The Vanishing of the Mona Lisa

by Martin Caparros

  “By all means.”

  “What is it you want to tell me?”

  “To put it discreetly: the story of the greatest theft of the century.”

  “In other words?”

  “The disappearance of La Joconde—the Mona Lisa—you’ll no doubt remember it,” he said, and of course I did. She had been stolen from the Louvre seven or eight years earlier, and the story had been on the front page of every newspaper on earth. But it was an old story, filed away now. In the midst of my disappointment, I tried to be polite:

  “Forgive me, but that whole business was resolved a long time ago.”

  “Was it, indeed?” he replied, with a mischievous smile, and I remembered the way it had ended, in another story that all the newspapers had carried on their front pages, when the thief, Vincenzo Perugia, had shown up with the painting at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence claiming he had stolen her in order to return her to her native land. Then his arrest, the initial widespread call to release him as a reward for his patriotic gesture, the trial, the gradual fading of interest after a few weeks of nitpicking legal arguments, and finally his sentence of seven months in jail, which by then he had served. Finally, his liberation, neither in glory nor disgrace.

  “Well, I’d say it was resolved. They caught the thief, recovered the painting—everyone saw the story.”

  “And you believed all that?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “You believed that that illiterate peasant was capable of pulling off an operation of that magnitude?”

  He spoke without either gestures or inflections of his voice, as if what he was saying didn’t particularly matter to him. I learned later that this was one of his favorite tricks, but at the time it impressed me: it made him seem quite invulnerable.

  “Look, actually, I haven’t really kept up with it.”

  “Then it would behoove you to catch up. If, when you’re done, you would like me to tell you the truth about what happened, I’ll be staying here in the hotel for another three or four days. But don’t be too complacent—you could just miss the story of a lifetime.”

  He doesn’t want to think of himself as old already, but he’s almost fifty now. If all goes well, he could have another ten or fifteen good years.

  The news of Vincenzo Perugia’s bolt reached him in the villa he’d rented in Tuscany, not far from San Gimignano. It struck him as a cosmic joke that the Neanderthal had gone to Florence to surrender the painting not a hundred kilometers from where he was. His first thought was to flee; it took him a couple of hours to convince himself that no one would be able to connect him with the news that was now shaking the country. Only then could he begin to consider the situation.

  Clearly he had been wrong: he’d overestimated Perugia’s intelligence. He understood now that he should have acted sooner—he had known this before—but he’d thought he had more time, not because Perugia seemed particularly patient, but rather because he didn’t think Perugia would come up with any kind of plan. He could imagine that the pressure of sleeping night after night with the La Joconde under his bed might have gotten to him and caused him to commit the worst kind of foolishness.

  It was not particularly dangerous for him, not in terms of the law or the police, since no one could connect him to the theft, but it was possible that one of his buyers would start to get nervous upon seeing all the newspapers talking about the sudden appearance of the painting. This was not a good time for him to be in America, but perhaps if he were to go he would be able to convince them of what they themselves wanted to believe—that the painting that had just appeared was itself a forgery. That the French, no longer able to bear the humiliation of having lost the Mona Lisa, had come up with this plan to show the world that they had recovered her. But that, just to be clear, the one and only original was the one that they kept hidden in their deepest safe or in their private vault. And that if they had any doubts they should call in an expert. And by all means, if they should have the opportunity, they were to go to the Louvre itself and look carefully at the copy that had been hung there. A true art connoisseur such as yourself, one who knows the original, after all, would see it right away. The thing is, the world is full of idiots. But we, we know the truth, you and me: we know.

  He often remembers something that Don Simón, that unlikely con man, had said to him, so long ago now. Don Simón had told him that after a certain age, it no longer paid to boast: the truth would either disprove you and make your boasts look pathetic or it would bear you out, and they would be unnecessary. And that this was called maturity and could be quite pleasant.

  I bet it is, thinks the Marqués. I bet it really is.

  “But don’t be too complacent—you could just miss the story of a lifetime.”

  It sounded like a serious threat. I picked up my whiskey and took a last gulp.

  “And why do you want to tell me this?”

  “Haven’t you guessed?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  Valfierno gave a condescending smile. Around us, the men and women continued their pursuit, though to us it felt as if they had disappeared.

  “Be patient; you’ll understand soon enough. If I were to ask you for money for my story, what would you say?”

  “That you don’t look as if you need it.”

  “Perhaps not. Perhaps you don’t see the significance of that.”

  I tried to think fast. If what he was saying was true, then I was looking at the opportunity of my career. But it was all very, very strange.

  “Again, excuse me. I’m inclined to hear your story, to work with you. But how can I be sure that you really were involved in the theft?”

  “Involved?”

  “Whatever you want to call it.”

  From the inside pocket of his linen jacket Valfierno took out a wallet of Russian leather, and from it a photograph, its edges curled. He handed it to me. It was a picture of him, a few years younger, his hair less white, in a dark suit, holding the Mona Lisa up for the camera. To me, the photograph seemed like conclusive proof.

