The Vanishing of the Mona Lisa

by Martin Caparros

  So dumb, he remembers. The footsteps keep getting closer. So dumb—the chance of his life, he thinks, like always. So dumb, so lost, and now here, shut up in this dark room with footsteps coming closer and closer. So dumb, always so dumb, the noise of the footsteps, now here, lost, dark—he holds his breath.

  The footsteps move away, get fainter, and for a few minutes—no one can tell how many—-no one moves or makes a sound.

  “That was very close,” says Perugia, when he finally dares to speak.

  “I thought the guards didn’t come at night,” says Michele Lancelotti reproachfully.

  “They’re not supposed to. Maybe they do now. Don’t worry, they’re gone. They won’t come back.”

  “How do you know they won’t come back?”

  “I don’t know. I think—yeah, I’m sure.”

  “They better not,” says Vincenzo Lancelotti, and Perugia hates him. Who does he think he is, these idiots can’t even tie their own shoes. He only got them because he had no choice, they’re the only ones he knew he could handle. Anyone else would have asked too many questions and wanted too much money and might even have bossed him around. Not the Lancelotti brothers. He had worked with them before on a couple of building sites and jobs, and while they might complain some, in the end they always did what they were told. They knew their place.

  It’s hot. A few weeks earlier, in the Bistro Berthe, Perugia had asked the Signore if he could do the job alone; he didn’t like the idea of having to take on two more, or having to share the money with them. The Signore had smiled and asked—perfectly friendly—if he didn’t think he needed any help, and Perugia had replied no, that he could do this on his own and that those two would just be a burden. The Signore had said that there was no chance, that he gave the orders, and that Perugia was to do as he was told. Perugia had looked away and agreed, but now he was having his doubts.

  “Try to get some sleep; it’s going to be a long night.”

  “Sleep? Here? You’re nuts, Vincenzo, you can’t sleep in here! How could anyone sleep in here?”

  You can tell that the Lancelottis are from the south—they can’t say anything without a torrent of words coming out, he thinks, and half closes his eyes. The room smells of oils, clay, turpentine—it’s a storeroom where painters who come to the museum to copy its paintings can keep their materials, and it’s crammed and dirty. He opens his eyes; he is not going to be able to sleep either, it’s too uncomfortable. His eyes are now used to the darkness, and next to the door he sees two brooms with their handles crossed. He knows this means something bad but he doesn’t remember what. If only his grandmother were here she would tell him. He snorts. The world is full of signs he doesn’t understand—if only he’d taken the time to learn them. If only he’d paid attention! His hands are sweating. His hands never sweat, he thinks, it must be the heat. He wipes them on his pants but they keep sweating. It’s as hot as an oven in the room and his legs are stiff. He’d pay money to be able to stretch them but there isn’t any room. Michele Lancelotti keeps fidgeting, driving him crazy.

  “Vincenzo.”

  “What?”

  “You said everything was going to be easy.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Doesn’t look like it.”

  “Yeah, you’ll see. Or are you scared?”

  “Scared? Me?”

  There are still hours to go, many hours. Perugia lights a match and looks at his watch: nine fifteen. It should just be getting dark outside, and they have to wait until just after dawn.

  “Vincenzo.”

  “Now what?”

  “Nothing,” says Michele. The other one, Vincenzo—why the hell did he have to be Vincenzo, too, thinks Perugia, like him? At one point it had brought them closer, but now it annoys him. He didn’t think Vincenzos were like that. Vincenzo Lancelotti’s thoughts are on a point too far in the future.

  “What do you think they’ll do when they figure out it’s gone?”

  Perugia doesn’t answer. The Signore said it was going to be a huge scandal, and he thinks so, too. When he worked at the museum he noticed how everyone treated that painting with more respect than the others—they looked after it better, they’d handle it differently. To him, it doesn’t look all that different from a lot of the other paintings, but for some reason he doesn’t understand, he knows that it is. One time in the bistro he had spoken up and asked, “Signore, can you please tell me why that painting is so important?” But the Signore had just looked at him the way his grandmother used to, with that look of disdain he knows so well, and said nothing.

  But Perugia knows he’s not stupid. It’s everyone else who’s going to be stupid, he thinks. He and his friends are going to be the ones who steal this painting that’s so important—he and his two friends—he, the stupid one. Let’s see all their faces when they find out! Tomorrow, when they figure out it’s not there anymore. Tomorrow, when we’ll have it. After we’re out of this hole.

  The Marqués de Valfierno

  1

  THERE ARE PLACES WHERE TO be a marqués is nothing special. Places where, oddly enough, that’s just what I can be.

  “You cannot imagine what that was like, Becker.”

  “I’m sorry—what was like?”

  “To flee from Buenos Aires. Just when everything looked as if it was starting to work out, I suddenly had to get out of there in four days.”

  “I or we? I thought you didn’t leave by yourself?”

  “That’s not the point. The point is that it was so sudden, so unexpected.”

  “I can imagine. It must have been very difficult.”

  “It was. But the strangest thing about it is that if it hadn’t happened, I would have lived out my days as a small-time provincial swindler in that country of braggarts. See how things can happen, Newspaperman?”

