A Dash of Magic: A Bliss Novel (10 page)

It was in 1671, in the Italian city of FLORENCE, that Signora Artemisia Bliss did manage to spare her own head by creating a dessert that pleased both the ruthless Duke Alessandro di Medici and his ruthless wife, the Duchess Margareta. Alessandro did prefer sweet desserts, and Margareta, sour. Signora Bliss, the Court Baker, was ordered to create a wedding dessert that would please both the Duke and the Duchess, on Pain of DEATH. The fearsome rulers did spare her life upon sampling her double orange Whoopie pie.

Signora Bliss did create two cookies of orange by mixing together the flesh of one
pumpkin
, one fist of
white flour
, one of the
chicken’s eggs
, and one fist of
sugar
.

She did bind the cookies together with a frosting wrought from the vigorous mixing of one fist
confectioners’ sugar
, one staff of
butter
, the juice of one
Blood Orange
, and the
Secret that lies behind the enigmatic smile of the Mona Lisa, uttered by the portrait herself.

Rose gulped. “We need to collect the secret of the Mona Lisa’s smile?”

“Looks like it,” said Purdy. “You didn’t warn us last night, Balthazar, when you suggested the recipe.”

“Hey!” he grunted, adjusting his purple cardigan. “You want your stuff to taste the best, you gotta collect the best. There’s nothing more sweet-and-sour than the Mona Lisa’s smile. Of course, it’s a very rare ingredient, and I don’t have it in my suitcase. We’ve got to go straight to the source.”

“All right,” said Albert, pouring himself a glass of water and gulping it down. “I guess we’re off to the Louvre museum.”

“Why are we going to a museum
now
?” whined Sage. “I thought the one perk of this nonvacation was that we’d be too busy to go to a museum.”

But Leigh shivered with delight. “Art!” she screamed. “Nectar of the human soul!”

The Louvre looked to Rose like a medieval castle—save for the famous glass pyramid in the courtyard. The building was so enormous that at first she didn’t realize it was all the same. “How big is this place?”

“Big enough to be seen from space,” her father said. “Now come on.”

The Blisses hurried to the entrance and found themselves at the back of a line that wound all the way around the block.

“This is worse than Disney World!” said Albert. He poked the shoulder of the uniformed soldier in front of him. “Sir? Do you know how long the wait is?”

“About three hours,” said the man.

Purdy looked at her watch. “We only have fifty-two minutes! Are you sure we can’t substitute a different ingredient, Balthazar?”

“It
has
to be the Mona Lisa’s secret,” he answered gruffly. “No way around it.” Balthazar had donned a baseball hat that was too big, even for his massive cranium, and had painted his nose and cheeks with pasty white zinc oxide to protect them from the sun.

“I have an idea,” Sage announced. “Let’s tell the guards that I have a rare disease where I can’t be out in the sun. They’ll let us in just to spare my life!”

Purdy shook her head. “That’s immoral,” she said. “Also, that’s a real disease. It’s called Xeroderma Pigmentosum.”

“Huh,” pondered Balthazar. “You know, I think the kid is on to something. We oughtta try. We’ve only got forty-nine minutes.”

Balthazar pulled a napkin from his pocket. Inside was a flaky pastry that looked chalky and old. “Here. We all need a bite of this before we get inside. It’s a Portrait Pop-Tart. Makes it so you can hear what the folks in the paintings are saying.”

Rose took a bite of the Portrait Pop-Tart. It was as dry and hard as a fingernail, and the jelly inside had dried into dehydrated red flakes. “When is this from?” she asked, doing her best not to spit her bite to the curb.

“Nineteen fifty-five,” answered Balthazar. “Sorry about that. I considered making a new one last night, just in case, but I had this perfectly good one stuffed in my suitcase.”

As soon as everyone had managed to scarf down a bite of the ancient Portrait Pop-Tart, Sage unwrapped the blue pashmina Purdy was wearing around her neck and draped it over his head, then spread some of Balthazar’s zinc oxide on his nose. “Let’s go.”

