The Vanishing of the Mona Lisa

by Martin Caparros

  “Nothing’s going to happen! You’re both being idiots,” he’d snapped and immediately regretted it, though they’d said nothing. He had stressed that they were not to acknowledge him and that they were to stay in the room until he gave them the signal.

  It is now 3:25, thirty-five minutes until closing. They have to pass the time. Perugia walks over and stands behind the brothers, who are pretending to look at the big painting. He looks at their shabby, threadbare suits and thinks to himself that everyone will know that they don’t belong here. Then he realizes he must look the same, and he worries again. On top of everything, his jacket is too big, so it can hide the bundle of tools he carries.

  But there is no one else in the Duchâtel Room now except for the three ladies, and Perugia pretends to look closely at the details in the large painting before him. As he does so he gets a shock. The painting is enormous, painted in dark tones with a lot of brown and red, showing Jesus suffering on the cross with the two thieves near him. Perugia crosses himself; exactly the same—with two thieves near him! He looks at the two brothers and tries to stay calm, cursing the moment he agreed to get involved in this mess. He looks up at Jesus and asks his forgiveness for these insults.

  “O Mary, conceived without sin,” he murmurs and looks again at his watch. It’s 3:27, and the women are leaving the gallery. Now he and the two others are alone in the Duchâtel Room.

  “Now! Let’s go,” hisses Perugia, and the three of them walk silently—as if their mere footsteps would give them away—toward the northeast corner of the gallery. There, hidden by the moldings, is a door barely the size of a man. Perugia fumbles with the hidden catch, working it with his penknife. An endless minute. Then the catch gives.

  “Quick! Inside, now,” says Perugia, and the three of them shuffle into a small dark room, filled with things that they can’t make out. They close the little door. Perugia leans back against the wall and the sound of his breath escaping is like thunder.

  9

  “THE FUNNY THING IS THAT he says it was you who convinced him to become Valfierno,” I said to Chaudron, and immediately realized my mistake.

  Before my eyes, Chaudron’s face was becoming a storm of bitterness.

  “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have told you that. But I have to admit it got my attention when I heard it.”

  “Why? Because he’s some fancy so-and-so and I’m just an old guy stuck in a chair?”

  Chaudron was shouting. This man who normally seemed as if he could barely get his words out was shouting at me, in his own way—almost without raising his voice, his fists pressed against the flowered arms of the chair, pushing each syllable out. As he shouted, his eyes and the rest of his face became sad, as if by having resorted to this he was already defeated.

  “Because you’re such a Newspaperman that you can’t imagine anything that you can’t see right in front of you? Because you haven’t figured out that there was a time when your hero was just a poor sap? Or because you don’t want to know?”

  Ivanka was watching us from the kitchen door and looking at me with hatred. Her thick legs were planted wide apart as if in defiance. The closeness we’d achieved over hours of interviewing was dissolving in front of me, just when I needed to ask him my most delicate questions. To try to get back in his good graces, I asked him how he’d thought up the name Valfierno.

  “Do you really think that crazy name was my idea?”

  Again I’d made a mistake, but for some reason I didn’t understand, Chaudron was starting to calm down.

  “No, that was his idea—who knows where he got the name. I even argued with him about it, like I did about him wanting to be a marqués. But that’s what the man wanted. He said that with Argentines, you couldn’t leave anything to their imagination; they were too stupid. He said that if you wanted them to understand anything you had to spell it out. We did agree on that.”

  Chaudron stopped talking, but only momentarily. He seemed to decide something.

  “Sorry about what I said before, Becker. I want to believe I don’t care anymore, but there are things about all of this that I’ve never been able to swallow.”

  “Did he change very much once he started being Valfierno?”

  “‘Very much’ doesn’t begin to describe it, Newspaperman. See if you can understand—when I met him, he was one of those guys who’s already given up, who doesn’t want to go any further; all he wants to do is to stay where he is and not move.”

  I’d sworn I wouldn’t let my face show what I was thinking but he must have seen it anyway because he answered me, though his fury had now passed. Now he just sounded tired, almost condescending. He’d gone from anger to despondency.

  “Now don’t get the wrong idea—it’s not the same. I’m old now, and sick. I have this house and some money in the bank and a wife who says she loves me. Back then he was just in his forties, counting fucks in a whorehouse and living like a dog, Becker, like a dog. Maybe I wasn’t clear.”

  He’d been quite clear, but he went on. He started to explain to me how a person makes plans and still believes they’ll change as long as they don’t yet have stories written on their face. That’s how he put it: “when their face isn’t full of stories yet.”

  “I mean, when your face is just one story with a nose attached. Haven’t you seen how, later, your face starts to break up into different stories? Two fault lines separate your cheeks from your mouth, your chin becomes its own entity, your forehead looks like a wrinkled potato? Well, when your face gets filled with all those stories you begin to think you’re done with plans, right?”

  I said yes, of course, and asked him as carefully as I could if he knew why Valfierno wanted to stay in the brothel, why he didn’t want to move on with his life. Chaudron said that he was trying to convince himself that he’d attained a certain wisdom.