  “I never did the very best I could in my life, but you know, in the end, that was the best thing I could have done. Others fake paintings, tickets, feelings. As far as I know, I was the first one to fake a theft.”

  I did not yet know that, with Valfierno, the whole notion of a conclusive proof was a mistake. I looked at the photo for a moment and then turned it over. There was nothing on the other side.

  “Satisfied?” he asked, sarcastically.

  I proposed that he come to my office the next morning, after breakfast. We would have room to talk there without any noise or interruption. He said no, that he would wait for me in his room at the hotel—room 712—at 8:35 in the morning.

  “Be punctual,” he told me. “It will be the most exciting day of your life.”

  I was ready to believe him.

  Though he knows he created something that no one else could, that no one could have imagined: his life. He knows—tells himself—that he has created art.

  It was then—with Perugia in jail, when there was no more point in wondering what to do with La Joconde, when the most important phase of his life appeared to be over, and with the war looming—that he received news of Valérie Larbin.

  She had sent him a letter via Chaudron, which itself was unnerving—a way of letting him know that she knew more. But that was not the worst part: “I just heard what happened to our carpenter friend. He might still have some reason for not talking, but I don’t.” And she went on to explain that the reason she had kept quiet until now was not the money he’d given her, but her wish to safeguard the Italian. Now, she could talk without worrying about that.

  The Marqués de Valfierno received the letter in Marienbad; it took him less than a day to get to Marseille. When he finally found her, in a tavern on the port, he had to hide his shock. She could only have been twenty-two or twenty-three by then, but she looked like an old woman. She had lost that freshness that had made h
er so appealing before; she had become fat, and something in her face had gone dull.

  “You don’t seem very happy to see me, sweetie.”

  “Are you?”

  “Of course. I always like to see my old friends. Especially when I think they’re going to be generous,” she said, giving him a smile that was just a little too broad. Her teeth were even worse than before. Valfierno told her to get to the point and asked her what she wanted. Valérie said money, of course.

  “Or did you think it might be something else, Marqués?”

  He thought: I could kill her. She was right—he did want to kill her. He tried to push the idea away, but it kept coming back. She talked on and on, the wine disappeared, and he couldn’t stop killing her.

  He had never before believed that killing someone could be a solution, that the problems it caused could be less than the problems it solved. Fear of the law and the police didn’t count for much in someone who had spent so many years living with them already. Of course, forgery and fraud were not the same as murder, he thought. A good con was elegant, and popular, whereas killing someone was dirty, and people didn’t like it. The public loves art forgers like us because we are all brains, we use our wits and cunning to get what everyone wants anyway. And we take advantage of people whom they don’t like anyway because they’re too rich, or because they’re also trying to take advantage—you can’t be conned unless you are also trying to con. And they like us because we mock the supposed value of things whose value they don’t understand.

  Murder, on the other hand, is something else entirely. The public likes mass butchery, great battles, accidents with no one to blame, but murder?—not a bit. The simple murder gets very bad press, and too much of it. For centuries our leading voices have been preaching to us that life is sacred—the same voices of those who were always killing: kings, judges, priests. But the fools keep believing the nonsense; a million flies.

  He tried to take stock: neither fear of the police nor the ancient prohibition against killing could shake him of this solution. Maybe their shared past would dissuade him—it would be easier to kill a stranger, after all—but that wasn’t it either. If it had been, their relationship would have made the idea of killing her repugnant. And it wasn’t.

  If he could have been sure that he was doing it only for the security of the operation he would have killed her, but he was afraid it might also be malice, spite—all those feelings that appear when a woman won’t do what a man wants. He was seized with fear—he might kill her without knowing exactly why, or knowing only too well.

  “You know, we were about to escape with the painting…”

  “Who is we?”

  “Don’t pretend, Valfierno.”

  “You and Vincenzo?”

  Valérie said nothing and looked at him hungrily. For a moment she was her old self. Valfierno looked away but then decided it was better to engage her.

  “What happened?”

  “Nothing. Some things are better when you don’t do them.”

  They ordered another bottle of Sancerre. Just before the dessert, Valfierno handed her the envelope he had prepared. She asked for more, and he told her not to try her luck. Something in his face, his voice, some memory, made her not insist. Afterward, she offered—it was an offer rather than a suggestion—to spend the night together, and this time Valfierno didn’t think he ought to refuse.

  He has created art, he tells himself, and no one else knows it. He, the Marqués de Valfierno, is not—could never be, would hate to be—one of those charlatans who, realizing that they were terrible painters and negligible poets, declared that their life was their art. No, he would never have chosen art; it had just appeared one day, suddenly.

