Mascara (12 page)

But Jarvik had escaped you, Doctor. I knew it as soon as he opened the door to his apartment and he was able, with the usual strenuous effort, his eyes wrinkling up, his face frozen into its habitual mask, to identify me. And what is more, he still needed me. Not only had you not poisoned him against me, Doctor; it was obvious that he did not even know that I had lost access to my files.

“What luck,” Jarvik said. “I was going to give you a call at your office. I’ve a little piece of work for you. Come in, come in.”

I asked him if we could take a walk around the block. I could imagine the Sunday lunch about to be served in there, the inspector’s kids making a hullabaloo, his wife in her wheelchair, her relatives hovering nearby, all of them preparing to sit down at the table and devour each other. I promised him that my problem would not take up much time.

“I almost called you today,” Jarvik said, shutting the door and starting off with me. “It’s an urgent case. There are too many other people trying to solve it.”

“If I can be of assistance.” Although I had no intention of helping him. ‘Who is it this time?”

“Here’s the photo,” Jarvik said, taking an envelope from his pocket and passing it to me.

I put the envelope away without looking at it. “I’ll have an answer by Thursday,” I answered, selecting the day when I was sure to be far from this former inspector and just as far from this country.

“Don’t you want to take a look?” those scissored, mathematical, exact lips of his demanded.

I opened the envelope to cut the conversation short.

It was a photo of Oriana. Her photo at four and a half years old.

Just my bad luck. No image taken by someone else could capture her as I would have; but if the snapshot had been at least a recent one, no matter how ungraceful the photographer, I might have had some clue to understanding that adult Oriana, that perverse woman from whom my childlike Oriana had fled. It was of no use to have a pale, indistinct, ineffective photo of the very same warmblooded girl that my body had been conquering and exploring in my own bed less than two hours ago. And whom I hoped was still there. Because if Jarvik was looking for her, then it was true that she was really in danger; if he, and who knows what other men, were on the trail, it was going to be more complicated than I had presumed to cross the border with her. Not only that: how could I possibly take your photograph, Marvorelli? How to enter your most private chambers with Oriana by my side, now that I could never again leave her alone at home? Two days after having made fun of Patricia’s despair, I was reduced to her selfsame defenselessness. Or perhaps even worse: if Jarvik began to apply to me those exceptional observational powers that had made him the most famous detective in the country, if he began to suspect that I was hiding the very woman he was seeking … He was already surprised by the time I was taking with the damned photograph.

“So you’ll crack the case by Thursday?” Jarvik asked, but his thin lips exhaled sarcasm. As if they were tasting my hesitancy.

I tried to make my voice stay calm. “And this girl. What did she do?”

“I’m looking for the adult, not for the girl.”

Since it was no longer possible to get the dossier from him, as had been my original intention, I used the occasion to attempt to squeeze whatever additional information about Oriana he might have. “You haven’t got a more recent shot?” I asked.

“That’s the only one.” A slit of mistrust began to form in the former inspector’s eyes. I had never before shown any interest in any of the cases he had brought me. They must have done something, I supposed, those men, those women, if the police were after them. I never asked about them. And now, only because it was so unprecedented that he should have passed me the photograph of a child, was it possible to add yet one more comment without, or so I hoped, awakening his misgivings.

“She doesn’t seem very threatening,” I said.

“Appearances,” Jarvik answered. “If you knew what she …

“What she …”

“If you trace her, I’ll tell you the whole story. As far as I know it. And that’s a promise.” And with this, Jarvik stopped in front of his apartment building. We had walked around the block. “But maybe you’d like to tell me what’s eating you up?”

While we strolled along, I had been debating with myself how to get into your hospital, Doctor, now that I would be burdened by Oriana’s presence. It was a situation I had never had to live: the girl I loved and protected was gradually turning me into a visible man. I felt, of a sudden, as if a sign or a scar had started to grow in the absence that I call my face, something that would identify me, something that would stop me from passing through all doors as I always had. To take that photo I was going to need help and that help at this point could come only from Jarvik. There was no one else. Risky? Not if you know people’s secret faces, not if you have discovered the threads with which to pull them.

And I had Jarvik trapped. Jarvik was going to swallow the absurd story I would concoct for him because he was, in the final analysis, a sentimental bastard. I had surmised it since our first encounter in the coffee shop, and I had confirmed it later when I took the precise snapshot of his face pulverized by weakness. Discreet, that snapshot. From a distance, that snapshot. I didn’t want him realizing what I was doing. Because I had caught him in a tedious coupling with his invalid wife—and it was so clear that he did not love her
and so clear that she bored him and so clear that he remained with her out of pity. Afterward, I studied those features from close up, carefully inspecting that face which was melting in the fatigue of a sexual act that afforded him no pleasure, that face which became flabby just before his genitals became tame and flaccid themselves. Mashed potatoes, I thought, with satisfaction. In spite of the severity that his visage announced, in spite of the propaganda that his steel-like lips trumpeted, he was a softy, a tender heart, a man who cries with the soaps and jumps into fights on the side of the underdogs. In other words, on the side of the losers. Under so much supposed firmness, mushy emotionalism. Unable to hurt someone who is downcast. In order to fool him, to get him to suspend that mind of his which analyzed and penetrated everything, it would be enough to feed him some romantic nonsense.

