Because I have never talked to anyone about my face. I don’t like to ask for pity, Doctor. To ask for pity is not that different from trying on the latest fashions to keep your lover, or going to a plastic surgeon to make new friends, not that different from what Jarvik’s wife does to him. Now I would have to do it.
Or was there any other way of somebody like me touching the soul of a man like him?
“This … it’s not exactly easy, Inspector. It will not have escaped you that I’m not what you could call, let us say, handsome, right? To get a woman, any woman, to fix her eyes upon me …” All of a sudden I stopped. It became impossible to banish Alicia’s face, to elude the words I should have entrusted to someone when Alicia went through that door leading to your consulting room, Mavirelli. Or if I could have talked to her about my face, if I could have begged her to stay with me because of my face. “Inspector! The woman I love has got to witness what I am willing to do for her. It’s not enough for me to give her the photo and then receive her thanks. She has to see me. See me. So I will be fixed forever in her memory. Or do you think that with this face …”
In my lifeless eyes he must have read an abandonment that was not entirely feigned.
His eyes softened.
He felt for me exactly the sort of compassion that I wanted him to feel.
Of course to invite someone into your intimacy, Doctor, has the disadvantage that the someone may end up accepting that invitation. That is what happened with former Inspector Jarvik. Because if I had managed to get him to heed my preposterous story, it was also true that he felt authorized to meddle in my personal affairs. It is the price you pay for demanding a favor.
“I would like to suggest something to you. I hope you don’t mind.”
There was in his voice—how to describe it so I won’t appear, myself, as a sentimental bastard, so you won’t get the wrong idea about me, Doctor—there was something almost affectionate, almost sweet. It was the first friendly advice anyone had ever offered me in my entire life. I did not answer him, but something that was not neutral in my eyes must have stimulated him, because he continued: “If you really want to win over a little woman, there is one sort of strategy that never fails. Do you know what it might be?” And when he realized that I was not disposed to answer, that I had no notion of what he was talking about: “A smile,” Jarvik said. “Just that. Everybody remembers somebody who smiles. And I have noticed, if you don’t mind my observation, that you never smile. Or am I wrong?”
Perhaps in another life, on another planet, inside another universe, I could have been the friend of a man like that. Now it was not possible. Nor would it be possible tomorrow. If he was softly opening up the doors of an affection that I did not need, it was his problem, not mine. What I needed from him I had already gotten: a promise of his help. I kicked shut, I closed, I locked those sterile doors. “I am not diseased, Inspector,” I said to him, and if he felt it like a slap in the face, I felt it to be a farewell at the very moment when I said it. “I will smile when I have reason to smile.”
So I treated him as I have treated everybody else who has crossed my vision. Like a sleeping woman that you can do anything to. Because he was blind and I was awake. He pitied me and I despised him. Because it was my fate to survive and his fate to serve me.
So he was that observant? He never conjectured that the woman he was looking for so importunately was none other than the friend with the bandaged face who accompanied me the next day to the hospital, who passed with us all the barriers you have set up to keep out the curious, Doctor. So analytic, was he? He didn’t realize that, not content with poking my camera into your private operating room, I used the occasion to quickly copy the supposedly nonexistent list of your more important patients, Doctor. So implacable, the former inspector? I made him play the cuckold’s role of my beloved’s guardian, taking care of her while I was inside, aware that, chained to his honor, he would not direct one word to the nameless woman he had by his side.
Just so you don’t get the wrong impression, Doctor: I did not trust him. Not him, not anybody, Doctor. Jarvik could not have coaxed even a phrase out of Oriana. Nor could your nurse out there, at this very moment as we talk to each other in here, make her open her mouth. I have trained her well. Whoever asks you about your bandages, I told her repeatedly, you answer that if it had been your wish to reveal details about your identity, you would not wear them. Or do you want those men to find you?
So don’t think that tomorrow I could not once more penetrate your security system, Doctor, that I could not take a new photo that would penetrate the security system you call a face, Doctor. All alone. Without help from Jarvik. Without help from anybody. Though for now, and you will have to agree with me, this should be sufficient.
You’ll notice, Miervadelli, that not one of your assistants prevented me from taking this snapshot. I wonder why you bother to hire them? So many of them and all so useless. Perhaps good apprentices of medical care, but as watchdogs—get rid of them. Not one of them perceived that there was a stranger among them in the operating room. They may have been too busy with the patient, Colonel Zagasto’s wife—I had no problem recognizing her. She always appeared on television. The viewers seemed not to understand that the clinic she was opening, or the school, or the park, or the avenue, were the same ones that had been on last week and that only the name had been changed. Her advisers probably didn’t want to waste their time changing her speech, which was the same idiocy she had read a couple of days back. Fortunately, she did not open her mouth while I was in there. She might have bored me to death. I was lucky: she was asleep when I arrived and was still asleep a few minutes later, when you came in.
