Confessions of a Mask (10 page)

Summer had come and, with it, there in my armpits, the first sprouts of black thickets, not the equal of Omi's it is true, but undoubtedly there. Here then was the point of similarity with Omi that my purposes required. There is no doubt that Omi himself was involved in my sexual desire, but neither could it be denied that this desire was directed mainly toward my own armpits. Urged on by a swarming combination of circumstances —the salt breeze that made my nostrils quiver, the strong summer sun that blazed down upon me and set my shoulders and chest to smarting, the absence of human form as far as the eye could reach—for the first time in my life I indulged in my "bad habit" out in the open, there beneath the blue sky. As its object I chose my own armpits. . . .

My body was shaken with a strange grief. I was on fire with a loneliness as fiery as the sun. My swimming trunks, made of navy-blue wool, were glued unpleasantly to my stomach. I climbed down slowly off the rock, stepping into a trapped pool of water at the edge of the beach. In the water my feet looked like white, dead shells, and down through it I could plainly see the bottom, studded with shells and flickering with ripples. I knelt down in the water and surrendered myself to a wave that broke at this moment and came rushing toward me with a violent roar. It struck me in the chest, almost burying me in its crushing whitecap. . . .

When the wave receded, my corruption had been washed away. Together with that receding wave, together with the countless living organisms it contained —microbes, seeds of marine plants, fish eggs—my myriad spermatozoa had been engulfed in the foaming sea and carried away.

When autumn came and the new school-term began, Omi was not there. A notice of his expulsion had been posted on the bulletin board.

All my classmates, without exception, immediately began chattering about Omi's misdeeds, acting like a populace after the death of a tyrant who had ruled over them:

". . . He borrowed ten yen from me and then wouldn't pay it back. . . . He laughed as he robbed me of my imported fountain pen. . . . He almost strangled me. . . ."

One after another they recounted the harms he had done them, until I seemed to be the only one who had never experienced his wickedness. I was mad with jealousy. My despair, however, was slightly assuaged by the fact that no one knew definitely why he had been expelled. Even those clever students who are always in the know at every school could not suggest a reason credible enough to find general acceptance. When we asked the teachers they of course would simply smile and say it was because of "something bad."

Only I, it appeared, had a secret conviction as to the nature of his "evil." I was sure that he had been participating in some vast conspiracy, which even he had not yet fully understood. The compulsion toward evil that some demon incited in him gave his life its meaning and constituted his destiny. At least so it seemed to me. . . .

Upon further thought, however, his "evil" came to have a different meaning for me. I decided that the huge conspiracy into which the demon had driven him, with its intricately organized secret society and its minutely planned underground machinations, was surely all for the sake of some forbidden god. Omi had served that god, had attempted to convert others to his faith, had been betrayed, and then had been executed in secret. One evening at dusk he had been stripped naked and taken to the grove on the hill. There he had been bound to a tree, both hands tied high over his head. The first arrow had pierced the side of his chest; the second, his armpit.

The more I remembered the picture he had made that day, grasping the exercise-bar in preparation for the pull-up, the more I became convinced of his close affinity with St. Sebastian.

During my fourth year at middle school I developed anemia. I became even more pallid than usual, so much so that my hands were the color of dead grass. Whenever I climbed a steep staircase I had to squat down and rest at the top. I would feel as though a windspout of white fog had whirled down onto the back of my head, digging a hole there and making me all but faint away.

My family took me to the doctor, who diagnosed my trouble as anemia. He was an agreeable man and a friend of the family's. When they began asking him for details about my trouble, he said :

"Well, let's see what the answer book has to say about anemia."

The examination was over, and I was at the doctor's elbow, where I could peep into the book from which he began reading aloud. The family was seated facing him and could not see the pages of the book.

". . . So then, next there's the etiology—the causes of the disease. Hookworms—these are a frequent cause. This is probably the boy's case. We'll have to have a stool examination. Next there's chlorosis. But it's rare, and anyway it's a woman's disease—"

At this point the book gave a further cause for anemia, but the doctor did not read it aloud. Instead, he skipped over it, mumbling the rest of the passage in his throat as he closed the book. But I had seen the phrase that he had omitted. It was "self-pollution."

I could feel my heart pounding with shame. The doctor had discovered my secret.

But what no one could ever have discovered was the singular reciprocal relationship between my lack of blood and my blood lust itself.

My inherent deficiency of blood had first implanted in me the impulse to dream of bloodshed. And in its turn that impulse had caused me to lose more and more of the stuff of blood from my body, thereby further increasing my lust for blood. This enfeebling life of dreaming sharpened and exercised my imagination. Although I was not yet acquainted with the works of De Sade, the description of the Colosseum in
Quo Vadis
had made a deep impression on me, and by myself I had dreamed up the idea of a murder theater.

There, in my murder theater, young Roman gladiators offered up their lives for my amusement; and all the deaths that took place there not only had to overflow with blood but also had to be performed with all due ceremony. I delighted in all forms of capital punishment and all implements of execution. But I would allow no torture devices nor gallows, as they would not have provided a spectacle of outpouring blood. Nor did I like explosive weapons, such as pistols or guns. So far as possible I chose primitive and savage weapons—arrows, daggers, spears. And in order to prolong the agony, it was the belly that must be aimed at. The sacrificial victim must send up long-drawn-out, mournful, pathetic cries, making the hearer feel the unutterable loneliness of existence. Thereupon my joy of life, blazing up from some secret place deep within me, would finally give its own shout of exultation, answering the victim cry for cry. Was this not exactly similar to the joy ancient man found in the hunt?