  At last I was a foreigner. It’s so easy, so comfortable to be a foreigner.

  He’d only been in Paris a short while and already his face had changed. Not just because of the dummy monocle he wore in his right eye, not just because of the carefully trimmed salt-and-pepper beard, or the hair worn slightly longer than usual to show that he wouldn’t be told what to do. Not just for the surprising ease with which he’d picked up the local language or the pleasure he took in using it. Not just because his height was no longer a disadvantage, nor for the casual disdain in his look, nor how easily he now closed some of his deals, nor how natural he now found it to handle women who years before would have terrified him. And not just because it meant something to be Argentine now—it was a passport he used judiciously but tirelessly, a way to open almost any door, because being an Argentine in Paris in those days was a guarantee of extravagant wealth. And not just because any mistake he made now was forgiven because he was Argentine, because to be Argentine now meant something and the French knew it and treated them with a new respect. No, the most surprising thing was that his face in the mirror now showed the calm that had recently come over him. “Calm”—there was no doubt that was the word. He had thought about it and concluded that this was the right word.

  There was also fear, of course, and the thrill of launching what he rightly or wrongly considered to be great ventures, but that same thrill produced in him the calm of knowing that for once, for the first time, he was doing something worthy of notice. That he—Bollino, Juan María, Perrone, Bonaglia—was finally someone with a story worth telling, finally the person he was always meant to be: himself, though he was now so different. And it amazed him, above all, to be at the center of a story that no one would believe in its entirety—but perhaps that was the way of any story really worth telling.

  I was amazed to be the hero of my own story.

  Though there was nothing quite so dizzying as not knowing what would happen to me in the next year, two years, five years.

  “At last, here I am, back in my own city.”

  “But Valfierno, this is the f
irst time you’ve ever been in Paris!”

  “Oh, really, Chaudron? How can you be so sure?”

  Sebastián de Anchorena is a master—he takes a fish knife and, very discreetly, he places one of those ridged swirls of butter one gets in the finer restaurants onto the sharp end of the knife and, with a lighter, gently melts the top of it. Then, carefully balancing the knob of butter on the knife, he takes the handle of the knife between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand and the sharp point of the blade between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand and holds the knife just in front of his middle, parallel to the floor. With an almost imperceptible movement that is nonetheless both swift and sure, he pushes the tip of the blade down and releases it suddenly so that the butter is propelled up to the ceiling with some force. I have seen him perform this feat various times and today is no different: the top of the butter, lightly melted, sticks to the ceiling and the butter hangs there menacingly until the room’s heat eventually melts it enough so that big drops of warm butter begin to rain down on whomever has the misfortune to find themselves below. Some of the other Argentine boys also do this, but as I’ve said, Sebastián is the master. Though I no longer envy him.

  “See,” I say to him, “what an Argentino I am.”

  “Of course, indeed, Señor Marqués. Bien sûr.”

  And I know that this would just have killed me before. The antics of Sebastián and his friends are the essence of art for art’s sake, symbolic of those lives, completely free of concern, in which all that is important is to assert that the needs of common mortals don’t affect them, do not touch them. That people like them have no need of what either time or money can offer; the only truly elegant thing being to spend these and ask for nothing in return, without aims, without regrets. People who can devote their efforts and their whole futures to perfecting a completely unnecessary skill. Pure art.

  They are aristocrats by an accident of birth, no more—just nature. I, on the other hand, built myself piece by piece. I, on the other hand, am indeed human.

  But there were nights when he couldn’t sleep. Though he washed his face and undressed and got into bed and closed his eyes, resting his head against the pillow, always a little cool, his head sinking into the pillow, he would realize, as he sought sleep, that he wasn’t going to find it.

  No, there were those nights when he knew long before trying that he would not sleep, that if on one of those nights he were to try, he would unleash an overwhelming torrent. He risked again being Bollino, Juan María, Perrone, Quique—any one of the dead. He risked the terror of getting up and going to stand in front of the mirror to see his own face, to convince himself of his face and his name, to tell himself that death could not reach him while he was still intoning each letter of his name, that as long as he was Valfierno nothing bad could happen to him, to tell himself that at last he was who he was but that he had to keep repeating it, sweating, in front of the mirror. This was what he risked.

  And so on those nights he wouldn’t even try. He would comb his hair and wax his mustache, he would put on a good felt hat and go out to lose himself in cabarets and cafés where he would be just another gentleman on the prowl, where everyone would look at him with envy and respect, and where he could seek out a girl who could give him a few hours without sleep. Where he could be no one.

  Sometimes my weakness frightened me. In my worst moments, it was my strength that I feared.