  “He would say what I told you before: that he was satisfied with his dreams, his imagination. That only fools tried to make their dreams into reality. He said he knew that and didn’t need anything else.”

  “He didn’t need it or he was afraid to try for it? From this distance he sounds like someone who was terrified, and I’d like to know why.”

  “Excuse me, did you come all the way here just so we could talk about him?”

  “No, of course not. I came to hear about you and about the things you did together.”

  “‘Doing things together’ is one way of putting it. There was a point where he just started doing things and all I could do was follow him.”

  Chaudron summoned his wife in a whisper—the kind of sound only a spouse can hear through a kitchen door—and asked her to bring us two coffees. Ivanka told him not to take advantage of the visit, that he knew he couldn’t have coffee this late at night.

  “I didn’t ask you if I could have coffee, woman, I asked you to bring it,” said Chaudron in a surprisingly mild tone, and then he began to tell me how he and Valfierno had arrived in Paris with almost no money. They hadn’t dared to bring any paintings out of a fear of French Customs, and they barely had enough to find a small apartment and for Chaudron to buy canvases and oils and to set up his studio there. But Valfierno had got in touch with certain Argentines in the city and very quickly found a couple of buyers for Chaudron’s Murillos and Riberas.

  “Paris was very tough for me. I don’t know if you’ve ever had this feeling, Becker, of coming back to where you started without having achieved a single thing. I was back where I had been almost twenty years before, when I’d had to leave, and everything was the same. That was tough, very tough for me. You know how I figured out that something was badly wrong?” Chaudron asked me, and then he stopped, as Ivanka had come in with the tray and the two coffees. Something had happened between them, too; he no longer wanted her to hear what he was going to say. There was an uncomfortable silence as she served the coffee. After she’d gone back into the kitchen he told me that everything went wrong once he stopped trying to find things.

  “Yes, do
n’t make that face, Becker. We lived in that studio and it was chaos—two of us in that small space with all my painting tools and materials. I used to lose things a lot, and I’d look for them. When things were all right, I’d find them, no problem. I’d lose something and then I’d find it, I mean I’d look everywhere, and it would turn up. Until one day, I don’t know what happened, I suddenly thought that I shouldn’t look anymore—I should think. And for a while everything seemed to go better. I didn’t look for things anymore. If I couldn’t find a particular color, I wouldn’t go through dozens and dozens of tubes trying to find it—no, I’d try to remember when I last used it and what I’d moved since then, and right away I’d find it. This’ll seem crazy to you, Newspaperman, but that’s when everything started to go wrong.”

  Chaudron fell silent; he was far away. I had the impression that he was staring at his painting of the Virgin with the baby Jesus as if there were some clue hidden there, but perhaps I was wrong—the idea of finding clues in everything was just too French for me.

  “As soon as we sold a few paintings and made some money, he moved out and got his own place. I don’t think he could stand me anymore then, even though the fact that Valfierno was my idea was something I never threw in his face. I’m not one of those guys who goes around all the time boasting about what they’ve done.”

  “But you kept on working together?”

  “Sure, or you wouldn’t be here, Newspaperman. You would never have come to see me if all we’d done was to sell a couple of pretty good copies of Spanish baroque painters. You came here to see me because he had that one brilliant idea. But I tell you, that only happened because in Paris he finished changing himself into Valfierno.” Chaudron told me that it was a process that had begun in Buenos Aires but that Valfierno had always seemed to be looking behind himself there, he was always afraid that someone was going to find him out.

  “But when we got to Paris all his fears went away. In Paris he really was his new self, he believed that he was that person I’d invented: the Marqués de Valfierno. Isn’t that ridiculous? And isn’t it even more ridiculous that because of that, the whole world remembers us now, even if it doesn’t know who we are?”

  I had the impression that his patience was running out, but there were still things he wanted to tell me. He said that in the middle of all his unease, he had begun to feel that the copy occupied a more and more important place. He didn’t want to tell me any more stories now, he wanted to recount his theories. But I still needed answers to some important questions.

  “I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, Becker. What’s happening now is that progress and all our modern advances are bringing the world closer and closer to the copy. Think about it: before, if you wanted to draw the plan of a city you had to imagine it. Nowadays, you just go up in a balloon and you look and you copy it down. You can see everything, and in the future you’ll be able to see more. My trade is full of people who compete with me who’ve had no training, there’s a whole gang of cheap imitators. I noticed this a while ago, Becker, and I also realized that the copy does not have the reputation it deserves. The copy is the basis for civilization; I don’t know if you realize that.”

  “Well, no, but—”

  “Please—don’t interrupt me. I’m telling you that if it weren’t for the copy, the world wouldn’t exist. Everything would be disappearing all the time. We are ephemeral. Originals don’t last; someone has to make a copy of them for them to keep existing. Sons of their fathers, the blacksmith of the blacksmith before him, the hammer of another hammer, chickens of their hens—everyone copies. Sons—copied by nature’s art—are imperfect reproductions of their fathers, with the mother meddling more or less. Without the copy there wouldn’t be any culture, there’d be no society or traditions, just animals. Just a din of individuals with no history.”