The weapon of my imagination slaughtered many a Grecian soldier, many white slaves of Arabia, princes of savage tribes, hotel elevator-boys, waiters, young toughs, army officers, circus roustabouts. . . . I was one of those savage marauders who, not knowing how to express their love, mistakenly kill the persons they love. I would kiss the lips of those who had fallen to the ground and were still moving spasmodically.

From some allusion or other I had conceived an instrument of execution contrived in such a way that a thick board studded with scores of upright daggers, arranged in the shape of a human figure, would come sliding down a rail upon a cross of execution fixed to the other side of the rail. There was an execution factory where mechanical drills for piercing the human body were always running, where the blood juice was sweetened, canned, and put on the market. Within the head of this middle-school student innumerable victims were bound with their hands behind them and escorted to the Colosseum.

The impulse gradually grew stronger within me, arriving one day at a daydream that was probably one of the basest of which man is capable. As with my other daydreams, here again the victim was one of my own classmates, a skilled swimmer, with a notably good physique.

It was in a cellar. A clandestine banquet was being held. Elegant candlesticks gleamed above a pure-white tablecloth; there was an array of silver cutlery flanking each plate. There were even the usual bouquets of carnations. But it was curious that the blank space in the center of the table should be so excessively large. Surely it would be an extremely large platter which was to be brought in and placed there.

"Not yet?" one of the guests asked me. His face was in the shadow and could not be seen. His solemn voice sounded like that of an aged man.

Now that I think of it, shadows hid the faces of all the diners. Only their white hands extended into the light, where they toyed with silver-shining knives and forks. An endless murmuring hung in the air, sounding like a group of people talking together in low voices, or talking to themselves. It was a funereal feast; the only sound that could be plainly heard was the occasional creaking or grating of a chair.

"It ought to be ready soon," I answered.

Again the gloomy silence fell. I could clearly sense that everyone was displeased with my answer.

"Shall I go and see?"

I got up and opened the door into the kitchen. In one corner of the kitchen there was a stone staircase leading up to street-level.

"Not yet?" I asked the cook.

"What? Oh, in just a minute." The cook answered without looking up from his work, as though he too were out of humor. He was chopping up some sort of salad greens. On the kitchen table there was nothing but a thick plank about three feet wide and almost twelve feet long.

A sound of laughter came down the stone stairwell. I looked up and saw a second cook come down the stairs leading this young muscular classmate of mine by the arm. The boy was wearing slacks and a dark-blue polo shirt that left his chest bare.

"Ah, it's B, isn't it?" I said to him offhand.

When he reached the bottom of the stairs he stood nonchalantly, not taking his hands from his pockets. Turning to me, he began to laugh jokingly. Just at that moment one of the cooks sprang upon him from the rear and got a strangle hold around his neck.

The boy struggled violently.As I watched his piteous struggles, I told myself : "It's a judo hold—yes, that's it, it's some judo hold, but what's the name of it? That's right, strangle him again he couldn't be really dead yet—he's just fainted—"

Suddenly the boy's head hung limp within the crook of the cook's massive arm. Then the cook picked the boy up carelessly in his arms and dropped him on the kitchen table. The other cook went to the table and began working over the boy with business-like hands; he stripped off the boy's polo shirt, removed his wrist watch, took off his trousers, and had him stark naked in an instant.

The naked youth lay where he had fallen, face up on the table, his lips slightly parted. I gave those lips a lingering kiss.

"How shall it be—face up or face down?" the cook asked me.

"Face up, I suppose," I answered, thinking to myself that in that position the boy's chest would be visible, looking like an amber-colored shield.

The other cook took a large foreign-style platter down from a rack and brought it to the table. It was exactly the size for holding a human body and was curiously made, with five small holes cut through the rim on either side.

"Heave ho!" the two cooks said in unison, lifting the unconscious boy and laying him face-up on the platter. Then, whistling merrily, they passed a cord through the holes on both sides of the dish, lashing the boy's body down securely. Their nimble hands moved expertly at the task. They arranged some large salad leaves prettily around the naked body and placed an unusually large steel carving knife and fork on the platter.

"Heave ho!" they said again, lifting the platter onto their shoulders. I opened the door into the dining-room for them.

We were greeted by a welcoming silence. The platter was put down, filling that blank space on the table, which had been glittering blankly in the light. Returning to my seat, I lifted the large knife and fork from the platter and said:

"Where shall I begin?"

There was no answer. One could sense rather than see many faces craning forward toward the platter.

"This is probably a good spot to begin on." I thrust the fork upright into the heart. A fountain of blood struck me full in the face. Holding the knife in my right hand, I began carving the flesh of the breast, gently, thinly at first. . . .

Even after my anemia was cured, my bad habit only grew the worse. The youngest of my teachers was the geometry instructor. I never tired of looking at his face during class. He had a complexion that had been burned by the seaside sun, a sonorous voice like a fisherman's. I had heard that he had formerly been a swimming coach.One winter day in geometry class I was copying into my notebook from the blackboard, keeping one hand in my pants pocket. Presently my eyes strayed unconsciously from my work and began following the instructor. He was getting on and off the platform while, in his youthful voice, he repeated the explanation of a difficult problem.

Pangs of sex had already been intruding upon my everyday life. Now, before my eyes, the young instructor gradually changed into a vision of a statue of the nude Hercules. He had been cleaning the blackboard, holding an eraser in his left hand and chalk in the other; then, still erasing, he stretched out his right hand and began writing an equation on the board. As he did so the wrinkles that gathered in the material at the back of his coat were, to my bemused eyes, the muscle-furrows of "Hercules Drawing the Bow." And at last I had committed my bad habit there in the midst of schoolwork. . . .