The Vanishing of the Mona Lisa: A Novel - Softcover

1

I am Valfierno.

Let's just say that I'm Valfierno. Or that I used to be. It was as Valfierno that I pulled off the most amazing caper -- the story of a lifetime.

"Why did you choose the name Valfierno?"

"Didn't we agree that you would limit your questions to matters of fact?"

"Yes, of course. Isn't that a matter of fact?"

"My dear fellow..."

Tuesday, August 22, 1911. The Paris late edition was selling like crazy. On every street corner, paper boys shouted out the news: someone had stolen the world's most famous painting.

"The Mona Lisa is gone! Read all about it! La Joconde has disappeared!"

"Mesdames, Messieurs, we have lost La Joconde! La Joconde has escaped!"

The heat was unbearable. It had been like this for weeks, and except for the few who were profiting from it, everyone was miserable. The topic dominated every encounter, every café, every ornate salon, every church and fancy brothel. In such a cruel heat, Paris couldn't be its usual festive self, and this made everyone feel all the more miserable, and cheated. Men and women would talk to each other of nothing but the heat. They'd move on listlessly to some other topic of little interest only to mop their faces and return to the subject again. "The world is not what it used to be," they sighed.

"It's progress, my dear, progress. If it weren't for the Socialists and this foul heat..."

For weeks, the heat sucked all conversation dry, until suddenly, that afternoon, everyone was talking again.

"They've stolen La Joconde! France is a laughingstock! Extra! Extra!"

I am Valfierno.

I was a very happy child. My mother called me Bollino and I thought that was my name -- Bollino, I'm Bollino.

One time in the street, a woman said, "What a lovely child, what's his name?" and I told her Bollino, and my mother laughed a lot, and said, "No, Señora, his name is Juan María," not knowing I also called myself Eduardo. But I -- Bollino, Juan María, not yet Enrique, still Bonaglia, also Eduardo -- was a very happy child.

The boy has dark hair, a wide face and delicate features, and is somewhat short for his eight years. He has a decisive way about him; he gives an order and the other two children follow. The other two are both blond, the boy is older -- about six -- and the girl is perhaps five. Around them the park is dazzling -- a sea of lush, perfect lawn, a pond sprinkled with lotus flowers, hedges trimmed in the shape of small houses, magnolias, monkey puzzle trees, oaks, islands of lilac bushes, white statues of animals and goddesses and warriors, also a peacock. At the top of the park the windows in the Frenchstyle mansion reflect the sunlight. The dark-haired boy announces that they are going to the statue of the deer. The blond boy objects.

"Don't tell me what to do! You can't tell me what to do! You're no one to tell me what to do, you're no one!"

Diego is shouting, on the verge of tears, and launches himself at the dark-haired boy. Bollino is half a head taller than him and stronger, too. Diego tries to hit him, but Bollino dodges his blows, not hitting back. Marianita laughs. Diego tries again, swings, and loses his balance. He falls, clutches his eye, and yells from where he lies on the ground that Bollino has hit him in the face. His little sailor suit is dirty.

"Bollino hit me! Bollino hit me! I'm going to tell my Mamá," he yells, his face stained with tears and mucus, as the heavy woman in the maid's uniform rushes over. Her skin is pale, she has blond hair and feet like platters. Up close she looks younger. She picks him up and cleans him off. Diego doesn't like her to touch him, and he recoils, yelling, 'Annunci, Annunci, don't touch me!' Mariana and Bollino watch them, holding hands. The air smells of orange blossom and loquat.

"What happened?" asks the maid, in her Italian accent.

"Bollino hit me! He's bad! I'm going to tell Mamá!"

"I did not! I really didn't! He fell, he slipped and fell. I didn't touch him!" says Bollino. The maid strikes him once across the face, hard. It makes a noise.

"So you learn not to mess with the kids," she says to Bollino, and he looks at her without any expression, all his effort going into not crying.

"But, Mamá, I didn't do anything!"

Suddenly, no one gave a thought to the heat. The painting's theft was a national scandal, and nothing stirs a population more than to be witness to a national scandal. Nothing grabs them quite like being at the center of a real disaster, cast as actors in a real drama -- the consolation of knowing they have lived through a moment that many others will for years just pretend to remember, of knowing that this time they have actually felt the touch of history, normally so aloof and disdainful.