  Chaudron was getting excited; he was transformed. I had the uneasy feeling that he’d spent years working on this speech without ever before finding anyone to listen to it.

  “If we didn’t have the copy we’d have to invent everything over and over again all the time. A revolution worse than all the other revolutions. If it weren’t for the copy, I’m telling you, the revolution would never stop. Imagine—if we think the world is already a mess the way it is, with the Russians, the Germans, all of that. The copy is order, it’s the only guarantee we have that order will be maintained.”

  “I’m sorry, Chaudron. You were telling me about when you decided to go ahead with the plan of La Joconde…”

  “I wasn’t telling you anything about that, Newspaperman. Don’t treat me like an idiot. What I was telling you is that there’s terrible injustice in all of this. You know, an artist who makes a copy is more skilled that the one who is being copied. All the copied artist has done is to free his instincts, he just lets it come out, does what he can. But the artist who copies him works hard, twists himself around to make what the other man made without even trying. What’s nature for one is art for the other. And art is what we were talking about, if I understand right.”

  Defiantly, Chaudron stopped talking. He didn’t look at me—didn’t look at anything—but he was seeing something. Then he told me to come close, that he was going to tell me something very important, a secret, he said, which could be worth a lot of money. He told me that times were very hard when he painted his Jocondes, that he had felt diminished; he couldn’t stand what he was doing.

  “This was what I’d done my whole life, you know? And then suddenly I couldn’t bear it anymore. I don’t know if that’s ever happened to you, Becker, but there’s nothing worse.”

  He told me he couldn’t stand the idea that his work was so overlooked, and that he’d had a moment of vanity, which he sometimes regretted. He also told me that he’d left a mark on all of his Jocondes.

  “Anyone who knows it could easily pick them out. All you have to do is look underneath the smile—that famous smile. There are two small, red eyeteeth just beneath the smile, Newspaperman. Just look for those—you’ll see them,” he said, and he let out a laugh, though it was hurt and harsh, the bitter sound of someone laughing at himself. I didn’t know what to say. He was giving me an incredible scoop—the proof I’d been seeking for so long.

  “No, Newspaperman, don’t listen to me. This is stupid—don’t pay any attention. Sometimes I can’t help getting caught in these things that have been eating at me all this time. You want to know the truth? I have a satisfaction that very few people have. I didn’t let myself get consumed by this work. I told my wife once what she should put as the epitaph on my grave, what Stendhal wrote about Saint Paul: ‘He was a true artist—a man surpassed by his work.’ My work has left me completely forgotten. And I could never stand it if I were better than my work. Can you imagine anything worse, Newspaperman? Anything more humiliating?”

  He looked at his hands, which were perched on the lace that covered the arms of his chair. They were tense, and looked like two large spiders.

  “I told him so many times, Newspaperman, but he never understood. He couldn’t understand.”

  Yves Chaudron fell silent, and this time it seemed that he had told me everything he was going to tell me. And yet I had to try anyway.

  “How did you think up the business of the six Mona Lisas? How was that supposed to work?”

  “Please, don’t bore me with details now, I beg you. It’s gotten late.”

  Ivanka was standing by the door again, regarding me in a mixture of surprise and fear. Or perhaps it was him she was looking at. I cleared my throat and thanked her, and said I wouldn’t disturb them any further, that they’d been very kind. I wondered once more whether to tell him that Valfierno was now dead. He looked fragile, but it occurred to me that the news might give him a lift. I didn’t know. I got up quietly and told them both again how grateful I was for their time.

  10

  HE HEARS FOOTSTEPS AND HOLDS his breath. They come closer. Vincenzo Perugia listens, trying to decipher them
. It sounds like only one person, and the footsteps are not very firm, as if whoever was out there was dragging his feet; it could be someone old. The footsteps keep approaching; the more he thinks the closer they get and they are now very close. Perugia remembers the guard’s yellow badge and thinks that nothing in this life is free. And that he knew he should never have gotten mixed up in—another step.

  Perugia thinks back to the time he saw a shooting star. He hears the footsteps and is amazed at the number of things you can think about in such a short space of time. Perugia would have been about fourteen or fifteen when he saw the star—who knows? Every year was the same in his village. Perugia was still living there. His father used to take him along every day to work in the fields. The girls used to tease him because of his voice, and that night in summer he saw the shooting star.

  The next day, he told his grandmother, his father’s mother, who was still alive then, and she asked him if he’d made his wishes. She was already scrawny by then, but she spoke the way she had when she was still large—arrogant, always talking.

  “So, Piccolino, what did you wish for?” she asked him.

  “Wish?” he replied, and the grandmother let loose a huge bray of laughter.

  “How can you be so dumb you don’t know that when you see a shooting star you’re supposed to make three wishes?”

  His grandmother laughed and laughed, smacking her thighs with her hands. She was sitting on a little straw chair in front of the house, underneath the vine, and she slapped her hands down on her thighs.

  “How did you get to be so stupid?” she says to him, and she tells him she can’t believe that a grandson of hers would have missed his big chance by not knowing that.

  “You don’t see a shooting star every day, Piccolino, not even every year; you just never know, maybe once in your life, and you missed your chance, Vincenzo. How can you be so dumb?”