Mascara

by Ariel Dorfman

  And I could not guess the identities of those who harbored her, as if she were a daughter who never writes home. But here in this growing darkness I wondered if she had not learned on her own how to give refuge to strange voices, if that was not the way in which she was paying for her safekeeping.

  Because the last time she allowed me to share her gaze, the last time I awoke outside my kingdom in an alien place, a terribly transitory and real place, there was in front of us a high window and a street. Through her eyes I saw the plague of those two men advancing. But they were not coming for me or for her. I knew it because of the absence of an approaching death in the reflection that Oriana returned to me from the glass of the window. They were coming for the hands of someone whom Oriana had comforted, the hands of someone, a man or a woman, who had taken care of her.

  And now that person could no longer help her and Oriana did not know how to save herself. So she had called on me. I forced her to look at those men rolling toward us like a sickening tide.

  “Run,” I told her legs, but they would not immediately obey me. The two of us watched, with eyes that were almost crippled, the avalanche of those men. “Run,” I repeated, with the fierceness one must summon to shout at morons who would let themselves burn to death in the middle of a house in flames. “And tell everybody that they are looking for you. Don’t forget.”

  I have not heard from her since. I must suppose that she fled. I must suppose that she listened to me. I suppose it is because those men have not invaded Oriana’s body, have not found me. Yet.

  It is my only hope. That she will not forget. In the few moments of liberty that she left me, I would demand that she repeat this to her fleeting guardians. Though they might think her mad. But they would not. Her terror could not evoke doubts or frivolous replies. They were going to believe her. It is possible, then, that someone else knows we are in danger.

  But would that be a person in whom I could put my trust?

  I go to the outskirts of my kingdom and I call from there. Like a wolf that wants to make the sky give birth to the dead moon with its screams. But who will hear me? And if they hear me, who will answer? Who will gather my words as I gathered those who were dying without a moon for their hands in the night?

  Even if no one answers, I do not repent.

  I did what I had to do. As soon as I was born I knew things that others take a lifetime to learn, that some never know at all. In front of my eyes a trainload of passengers was derailing. In front of my eyes the passengers were bleeding to death. And if I had to soil my immaculately washed sheets, if I had once again to clean that blood with the sheets of my recent birth, I would do it all over again. It is nothing to be proud of. That’s the way my life turned out. When a bird falls from a tree, you must return it to its nest. Some do not see the bird, they do not see the tree.

  I do not blame them. If they do not answer. If they do not come.

  In this kingdom there are no faces, not even my own. Here even the birds that fall from their nests exist only in the memories that were lived by others. People do not walk, traffic signals are not put up, parks are unnecessary. There are only houses and musings and pathways which lead from house to house, and in each house a family of memories sleeps, waiting for me to come visit them. And soon the lights will start to go out, one after the other, like a city that has spent its energy. Going out as the sky went out that night in my dream. And then Oriana’s door will open. It will open, not so that I may leave but so that those men may finally enter my last home.

  I want you to know it, ladies of my dreams. Though you cannot hear me, though you do not dare open your kingdoms to my voice. I want you to know that the one who is dying now is me. I want you to ask yourselves if I do not have the right to a miracle. If I cannot be rescued, just once, just once, just one single time, the way it came to pass in the fairy tales my father told me.

  I want you to ask yourselves.

  While in some corner of this city where I cannot walk, my mother and all the mothers of the universe are dying without anybody to listen to their song.

  THIRD

  I am sure you will forgive me, my friend, if I answer you with a slight tinge of familiarity in my voice. I do have my reasons: it could almost be stated that we are already partners. You do not like the idea? Please. I did not interrupt you until you had finished. And you were not brief.

  So, with all due respect, let me inform you that it is my considered opinion that you underestimate us both. You do not demand all that I can give; and you proffer far less than you yourself can deliver. What else am I to deduce? Being the privileged proprietor of that special face, what do you submit as your part of the deal? A miserable batch of photographs. When I have within my reach all those live bodies, you offer these miserable photographs. And knowing the power I have to grant your most extravagant and outrageous desires, what do you ask of me? To travel abroad. Not a good way of doing business, my dear fellow. Not when both sides end up losing.

  You decidedly need someone to look after your interests.

  I do not blame you for your misgivings. Like you, during all these years I could not conceive that a partner might be an equal. A partner would inevitably sell you to the highest bidder, as your Pareja did when the opportunity arose. Even at the period I would like to talk to you about, even then, when I was a young doctor, just out of medical school, squandering my time as an intern in that mediocre hospital for insignificant people, the certainty I had already formed of my own worth would not allow me to entertain even the notion of an associate. A brilliant career beckoned to me from the future. Someone with your avid eyes would have understood it right away: I was going to be the most eminent plastic surgeon of all time. Yes. Of all time. You do not have the slightest drop of ambition in your veins. You cannot understand anybody’s longing to shine. What I yearned for was to defeat even rivals who would appear after my death.