My mother raised me valiantly. I remember her feeding me once -- it must be one of my first memories -- she speared tiny pieces of meat for me on the end of a fork, and with each bite of mine she said, "Bollino, chew each piece well with your mouth closed, or you will hurt both your belly and your reputation," and she laughed. I laughed, too: "reputation" must be a very funny word.

She was always looking after me, and that family was also very good to me. When I was little we spent all our time with Diego and Marianita. Those were long and happy days, swimming, riding the horses, playing games in the park and the playroom, my mother watching over all three of us. The family would give me presents -- toys and clothes -- and every now and then the father would tell me that he loved me like a nephew, and that I was very intelligent and would do well in life.

Until I turned ten we were inseparable, those children and me. Afterward, when Diego began his studies with the governess they'd brought in for him, his father gave my mother money to send me to study at school with the monks. The day before I was to start, he called me into his study and told me that nothing was more important than education, and that only without it were you truly poor, and that if I had any problems I was to tell the Father Superior, he would take charge of me, and that he wished me all the best things, and that if there was anything I needed I was to come to him, and he gave me a smart leather folder for my papers.

The day that he had Angel take my mother and me in the carriage to my first day of school, I discovered that beyond the walls of that park there was a path that led down to a large town on the banks of a river. It was very ugly. I'd heard people talk about it before, but until then I had never paid any attention.

"But Valfierno, that's not where you were born."

"Are you asking me this, or telling me?"

"You told me your mother was a foreigner. You told me you were a foreigner."

"A foreigner, you say? From where?"

The woman waits at home. Home is a squalid room in a big house that had once been a palace. Ages pass. She sits wringing her hands and waiting, knowing that she will have to wait many more hours. In those hours she will ask herself a thousand times why she wasn't able to find the words to persuade him not to go. Neither words of love, nor threats, nor reminders of his paternal responsibilities could help her, and she will ask herself again and again what could have made him choose that supposed duty that had called him away.

She will also wonder if maybe he was right, as he was so many other times -- that she exaggerates her fears, that they are just a woman's hysteria, nonsense. Surely he is right, and yet she is still scared, and she still expects to hear how he left, arrogant as always, bidding a careless farewell with that condescending smile. "Don't worry yourself, woman, these are not things for you." And "you" could have meant her and the boy, but she knows that it didn't, that it meant women, all women, and it saddens her to be mixed in with them all like that, as the smell of burnt grease on his clothes in that room saddens her, the smell he leaves behind for her so that she won't forget that it's him she is waiting for.

The woman is not yet twenty but already heavy from motherhood and her diet of bread and beans. She has unusually light eyes in a face that is dark and streaked from wiping tears away with dirty hands. She sits, and sitting, you notice the weight and roundness of her arms. She would make a beautiful Madonna.

Her name is Annunziata -- Annunziata Perrone, born in Trimoli, in Italy, on the twenty-fifth of March, 1850, a Monday, the Feast of the Annunciation. Daughter of Giovanni, wife of Gian-Felice Bonaglia, ex-seamstress, a woman now.

She continues to wring her hands slowly, then dries them on her brown skirt, which is clean but for the small grease spots that won't come out, and she thinks again of the words she couldn't muster and tries to comfort herself. She never knew how to use words; he was the one who knew how. When he was first pursuing her, after work at the dress factory, when she was fifteen and had a smile -- everyone agreed -- that would be her fortune, she knew that she was supposed to keep quiet and listen to him. She was quiet when he asked her to sit with him beside the dry fountain in the square, and she was quiet each afternoon when he came back to find her again and extended his hand for her -- he did not reach for her hand, but would extend his hand so that it was she who, quietly, would grasp his. She said "I do" quietly when the priest asked her, and she kept her screams as quiet as possible for the midwife who told her how happy her man would be now that she'd given him a son. "A healthy boy! Your man is going to be very happy!"

She knew to be quiet, and was learning that her silence could give her power, as well -- that perhaps she didn't need words. She thinks now that when she did need them -- this morning, for example, those words of love or duty or sadness that she didn't know how to say to him -- it was too late, and she twists her hands and dries them on her skirt, and the boy grabs them and asks h...