  Feigning nonchalance, Sebastián launches the little swirl of butter. The knife is left quivering in his hands, the butter on the ceiling. Santiago and Ramón smirk quietly and bring their napkins up to their mouths, and we go on talking about the new show at the Opèra-Comique, the girls in the chorus, and their weekend at Château Longueville. The skill of Sebastián’s little trick has delighted me, too, but I no longer envy it. I have to pretend that I am one of them. For the moment I still have to pretend, although I know that now I am also doing something important, that I am going to give the world something to talk about. That if these boys knew—if I could tell them—they would envy me. Tomorrow night, if everything goes well, I’ll go and see that little cocotte I used to know from the Faux Chien, Valérie. Nothing special—she’s just one of many—but if all goes well and she gives me the information about her Italian friend, then I can get something big going. Finally, I’m going to do something important.

  “In the end it wasn’t that difficult. It turns out there’s nothing easier than convincing someone who wants to be convinced. Look at you, for example—you accept my story without question.”

  “You’re talking about me?”

  “Who else, my Newspaperman, my indispensable Newspaperman.”

  2

  VINCENZO PERUGIA AWAKES WITH A start and realizes he’s been asleep. Opening his eyes, he is surprised that he can’t see anything, then remembers where he is, in the darkness of the little room. He is startled by his leg touching something—the leg of one of the Lancelotti brothers. Confused, he looks over at them in the darkness and can just make out that they, too, are sleeping, and he thinks suddenly that it must be too late, that the hour is past, and that, like idiots, they have missed the biggest opportunity of their lives. The shooting star, that cursed shooting star! He is filled with a deep unease, his eyes burn, and his forehead weighs on him like a tombstone. He struggles to find a match in his pocket and lights it: it’s 5:20 in the morning. Now what he dreads is the time still left to wait.

  “Vincenzo.”

  “What?”

  “Are you awake?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I can’t sleep.”

  “Looks to me like you just were.”

  “Yeah, but I can’t. I’m asleep, but not really.”

  “Just wait. Not long now.”

  The hour is interminable. Perugia tries to imagine himself arriving back in his village in a luxurious car, like a Bugatti, or a Mercedes, but still the time drags. He imagines all the girls who will want him to take them out, who will look at him and say, “Yes, whatever you want”; they are all the same, completely shameless. He thinks about how difficult it will be to find a decent woman he can marry. Then he tries to imagine the house he’ll buy in the village, and about the life he’ll have as a rich and respected craftsman, but the pictures won’t come. And the time seems to stand still.

  “Vincenzo.”

  “What?”

  “How long now?”

  “I don’t know; not long.”

  “Will you tell me when it’s time?”

  “What do you think?”

  Perugia fights drowsiness; he must not sleep now. Now all his fear is focused on the danger of falling asleep, which helps him. His visions of his village aren’t enough to keep him awake; he might have dozed off, he can’t be sure. Then it occurs to him that he should think about Valérie, her neck, her tits. Valérie’s tits are worth all the Jocondes in the world, he thinks, and he gets nervous. Now he tries not to think of her, but that doesn’t work. He spends a long while thinking about Valérie, going back and forth, round and round, as if he were trapped on a merry-go-round: her tits, her neck, her ass, tits neck ass, nick tets ass tits tits tits…At last his head gives a little shake and he lets out a sort of cough, or snort. A whore, like all the rest. Michele Lancelotti wakes up.

  “What is it? What happened?”

  “Nothing. Nothing happened.”

  Perugia lights another match and looks at his watch: twenty to seven in the morning on that famous Monday.

  “Okay, guys, get up. It’s time.”

  The three of them try to get to their feet without bumping themselves. They pull out their white aprons and put them on. On Mondays the museum is closed, and the only ones allowed in are the employees, the guards, and the maintenance staff. They all wear white aprons. The workday begins at seven. Vincenzo and Michele Lancelotti grab cloths; Perugia picks up a broom. It occurs to him for a moment to wonder what this means, but there isn’t time.

  “Okay, yo
u know what you have to do.”

  “No.”

  “Sure you do—what do you mean, no?”

  “Yeah, okay—follow you.”

  “Yeah, and keep your mouths shut, don’t forget,” says Perugia, and he opens the door very slowly.

  3

  “IF IT WASN’T FOR THAT whole business I’d be Mr. Nobody now, Mr. Becker. But look at how they greet me, see? Look, look at the respect.”

  It’s true that they’re looking at us. At the tables around us everything stopped when Perugia and I walked in. The tiles of the domino players froze in midair, people who were talking stopped in mid-sentence. Even the birds quieted down. The domino players inclined their heads slightly, in deference; some of them touched a finger to their hats. Two or three said, “Ciao, Vincenzo, how are you?” Now everyone has gone back to what they were doing, and Perugia takes a swig from his glass of wine. He wipes his mouth on the back of his hand, his hand on his pants under the table.

  “You’re not a Jew, by any chance?”

  “Well, yes. Why?”

  “Nothing, just asking. It doesn’t matter to me; everyone respects me here. But some others would have problems if they were seen talking to a Jew, you know?”

  “No, why?”

  “Come on, Boss—don’t pretend like you don’t know.”

  Vincenzo Perugia is wearing a straw hat that used to be white with a new red ribbon, a cotton shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and black suspenders. He looks around him and doesn’t seem as calm as he says he is. He speaks in a low voice:

  “With a Jew, of course, but it would happen with other foreigners, too. You said you were American?”