—that he runs into his mother on a street in Rosario and that she looks at him and is about to say something. Then he dreams—he prefers to think that he dreams it—that he’s about to tell her not to say anything, but this makes him sad, and he says nothing and instead listens to his mother talk. But he doesn’t understand what she’s saying. He can’t make out either the words or the gestures.

  Sometimes, as practice, to make up new dreams for Valfierno, he imagines that, rich and elegant, he finds Marianita Baltiérrez and marries her and buys the big house for her from her idiot brother Diego—if he owns it—and once again they play in the park, in that little room under the roof, in the big master bedroom. He doesn’t dream this, he daydreams. Bonaglia no longer dreams; Valfierno does.

  I was afraid.

  “Valfierno, come on, it’s time to begin.”

  “What’s wrong, Chaudron, are you running out of funds?”

  “This can’t go on forever, and anyway there’s no point. Believe me, when I look at you now I see someone else completely. I never even think of calling you Bonaglia anymore.”

  “Perhaps, Chaudron, perhaps. I was thinking about how to begin this. I suppose we have to do something, don’t we, to start this?”