Untamed

Two Christmases ago, my sister and I presented our parents with a check to buy themselves a trip to Paris. They were so touched and proud that they framed the check, uncashed, and hung it on their living room wall. This year we doubled down. We bought four plane tickets to Paris and decided to hand deliver our parents to the city they had always wanted to visit. We stayed in a tiny apartment overlooking the Eiffel Tower. I had never been to Europe before. I was charmed.

Paris is elegant and old. Being there made me feel elegant and young. It helped me forgive America for our arrogance and fury. In Paris, surrounded by ruins of ancient baths, guillotines, and churches more than a thousand years old, humanity’s mistakes and beauty are unfurled like a mural. In America, we are so new. We still fancy ourselves conquerors and renegades. We’re all still trying to be the “firsts” to do this or that. Can you imagine? We are all competing for our parents’ attention, and we have no parents. It makes us a little jumpy. Paris is not jumpy. Paris is calm and certain. It’s not going to startle easily, and it already knows the words to all the songs. Everywhere I looked in Paris, I found proof that leaders come and go, buildings are built and fall, revolutions begin and end; nothing—no matter how grand—lasts. Paris says: We are here for such a short time. We might as well sit down for a long while with some good coffee, company, and bread. Here, there is more time to be human, maybe because there has been more time to learn how.

When we visited the Louvre, we entered the Mona Lisa room and found a crowd of hundreds pushing, jostling, selfie-ing all around her.

I stared from a distance, trying to appreciate her. I really didn’t understand what all the fuss was about. I wondered if all the jostling people understood or if they were just acting like they did. A woman walked over and stood next to me.

She said, “You know, there’s a theory about her smile. Want to hear it?”

“Yes, please,” I said.

“Mona Lisa and her husband lost a baby. Sometime later, her husband commissioned this painting from da Vinci to celebrate the birth of another baby. Mona Lisa sat for Leonardo to paint her, but she wouldn’t smile during the sitting. Not all the way. The story goes that da Vinci wanted her to smile wider, but she refused. She did not want the joy she felt for her new baby to erase the pain she felt from losing the first. There in her half smile is her half joy. Or maybe it’s her full joy and her full grief all at the same time. She has the look of a woman who has just realized a dream but still carries the lost dream inside her. She wanted her whole life to be present on her face. She wanted everyone to remember, so she wouldn’t pretend.”

Now I understand what the fuss is all about. Mona Lisa is the patron saint of honest, resolute, fully human women—women who feel and who know. She is saying for us:

Don’t tell me to smile.

I will not be pleasant.

Even trapped here, inside two dimensions, you will see the truth.

You will see my life’s brutal and beautiful right here on my face.

The world will not be able to stop staring.