Renée Oliviér

PRAGUE, CZECHIA

Monalisa. A name shaken from a branch. An overripe fruit, fat with legacy and expectation. Sour. Firm. Much like herself on certain days. Or nights like this one, when she is forced to detangle herself from her namesake.

Monalisa paints with her canvas facing away from the window to hide this new portrait from prying eyes. Of course, there are no prying eyes. On the sixth floor of her panelák apartment, only winged creatures could set their eyes upon it in passing flight. A fleeting secret. She shivers. The windows rattle with each exhale of the blizzard. The vibrant yellow is out of place against the black void on the other side of the glass. ‘Paint a self-portrait,’ the art class brief had said, ‘answering the question: Who are you?’ How very cruel a prompt. Her painting mocks her from its canvas.

She had photographed herself in the same pose as the famous Lisa Gherardini against her peeling olive wall. The lighting was awful. Rembrandt, but in an unfortunate sort of way. On canvas, she has replaced the peeling olive wall with a background of yellow wallpaper. The wallpaper, though she can’t say why, feels important. The image had come to her in a recurring nightmare.

Her fingers are beginning to gnarl and stiffen around the paintbrush. She stops. Huffs. Tosses the paintbrush aside. There is no capturing that look. Not on camera, not on canvas. The eyes follow, like a trick. Watching… Does she like watching her fail?

In this moment, Monalisa wants to plunge a palette knife into the canvas. The tearing sound would be satisfying, she thinks. She would like to use it to excise herself, surgically, from the background. The background can be salvaged. The soul cannot.

Suddenly, the face staring back at her disappears. Her stained glass lamp flickers and dies. She is swallowed by ink black. The moonlight is drowned in thick clouds, and the sodium streetlamps are off for the night. She suspects her fridge, a cheap replacement from a second-hand shop, which trips the circuit-breaker constantly. She could attempt to search by feel for the phone tangled somewhere in the sheets of her unmade bed. But she keeps her cigarettes in a tortoiseshell bowl on the dresser. She finds her lighter beside it, flicking it open with a ‘clink-schlick.’

Through the creaking door, down the long hallway, over the moaning floorboards. She raises the small flame, and a white box emerges from the dark. She lifts the lid, searches for the red switch, and flips it upwards. It clicks with finality. Monalisa squints as the overhead light flickers on with a struggle, swallowing the darkness with harsh, artificial light. She pries her eyes open, and-

The fuse box is gone. There is no door. The walls, which are in a different position than before, are not concrete, but wallpapered with yellow stripes and chevrons. As if jolted with a cattle prod, she stumbles back with a suffocated gasp, her back colliding painfully with the new wall behind her. The lighter is knocked from her hand, landing at her feet. Her eyes fix on the floor as she bends to retrieve it. The floorboards, which had been splintering due to worn-off varnish, have been replaced with dull, spongy carpet.

Monalisa struggles for strangled breaths. She is made dizzy by the stench of mildew, and by the incessant buzzing of the lights hanging over her head in a patchwork of haphazardly arranged drop ceiling. The stale air has an oldness to it, like it hasn’t been disturbed in years.

This room awkwardly folds into another at the corner, like some non-Euclidean parallax illusion. She blinks violently and drags her nails through the wallpaper hard enough to make it tear and curl against her fingertips. An attempt to claw her way back to reality.

Hugging the wall, she stumbles into the next room. Although ‘room’ doesn’t seem like the right word… The open space stretches past the vanishing point of the horizon. The rails holding up the ceiling tiles converge there, like the guidelines used in perspective drawing. This ‘room’ is broken up by asymmetrical pillars of inconsistent size and shape. Some of them thin. Others tilted. A few meeting at the edges to form shadowy corners. A space somehow both claustrophobic and agorophobic. She is cowed by its openness and its endlessness. She retreats cautiously back into the other room.

But the room is… changed. Neat. Square. A hall lined with insets and podiums, all empty, except for one, center stage on the farthest wall. Monalisa is very, very still. Facing her, watching her, from her high place on the wall, is her namesake. The real Mona Lisa. Even the imitation of life is so disturbingly vivid and textured in this place. She looks like she might climb out of her gilded frame. This place, which she had painted, must swallow obsession. And now, it has swallowed her.

‘Perhaps I am dead,’ she thinks. Yes, that must be the case. Electrocuted, perhaps. She can be certain this is not heaven. The dread tells her that. But, if this is hell, where is the fire? The brimstone? The cries of anguish? She would expect some grotesque creature with a crooked grin and twisted body to greet her in hell. Not Her. Even here, she is tormented by this woman. Of course, she would follow her into hell. No. Not hell. Not heaven. Somewhere else.

Oblivion.

Monalisa runs her thumb over the cool gold casing of the lighter. The eyes follow, like a trick. Watching.

‘Clink-schlick.’

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