“There’s no danger,” Patricia lied.
“Then you take care of her.”
“I can’t.”
“And why can I?”
“Alicia told me that … you were special. That nobody would ever think of looking in your house.”
“Alicia told you that?”
“It’s only for a day. I’ll come get her tomorrow. For sure.”
“You won’t need to come tomorrow. Or the day after, for that matter. To be clear, don’t ever come back. Not with your friend. Not without her.” I stood up: she could understand this was no light decision. I passed her Alicia’s photograph. I still hadn’t looked at it. “And take this with you. I won’t be needing it.”
Not knowing that two days later I would have that very Patricia, as insolent as ever, in front of me again, repeating the same bravura performance:
“Only for a night.”
Strange that I should not be bothered by her duplicity, more visible now than the last time. If she left Oriana with me, she wasn’t going to return tomorrow. Who knows how many days she had been trying to get the afflicted girl off her back. Maybe someone had stuck her with Oriana just the way she was trying to stick her with me now. That’s how I perceived Oriana’s life for months, deposited and transferred from house to house like a package. Until nobody knew who had her or who was responsible for collecting her again. I was, at any rate, the last stop. Because if Patricia, as seemed likely, did not return, I really didn’t have any other place where I could leave the burden, not if these eyes of mine were unable to get themselves even one paltry witness in the whole universe, and with a witching doctor like you, Mivalleri, chasing the light out of them. That same reasoning should have moved me to repeat: “Impossible, impossible,” to befuddle her with some stupid excuse, perhaps more rational than any the two of them had heard during these last endless days. No. There was no way she would be coming back tomorrow. Because if I was the last name on a list that had already failed her hour by hour, who was Patricia to obtain tomorrow? How could she sincerely guarantee that someone would relieve me of this prize so soon? That some one would ever relieve me? The panic, the weariness in Patricia’s hands, not even trying to disguise themselves as something else, should have warned me.
Instead, as usual, I felt quite confident that I would be able to confront any problem that would develop. I could not deny that Patricia had not given me her real name, but on the other hand, she couldn’t know that I had, that I still have, her face in my memory and that this could lead me to her more efficiently than any erasable smudge of fingerprints. If I had to locate her to return this piece of cargo, a quick consultation of my office files would be enough.
None of which I told Patricia when she stood up to say good-bye.
“There’s something else,” she said. “Don’t let her out of the house, not for any reason. They’re—well, somebody’s looking for Oriana.”
If I had had my camera in order to capture the crack of fear with which her face split open. It was only for a moment. What was inside her opened and shut as if a ray of light had sliced a block of ice and revealed, for less than an instant, the thing that had been caught, in there, dead and dying. What I saw in Patricia was more than that vague terror which from the start had been as noticeable as the sweat on her face. What she had allowed herself now, because she knew that I was going to take custody of the luggage called Oriana no matter what happened, was the image of her own ending. Someone was going to kill her. If I had that abyss of her face in a photo, I could have continued exploring it, asking questions of its gray areas, I could have questioned Patricia’s corpse in order to extricate from her eyes that were setting the image of her murderers, and what they were hunting in Oriana. Because they were going to kill Patricia because of Oriana, due to something that Oriana was hiding, due to—it was my guess—something Oriana may perhaps not even have, anymore. But the ray of light passed and was swallowed up. And there was no more investigating I could do. Afterward I would lament my reluctance, but at the moment I found it unimportant. I thought that Oriana’s past would be there, as always, on the surface of her skin—that I could suck it out of her as easily as a nurse’s syringe draws blood from a body before an autopsy.
“What you should know, perhaps, is that—” Patricia began saying.
I admonished her with my hand. “Not a word. I don’t want to know anything about her.”
