Mascara (11 page)

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 your 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.

So you won’t misconstrue the fact that I asked for that aid, so you’ll believe that on that Sunday when I left my office, I hadn’t
even thought of it, so you’ll know that what was burning up my eyes was that dossier of Oriana’s and nothing else. It was not fear that drove me to turn to the one person who was not on the list that Tristan Pareja had slipped into your hands, the one person you couldn’t use against me, the last secret contact that I never mentioned to anybody: former Inspector Federico Jarvik. That’s not what he’s called, of course—but most of the names that I mention here are not the real ones, except for the name you inherited from the fornicators who produced you, Mavarello, and I keep confusing that one.

Why should I make your task easy? Haven’t you declared in interviews that names are no more than “a muddled and precarious mixture of syllables,” whereas the face is eternal? Haven’t you said that? Haven’t you said that even the face of someone who was born with the most undistinguished features in the world, that even that face you could transform into something wonderful? If what you say is true, then you should be able, as I am, to identify every person immediately without needing to know what sad, fragile sounds their parents gave to them—like branding cattle, Doctor—at birth.

Because it was that talent which brought to me one day precisely the stone-faced man with the impenetrable eyes whom I have baptized with the name of Federico Jarvik. He didn’t come to talk to you, Doctor. He came to talk to me.

He strode directly into the small office I had next to Pompeyo Garssos’s vast chambers and sat down in front of me. He remained there for a couple of seconds without saying a word, looking at me parsimoniously, as if he were trying to fix me in his memory and it were costing him no end of trouble.

“Jarvik,” he stated finally. “Bureau of Investigations.” And then, almost at once, “Why should I show you my I.D.? You have ways of knowing that I’m telling the truth. I’ll meet you at the corner coffee shop. I don’t want to talk here.”

I wondered whether to accept his invitation. Not because I was afraid that the police might be onto my photographic adventures, although I’ll admit to the faintest hint of disquiet about that. All human beings feel revulsion when they watch their enemies eating, isn’t that so, Doctor? But I don’t know one who had to look
on, as I did, while members of his family devoured the food in front of his hungry eyes. Naturally I could steal from one plate or another and concoct a supper of odds and ends. It’s only that those mouths hypnotized me: it was as if they were chewing me, transferring energy from my body so they could grow more and eat more each day. At times hatred stuns you, Doctor. I would awaken from my daze and all the plates would be empty already, and my parents and brothers and sisters would be getting up from the table and there was not a scrap left to purloin. Their faces like those dirty plates. The tongues licking the lips as sweepers wash from a city street the hairs of a dog which has just been squashed by a drunken truck. Have you never seen the way in which people salivate before a meal, have you never forced yourself to imagine the descent into the secret cesspools of the body, where neither you nor anyone else has ever gone? How can you, after that, break bread in somebody’s company? For me it was much better not to sit down at the table. Not that one. Not any other one. Ever again. From the moment I decided to pick among the dregs of their food, pass the mire that they left behind through the sieve of my eyes, I never again sat down at my enemies’ table. I can assure you they did not miss me.

Fortunately the impassive and prim lips of the inspector were sipping only a cup of coffee. When I approached the table, without taking a seat, he hesitated, as if he thought I might be the waiter bringing him a glass of water. But I realized that he had, after all, managed to recognize me.

“It’s taken me years to find you,” he said, after I rejected his offer of refreshment. “I am now able to comprehend why it was so complicated.”

I answered that I did not know what he was referring to and that if he wished to speak to the director, today was not the best day to—

“I came to meet you,” he interrupted. “You’re responsible for all the cases that have been solved, the ones that take care of the false I.D.s, aren’t you? And don’t make me lose valuable time telling me it’s Pompeyo, because my observations and statistics prove that he never fingered a false license before you arrived, and that if you leave, he’ll never finger another one.”

A more vulnerable person would have felt alarmed at what seemed like the end of anonymity. But it would not be necessary to change employment, alter my name again, surreptitiously build another network. My gaze had already infiltrated the defenses that surrounded that young inspector’s face. His implacability was no more than a façade. My zoom could, any evening, discover the buttons that had to be undone in order to domesticate him.

It turned out, however, that the definitive photo, which I snapped of him a couple of weeks later, was never required. The inspector treated me with no hostility. As if he respected me. He had no intention, he said, of disturbing the privacy that I quite evidently cherished to such a degree. If I did not wish to use my rather uncommon skills to their fullest in some superior position, he was not one to dispute my choice. And if there was anything that he could do in order to facilitate the sort of inquiries in which, or so it seemed, I was immersed … But he had, if I did not mind, some favors to ask me. It was confidential work, so much so that he preferred not to make the request through official channels. He did not think that the Director of the Archives should be involved. Moreover, I should tell no one that I had been contacted. That was why, from now on, we would always meet outside the office: at this coffee shop, at his house, or at mine if I authorized such an invasion of my own space.

The services the inspector demanded of me were of two sorts. The first was not so different from what I had already been doing: he would give me certain photos, I would discover their real identity in my files. The second service posed a more challenging task: if he were to describe a face to me, rich in detail, would I be able to pinpoint, among the millions of photos in the archives, the corresponding person?

And if I did not cooperate?

“You’ll cooperate,” Jarvik said. “It’s easier than running.”

He was right. Now that he had hunted me down, he wouldn’t leave me alone—not a detective as tenacious as he had proved to be. He had figured out my skill for remembering faces, though he did not seem to suspect what I did with my camera. If I just disappeared and resurfaced at another, similar post, he would trace me to my new hideaway after a couple of years, maybe months,
and then he wouldn’t be as easygoing with me as he now was. It was better to have him as an ally. I didn’t care, after all, what he did with the faces and data I’d bestow upon him. I even said to myself—so you can see, Doctor, that something in the desultory ice of my eyes already anticipated Pareja’s betrayal—that it might be good to establish some independent contact to whom I could turn in case my network broke down. It was only years later that I realized that it was also to Jarvik’s advantage to keep our collaboration in the shadows. When the government changed and they kicked him out of the bureau or he resigned or something of the sort—I have never been interested in politics, Doctor—he let me know that he intended to continue as a private investigator and that he saw no reason to end a relationship that had been so fruitful. If I wanted to continue assisting him, he still had excellent contacts inside the police and everywhere else, and he hoped that someday he would find a way of compensating me for my services.

I had never needed any such compensation. Up until now. At last, after years of granting him favors, it was my turn to ask him for one. Unless you, Doctor, or Pareja or another of your cronies had gotten in touch with him before I had.