Oriana is different. I saw her in front of me, transparent and enigmatic and entirely disrobed of all protection, whether in words or in clothes, and I wondered—never had I asked such a question, I do not even have a name to give to this fear that shrieks inside me—if she were going to escape. It was not a physical evasion that I feared, Doctor. Nobody—not even someone like you, Doctor, as you shall discover in a few hours’ time—can run from my eyes. But Oriana might—and here the pain in my thoughts trickled into what must have been my heart; she might—and this could be happening right at this moment, as I speak to you; Oriana might break away from her own self, awaken from her amnesia, and become again the ordinary everyday person she once was, in other words, precisely one of those beings without a mystery to hide who bore me to death, the kind that visit you, Doctor, so you can continue to perpetrate your repertory of faces upon them.
When I used to make love with those women, Doctor, I never got to the bottom of them. It is possible that they may have had, deep within their selves, perhaps, an image of the Paradise that they had lost, of a time in which they were not the window dressing that others had forced them to become in order to exist. Too deep to find it: their childhood. I was never able to descend to that zone, if it was there, inside them. It was necessary to beat open a track through a whole garbage jungle of honey-dipped-beige natural-blush coloring creams, everything that revolts me, the eternal scripts and jingles, the body lotion and the body sales and the body cleansers and the body tonics, all the rose refining masks and the nonoily skin supplements—layer upon layer of make-up and memories which each person uses to induce the other to love him or her, to convince the other that this partner is a good investment. One face after the other that I classify inside my own filing system so that they will never have a chance to manipulate me, just as the police keep and study a rogues’ gallery of the worst criminals, just as children rehearse and perfect one face after the other for the audience that starts to disrobe them as of a certain age, just as they learn the gestures with which they will have to become the managers of themselves from a certain age onward.
An age that Oriana has not yet reached.
I had to entrust myself to my sex so that it would help me discover what up till then more perceptive organs had only muttered to me. Abandoned by my camera, unable to explore through my eyes the eclipse of Oriana’s unknown face, I could only begin to explore the identity of this twin of mine by entering her supposedly alien body and making it my own, pressing the crushed grapes in my fingers to feel what she was feeling, I with no face and she with no past, the two mirrors reflecting nothing more than each the other and the other again. Because if somebody or something has erased, as if it had never existed, her whole life after she was five, nobody has been able, on the other hand, to banish the experience of those years from her body. She may talk like a small girl, but she makes love like an adult woman.
And that’s why I’m in a hurry, Doctor. That’s why I need to procure her secret file.
You think it’s because I’m scared? That those men who are searching for her have me on the run?
Let them look for her all they want, let them wear out the soles of their shoes shuffling up and down the whole country. By tomorrow night we’ll be abroad—thanks to you, Doctor. Yes. You may not know it yet, but you’re going to give us everything we need.
My haste has other origins.
Oriana’s previous existence is not registered in that report alone. Her true history is also known by some adult Oriana who is crouched within that child Oriana who stretched out her arms to me so that I could protect her. That older woman is determined to come back to the surface and transform my loved one into a normal, orthodox, uninteresting being, one of those millions that stroll along the streets with their jeans pressed so closely to their buttocks that you might presume they had a secret to conceal and didn’t want it to come out. Pretending they have some sort of real enigma in there, between their skin and their clothing, something that might be worth exploring. Normal: someone with a past, with a mask, with a piece of lipstick. A person like you, Doctor, like Enriqueta, like Tristan Pareja.
I am going to prevail against her.
My sex suggests to me that she is in there, preparing her revenge, watching the almost-five-year-old Oriana from a corner in her brain, from a curtain, from the corrupt camera of a pair of concealed eyes in there. Watching me as I listen to her Evelike mewls of pleasure, watching us make love, lying next to us in bed, lying on her back when Oriana gets on top of me, planning the merciless day when she will again take by assault the face that once belonged to her.
I will not allow her to interpose her memories between us.
It is a decision I made Saturday at dawn, the first morning that we shared. That was when Oriana’s hand awoke my shoulder, and the lips of Oriana in my hair and Oriana’s body in the sheets, and she asked me something that I myself, with all my prophetic inclinations, would have been unable to predict:
“Hey, who are you?”
And as I was in no condition to answer, she said, “I’m almost five years old,” with that shine in her eyes that indicates that there is no double-dealing in her of any sort. “You can call me Oriana. I think that’s my name.”
And then, as I was still stupefied, still silent:
“Will you take care of me? ’Cause there are some men who are looking for me … Somebody told me that I had to hide.”
So this woman, Doctor, not only has stopped growing in order to remain forever on the threshold of her five years of age, not only does not retain in her memory her real name, who her parents might be, and where she was born, but does not remember what just happened to her yesterday. For once, I didn’t mind if somebody didn’t recognize me: she treats everybody the same way. Nobody has a permanent face in her world, a world where someone like me can compete, can triumph. Her eyes went blank when I mentioned Patricia’s name, when I asked her about the games we had played the preceding night.