Your operating mask worried me. But I was sure, let me tell you, or maybe it was a mere intuition, that at some finale of your intervention, you would tear that piece of cloth off and reveal that one face of yours which had been indelibly marked by an inner demon, that face upon which, as on a blackboard, even a small kid could read what your burning and sunken eyes were really thinking. The camera should not spring into action until that moment arrived. And that’s how it went. I crouched with utter calm in my corner, waiting for the curtains to rise on your face, Doctor, with my machine hidden, just in case, underneath the white smock that Jarvik had handed me. Some ten minutes later, when the patient had been entirely split open, with that silence which bones exude when they are at their most naked, glimmering under that arc of lights, you made a slight gesture with your left hand, and, as if miraculously, your assistants disappeared. Even the anesthetist fled. They were so quick and efficient about it that I had no doubt this was not the first time they had been asked to leave the room during an operation. What you did to Colonel Zagasto’s wife, have you done it—or am I way off target?—to your other patients? Did you do it to Alicia? And do your assistants leave you alone because you have convinced them that you possess some sort of magical procedure that nobody else can witness, something that guarantees the happy outcome of the operation? We were left alone, Doctor, I in the shadows and you under the reflectors and the woman sprawled on the table between us, like rotten earth which a pair of dark birds was going to dispute. When you lowered your mask, Doctor, as if you were taking off your trousers, my camera knew that not much time was left and also that, once again, my eyes had not erred. You began to advance, with the graveyard of your face open on the openness of that woman’s face, advancing toward her with eyes that boiled with the insects of an unnamable desire, and I thought for an instant that you were going to make love to her and that this was the secret I would capture forever. But the photograph I have is more interesting, Maraville. It is a pleasure to confirm that your aberrations are much more intense and profound than those of the mere flesh, and that you will be more than willing to negotiate an agreement with me, which will give you more power and will give more of Oriana to me.
It is possible, therefore, that you know, as I do, master surgeon, that one’s real sex does not re
side between the legs but further up, in those eyes that were watching the face of that skinless woman exposed like a soiled heart in the middle of the road. Your hands descended, Doctor, toward the entrails of that face, and when they were about to penetrate them, when the violation was about to be consummated, my camera seized the exact instant before it—and what can be seen between your fingers is a tiny metallic apparatus, which you were on the verge of placing inside some space in Mrs. Zagasto’s skull. It is not quite clear where, Doctor, in the snapshot, see for yourself. Only don’t touch the celluloid, please. I must presume it is in the cavern that yawns behind the nose, that communicates upward to the brain and the eyelids, that controls the tongue and what is said and what is listened to, some recess that must be the geographic center of the personality. My eyes first and then my hands and the pale film in my brain after that and the orgasm of the shuddering trigger of the camera at last and I had you, Doctor—your face like a gigantic mouth turned inside out like a glove of skin, and the woman like a wedding cake that someone has crushed and that will nevertheless soon be eaten to the last dreg, and above all the undeniable shining of that thing which you situated in the most private part of that patient in order to—what do you do with that insignificant mechanism, Doctor? Do you spy on people? Do you give them orders? Or do you merely listen to their most intimate conversations?
When I finish talking to you, in a few more minutes, Doctor, I’d really like to know.
But I see no need to point out that it is not in your interest for anyone else to get this photo. In exchange for not sending it, to the colonel or to any of your other clients, the services I require from you are exceptionally paltry. A modest monthly sum deposited in a foreign bank and, right now, an insignificant amount, which will help us take care of urgent matters: my plans are to travel tomorrow evening. And because I understand that business deals work only if both parties are gaining, each week you will receive, Doctor, from abroad, one photograph from my collection. You may well ask, of what use will they be? I’m astonished, Mirevedelski. What I’m giving you is an authentic gallery of human privacy—thousands of faces at their worst, their most intolerable. You can use the photos for blackmail, if you wish; but I suggest that they can serve you better by helping you further disguise that vileness—they will be like the counterpart of each lovely feature that you have been modeling with your chirurgical hygiene. Study those leers, that nudge, this wink, the mad pantomime with which people betray their concealed emotions. Study them to learn how to erase them from the humanity that comes before you. You must stretch that skin, stretch the falseness, the terseness of that skin, stretch it so tightly that not one of the subterranean gestures that are vegetating below can escape.
As for my departure from this country, I wouldn’t mind having a medical certificate signed by you, Doctor. Just write that anybody who takes the bandages off this patient runs a high risk of infection. That should be enough, and your fame and influence, Doctor, to guarantee that we’ll be able to pass under the very noses of the men who are trying to reach my girl before Jarvik does.
And, of course, Oriana will, in effect, be needing those bandages.
You see this photograph? This one? The one that the former inspector gave me, Oriana as a child?
What I want, Doctor, is for you to return this face and this age to Oriana’s body. While I assist you. No one else can be present. I want her exactly, and forever, as she appears in this photograph. There are other faces at work inside her, Mavirelli, swimming beneath her innocence, trying to come up for air.
I want you to suffocate them, Doctor.
Well, Doctor? Oriana is waiting for us outside. Shall we go and undress her?
