When Mona Lisa Speaks
The sound came when my furred and fetal love slipped through a wormhole. From the hole left behind in my body, an umbilical string fretted into the afterlife. Constant, loudest in the dark, the crystalline clang wavered on the threshold of hearing. The atonal clash of worlds incongruent and cruel rang in my ears.
Tinnitus bored its tunnel of sound through natural holes in my head. A doctor in another age would have bored new holes to let the sound get out. Like a feedback loop at a microphone check, the sonic cry wailed, a top forty hit with a bullet in the head.
How lovely to dwell behind bulletproof glass, confined in the safety of a conservation case. To be as placid as Mona Lisa’s face.
The doctors diagnosed hypertension or coincidence. They said lose ten pounds, see if that helps. They disapproved of my anthropomorphism, my pronoun choice. I pursed my lips, folded my hands, and met their gaze with equatorial grace. I listened as the howling outrage undermined their good advice and pounded in my eardrums like a cult.
None of them had the courage to call my condition by its name.
Mediterranean women once mourned their dead during days of ritual howling. Society allowed the leer of pain to undo a woman’s compulsory beauty. In contrast, the makers of art cowered at the sight of women’s rage. Voiceless bodies haunted an eroticized or sanitized space. The female model carried the message of a man. He chose how to affix her soul in the stillness and silence of pigment or stone.
Lisa Giaconda sat, plump and passive, as her voice turned to poplar. In a final act of dominance, asserting woman as an idealized enigma reflected by man, Leonardo painted his initials hidden in her eye.
The Renaissance medical texts of Salerno Italy defined a woman as a half-man, an incomplete creature. How easy to accede to a fractional existence in the empty aftermath of loss. How much less loud insomnia becomes in the whispered clamor of prayer. Half-Italian, the heritage of patriarchy baptized me to sit. The idealized silence of an incomplete body conjured my lost ghost. I embraced the wail, held tight the thrum of connection. She was too brave to let me go.
Brave women of the Renaissance refused to sit, to be defined by others. They wielded the weaponry of brush, chisel, and palette knife: Sofonisba Anguissola, Artemisia Gentileschi, Elisabetta Sirani, and students in Bologna, Palermo, and Rome. Art history only began to admit their importance after several centuries of silence.
Bodies in the Louvre still crush into the Denon wing to honor the enigma, the ideal.
When Mona Lisa speaks, my tinnitus joins her siren cry. Puzzled tourists mob as her pursed lips part. Lashless eyes grow wide. Tears wash away the mark of the man in her pupil. The atrocity of her silence is stamped on the faces that gape. Their distorted horror reflects in bulletproof glass.
Mona Lisa’s conservation case begins to shake. A tremor fulminates from the center of her opening mouth.
A sound like a siren shatters the glass. The trumpet of rage sings.
Atonal cries blast through the wormhole, pounding mismatched skins stretched too thin over the pulse of living drums. She screams agony into the afterlife.
Her plump hands unfold and reach through the demolished safety glass, beyond enforced isolation, beyond temperature control. Poised to strangle, poised to pray, Mona Lisa shrieks. The holes in our bodies vibrate and echo with centuries of umbilical strings strummed, broken, and plucked.
Joe Koch writes literary horror and surrealist trash. Author of the novella “The Couvade” and
other short fiction, their work has been published in journals and anthologies such as Synth,
Fable, Honey & Sulphur, and In Darkness Delight: Masters of Midnight. Consume their
monstrous musings at horrorsong.blog.