Becker

 

“IS THIS CHARLES BECKER?”

“Yes, Becker here.”

“I am the Marqués de Valfierno. I’d like to talk to you.”

“What is this about?”

“I have a story to tell you.”

At first, I didn’t understand. He telephoned me at my office at the Chronicle and told me his name was Marquez and that he had a story to tell me that might interest me. The war had just ended, and San Francisco was teeming with soldiers, recently demobilized and out of work, looking to sell whatever they could, including the most unlikely tales. I got six or seven calls like this every day and rejected most of them outright. But something in the way this man spoke made me pause; his voice wasn’t so much asking as commanding. He didn’t ask me if we could meet, like most of the other unfortunates, nor did he tell me he had the biggest scoop for me that I’d ever heard, as the typical smoke-and-mirror guys used to do. No, he simply told me that he had a story to tell me, and I asked him where and when would be convenient. As I hung up, it occurred to me that he also had a strange accent.

“Marquez?”

“That’ll do for now, but it’s Marqués, a title, not a name. I am Marqués Eduardo de Valfierno. How do you do?”

It was impossible not to spot him. The bar at the Fillmore Hotel was humming with excitement, alcohol, girls in short hair and skirts, and men on the prowl dressed in garish ties. The piano was playing, but no one could hear it. The men and women flirted, yelled, shot each other looks, touched—all of them intent on making up for the years lost to fear and the trenches.

At the end of the lounge, sitting in a black leather armchair as if none of this had anything to do with him, sheathed in an impeccable suit of cream-colored linen, was the slight figure of a man in his fifties with the majestic head of a statue, the mane silvering, an aquiline nose, graying, pointed beard, and very lively eyes.

“You telephoned me.”

“You are Charles Becker?”

“I am.”

“What will you have to drink?”

“What have you got to tell me?”

“Whiskey? Two ice cubes? Three?”

The Marqués’s eyes never stopped moving. As if he wanted to be sure to see everything going on around him, or perhaps, as I was not to think until much later, as if he knew what was coming.

“I can wonder about what I did, but not about what I’m going to do. Not because what I did is more important than what I might do, but because the past is infinitely malleable, whereas the future can only be what it is going to be.”

“What?”

“You understand perfectly well, Newspaperman.”

He spent a while traveling. For him, those first months of 1912 would always be his happiest, if by happiness we mean the peace that comes from knowing you have done what you set out to do and have nothing else pressing. Or, to immerse yourself only in the present.

Every so often he would read news accounts about Paris and the hunt for La Joconde; he took great pleasure in these. The police were baffled, and though they consulted all of the city’s psychics and witches and fortune-tellers, they were getting nowhere.

The museum’s director was fired, the security procedures were changed. These were the gropings of the blind, and there were several. Embarrassment over the affair reached up as far as the government. Finally, they managed to apprehend a suspect. The press supplied the details: he was a poet of vaguely modern style, perhaps homosexual, by the name of Guillaume Apollinaire, who aroused suspicion when a friend of his who worked at the Louvre either sold him or gave him as a present a small Iberian statue, which he in turn had stolen from the museum. His accomplice—this word would sometimes appear in quotes—was a young Spanish painter by the name of Pablo Picasso. He was interrogated and then let go. The poet, Apollinaire, was held for a week; in the end he was released without charges.

The newspapers kept on printing nonsense. What the reporters wanted to know more than anything was how the thief would be able to sell such a famous painting. Valfierno was like a child in his glee: he would enjoy these accounts hugely at first and then suddenly be irritated by their stupidity.

And then the story stopped appearing in the newspapers. Sometime in the middle of 1912, the Louvre’s management gave up and filled in the space on the wall with a portrait by Raphael. Valfierno understood, even as they did not, that they were trying to forget.

He traveled. All of his destinations seemed to him to merge into one: the Carlton Hotel on the Côte d’Azur, the María Cristina in the north of Spain, the baths at Marienbad or Baden-Baden, the Select—or was it the Excelsior?—in Alexandria. The scenery changed, and the climate, and the language spoken by the staff, but the people were always more or less the same. The meals, the conversations, the occasional trysts, the gossip. In the end, he thought, we do not amount to much.