Heads turned as the Blisses marched around the block to the front of the line. At the entrance, a tired woman with short brown curls was taking tickets.

“Excuse me, ma’am,” said Sage. “My name is Leonardo Da Bliss, and I’ve traveled all the way here from Alaska with my family.”

Sage indicated the motley crew that stood behind him.

“I have a rare condition called . . . zero-drama piggytosis.” Sage glanced back at Purdy, who smiled nervously. “I am allergic to the sun. My whole life, all I’ve wanted was to see the
Mona Lisa
, painted by my namesake, Leonardo Da Vinci. But I can’t wait in this line for another three hours under the blazing sun. I was hoping you could let me and my family in, or else I’ll have to go back to my hotel and look at pictures of the
Mona Lisa
on the internet.”

Rose could barely believe what a whopper of a lie her brother had just told, though she had to hand it to him—he had pulled it off without flinching.

Rose risked a glance at the ticket taker. It seemed to have worked!

The ticket taker smiled gently. “Sure, sweet one. You and your brother and sisters can come in for free. But it’ll be thirty euros for the adults. And you’ll have to put the cat in the coat check.”

Balthazar looked like someone had punched him in the stomach. “Thirty euros?” he gasped. “That’s forty bucks! Outrageous! Just send the kids in.”

While Purdy, Albert, Balthazar, and Gus waited outside, the four kids marched right in to search for the
Mona Lisa
.

Everybody walking through the halls of the Louvre spoke in hushed tones, which was good, because the din coming from the portraits was deafening.

It was impossible, for instance, to ignore the portrait of Napoleon Bonaparte crossing the Alps on horseback. “I’ve grown weary of our journey,” he whined. “My toes are frostbitten. I’ve change my mind about Russia—I don’t want to go anymore. I hear in Russia they put small dolls inside of larger dolls. I don’t understand. I can no longer feel my fingers. Does anyone have a slice of quiche? Are we there yet?”

Sage couldn’t resist. He walked over to the portrait of Napoleon. “I sympathize, Your Excellency.”

Napoleon’s eyes seemed to shift ever so slightly to Sage’s face. While his mouth didn’t move, the Bliss children could hear exactly what he was saying.

“You can hear me?” the portrait asked Sage.

“Yes, sir,” said Sage.

“
C’est beau
,” whispered Napoleon. “Bring me a croissant! And a carafe of my finest wine! This horse’s hair is coarse and unpleasant. Bring me a donkey!”

“It’s been a pleasure, sir,” said Sage, saluting Napoleon and rejoining the group.

“Wait!” called the painting. “Where are you going?”

“Wow,” whispered Sage as he continued down the hallway. “He really
is
a whiner! Can you believe that guy, Ty?”

Ty offered no reply—he was too busy staring at a portrait of a naked woman’s back. He managed to look away long enough to read the name of the painter on the card next to the painting. “Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres,” he said. He turned back to the painting. “
Hola,
mi amor
. Is that the name of your . . . husband? Your boyfriend?”

While the woman in the painting didn’t move, Rose could clearly hear her voice. “He was just a guy I met at the market while I was buying beans,” she said. “He told me this painting was just for practice. He said people thought he was a terrible artist and no one would ever see it. But here we are, well over a century later, and a thousand different people stare at my butt every day. You among them.”

Ty blushed. “I’m sorry,” he said, looking at the floor.

They hurried on.

Rose elbowed her brother. “Serves you right for trying to pick up someone in a painting.”

At the end of the hall, a crowd of tourists stood in a huddle, all facing the wall. Rose stood on her toes and strained to see what they were looking at.

There she was: the Mona Lisa.

The painting was much smaller than Rose had pictured. It was covered by glass and illuminated from above by a small lamp. Rose squeezed her way to the front of the crowd to hear what the Mona Lisa was saying, but the painting was silent.

“Hello,” Rose whispered. “Mona?”

Nothing—except for confused stares from the people standing next to her.

“Let’s let the strange little girl have her moment alone,” whispered one couple.

