Pilgrim (58 page)

She would have been perhaps forty-five years old when the picture was taken late in the nineteenth century. Oddly, she faced the camera in precisely the same position as Elisabetta Gherardini Giocondo had faced the gaze of Leonardo da Vinci. Perhaps this was merely a trick—or perhaps, from the artist’s point of
view, it offered the perfect view of the sitter’s face. Leonardo himself had written:
always require your subject to sit so the head is at an angle to the torso
.

There she was:
the woman who claimed to be my mother.

There was no smile. There was no guile. There was only sadness.

Pilgrim had seemingly hated her—dismissing her as a poseur, since in his own view he had no parents but merely was. This was, indeed, a unique form of madness—not to have been born, yet to be.

Jung placed the photograph in his pocket. He looked about the bedroom and the sitting-room and decided, before he left, that Kessler must pack all of Pilgrim’s possessions—his clothing, jewellery, books and toiletries—against the time when the escapee would be returned to them. In the meantime, he would see to it that no one else would occupy these rooms. In the strangest way, they were sacrosanct. Jung wanted them to remain, whether empty or not, as a part of his purview.

To that end, he returned every morning to feed the birds.

6

Two days earlier, on Monday, July 1st, Pilgrim and Forster had risen early, packed their bags and locked them in the boot of the Renault. They checked out of the Hôtel Paul de Vere and drove to a service station
where they had the car prepared for its next journey. The petrol tank was filled and extra petrol was set on the floor of the back seat. Pilgrim had insisted on two containers, in spite of Forster’s protestations that one was ample and more was possibly dangerous.

“I have my reasons,” Pilgrim said—and that was that.

There was also a checklist in Pilgrim’s inner pocket.

Soft cotton gloves for both.

Walking shoes.

Light overcoats.

An artist’s portfolio with twelve sheets of drawing paper.

Conté crayons and pencils.

Canvas camp stool.

Pliers.

Razor knife.

Money.

Picnic hamper—pâté—bread—fruit—chocolate—wine.

All of this had duly been assembled and put in place.

Forster parked the Renault on the rue du Pont Neuf, just around the corner from their hotel and only a block or two from the morning’s destination.

At ten o’clock on the dot, they arrived at the Louvre and presented M. Moncrieff’s waiver to the guard at the door. Pilgrim was then saluted as if he might have been visiting royalty.

The great halls were empty. The echoes of far distant footsteps were the only presences besides the silent statuary and the mirrored images of Pilgrim and Forster as they passed on their way to the Salon Carré.
Then, at a greater distance still, someone unseen began to whistle and a door slammed.

“
Merde
,” a man said.

The whistling continued.

The light, though diffused, was ample and bright enough to reveal every detail as they went along—the carved lintels above the doorways—the marble figures ensconced in their niches—the glorious tapestries and the gilded mirrors.

Stairways curved away hither and yon and one of these had an arrowed sign that pointed to
La Mona Lisa
. Forster carried the camp stool, the portfolio and the box of artist’s supplies in which the pliers and the razor knife were secreted. Pilgrim carried the picnic basket. He looked as if he were bound for the Tuileries.

There was a guard at the entrance to the Salon Carré, to whom Pilgrim showed the chief curator’s waiver. More saluting, more nodding, and they continued on their way.

At the far end of the Salon Carré, an artisan in a white smock was standing on a ladder attending to some painting that was needed on the exit door frame. Apparently, earlier in the morning, the man had repaired the plaster there and was now disguising the joins where the new work met the old.

Pilgrim and Forster walked about the room as if they had all the time in the world—though on each pass before the
Mona Lisa
they lingered longer and longer until at last they stopped.

Forster set aside the portfolio and opened the camp
stool, placing it about five feet away from the painting.

Pilgrim removed his topcoat and hat and laid them on one of the benches provided for viewers. He did not, however, remove his gloves. Sitting, he opened the portfolio and spread it on his lap. Forster handed him his box of drawing materials and stood back gazing at the portrait.