  The first thing I asked that morning in his hotel room at the Fillmore was why he had chosen me to tell his story to. He smiled. It was not the right question to ask, but it didn’t matter; Valfierno did not mind my questions. He had a very definite idea about what he wanted to say, and he said it. The fact that I was there was almost incidental. He needed me to be there and to be listening, though for most of those two days I had no idea why. I do know that it bothered him that he needed me there; he made that quite clear.

  “Tell me, Newspaperman—I imagine you’ve masturbated before?”

  “I assume we’re not here to talk about that.”

  “You assume wrong. A jerk off, if you’ll pardon my French, is a kind of fake sex, wouldn’t you say? Until it becomes its own kind of sex. It’s the same with every forgery—it always ends up becoming the thing itself. You ought to know that.”

  The hotel room’s blinds were closed; Valfierno had not wanted them open. He said we couldn’t let the present interfere with our story. Later it occurred to me that what he was really keeping out was reality, but I didn’t say anything. His recounting was exhaustive; we spent endless hours in there. He began the story of his life at the beginning, in Italy, and spared me no detail—I couldn’t say if these were true, but he supplied many details of all kinds—in the telling, all the way through to the theft, and the ending.

  He showed me papers, clippings, photographs. He was scornful, warm, anxious, conscientious. Those two days were endless. Little by little, almost without meaning to, I began to realize that this Marqués was different from the other. That he would say things so that his interlocutor would think the opposite. He would tell me that he needed me there, but very sarcastically, to make it seem as if this wasn’t the case, to neutralize that need with his irony. But he did in fact need me. And of course I understood very well how extraordinary his story was—I was overcome with the excitement of knowing how it would change my life.

  “So, Newspaperman, you are now the only one who knows the truth. Or perhaps not. Sometimes I think they also know…”

  “They?”

  “The ones who can’t not know. The thing is, they don’t want to say anything. The story of the little idiot Perugia, a dumb thief who represents no threat, serves them well. They much prefer that story to mine, which could inspire copycats. So they keep it going. I don’t know, I’m not sure about that.”

  I was amazed that he told me this; in those two days I had also learned that uncertainty was not comfortable for him.

  “In any case, I know that if no one ever hears my story, then they will have won.”

  No, he tells himself, unsung glory works for a while, but we are not really that strong. The moment comes when we reach for the mirror, for others to learn that it was me, he tells himself. He has lived all these years with that knife in his flesh.

  He tells himself that he is a fully grown man. He doesn’t want to think of himself as old already, but he’s almost fifty now; if all goes well he could have another ten or fifteen good years.

  He often remembers something that Don Simón, that unlikely con man, had said to him, so long ago now. Don Simón had told him—twice, three times, more—that after a certain age, it no longer paid to boast: the truth would either disprove you and make your boasts look pathetic or it would bear you out, and they would be unnecessary. And that this was called maturity, according to the old Galician, and could be quite pleasant.

  It must be, thinks the Marqués. He thinks that it really must be, but that he never managed to learn it.

  Though he might have been close once. It was when he had the accident, just over two years ago. He was in that little hospital bed, completely shattered—he was immobilized, entirely in their hands, while a doctor with a fearsome expression poked around in his wounds. He knew that he couldn’t do anything, and he felt a profound relief: he didn’t have to make any more decisions. He had done all he could and could do no more. He thought that day that he had learned something. Then he got better, and it left him, so in truth, he hadn’t learned.

  Though he knows he created something that no one else could, that no one could have imagined: his life. He knows—tells himself—that he has created art. Everyone talks about art—the dandies, the salon revolutionaries
, the weekend painters who boast about using colors their mothers would have forbade them, the avant-garde “musicians” who arrange dissonant chords reminiscent of schoolyard farts. They all talk about it, but he really did it, made art; the rest is just playing around.

  He has created art, he tells himself, and no one else knows it. He, the Marqués de Valfierno, is not—could never be, would hate to be—one of those charlatans who, realizing that they were terrible painters and negligible poets, declared that their life was their art. No, he would never have chosen art; it had just appeared one day, suddenly.

  But he had known how to grab hold of it. He doesn’t want to be one of those pathetic fools who believes he’s created a masterpiece that no one else can see, who skulk in the corners and badmouth everyone who can’t appreciate them, who are gradually poisoned by their failure, which they persist in regarding as genius.

  No—he tells himself—unsung glory works for a while, but we are not really that strong. The moment comes when we reach for the mirror, for others to learn that it was me, he tells himself. He has lived all these years with that knife in his flesh. Not all the time, of course, not every minute, or even every day, but it was there nonetheless. Always there.

  And now he didn’t know how to get rid of it. The whole success of his plan—his great plan, his work of art, he thinks—depended on no one knowing about it. As long as everything went well it would remain a secret. Only if the plan failed would an even greater failure be avoided: that the world would never get to know of it. But in that case, his masterpiece could not be perfect: if it is not discovered, if I remain free, unpunished, then no one will ever come to know who the Marqués Eduardo de Valfierno was. And if they discover me then it will not have been a masterpiece—and I will no longer be Valfierno.