Sunday morning was a repeat performance of Saturday. Except that I was the one who woke her this time, anxious to find out if the miracle would continue, and once more, “Hey, who are you?” and again the same voice introducing itself as if we had not already spent two long days of loving together, “I think my name may be Oriana,” and again, “What are we going to play today?” and “Watch out, there are some men who are—” and then I knew, I knew that if we were to stay together, it was absolutely essential to destroy any chance that the woman who had once occupied that body should come to disturb us.
I am going to keep her forever, Doctor.
Because if I had to present myself to her all over again on Saturday and Sunday and yesterday and today, her fingers, conversely, still knew me, her skin had not forgotten my touch. In her hands and in the permanent sanctuary that she offered me, there remained the wisdom from the days we had lived; and there, as well, shall be deposited the different identities that I will bestow upon her.
I need nothing more in the universe: Oriana, because of her unanchored memory, that double amnesia of hers, Maravelli, is a perpetual adventure. That she should not have the slightest idea of who she is, that she has even lost the previous day’s experience, lets me choose for her, upon our awakening, an original role. I don’t expect this to shock you too much, Doctor. You do the same thing. You select the face for each patient—and if you don’t like it, you change it. I also select a face; but mine, unlike yours, lasts only twenty-four hours. That Saturday, for instance, not knowing if the next day she would forget again, I told Oriana that her real name was Enriqueta and filled her in on the life of the girl who had twisted my destiny with her doll and my drawings. I had always wanted to possess Enriqueta—not through a photograph, not through the unfaithful steward of my sex, but to have her under my sway the way a character belongs to an author, to be able to give that story between us, if I so desired, an ending that supplied more satisfaction, to be able to relive once and again that scene in
the playhouse in her garden until it came out exactly as I had dreamt it, so that the victim was Enriqueta and not me. Monday, yesterday morning, in fact, I let her play Alicia, and Alicia did not submit to you, Doctor. She stepped away from your office door and accepted me rather than the face which you had prepared for her.
Of course I will not select Enriqueta or Alicia each time. At the beginning of the day, and today indeed that is what I did, I can offer to Oriana one of those women who are in my files, one I have followed and explored, or tomorrow a woman I have invented from one of the thousand photographs I chanced upon in the archives, or the day after tomorrow one of the women I have read about who died thousands of years ago: a saint, a queen, a heretic, a witch, a whore, a movie star. She can be real, she can be fictional: the only circumstance that never changes is that she always ends up at my mercy, always ends up awaiting my indulgence, my forgiveness.
She disguises herself and we play until the sun goes down.
The last five days of my life, Doctor, have therefore been played out as a drama whose basic direction I have written ahead of time but whose variations and developments will be improvised by the two actors, a drama where I invariably control the final act of coupling. She doesn’t want to invent her own role. She couldn’t if she wanted to. With no memories to orient her, she is grateful that somebody else should guide her existence, she thanks me simply for not scolding her or leaving her locked up in a room.
Boring? For me?
Why, aren’t you bored by the same woman every day or by so many women who are all the same, all of them believing in the role written for them by some demon of their unhappiness inside their head, written by their P.R. agent inside, written by their need to please some man? Whereas Oriana knows that this pastime is provisional and fleeting, no matter how passionately she may practice it: at the end of the entertainment I will be waiting to return to her the gift of her childhood. Other women should envy her: who would not want to live the most perverse of aberrations, to descend to the sewers of the human soul, and emerge without a scratch, without having to ask questions or tremble in fear, able to awaken the next day soothed by forgetfulness, ready for yet another voyage of discovery?
Why should she feel unfortunate? For her, every day shall be as a first birth, with all the fresh air that came at the beginning of Creation. And the person who accompanies her, the person who can show her the perpetually recent contours of the universe, will be as a god.
Doctor, I had no childhood. I grew old all at once. My eyes forced the rest of my body to hurry. Now, with Oriana’s eternal fountain flowing through my life, I am becoming young again: it has been merely a matter of seeing the world with the fertility of those eyes of hers that dawn with such clarity each morning; it has been a matter of recreating each day from her nothingness a new personality. She is as Eve. But I shall not be Adam, I shall be God and the Serpent rolled up into one, starting the day as God and ending it as the Serpent, with the chance to begin the next day another story, a new galaxy, another Garden and another Exile, until the end of time. I can rewrite and recapture the whole of human history. We can be each of the past’s lovers, each character in each novel: and it will always be my narrating her, a thousand and one times if that is necessary.
How glad I would have been, that Sunday, to have scoured her forever, to have explored her transitory day-being and that more permanent nocturnal self inside, her one day-mind and her forever-body. But that urgency in me, Doctor, that fear that she might disappear from under my hands at the next moment … I have been a watcher for too long not to know that inside each cell there is a voyeur, in each stump of her blood, that other Oriana was watching me through the keyhole eyes of all my own Orianas, the hard holes of those pretty eyes that I have now claimed, preparing herself to come out and take from me that childhood that I was always denied.