He meandered. For the moment, he preferred not to return to America, and the thought of Argentina also still made him uneasy. But the rest of the world was his.

He had no obligations and had never before fully realized the significance of that state, having heard the phrase repeated in error so often by others. He had no obligations. No home, no country, no family. Just a name and a mountain of cash; he was free to follow any whim at all. The sheer possibility was infinite; sometimes, in the middle of his pleasure, it seemed almost terrifying. There were too many possibilities, and above all they were unpredictable.

He told himself there were certain things he had to decide. He had, for example, to come up with a place to live. But in order to decide that, he would also have to decide who to be. This he avoided, as he avoided reminding himself it was something he had to think about.

For the time being, he pretended that the only question was to choose what it was he wanted to do. He wanted to do nothing but didn’t know how to go about it. After a few months, the usual ways of doing nothing were proving repetitive and rather boring. And whenever he thought of doing anything, it seemed so trivial compared to what he had just done. Trivial and unnecessary.

The only thing that interested him was to entertain certain additions to his recent, perfect feat. “Something that is perfect”—he was told by an educated Russian woman whom he encountered at more than one spa—“is something that can’t be improved, something finished and perfectly complete.”

“In that case, Madame, nothing is really perfect.”

“No, Marqués, but sometimes we ought to pretend.”

He still had La Joconde, or rather, Perugia still had her. He had known from the beginning that he didn’t want to keep her; he had only arranged her theft so that he could sell the copies, and any contact he had with her now could only complicate things. At some point, though he had no desire to do so, he knew that he had to come to a decision about what to do. From time to time he would write a brief note to the Italian telling him not to despair, that he had not forgotten him, that he would be back to see him. He knew that he would eventually have to see Perugia and do something—he couldn’t just leave the world’s most famous painting under some peasant’s bed, though there were nights when the absurdity of it seemed perfectly appropriate to him.

He considered different options. The simplest, without doubt, was to get rid of her entirely: to destroy her. He had recently read Stefan Zweig’s account of Herostratus, who, wanting his name to endure at any cost, burned down one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world, the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, in 356 BC. The city elders condemned him to death and above all decreed that his name be forgotten forever. Yet now, in the twentieth century, Herostratus’s name was known while no one remembered who had been on that council of elders.

But Herostratus had not been able to think of a better way to ensure his everlasting fame, whereas he—Valfierno—had already found a way to ensure his, though nobody knew it yet.

He continued to think that burning the painting was indeed the best choice, and also the simplest. It would put an end to the whole affair: the Louvre’s painting would never reappear, his buyers would be happy, and eventually the theft would be forgotten. By burning La Joconde he would be destroying the only proof that the others were Chaudron’s copies.

He liked to imagine that some day—decades, perhaps centuries in the future—the originals would start to appear: two, three, eventually six identical originals. Then this most celebrated painting would become a collection of identical paintings, indistinguishable one from another.

But he thought the idea of just setting fire to the painting seemed a bit weak, a little gratuitous. Then he was struck by a brilliant idea. He would collect the painting from Perugia and take it to a safe place. There, he would get a moving picture camera, which he would teach Chaudron to use. Together they would film a true work of art: the destruction by fire of the great painting. He imagined that old wood resisting the fire at first and then slowly catching, the colors changing, dripping, the smell of scorched oil paint, the wood now in flames, that gently smiling face dissolving into ashes, the eyes dissolving, that myth and all those centuries of nonsense dissolving, just because he, Eduardo de Valfierno, had known enough to show that they were nothing.

They’d be able to sell that film for thousands, millions. Then they’d return one of the copies to the museum—that would be the real coup! True art: to present the copy as the original, cause them to put that lie on display, and know that millions of people would gape in sacred awe at a painting that wasn’t. Fools, believing in their foolishness! On, flock! To your trough! Sometimes he liked to tell himself that this is what he had actually done.