Patricia must have thought it was to protect myself, so I could pretend I didn’t know anything in case Oriana was in real trouble. Patricia was wrong. What I wanted was to be able to find out who she was on my own, to follow her mysterious tracks without listening to information of any sort volunteered by anyone, true or false. I never wanted to feel, when I faced her, like the other inhabitants of this city, who, when they meet strangers, stock up on useless data, statistics, annotations, dental records, credit information, feigning a knowledge they do not have. I did not want ever to be like you, Doctor, when you submerge yourself inside the face of someone who intrigues you, unpeeling her enamel layer by layer, with all your technical contrivances and your implants and your X-rays and your incisions, all of you descending mercilessly upon your patients.
It was then that Patricia looked at me with a glint of doubt in her eyes.
“Say good-bye for me, will you? Tell her I’ll come for her tomorrow—for sure.”
And with these words, she left.
I am glad to be able to inform you, Doctor, that I have not seen her since. They must have killed her rather soon.
How did Oriana sit on the toilet?
It is not a trifling question, Doctor. If she were one of those women who wrinkles her skirt up till it presses in on her like an old strait jacket, her panties locking one knee to the other, and then proceeds to loosen a gush as narrow and miserly as those faces you operate, if she were one of those who wants to protect herself from the drafts of air and the eyes in the wallpaper, if she had been one of those, I wanted nothing to do with her. I required openness: getting rid of her skirt with a kick, tossing the panties away as if she would never use them again, absolutely delighted with the fluids that were about to drop from her body. I required her without fear.
To contemplate how a woman lets go on the toilet seat is one of the best ways, though not the only way, to avoid making a mistake with her.
In Oriana’s case, destiny—or at least destiny with the sham name of Patricia—had offered me the perfect possibility of confirming that my intuition about her was correct. She had been banished to my own bathroom, no less, to await our decisions about her immediate future. All I had to do was drag my aching leg up the stairs with all necessary quietness and put one periscopic eye to the blessed keyhole, the best friend of every man who wants to discover the quicksands that women hide. What else are your operations, Doctor, other than an attempt to close that marvelous slot, to make sure that nobody will ever again be able to read the real face of one of your patients?
The fact that I did not give in to the temptation of spying on Oriana in the bathroom, the fact that I awaited her presence downstairs, could almost be called an act of recklessness. Recklessness? I can already hear you, Mavrelli, making fun of me. Reckless? To respect the privacy of a guest? And yet, I was taking an enormous risk, breaking one of my most sacred customs. You know what I’m talking about, Doctor. You’ve boasted ponderously in newspapers that you could operate on anyone—even someone with no face, someone like me, unsalvageable. But if I were to appear to challenge your claim, would you really risk it? I don’t think so. And in my case, I was betting that Oriana was so absolutely different from other women I had known in my life that it would be worth approaching her in a different manner. What I was abandoning, in fact, was a method that, since my earliest days, had helped me to examine, one after another, an endless beehive of vixens, a method that had proved infallible.
I was six years old the first time I had ever decided not to apply such a profitable procedure, a
nd it took me almost a decade to recover from the disastrous results. I was in love with a little girl called Enriqueta and, forgetting everything I had learned while squinting at my mother, sisters, cousins, aunts, or female family friends—following them as they discretely stood up to leave the room—against every instinct in my retinas, as a supreme token of adoration and trust of Enriqueta, I abstained. Temporarily, Doctor.
At the beginning, that abstention was the only homage I could pay her. I’ll admit it is not the best way to win the heart of the prettiest girl in our class—the silent sacrifice of not watching her while she’s pissing. But what other offering could I surrender?
Nobody paid any attention to me, and why should she, the most popular of all the girls I knew, with her wealthy parents, her father who was a doctor just like you, have been an exception? I was nothing, no one, less than one. Other than my furtive convergences upon the keyhole, I did not have, at the time, even one weapon with which to defend myself.
Photography? I had not yet realized the pleasures it would bring. And the fact that I was completely anonymous? I was aware—no doubt about it—that nobody remembered me, that the world acted as if I had not been born. Less visible than an Indian or a nigger, much less visible than one of those tramps sleeping in the street. At least people don’t walk on one of those; they side step the smell from the shit glued to their unwashed asses. They take them into account. But not even that, for me. People I have known for years stumble against me, push me. If I’m lucky, they’ll apologize: Oh, so sorry, they say, without the faintest show of familiarity, never able to tell who I am. One day, in front of our home, my own father gave me a shove. Not only did he not recognize me, on top of that he insulted me: “Why the fuck don’t you watch where you’re going?” Blaming me for his clumsiness.