  On that afternoon, therefore, when a child was brought to me, a baby who had just been born, it mattered that I knew who I would someday be. The baby seemed ordinary, one might almost venture that it was immeasurably ordinary and yet the nurse who shoved it onto my weighing scales assured me that there was something strange about it, perhaps in its face. She was, she informed me, an extremely responsible employee, but in regard to this little child, she would forget the most elementary tasks. She was not giving him his bottle on time, she wasn’t bathing him on schedule, she wasn’t taking his temperature.

  Oh, no, you don’t. Not one interruption. No. Not a word. I let you speak as long as you wanted. It is my turn now.

  True, it has been my turn all these years. My turn began at that moment, so many decades ago when that nurse offered up that child into these hands, which you are watching with such intensity. But that’s my privilege.

  I did not, on that occasion, intend to waste more than five minutes on the case. Why should I attend to that child’s problems? Or worry about the nurse’s fatigued, overwrought brain? But just in case, I sent her out into the corridor. I might have been inexperienced, but I had already warned myself that it is indispensable to be alone with any patient: our consulting rooms are like temples. Our privacy is what protects us.

  So that day, fortunately, there was no one to witness how I examined the boy. His skin, particularly the skin on his face, turned out to be special. What need is there to describe it? You know better than any other human being both its defects and its virtues. I will not lie to you: I was very excited. Never, in the most obscure bibliography or the most meticulous notes, had I ever read of anything quite like this. A chameleon, after all, a butterfly altering its colors, a rabbit shedding its fur according to the seasons, all are creatures programmed for a limited, cyclical register of environments and habitations. But that a human being would be able to fuse with his ever-changing backgrounds, could mix in to the point of invisibility …

  Even at that moment I was aware that the commercial possibilities were, for all practical purposes, infin
ite. For leisure, for love, for work, for journalism, for military uses: unlimited. Do not interrupt. I know what you are about to say: of course nobody in their right mind would wish to remain in that condition permanently. I had chosen my specialization precisely because I knew that people kill, lie, betray, accumulate millions, decide whom they will marry and who will be their friends, with the sole objective of achieving prominence, of being seen. Show me a beggar who does not dream of becoming an emperor.

  Who would want to admit, as you already have, in fact, that one is dead before having had the chance to live? But on a transitory basis, my good man—that is altogether another story. For a criminal or a policeman, for a spy or someone who fears spies, for a husband who cheats on his wife or who wants to see with his own eyes if she is faithful to him. I had, as yet, not one client; nevertheless, I knew what they would give to be able to saunter unseen among their employees, their subjects, their voters, their pupils, their rivals. I could already picture myself. Having altered their faces into loveliness and instant media recognition, I would invest them with an additional momentary invisibility, so that they could find out whom to trust and against whom to act, so that they could have private vacations where nobody could identify them, so that they could wield more power than they had ever conceived of.

  But my own dreams of fortune and fame did not last long. A few seconds, to be exact. The chemical substance (or if you want to call it magical, I don’t mind) within that skin would be useless to me if I told the hospital about it. Just as I had automatically chosen to discard that silly nurse, just as it had never crossed my mind to let her share one cent of the profits, that is just how my superiors would exclude me from the deal. I was as new to that profession as that little boy was new to the world. Other surgeons would operate on him, others would get their pictures in the papers and on the evening news. I would get—if I was lucky, that is—a footnote, some trivial reference in a medical encyclopedia. Unless …

  That is right. Unless I kept the secret of that skin till more propitious days. Unless I simply let the wrapping paper with which that child had come to this earth, unless I let it grow with all the dark liberty it could muster, and I were able to appropriate it much later, when I would have the resources to insure its adequate exploitation. It did not occur to me and you can see that I was not amiss—that someone half visible would have any trouble surviving.

  I proceeded to tell the nurse, therefore, that the child could not be in a healthier condition, and that she was the one in need of medical attention, preferably of the psychiatric variety, because she seemed on the verge of a surmenage. As for me, I was nobly ready to overlook her repeated failure to care well for the infant. If she talked about the matter with anyone else, however, I would be obliged to bring charges against her. So this consultation was not even noted in your files or in mine. That is why you did not discover it when you began to research your past.

  Which does not mean, my friend, that I let you go your merry way without following your trail. Although you were not to produce dividends until twenty years later, you were somewhat of an investment, were you not, a future factory? I can remember that at a certain moment one of my more subtle interventions even became necessary. The first time they took you back to the hospital for a harried checkup, I took care to alter the results of the laboratory tests—making sure that nobody investigated what ailed you. I am not attributing to myself credit that in all fairness belongs mainly to you. But neither do I deny that, with all discretion, whenever it became indispensable, I spent my scant revenue to close the door that might have led you into the public light. And, in effect, here you are, like a tiger ready to be embalmed.