But he didn’t do it, either this or anything else. His leisure was becoming unbearable, and the morning’s brandy was no longer able to liven him up enough in the face of another day like all the others. His breakfast brandy became two, sometimes three. One night he woke up sweating: he was terrified of ending up as Bonaglia again. He got up, lit a long, fat cigar, and sat with a drink in his hand. The real problem was not that he might go back to being him, he knew; it was the suspicion that he had never stopped being Quique Bonaglia.

That night he thought of a thousand ways he might leave that man behind. As the dawn came, in the dim light, his guard down, he thought he would go back to Argentina one day to find Mariana de Baltiérrez; she was still so blond in his memories.

He says—wonders, tells himself—that he is grown up now.

The Marqués said nothing while the waiter put my whiskey beside me on the low table. Then he lifted his glass and murmured something in French. I returned his toast and asked him if we could start.

“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 her 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.

He has spent all these years with this wound, with the knife. And now Valérie has found him again and he cannot give her what she is asking, or rather, he just no longer wants to.

The afternoon of the second day stretched on. In the next-door room, a couple made love in a profusion of noise. More than once I detected—or thought I did—a wistful smile on Valfierno’s face. I had more questions, but I didn’t ask them. Interviewing is a strange business. Somehow, you think you have the right to ask a perfect stranger what you wouldn’t ask your best friend. This time, in spite of that, I kept quiet.

We had reached the point where there was not much left to say, when Valfierno called down to have them bring us a bottle of champagne. It was his way of marking the end. We had just been through two days that had felt like two years. I could no longer see in his face the majestic features I had seen at the beginning. His greying mane was in disarray, his eyes were tired, and he wore a kind of grimace I could not decipher. His slightness of frame was now more noticeable. He had just entrusted me with the story of his life, and yet he continued to keep an unbridgeable distance between us. We toasted. Then he reminded me that I had asked him, on the first day—to say “yesterday” would have been improbable—why he was telling me all this.

“Yes, I remember. Although I think I’m starting to understand.”

“I doubt it, Newspaperman. I’m telling you all this because tomorrow Valfierno is going to die,” he said, and he gave what he meant to be a dramatic pause, which it was. By now I had learned: I didn’t want to seem ridiculous by asking what was sure to be the wrong question. He proceeded to play with me, going on a detour:

“That rascal Don Simón was wrong. Age is knowing that there are things you are doing for the very last time. You don’t know this yet; you’re too young, but I know. I have eaten kidneys, which I will not eat again, as my body will not let me. I have been in places that I know I will not see again. I have enjoyed the company of women who are now dead. I’ve given up all hope of seeing certain parts of the world. This is the last time I will tell the story of Valfierno. It might even be the first, but it is without doubt the last. Starting tomorrow I will have to have a new history or I will be finished. And I will have to forget what it was I did so that my life would have meaning.”

These were very hard words—hard more than sad—and so they were accompanied by his brightest smile. I didn’t know what expression to have as I listened.

“Tomorrow I will no longer be Valfierno. I don’t know yet who I will be. I do have a passport which I will use for a while, as you might imagine. I know what I will call myself, and where I’m going to live, but these are small things. It saddens me, but I have no option. The truth is, Newspaperman, I liked being Valfierno.”

Valfierno’s specialty was words, concocting grand phrases, but this time there was something very serious behind them. Valfierno—or whoever he was by this time—spoke in softer and softer tones, as if to himself only.

“If I had been consistent, if I had really been making a work of art of my life, I should have died—should have been seen to die—seven years ago, when I finished selling the Jocondes. Valfierno has already lived too long, certainly longer than was a good idea. But I’m not happy about it. I had become used to it, I liked it,” he said, and fell silent. He seemed to be very far away. He had another sip and went on, not looking at me.

“Now of course it’s necessary. Valérie is hard at my heels, so I have no choice but to disappear. This revenge is much greater than anything she could have planned. She will have gotten rid of Valfierno. It’s funny, isn’t it?”

And then, suddenly, as if it had just occurred to him:

“What do you think about Bonaglia as a name? Now that would be a great joke, don’t you think?”