The crowd that had gathered around the portrait dispersed when they heard Rose whispering to herself. Before long, Rose and her brothers found themselves face-to-face with the famous portrait.

“I said, Hello!” Rose whispered again.

“Oh, I heard you the first time,” the painting said, her voice soft and low.

“I . . . we . . . we are in a baking competition,” Rose whispered to the painting. “We need to capture the secret of your smile. So, if you’ll just tell us, we’ll be on our way.”

The painting scoffed. “Everyone thinks I’m smiling. I’m not smiling! I’m frowning, like a respectable woman. So, whatever you need for your baking competition, you’ll have to find it somewhere else.”

“I
got this,” Ty said, running his fingers through his hair. He sauntered up to the painting, bit his lower lip, and furrowed his brow in a pose that Ty had practiced many times and called “The Album Cover.”

“You look like you are having surgery,” said the Mona Lisa.

Ty broke his pose and let out his breath. “What do you mean? I practiced that face for two days! I did so much research!”

“I hate to break it to you,” said the painting, “but you look like—” and then she said things Rose had never heard an adult woman say before in her life, let alone a painting of an adult woman.

Ty gasped. “You have a dirty mouth! No wonder you keep it closed!”

Rose turned to look for Leigh, who’d wandered down the hallway and was having words with a docent who wore a red uniform that made him look like a bellhop.

“I just wanted you to know that your biography of Eugène Delacroix contains glaring misinformation,” Leigh argued, scratching a bit of spilled oatmeal off the front of her crusty
101 Dalmatians
T-shirt. “Though he did in fact attend both schools, it was at the Lycée Pierre Corneille that he first won accolades for his illustrations and not at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand as your placard asserts.”

The docent looked around wildly, wondering if he was the subject of a hidden-camera show, as the young woman who knew the details of Delacroix’s biography looked no more than four.

“Leigh! Get over here!” called Rose.

“I’m in the middle of something,” she answered.

“I will be in the middle of a nervous breakdown, Leigh, if you don’t come back here right now.”

Leigh begrudgingly toddled over to Rose and Ty and Sage.

Why am I the only one who can behave like a normal person?
Rose wondered.

“Well, well, well. If it isn’t Mrs. Lisa Giocondo herself,” said Leigh, her tiny arms crossed coolly over her chest.

“Her name is
Mona Lisa
,” Rose corrected.

“No, the little one got it right,” the painting said. “My name is Mrs. Lisa Giocondo.
Mona
means ‘ma’am,’ and yet everyone always calls me Mona. It’s not a name!”

Rose was speechless. “I didn’t know. I’m sorry.” Rose turned to Ty and whispered, “Why is this woman so crabby?”

“I heard that,” said Mona Lisa. “I’m two-dimensional, not deaf.”

“No need to apologize for being crabby,” said Leigh. “You’d be crabby, too, if you were subject to the Byzantine gender politics of the sixteenth-century Florentine upper class. Lisa here was born in the late seventies—
fourteen seventies
, that is—and when she was fifteen or so—just a couple years older than you, Rose!—she was forced to marry a man in his forties, then proceed to raise six children. Am I right?”

Now the Mona Lisa was speechless. “Go on,” she finally said.

“She wasn’t expected to have any interests of her own, except for cleaning and cooking, and she rarely left the house, except to sit for twelve hours straight in Leonardo Da Vinci’s studio because her husband wanted to have a picture of her.”

“You’re making this worse, Leigh,” said Rose. Rose pulled a pacifier from her pocket and popped it into Leigh’s mouth.

“Take that little plastic giblet out at once!” cried the painting. “This child is the only one who understands me! Please, young soothsayer. Continue.”

Leigh spat out the pacifier and cleared her throat. “I’ve watched all the art criticism about the enigmatic ‘half smile’ of the
Mona Lisa
on the Art History Channel, but I personally have always thought you were simply trying
not
to smile. Renaissance portraiture consists exclusively of sour, pious frowns. You were trying your best to maintain a frown, but something in the room tickled you, something—”