I still had not fully understood that this semivisibility, my esteemed Doctor, could in other circumstances constitute an advantage. I would be able to circulate among people and find out each one of their secrets, follow my closest relatives, schoolmates, colleagues, and never be noticed. Later, when I had gained access to the state archives, to medical files, school report cards, confidential memos from insurance agents, not to speak of the inexhaustible documents of the Department of Traffic Accidents, it would have been easy to humble someone like Enriqueta, to add her to my collection.
But I was as defenseless as any child of six. More defenseless, because I had no knickknack to sell, no rhyme to recite, no cute song to trill. There was not in me even one smile with which to coax some dessert out of a mother or to blackmail an uncle into taking me to the movies. How was I to know how unusual it was to remember each intense face so well, each pimple and pore on each cheek, each soft or blustery mustache? I believed—and you know, Doctor, I may still believe—that all children have a similar talent. It may be that I had to preserve and develop mine because, unlike other children, I had no other skill with which to replace that natural aptitude everyone is born with.
For several months, I waited for the opportunity to render Enriqueta some unheard-of service: to gallop to the rescue, to save her from some ogre—someone like you, Doctor—who wanted to steal her face. And as such an occasion did not present itself, I decided to bribe her with a gift. Not an easy thing to do. I did not receive an allowance. When I asked for it, my father would assure me that it had already been given to me and that I was trying to cheat him. He had instantly contrived for himself some sort of ice-cold memory. That’s how it always was with me: not only did people refuse to see me, but when I protested, they would cram me into their invented reminiscences so as to quickly get rid of me. I was inserted, over and over, into a past that they convinced themselves existed but that I had never lived. I was condemned, therefore, to manufacture the gift by myself.
I chose to send her some drawings, one each day. Double mistake. The first: I was unable to cross two lines in the right place, unable to close a wavering circle, unable to paint the colors of the rainbow without seeing them run like tears. A justifiable awkwardness. My hand anticipated instinctively what my eyes would discover someday: that only a photo does not lie. Or some photos, at least, Doctor. But that was not all. The drawings themselves were deceitful. Enriqueta was frivolous, cruel, merciless, but I pictured her as magnificent and benign, generous as a smiling sun. As if by merely describing her in this way, Malaveri, she would magically be converted into that person. Many years would pass before I realized that this sort of procedure, which plastic surgeons have perfected in order to capture people’s souls, was of no use to me. Did I also want to impose upon a skin that did not deserve it the forgery of a beautiful mask? I had not learned a law that you certainly knew, Doctor, when you chose your profession: the more illusions you have about someone, the more captive you are. I was Enriqueta’s prisoner. A prisoner without the right to enter her castle. Her castle? Not even the cellars of that castle.
If I began to send drawings to her, it was because I wanted to be invited to her birthday. No matter how unsightly those drawings might be, they were a way of asking for attention. Each morning, when she arrived at her desk, she found the gawky colors I had worked on so hard. It is true that she never thanked me for them, not even casting me one of those smiles which you fabricate, Doctor; but I comforted myself with the thought that she was receiving them like a remote queen who, however accustomed to the cheers of the multitude, nevertheless could feel gratified by an offering from a worm. Each morning she would put the drawing away in her schoolbag. If she was taking it home, it had to have some special value to her, and my hopes grew that I would receive, for the first time in my existence, proof that someone had noticed me. What I wanted, Doctor, if you allow the distinction, was not to go to the party so much as to be invited.
The only child in the class who did not get a dainty little card with seven pink elephants dancing on the cover was yours untruly.