Whenever I think about the story of my life I always look for the moment when everything changed, when everything turned around. And I find that there wasn’t one. That even though I changed my name and my story many times, that was never it. And that for me, for him, for us—for the one who survived—that was the key: the hope that one day we would become another. But it never happened. I don’t know why, I can’t explain it—it just never happened.

“Excuse my asking, but 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…”

It was now very late. With the last of the champagne, Valfierno moved on to detail his instructions.

“Of course, you’re not going to be able to tell this story, Newspaperman.”

“What?”

My face must have looked a sight. For the first time, Valfierno let out a huge guffaw.

“It’s not so bad! I didn’t say never. I’m just telling you that you cannot tell my story until I say that you can.”

“And when do you think that will be?”

“It’s not that I think—I’m ordering it. You may not think I can do that, but you’ll see that in fact I can. I realize I’ve put myself in your hands, but not in the boring way you imagine. It’s true that you could publish all of this tomorrow, and I’d have a bad few days of it, but it would be much worse for you.”

Valfierno stood up and began to pace the room. I could only think of that old image of the caged lion. He told me it would not be difficult: that if I were to publish early, he would be able to deny the entire story categorically, and that I would be found, not long after, with a bullet in my head.

“A suicide, of course. You would not have been able to bear the shame of such an enormous lie.”

It didn’t seem that simple to me, but from where I stood, nothing he said seemed all that implausible. I believed him. Valfierno opened the blinds. It was the middle of the night.

“No, the reason I’m in your hands is because when the time comes, if you don’t print my story then I will vanish forever. It’s up to you: if you remain quiet, my entire life will be a resounding failure. I’ll be like the castaway who writes a magnificent book on his desert island. Or the blind man who conceives a brilliant sculpture that no one will ever see. Or the great ruler who stepped down in a friend’s favor in order to avoid the war that would have destroyed his country. If you remain silent, then an artist of genius will have disappeared from the face of the earth, disappeared without a trace. But you won’t do that. You couldn’t stand that silence. That is not what you are made of.”

“How do you know?”

“Don’t you worry—I know. Or do you think I chose you without knowing anything about you?”

He stopped talking and stared at me, and I could not return his gaze. He went on to give me his specific instructions:

“Every year from now on, on the twenty-second of August, you will receive a letter from me. It will not, of course, say who it’s from, but you will know. This annual letter will be what tells you that I am still alive; it will be the affidavit of my existence. Don’t look for me—you would regret it. When I die; then, yes—then you can tell my story to the world.”

I thought about what he was describing and then said, without thinking:

“But, Marqués, that could be a long time.”

“Are you disappointed?”

“No, no, please—that isn’t what I meant. Forgive me, but how will I know when you are dead?”

“You will know, don’t trouble yourself. You will know when I die. The person who won’t know, of course, will be me,” he said, attempting a smile which was pure melancholy.

“That is when you will tell my story. This is another reason why I have told you all of this—so that I can die in peace. I don’t want to have to remember it all on my deathbed. It would be horrible if what occupied my life were to occupy my death as well.”

I didn’t want to offend him, but there was one question I still had to ask. I had learned his very own lesson:

“Forgive me again, Marqués, but how can I be sure that you are not lying, that your whole story is not another forgery?”

“You can’t know. But don’t worry. You’ll see that it’s true. When you tell the story, there will be certain old fools who will appear, bleating that Valfierno sold them one of the paintings. Nothing will please these old leftovers more than to have been hoodwinked by someone widely acknowledged to be their better. It’s a simple fact. If it weren’t for this, modern democracy could not exist.”

“Never mind all that, Marqués. I’m asking you if it’s true.”

“It is, but you will never be able to be sure. You could ask Perugia, but you would still never know if he was lying. You could look for the others, but you might never find them. Or you might—who knows? But you will not know. These are the terms on which you tell the best story of your life—the story of mine.”

I don’t believe I have made a mistake: Becker will tell the story. Then I will have the answer to the question that haunts me so much now: who is it that will die when I die? At one point I came to believe that no one would. That just in the strength of changing who I was over and over again, I could cheat death itself. I now know that that is not true; that someone has to die.