“See what you can find out about that fellow at the far end of the room,” Pilgrim said,
sotto voce
. “We may need to do something about him.”

“Yes, sir.”

As Pilgrim sketched what he already knew was his own portrait, he was amused by the juxtaposition of his present image over that of the painted lady. The glass that covered her reflected only the roughest contours of his face—its basic shape, its bones and its shining highlights. The rest was a melding of artifice and reality. A portrait of time.

The artisan’s name turned out to be Vincenzo Peruggia. He was a northern Italian from the town of Domena in the Lake Como district. His true profession was house-painting, but he had extended his talents to plastering and repair. This much Forster learned in the course of a preliminary conversation, standing at the foot of the ladder as the moustachioed Italian worked above him.

They also discussed the care and growing of moustaches, Forster confessing that growing his own had been a relatively new adventure.

Peruggia was not very large—being even shorter than Forster, who stood at five-foot-nine. He had a
dark, overly serious face, though not unattractive. His body was spare and compact, his posture exemplary. Oddly—or so it seemed to Forster—he had extremely small hands. But his work was delicate and fine and exquisitely executed. Forster was fascinated by the process of how the paints were mixed to mask the lines between the old and new plaster.

Their conversation in itself was a charming, almost comical mix of English and Italian sprinkled with French.

At the same time, the guard on duty—whose name was Verronet—came and stood behind Pilgrim and his sketching.

It was clear almost at once that Verronet was an amateur—a substitute guardian with no real interest in what he did. The
Mona Lisa
meant nothing to him.
It is just another painting and I am here to watch the paintings
—as if his job was to be a voyeur.

“Do you like her?” Pilgrim asked in French.

“She’s all right. I could do with larger breasts.”

Pilgrim smiled, thinking he could remember the weight of them.

“She was not a large woman, you know.”

“Well, she’s sitting down—how is a man to tell? I think I would not have made love to her.”

“Oh? And why is that?”

“I do not like superior women. A woman should stay in her place.”

“You think she is superior?”

“In attitude, yes. But I wouldn’t call her beauty superior. I think she is too aloof. I feel no humanity.”

“Are you a student?”

“No.”

“You talk like a student. You know nothing—yet you have opinions.”

This was a mistake.

“I am not a fool,” Verronet said indignantly. “And, if I may say so, judging by your scribbles, you are not an artist. May a man not have opinions?”

“Of course,” said Pilgrim. “I apologize. I meant only that I think you are wrong about her lack of humanity. I think she is supremely human.”

“Each man to his own taste. If I were to have a woman of that station, I should want her to seem less above me.”

“I see.”

There was an awkward pause. Pilgrim withheld his sketching hand. Verronet gave a cough. “I will leave you now,” he said. “I am going to the W.C. for a cigarette. And while I am gone, if I may say so, I should keep an eye on the Italian at the other end of the room. Anyone can be a thief, you know—and Italians are notorious for it. Like gypsies and all other dark-skinned people.”

“Very well,” said Pilgrim—and resumed his sketching.

At noon hour, Forster returned from his conversation and suggested that now would be an appropriate time to take their lunch.

“And the man on the ladder?”

“I think we need not fear him.”

“But can we use him?”

“It is possible. Though how, I do not know.”

“Why not invite him to dine with us?” Pilgrim smiled, like a conniving child. Then he said: “after all, generosity breeds compliance.”

They ate in the Place du Carrousel.

Peruggia had brought his own bread, cheese and wine, but accepted pears, more wine and some chocolate from the hamper.

The sun was shining. It was all very pleasant. Pilgrim had sufficient Italian to be able to manage something of a conversation with the house-painter. In the course of this, he discovered that Peruggia was single, thirty-two years of age and had come to Paris in order to escape the intransigent reign of poverty in Italy, where there had been so little employment he had been in danger of starving.

The man was barely literate. He could write his name and garner the gist of a headline in the Italian papers, but he had never read a book nor had one read to him. He had never gone to school and he could calculate figures only by counting on his fingers. And yet, he was a craftsman of great skill and had worked many times at the Louvre.

