Dasha: Mona

At the first look, Mona by Reinaldo Arenas seems like an average fantasy story. Elisa, a mystical woman, ends up being a creation by a famous artist Leonardo Da Vinci. When he created the portrait he put so much personal feelings and energy that I allowed him to live through this painting for the next four centuries. It seems very plain and simple; there are no aspects of magic realism. But through deeper analysis one can see that it’s not the story that is full of magic realism, it is the essence of events and objects in this story.

There are some obvious binaries in this story, and one of them is binary between past and present. When Elisa was first introduced in the story I got a suspicious feeling that she will be somehow related to the famous portrait. Her description is very similar to the way Mona Lisa is portrayed: ”Long reddish hair, ample forehead, perfect nose, fine lips, and honey-colored eyes that looked me over openly (a bit shamelessly) through long false eyelashes (37).” In the end readers find out that she is the woman from portrait, she keeps living as long as the painting exist. The boundary between present and past becomes very vague.

Another binary in this story is between masculinity and femininity, which is the most important binary considering the sexual orientation of Arenas. Elisa is not really a woman; she is a manifestation of a man’s feelings, emotions and attitudes. It takes her a lot of energy to sustain the pretty appearance: “…she apparently was losing the concentration and energy, as she said, enabled her to become a real woman (59).” She fails numerous times when Ramon notices that she is missing some parts of the body. This moments can be considered as part of magic realism because they blend reality and fantasy: “the strange sensation of having close to my lips the thick under lip of some animal (39)”,”I saw the face of a horrible old man (41)”, “Except that perfect body had no head (44).” Later in the story when Ramon is having sex with Elisa for the last time, she turns into Leonardo Da Vinci or to better explain what happened to Da Vinci after four hundred years. There are no more boundaries between sexes; it feels all the same to main character as he tries to find a way to save his life.

Arenas showed a lot of aspects of his life in this story. In some degree Ramon is Arenas, who also came to New York through Mariel Boat Lift, and probably at first was hiding his sexuality. Gay people always try to hide their true interests and sometimes even pretend to be straight. Readers can see this in the story, where Elisa is only a woman on the outside; she is really just a man inside. So Ramon is technically homosexual, but unconsciously covering it up with having sex with random women. It is very peculiar how Arenas chose Leonardo Da Vinci. A lot of rumors have been floating around since his death doubting his sexual orientation, but until this time there is no concrete evidence. Mona Lisa is portrayed as a perfect and complete woman, maybe it symbolizes the striving for perfection, but never reaching it.

According to various sources Arenas was sick with Aids, and was afraid of death, getting old and just dirt in general. There are a lot of proves of those facts in this story. According to Arenas Leonardo Da Vinci in this story didn’t want to die so he put his essence in the portrait so he can live through it. He also wanted to be always beautiful and young and that’s why the portrait is beautiful young woman. Arenas showing his own feelings and fears of getting old or dying from Aides through famous artist because he probably also feels connection to him through sexuality issues. Mona Lisa is shown with a very unusual background – the swamp. That’s where Elisa kills her lovers, who find out her true identity. This can be very symbolic, because Arenas doesn’t want to die, and especially he doesn’t want it to happen in the dirty place, and swamps are the biggest dirt pools. For Arenas the best years of his life were spent in New-York, he is sick with Aides and probably doesn’t have much time left, and he reflects it through the thoughts of terrified Ramon who thinks he is about to die: “I remembered at that moment but the enormous salad bar at Wendy’s. To me it was like a vision of my life these last few years (fresh, pleasant, surrounded by people, and problem-free) (58).”