Rachel composed this delightful piece about Mona Lisa by interspersing the titles of recently published books (listed in the Daedalus Books catalog) into her tale.
I confess, I've always felt a kinship with the Mona Lisa and wondered about that mysterious smile of hers.
Was she just holding in some gas, an inconvenient burp perhaps? Or did she hide her power, her un-maidenly ambition, behind that docile smile? Was she perhaps ambivalent, undecided about the color of the new curtains, or was she just plain bored, pretending to be gracious and mysterious?
And those eyes, following you no matter where you stood; a secret kept, a watchfulness. Some said I looked like her, at times when I was most unlike myself, holding an artificial pose of self-confidence.
Who was she, the real Mona Lisa? What would she have done with the toss of a lemon; how would she have responded to this natural disorder of things? Would she have been relieved to give up her pose, that calm pretense? Would she have been jarred out of that hidden inheritance of genteel femininity? And then again, would she have known how to slice an onion, or was that task always left to unseen kitchen maids; would she even have known what an onion looked like, or what to do with it, or how to find the five spice street, down in the market section where the poor folks slept and ate, or shopped for their mistresses?
She lived in the perfect house on the sweeter side of the city, where private lives were protected from public scrutiny, where rare and precious things were carefully collected and at times displayed, away from the Bridge of Sighs. She had never shown her diary of a bad year to anyone, never acknowledged the right mistake made so long ago, once on a moonless night when she had followed the water and discovered the secret of the miniature rose. She liked to sing songs without words . . .
But stop me if you've heard this one.