So you can understand, Doctor, even Alicia—Alicia with her face like a moon’s crater, with her leatherworks smell, with her voice like barbed wire on a record—even she had gotten an invitation. Strange how one can suffer, at that age, all the humiliations of the universe and still not give up. We seem to need more. Otherwise, why in heaven did I, the day of the party, having calculated that all the other children had already left, direct my shoes to scuffle toward Enriqueta’s house? It wasn’t that I had decided something as drastic as breaking my silent promise not to spy on her. It just turned out that way.
At the back of her garden, her father had built a playhouse for her. There was a watchdog, but I wasn’t scared: not even the dogs bother to look at me. It was as if I were a stone for that mutt. I approached the playhouse slowly and, noticing a gap in the boards, I put my eye to it. The house was empty. In a corner, next to a pile of sprawling dolls, I saw my drawings, shipshape and intact. It was surprising that they should be there, as if they were being saved for some special occasion. Perhaps she was also in love with me but did not want to confess it. The idea that if someone loves you, she’ll make you hurt—that sort of shit, Mirdovellez.
All of a sudden, I saw her come in, and instead of withdrawing my eyes, as my unilateral pact not to spy on her demanded of me, I stayed there, as if transfixed. Enriqueta was worn out, flushed from so much excitement. She was carting along a colossal doll, which seemed new—they had just bought it for her.
She sat it in front of a mirror and began to put make-up on its face. Those weren’t play cosmetics she was using. Even at that age I knew more than enough about beauty products to realize that she had rifled her mother’s boudoir.
I would never have dared do anything like that. My mother’s powder and mascara were inviolable. Sitting in a babyseat in the mirrored room of the TV studio where the woman who had carried my unmemorable body inside her for nine months worked, only two years old, I figured out that cosmetics were not for me. If my mother was so busy preparing the businessmen, the politicians, the priests, the movie stars, for their interviews and banquets and
debates, what sort of skin care was going to be left for her son? One face after the other, all afternoon and evening, painting the smile on one to deceive the other and the smile on the other to continue the deception and both smiles to deceive the fools in the audience, expending on her craft and clients all the time and tricks she never spent on me, not a speck of talcum, not an eyeliner, until one day I asked myself if my untouched face might be the reason no one ever paid any attention to me.
But all too soon I understood that not all the make-up in the world would have saved me. I understood it, to be precise, the day on which my little sister was born. I had encouraged the illusion that when she arrived she would fulfill two of my desires. The first was that she should have no face. And the second, that she should bring me mine, the one that had perhaps been forgotten back there, in those moist ashes inside my mother’s stomach. But my sister was as complete as can be—bubbling over, pinkish—and brought me no other gift than the knowledge of my own loneliness. My mother, such an expert in the techniques of false eyelashes and wigs, did not need to wait so long. She must have guessed it instinctively in the instant of looking at me—or as she twisted her eyes away from me the first time. Unlike my brothers, I had nothing in my face that anybody could register, not a surface on which some improvement could be imagined, not the rag of a possible alteration. If someone like you, Doctor, a genius such as you, had seen me at the beginning, who knows if my life might not have changed. Or if some woman, many years later, Alicia perhaps, had given me birth with a permanent look instead of chasing the mirage of a face promised by the unhealing hands of the surgeons of this world.
What is certain is that the woman who should have succored me did not do so. That she brought me into the world, that lady who cloaked faces, of that there was no doubt. But she had not continued with me for the rest of the voyage. She left me there, featureless, abandoned on the wharf—or on the ship that was departing—and I had to defend myself alone. Because what is superimposed upon the blank blackboard children bring with them is their parent’s face. That is why—and not for some stupid biological reason—they look more and more like their fathers and mothers as the years grow by. At birth, parents and relatives and lovers coo, flattering themselves with some conceivable resemblance. Lies. For a real similarity, mere fornication, pressing one seed into service so it becomes an unwilling body, is insufficient. In order to secure that face, the adult must keep on interposing himself between the just-born baby and the world. For the rest of its life the child will pay for that protection against alien eyes. You must know what I’m talking about, Doctor, you must have studied it scientifically.