It was that sense of urgency, that haste to kidnap her for all time, the fear that time was running out, the cloudy photograph forming in my mind of someone inside who is searching for her, somebody’s hand caressing a report on her; that was what drove me to go to the office that day. I still did not know, that same Sunday morning when I decided to keep her forever, that I would eventually turn to you, Doctor. I thought that my files would be more than sufficient to accomplish my purposes, to find the minimal information on Oriana’s identity, the data that would allow me to reactivate my network.
But let me make one thing clear. If I finally decided to obtain some sort of intelligence on the woman Oriana had once been, it was as a preventive measure, not as a road toward her true being. Who knows better than I that those mediocre reports are of no consequence compared to the fierce probe of one of my photographs? I concluded that it was important to use this imperfect substitute to explore Oriana’s past, because I have no other way of reading what she once was, because I have no other way of protecting her from the ghost she carries inside. I needed clues, I thought, however inconsiderable, to understand the outlines of her previous existence and to sketch out the references I must drastically elude in the future. I have read that some casual allusion to a past incident could restore her memory, restore her to the rattrap from which she had enabled herself to escape. This was my way of assuring her an unperturbed and blissful captivity.
What I did not expect, on the other hand, was that my key would not fit into the lock on the back door of the Transportation Ministry. Someone had changed it. I tried to go in through the front door. It was barred. Naturally, when the porter arrived, sleepy and ill-tempered, he didn’t recognize me. I showed him my identity pass. He looked at the name and then, with all brazenness, he put it away in one of his pockets.
“That’s right,” he said, yawning. “They told me you’d be coming by. I’ve got a signed order—from Pompeyo Garssos. Here it is: you don’t work here, anymore.”
I did not bother to discuss the matter with him.
If this had happened to me a week before, it would have had no effect upon me. It would merely have been a matter of returning there in another hour. The idiot would not remember me, and I would easily persuade him to let me in under another name. Or if that didn’t work, the very next day, a Monday, I could pass under his blind and bleary eyes, mixed in with the crowd of other employees. Once inside, I could slip among the papers like a phantom, gathering Oriana’s data and the other reports I needed to reconstruct my empire without anybody so much as realizing I was there.
I had always done things slowly. Prudence suggested it. So did principle. But what I was lacking now was time, Doctor, time, which had always been my main ally.
I saw your hand in all this immediately, the message you were sending me. That I should go to see you, that we should work this matter out like men. You had stolen my tranquility, you had destroyed my network, now you were taking my job. And who knows what other surprises you had in store, Doctor—in my office, on the street, at home.
So you have only yourself to blame for having attracted me to your private operating room. It was all the same to me by then, Doctor, if I ended your career as a face peddler or if I let you go scot-free. The only thing I cared about was to save the woman who had the only face in this world that was not for sale. Behind me, as if the sound itself accentuated my own decision, I heard the porter shut the gate with a double lock, disappearing into the bowels of the building that for so many years had been the temple of all my knowledge and the headquarters for all my contacts. I did not allow myself even a smudge of nostalgia for its loss.
As it is you, Doctor, who are denying me the use of what it has taken me a whole lifetime to construct, it seems fair to me that it should therefore be you who will submit to me the resources with which I intend to solve my problems.
If I did not want to continue finding obstacles in my path, the time had come to confront you directly, Doctor, to ask for an appointment.
But with your permission, Mierdavelli, first I’ll take your photograph.
I want you to fix yo
ur eyes on this snapshot. Do you recognize anybody? Do you recognize the person who is operating? Looks like you, doesn’t it, Doctor? Or are you going to deny, do you dare to deny, what your hands are doing? You don’t? Another question, then. Would you like that patient, the woman you operated on that day, to receive a copy? Or should I send it to her husband, Colonel Zagasto? Or would you rather that the photo be sent to one of the thousands of other city residents whose faces you have been purging all these years—without the inquisitive presence of my camera? Yes, Doctor. I also have a list of your patients.
How did I do all this?
You are forewarned: I could have done it on my own. It is true that I no longer have my files. True that you have dispersed my contacts. And true also that my errand boy, Tristan, is now at somebody else’s insidious beck and call. But even so, Malavierro, your fortress is not inaccessible. Anyone persistent, ready to be rendered invisible by holding his breath, could have negotiated an entry into the hospital where you usually operate, could have crossed the eight additional security checks, mounted the staircase that leads to your private chambers, neutralized the infrared alarm rays. Anyone could have witnessed from one of the dark walls the ceremonies that I witnessed that day. Just so you know: if tomorrow I do not have Oriana by my side like a living howl, tomorrow if I feel like it, tomorrow I can once again smuggle myself, this time without anyone’s aid, into your operating room.