Confessions of a Mask (9 page)

Life-force—it was the sheer extravagant abundance of life-force that overpowered the boys. They were overwhelmed by the feeling he gave of having too much life, by the feeling of purposeless violence that can be explained only as life existing for its own sake, by his type of ill-humored, unconcerned exuberance. Without his being aware of it, some force had stolen into Omi's flesh and was scheming to take possession of him, to crash through him, to spill out of him, to outshine him. In this respect the power resembled a malady. Infected with this violent power, his flesh had been put on this earth for no other reason than to become an insane human-sacrifice, one without any fear of infection. Persons who live in terror of infection cannot but regard such flesh as a bitter reproach. . . . The boys staggered back, away from him.

As for me, I felt the same as the other boys—with important differences. In my case—it was enough to make me blush with shame—I had had an erection, from the first moment in which I had glimpsed that abundance of his. I was wearing light-weight spring trousers and was afraid the other boys might notice what had happened to me. And, even leaving aside this fear, there was yet another emotion in my heart, which was certainly not unalloyed rapture. Here I was, looking upon the naked body I had so longed to see, and the shock of seeing it had unexpectedly unleashed an emotion within me that was the opposite of joy.

It was jealousy. . . .

Omi dropped to the ground with the air of a person who had accomplished some noble deed. Hearing the thud of his fall, I closed my eyes and shook my head. Then I told myself that I was no longer in love with Omi.

It was jealousy. It was jealousy fierce enough to make me voluntarily forswear my love of Omi.

Probably the need I began to feel about this time for a Spartan course in self-discipline was involved in this situation. (The fact that I am writing this book is already one example of my continued efforts in that direction.) Due to my sickliness and the doting care which I had received ever since I was a baby, I had always been too timid even to look people directly in the eye. But now I became obsessed with a single motto —"Be Strong!"

To that end I hit upon an exercise that consisted of scowling fixedly into the face of this or that passenger on the streetcars in which I went back and forth to school. Most of the passengers, whom I chose indiscriminately, showed no particular signs of fear upon being scowled at by a pale, weak boy, but simply looked the other way as though annoyed; only rarely would one of them scowl back. When they looked away I counted it a triumph. In this way I gradually trained myself to look people in the eye. . . .

Having once decided that I had renounced love, I dismissed all further thought of it from my mind. This was a hasty conclusion, lacking in perception. I was failing to take into account one of the clearest evidences there is of sexual love—the phenomenon of erection. Over a truly long period of time I had my erections, and also indulged in that "bad habit" which incited them whenever I was alone, without ever becoming aware of the significance of my actions. Although already in possession of the usual information concerning sex, I was not yet troubled with the sense of being different.

I do not mean to say that I viewed those desires of mine that deviated from accepted standards as normal and orthodox; nor do I mean that I labored under the mistaken impression that my friends possessed the same desires. Surprisingly enough, I was so engrossed in tales of romance that I devoted all my elegant dreams to thoughts of love between man and maid, and to marriage, exactly as though I were a young girl who knew nothing of the world. I tossed my love for Omi onto the rubbish heap of neglected riddles, never once searching deeply for its meaning. Now when I write the word love, when I write affection, my meaning is totally different from my understanding of the words at that time. I never even dreamed that such desires as I had felt toward Omi might have a significant connection with the realities of my "life."

And yet some instinct within me demanded that I seek solitude, that I remain apart as something different. This compulsion was manifested as a mysterious and strange malaise. I have already described how during my childhood I was weighed down by a sense of uneasiness at the thought of becoming an adult, and my feeling of growing up continued to be accompanied by a strange, piercing unrest.

During my growing years a deep tuck was sewn into every pair of new trousers so that they could be lengthened each year, and just as in any other family, my steadily increasing height was recorded by successive pencil marks on one of the pillars of the house. The little ceremony of these periodic measurings always took place in the sitting room under the eyes of all the family, and each time they teased me and found a simpleminded pleasure in the fact that I had grown taller. I would respond with forced smiles.

Actually, the thought that I might reach the height of an adult filled me with a foreboding of some fearful danger. On the one hand, my indefinable feeling of unrest increased my capacity for dreams divorced from all reality and, on the other, drove me toward the "bad habit" that caused me to take refuge in those dreams. The restlessness was my excuse. . . .

"You'll surely die before you're twenty," a friend once said to me jokingly, referring to my weak constitution.

"What an awful thing to say!" I replied, screwing my face up into a bitter smile. But actually his prediction had a strangely sweet and romantic attraction for me.

"Want to make a bet on it?" he went on.

"But if you bet I'll die, there'd be nothing for me to do but bet I'll live."

"That's right, isn't it? It's a shame, isn't it?" my friend said, speaking with all the ruthlessness of youth. "You'd certainly lose, wouldn't you?"

It was true—not only of me, but of all the students my age—that nothing approaching Omi's maturity could yet be discerned in our armpits. Instead there was only the faintest promise of buds that might yet burgeon. For this reason I had never before paid any particular attention to that part of my body. It was undoubtedly the sight of the hair under Omi's arms that day which made the armpit a fetish for me.

It got so that whenever I took a bath I would stand before the mirror a long time, staring at the mirror's ungracious reflection of my naked body. It was another case of the ugly duckling who believed he would become a swan, except that this time that heroic fairy tale was to have an exactly reverse outcome. Even though my scrawny shoulders and narrow chest had not the slightest resemblance to Omi's, I looked at them closely in the mirror and forcibly found reasons for believing I would someday have a chest like Omi's, shoulders like Omi's. But in spite of this, a thin ice of uneasiness formed here and there over the surface of my heart. It was more than uneasiness: it was a sort of masochistic conviction, a conviction as firm as though founded on divine revelation, a conviction that made me tell myself: "Never in this world can you resemble Omi."