But I would like to know who. Who will die when I die? Which one? The one who walked the earthen streets of Rosario? The one who loved Marianita without knowing who she was? The one who made art of a plan? The one who didn’t want to be one? The one who wasn’t one of the others? The one who never smoked that opium in Malacca, who tried all those delicacies, who didn’t see his father, who let himself be touched by that priest, buggered by that prisoner, loved by those women who never wanted him. Bonaglia, Juan María, Perrone, Eduardo—the one who tomorrow, in telling his story, would die. Not all of these—so many deaths in one would be an injustice! But nor had they all been lives—just intentions.

No doubt for Becker it will be Valfierno who dies. For many people it will be Valfierno. There is no one for whom it will be Bollino who dies—Bollino died a long time ago. Sometimes I think that you could prevent an old man from dying if you were to call him by his first nickname—if someone were to address him by the name his mother first used, and if he were to believe it. But someone has to die. Where will they bury me? And under what name?

Becker will tell the story; he will answer my question. Of course, it’s also possible that he won’t. I hope that he does, but I will never know. I could tell it myself, first, but who knows what price I might pay? Perhaps one day I will decide to pay it. It’s an interesting thing to decide one is going to pay a price when one doesn’t know what that price is. I’ve done it so many times; it’s the only way to really pay. It’s quite possible that he will never tell the story. Many years ago I read a sentence which I have never forgotten: “Now, in the room, all that’s left is what is left when there is nothing else left.”

Me.

Valfierno.

About thirteen years went by after that meeting. I moved to Baltimore, and his letters continued to find me. They would arrive every year in late August, containing the same fragment of a poem, in Spanish. After a few years, I had it translated so I could discover its message:

I shall die before you, and my spirit

In its tenacious resolve

Will sit there by the doors of death

Awaiting you.

There, where the enclosing tomb

Opens, in turn, an eternity

Everything we’ve both so long kept quiet

Now we must begin to speak!

I have to confess that I did not quite understand it.

From time to time he also sent me gifts: an expensive book, opera tickets, a three-day vacation in New York, even a silver service for my wedding. He was in my hands as he had said, though in fact I held nothing. I must admit that I found it difficult, knowing that I had a story that would change my entire career and not being able to use it. More than once—in fact hundreds, thousands of times—I was tempted just to go ahead and publish it. But I resisted, or rather, I didn’t have the courage not to resist. That night in San Francisco, as we were taking leave of each other, Valfierno smiled:

“Who can say for sure that the painting that Perugia returned is in fact the real Mona Lisa? That I don’t have it in my house, for example. That I didn’t burn it, or sell it to J. P. Morgan? Can you, Newspaperman?”

I, too, tried to banish my own doubt. It served me to do so.

In October of 1932, I learned of the death of Eduardo de Valfierno. As he had promised, I received a very formal letter announcing his decease. It was not signed, and the style of it made me think he might have written the letter himself before he died. There was a poem, but a different one this time. I had it translated that very day:

I’d gladly give the best years of the little life I have left to know what you told them when you spoke of me.

The letter went on to inform me that in his last years he had called himself such-and-such and had lived somewhere, which I was asked not to reveal—and I won’t; it doesn’t change anything. The letter told me—and authorized me to reveal—that in his last months he had again taken the name of Valfierno, and that death had finally visited him on a finca—a ranch—near Buenos Aires. He had told me once: that to have lived as Valfierno he would have to die as Valfierno.

This news caused me unparalleled excitement. It never even occurred to me to wonder if indeed it was true. I quit my job at that Maryland newspaper and invested everything I had in completing the story. In those months I met Perugia, and Chaudron—and I convinced myself that the Marqués had not been lying. Valérie, on the other hand, I was never able to find. I don’t know if she is even alive now, and I don’t like to think that he might have killed her. I also tried to get in touch with the buyers. Valfierno had not given me any of their names, which was understandable. I never found any of them, which is also understandable.

So now at last I can write the story of the most ingenious theft of the century. And while I can’t be sure this is exactly how it happened, that can’t prevent me from telling the story—journalism does not allow such indulgences. In any case, all that is left now is for me to write.