As they ate and drank, Pilgrim worked his way further into Peruggia’s passions—having sensed that, as with most uneducated people, his passions were many and profound. The inability to read and write was a source of deep frustration—not to be able to communicate made the need to do so overwhelmingly urgent.

Peruggia’s greatest passion was his patriotism.
Italy is the mother of all the living world
. It was that simple
and that straightforward.
La Donna Italia!
he called her, raising his glass. And he said that in all his many working hours at the Louvre, it had not been lost on him that the greatest works of art were every single one of them Italian!
Titian! Tintoretto! Caravaggio! Botticelli! Leonardo!

He sang these names as if they had been set to music by Verdi.

“And the greatest of the treasures in the Louvre is
La Gioconda! La Gioconda
is
La Donna Italia
herself! The mother of us all!”

Pilgrim smiled and nodded, but said nothing.

Vincenzo Peruggia went on: “if it had not been for Napoleon,
La Gioconda
and all these other wonders would have remained in Italy, where they were born.”

“Napoleon?” Pilgrim tried not to sound too incredulous.

“Of course,” said Peruggia. “He came into our country and raped it of all its great works of art. This is what, everywhere, the French have done. Invade, make war, slaughter, burn and walk away with the spoils. It is all Napoleon’s fault. My greatest wish would be to return every one of the Italian paintings in the Louvre to Florence, Rome and Venice—to wherever they were born—and to keep them there forever.”

“An admirable idea,” Pilgrim said. “But quite impossible.”

“No, no,” Peruggia countered. “Not impossible at all. For instance, I have studied how one may free the
Mona Lisa
from her pinnings.”

Pilgrim said nothing.

He was thinking:
to return her to where she belongs. Yes. To want the light to return. To want the light instead of darkness
.
This is my whole intention.

He remembered his rampage in the Music Room at the Burghölzli. He remembered throwing the wax recordings and smashing the violin. He remembered his rage and the overwhelming sense that art—all art—was impotent. And he remembered the figure of the Countess Blavinskeya crouching on the floor, looking up at Kessler and shouting:
DON’T
!

To want the light back. To want the light instead of darkness.
How could one make them understand? More must be wanted than the mere presence of art—something must be lifted in the spirit of the viewer, the reader, the listener. Something must be lifted out of the gutters of violence and degradation into which the human race had sunk so willingly. Could the answer lie in such simple men as this, as Peruggia, with his illiterate, uneducated notion that to restore a painting to its birthplace would be to shed light on a failed and failing people?

“My problem is,” Peruggia said, “I have not sufficient courage. Many times I have been alone in her company, but I do not possess the bravery to take her down and run.”

Pilgrim said: “but if someone else were to take her down and hand her to you, would you then at least be able to run with her?”

Peruggia sat silent.

Then he said: “what is Monsieur suggesting?”

“That I agree with you,” said Pilgrim. “I agree that
her place is in Italy. In Florence. I like what you say about art being born. It is absolutely true. All great art is born—its mother is its country, its culture; its father is its painter, its sculptor, its composer or its writer.”

Peruggia smiled. “I could not have said it like that,” he said, “but I do believe it.”

And that is how it happened.

At 2:00 p.m., the guard, Verronet, went again to the W.C. to smoke another cigarette.

Peruggia cut the painting from the wall.

Pilgrim withdrew it from its frame.

Peruggia was handed the canvas, wrapped in the portfolio.

Each man left the Salon Carré by a different route, Forster leaving the frame and glass in the stairwell and all emerging from the Louvre at 2:20 in the afternoon.

Pilgrim handed Peruggia five hundred francs and said: “journey well.”

On parting, none looked back. Pilgrim and Forster walked to the Renault—deposited the picnic hamper, the pencil-box and the camp stool in the rear seat above the petrol. Pilgrim—exuberant and beaming—threw his topcoat onto the hamper and said: “we shall leave Paris at four. But first, we shall celebrate. To
Le Jardin des Lilas
for champagne!”