What do you say?
SECOND
As for me, I am still enclosed in this kingdom that I built for myself.
When you think of it, it wasn’t due to my memory. It was due to my hands. Because adults also told me, as they have told every child in the world, that we arrive here with hands that belong to us. The difference is that I always knew it was not true.
I knew it at birth. The first thing I saw were those two men waiting at the foot of the bed. The same ones that had come to visit me, some time before I was born.
You don’t remember them? A pair of men always in a hurry, blunt, and always in a hurry? The real owners of my hands, of all the hands in the universe? With their deeds to the property? With their knives? With their photos? I had no hands when they came to see me. If you want them to be born whole and healthy, they said, you’d better rent a couple. You can pay on the installment plan, they said. On the condition that you return them the day you die. And that’s when they showed me the photographs of the people who had rejected their offer. Beggars’ stumps. Fingerless babies. Hemiplegics. Paralyzed limbs. So that those images would not anguish me for the rest of my life, they promised I would forget that conversation. According to them I would live, like everyone else, with the illusion that my hands belonged to me.
In that, however, they were wrong. Because I remembered them at my birth. My father did not see the men, my mother did not see them. Only I realized when they began to approach. I shut my eyes so they would not know that I had recognized them from before.
“Seems like she’s got them in good shape,” the bigger one said.
“Hurry up,” said the other one. “We’ve got a lot more to inspect. They reproduce like rabbits, this rabble …”
“Lucky they also die,” the bigger one answered and looked straight at my papa.
“Yeah. Not much time left.”
Almost five years later, when papa died, I saw them again.
I had spent my infancy trying to convince myself that these men did not exist. But at nighttime, I dreamt of them. They were just as I had glimpsed them that first time in my mama’s cavern. Except that in my dreams they had grown more hands and I had grown old. I was lying in an open field. It was midnight. Suddenly, as if they were lights in a theater, someone turned off the stars. And that enormous double silhouette darkened the horizon, and then those multiple arms crawled toward what had been my body and I could feel their ice descending down my shoulders and my arms, and if I was lucky, papa would awaken me.
“What did you dream, little one?”
So much love, so much weariness in his voice. I did not have to listen to those men to know that he was going to die.
“I don’t remember.”
“If you tell me, you’ll feel better.”
They could not be far away. Perhaps in the next room. And if I revealed their existence, they would come to take my very own hands, even before I had passed away. So he was the one who had to comfort me with some incident from his life, a fairy tale where somebody saves the girl when everything seems lost. Even today I can repeat, word for word, each story he told me. I have kept them here alive in my kingdom.
That would happen—if I was lucky.
Because the sicker papa became and the more harried my mama, the less they worried about waking me from my nightmares. And then I had to witness and watch in my dreams what those men would do to my hands, what they would do to my hands the day I died.
They tied the dead doves of my hands to a rope as if they were afraid of catching a contagious disease. Complaining bitterly that I had ruined them. When they had been consigned to me, they were new and decent and now they were haggard and played out. “My poor treasures,” the bigger one muttered as if they were a pair of strangled dogs. “Look what they’ve done to you.”
They washed my hands. I had to witness how their many arms soaped the fingernails and the fingers that had been mine, what used to be my knuckles and the palms. I watched them fracturing the music of that skin. Stuffing my pretty hands into a huge pot of boiling water, extracting them as pale as sheets. Without a wrinkle. Without a line that could remind anyone of what they had once caressed.
Really dead now.
And they would cast them, like throatless birds, into a heap with thou
sands of other hands. It was only then that I realized that, behind me, by my side, near and in the shadows, other eyes were accompanying me. My parents, my cousins, the men and women I would get to know if my life were long enough, those people my hands would travel with if I could keep them.
We were never able to discover their final destination. We did not dare, even in a dream, to follow those men when they lowered themselves into a vast cellar where people graced with only two hands were bound to lose their way. We remained behind with our voices to keep us company. Our hands, white as death, blurred and without history, were now going to start a journey toward the arms of the children who were about to be born. So that no child could know what had come before, what her ancestors had danced. So that we would forget.
I would awaken by myself, with my hands intact and loving, with those voices still whispering in my ears, truer than the pillow, than the early song of birds at dawn, than the sad footsteps of my mother going to give papa his medicine. That’s what they use the hands for, the voices said to me: to punish whoever betrays the terms of the contract. It’s what will happen to you if you ever tell this secret.
I would get up and go to my papa’s bed.
I was too small to gather him into my arms. The only thing I could receive from him was his melody, the rhythm of his memories. I had already noticed that people treat their memory as if it were an endless garbage deposit. They stuff themselves with the past and then defecate it.
I was different.
When those men arrived to get my papa’s hands, I had already labored at length to keep the memories clean and intact.
I had spent my infancy trying to convince myself that the men did not exist. But I was not surprised when they came in the door a few moments before papa stopped breathing. Mama cried quietly, her face hidden, her shoulders downcast. I did not turn to look at them.