In the woodblock prints of the Genroku period one often finds the features of a pair of lovers to be surprisingly similar, with little to distinguish the man from the woman. The universal ideal of beauty in Greek sculpture likewise approaches a close resemblance between the male and female. Might this not be one of the secrets of love? Might it not be that through the innermost recesses of love there courses an unattainable longing in which both the man and the woman desire to become the exact image of the other? Might not this longing drive them on, leading at last to a tragic reaction in which they seek to attain the impossible by going to the opposite extreme? In short, since their mutual love cannot achieve a perfection of mutual identity, is there not a mental process whereby each of them tries instead to emphasize their points of dissimilarity—the man his manliness and the woman her womanliness—. and uses this very revolt as a form of coquetry toward the other? Or if they do achieve a similarity, it unfortunately lasts for only a fleeting moment of illusion. Because, as the girl becomes more bold and the boy more shy, there comes an instant at which they pass each other going in opposite directions, overshooting their mark and passing on beyond to some point where the mark no longer exists.

Viewed in this light, my jealousy—jealousy fierce enough to make me tell myself I had renounced my love—was all the more love. I had ended by loving those "things like Omi's" that, by slow degrees, diffidently, were budding in my own armpits, growing, becoming darker and darker. . ..

Summer vacation arrived. Although I had looked forward to it impatiently, it proved to be one of those between-acts during which one does not know what to do with himself; although I had hungered for it, it proved to be an uneasy feast for me.

Ever since I had contracted a light case of tuberculosis in infancy, the doctor had forbidden me to expose myself to strong ultraviolet rays. When at the seacoast, I was never allowed to stay out in the direct rays of the sun more than thirty minutes at a time. Any violation of this rule always brought its own punishment in a swift attack of fever. I was not even allowed to take part in swimming practice at school. Consequently I had never learned to swim. Later, this inability to swim gained new significance in connection with the persistent fascination the sea came to have for me, with those occasions on which it exercised such turbulent power over me.

At the time of which I speak, however, I had not yet encountered this overpowering temptation of the sea. And yet, wanting somehow to while away the boredom of a season which was completely distasteful to me, a season moreover which awakened inexplicable longings within me, I spent that summer at the beach with my mother and brother and sister. . . .

Suddenly I realized that I had been left alone on the rock.

I had walked along the beach toward this rock with my brother and sister a short time before, looking for the tiny fish that flashed in the rivulets between the rocks. Our catch had not been as good as we had foreseen, and my small sister and brother had become bored. A maid had come to call us to the beach umbrella where my mother was sitting. I had refused crossly to turn back, and the maid had taken my brother and sister back with her, leaving me alone.

The sun of the summer afternoon was beating down incessantly upon the surface of the sea, and the entire bay was a single, stupendous expanse of glare. On the horizon some summer clouds were standing mutely still, half-immersing their magnificent, mournful, prophet-like forms in the sea. The muscles of the clouds were pale as alabaster.

A few sailboats and skiffs and several fishing boats had put out from the sandy beaches and were now moving about lazily upon the open sea. Except for the tiny figures in the boats, not a human form was to be seen. A subtle hush was over everything. As though a coquette had come telling her little secrets, a light breeze blew in from the sea, bringing to my ears a tiny sound like the invisible wing-beats of some lighthearted insects. The beach near me was made up almost altogether of low, docile rocks that tilted toward the sea. There were only two or three such jutting crags as this on which I was sitting.

From the offing the waves began and came sliding in over the surface of the sea in the form of restless green swells. Groups of low rocks extended out into the sea, where their resistance to the waves sent splashes high into the air, like white hands begging for help. The rocks were dipping themselves in the sea's sensation of deep abundance and seemed to be dreaming of buoys broken loose from their moorings. But in a flash the swell had passed them by and come sliding toward the beach with unabated speed. As it drew near the beach something awakened and rose up within its green hood. The wave grew tall and, as far as the eye could reach, revealed the razor-keen blade of the sea's enormous ax, poised and ready to strike. Suddenly the dark-blue guillotine fell, sending up a white blood-splash. The body of the wave, seething and falling, pursued its severed head, and for a moment it reflected the pure blue of the sky, that same unearthly blue which is mirrored in the eyes of a person on the verge of death. . . . During the brief instant of the wave's attack, the groups of rocks, smooth and eroded, had concealed themselves in white froth, but now, gradually emerging from the sea, they glittered in the retreating remnants of the wave. From the top of the rock where I sat watching, I could see hermit-shells sidling crazily across the glittering rocks and crabs become motionless in the glare.

All at once my feeling of solitude became mixed with memories of Omi. It was like this: My long-felt attraction toward the loneliness that filled Omi's life—loneliness born of the fact that life had enslaved him—had first made me want to possess the same quality; and now that I was experiencing, in this feeling of emptiness before the sea's repletion, a loneliness that outwardly resembled his, I wanted to savor it completely, through his very eyes. I would enact the double role of both Omi and myself. But in order to do so I first had to discover some point of similarity with him, however slight. In that way I would be able to become a stand-in for Omi and consciously act exactly as though I were joyfully overflowing with that same loneliness which was probably only unconscious in him, attaining at last to a realization of that daydream in which the pleasure I felt at the sight of Omi became the pleasure Omi himself was feeling.

Ever since becoming obsessed with the picture of St. Sebastian, I had acquired the unconscious habit of crossing my hands over my head whenever I happened to be undressed. Mine was a frail body, without so much as a pale shadow of Sebastian's abundant beauty. But now once more I spontaneously fell into the pose. As I did so my eyes went to my armpits. And a mysterious sexual desire boiled up within me. . . .