  At first I would visit you regularly, with a mixture of gratification and anguish similar to that with which people open the stockmarket pages in the paper, sure that no matter how long it might take, a day would come when your hide, like that tiger’s, would again be available and, this time, profitable. But later, my visits became less frequent. On my own, without having to skin you for a profit, I was getting on splendidly in my profession. I may have been overly confident. I was inspired by the vision of a world where the people who appear in the news, the prominent people, the people that matter, yes, indeed, that they should all be as shining and bubbly as the unbelievably enticing angels who each day provoke us in the soft-drink ads.

  As a child, I had always hated ugly people, with their defective eyes, their tortured nostrils, their repugnant pelt. It was an unfair imposition, especially if they happened to be the sort of person who had acquired some degree of notoriety. Repulsive insects like them, I told myself, should conceal themselves, or at least should make the effort to transfigure their visage. I would be, I swore, the instrument for that transfiguration. I would be the provider of embellishment and grace for the pre-eminent men and women of our time. Quite a responsibility, wouldn’t you say?

  This crusade for a society in which power would always be exercised with the accountability of beauty did not make me forget you totally, but I will be the first to admit that you began to grow distant, perhaps pale, setting behind the horizon of my priorities. It had always been irksome to follow your wake, but now, as I concentrated on matters that seemed more immediately advantageous, to locate you was becoming more difficult and impractical. In some page of my inner calendar, I knew that your high school graduation was drawing near and that it would be the key date to present myself to you, to propose a covenant. But when you graduated, I was in the middle of the most promising transaction of my whole career. You boast of the fact that you care not a bit about politics, so I will not tire you. Nor would confidentiality allow it. But there are certain things you might as well know—it will affect the way in which you consider the counteroffer that I soon shall put before you. So you can realize that I do have the means to defend you and, if you insist, your transient mate as well.

  Some time after I left the hospital, a rather grayish sort of client came to see me. Quite a common person—but with one idea that I do not hesitate to qualify as an act of sheer genius. You are not interested in names or you forget them, so I do not intend to fill your head with insignificant syllables. It is enough to say that the man knew only one thing well in the world: he knew the face that he wanted to have manufactured for himself. He had invested all his money in polls. But not in order to guess people’s tastes, their opinions, their political preferences. The only thing that mattered, he said, the only thing he needed in order to be successful, was the exact face that people at a certain moment in history were expecting. And at that moment he had discovered the popular demand for a curious blend of juvenile features with a serene and mature gaze. That is what everybody longed for at the time. I rearranged his grandfatherly sunken cheeks, I made his eyes so sweet a blue that they would seem incapable of swatting a fly, I grafted determination and innocence onto his bland jaw. He specified what he wanted, but I made the sauce. And his success was spectacular.

  It was auspicious that I had already elaborated the revolutionary method whereby we can curtail the time it takes to alter a face. What my ads say—that we can change everything in somebody’s physiognomy in less than half an hour—happens to be absolutely true. But what started out as a strategy for the industrialization of gorgeousness ended up by allowing me, in the case of this client, to compose incessantly, without interfering with losses of time, the everyday adjustments that he required. An early fifteen minutes with me and he was remodeled for the day. An austere wrinkle added over here, a mischievous radiance over there, and the man he saw in the mirror was exactly the one that the opinion polls suggested would be popular. What was he? A senator, a president, a lieutenant colonel, a TV anchorman, the manager of the largest corporation? That should not concern us here. Thanks to the skill of his opinion polls and of my hands, we had discovered a way to keep him in his post forever.

  Or at least that is what we believed. But one day my client, venerable as a statesman, exuberant as an adolesce
nt, came to see me, rather perturbed. For some time now his secret polls stubbornly insisted on the weariness of his multiple admirers or fans. They wanted a new face. And now a man had appeared who was threatening him. You are not interested in these details, are you? Enough to say it was someone who was going to strip him of his most valuable asset, his popularity. It was not the first time. My client had already, by then, eliminated several rivals. That, however, was no longer sufficient. Physical elimination, I mean. The problem had to be confronted on a more permanent basis. And his solution was drastic and simple: it had become essential to steal the face of the person who was preparing to replace him. In effect. Transfer it to my client. You will agree with me that to abduct a face is considerably less arduous than people imagine. Nobody realizes what has happened. Fascinated by the luxuriant surface, the differences that do not transcend, the ups and downs of presumed distinctions, the so-called citizens or consumers or TV viewers gulp down the same old medicine over and over in splendid new bottles. How many are there like you, who can perceive the old face repeating the old tics and tricks under the face that has recently been renovated?

  At some point, however, more or less at the time when you were supposed to graduate, I was asked to a secret meeting at my client’s office. He had died. A sudden death. His closest associates were shocked. An extremely dangerous vacuum of power was opening—in the enterprise, in the country, in the army, in the party, in the TV network? You do not care to go into these details, do you? It’s not your cup of tea? What does matter for the understanding of our affairs is that they demanded a new transplant.