“Inspector, I’m … well, you’ve noticed, no doubt, that I don’t speak much about myself. But the truth, Inspector, is that there is a woman who … well, I like her. I would rather, for obvious reasons, not reveal her name. I am trying to convince her that she should not undergo an operation with … do you know a surgeon called Miravelli?”

“Mavirelli?” The former inspector corrected me, letting a skim of curiosity run down his face like paint. “Has she got some sort of sickness in her face?”

“She thinks she’s … ugly, Inspector.”

In order to build a solid lie, Doctor—you know this better than I do, you who make a new deception out of each old face you operate—one must always start out with a nucleus of truth. So I allowed myself to evoke Alicia while I talked to Jarvik—Alicia and not Oriana. I knew that the passion, and the pain, that would seep into my eyes would shake him. “She’s a fool. She compares herself to the
TV
stars who sell panty hose and convertibles and tropical vacations. She wants a new face.”

“Tell her,” Jarvik erupted, “that to be beautiful all you need is the love of one person.”

Those were the words I was expecting from him. Those were the words I had once dared timidly to murmur to Alicia.

I went on. “I’ve gone to visit her every day this week,” my deceiving throat said to Jarvik, “and she won’t listen to me. But this
morning, I went to see her this morning, and the poor thing had her face all bandaged up. Already. The operation’s going to be on Tuesday and she’s already … I couldn’t stand it.”

“Go and talk to her again,” insisted Jarvik, moved as if he were speaking to somebody he had once loved. “Tell her that beauty comes from inside. Tell her that doctors do not have magical solutions.”

“That’s what I told her.” And it was true. That was what I had told Alicia. “And I must have been convincing, because she gave me one last chance.” Although Alicia had not given me that last chance. “And that is why, sir, I need your help.”

“It has never been said of me,” Jarvik separated each word as if it were a watermelon seed that had to be spat out, “that I was not ready to help someone in love.”

He was about to fall into my trap. So I sweetened the story up some more: “The problem is that she demands proof of my love.”

“Like a fairy tale!”

“Like a fairy tale, Inspector. She will consider canceling the operation. If I …”

“If you …”

“If I can take a snapshot of the doctor in the midst of one of his disgusting operations. It would have to be tomorrow. I have no problem, as you can well imagine, entering the hospital by myself. What is more difficult is getting her inside. And I insist on her accompanying me. Only up to the operating room. She can wait outside. I can take care of the rest. That’s what I need you for.”

I could read the mistrust written in Jarvik’s steady, immutable eyes. His reasoning had not been totally eclipsed: it still flashed warnings to him. And I knew that a man as methodical as he would not believe my sincerity—I who had up to that moment always been so silent, arrogant, reserved—if I did not entice him into the whirlpool of my new persona as victim, as surprising to him as it was to me. To allay his suspicions, he had to see me as essentially debased, as debased as his own wife.

It was not as easy as I had planned it years before, when I had taken that photo, when I whispered to myself that this would be the way to entangle him if some day in the future it became necessary.

Because I have never talked to anyone about my face. I don’t like to ask for pity, Doctor. To ask for pity is not that different from trying on the latest fashions to keep your lover, or going to a plastic surgeon to make new friends, not that different from what Jarvik’s wife does to him. Now I would have to do it.

Or was there any other way of somebody like me touching the soul of a man like him?

“This … it’s not exactly easy, Inspector. It will not have escaped you that I’m not what you could call, let us say, handsome, right? To get a woman, any woman, to fix her eyes upon me …” All of a sudden I stopped. It became impossible to banish Alicia’s face, to elude the words I should have entrusted to someone when Alicia went through that door leading to your consulting room, Mavirelli. Or if I could have talked to her about my face, if I could have begged her to stay with me because of my face. “Inspector! The woman I love has got to witness what I am willing to do for her. It’s not enough for me to give her the photo and then receive her thanks. She has to see me. See me. So I will be fixed forever in her memory. Or do you think that with this face …”

In my lifeless eyes he must have read an abandonment that was not entirely feigned.

His eyes softened.

He felt for me exactly the sort of compassion that I wanted him to feel.

Of course to invite someone into your intimacy, Doctor, has the disadvantage that the someone may end up accepting that invitation. That is what happened with former Inspector Jarvik. Because if I had managed to get him to heed my preposterous story, it was also true that he felt authorized to meddle in my personal affairs. It is the price you pay for demanding a favor.

“I would like to suggest something to you. I hope you don’t mind.”

There was in his voice—how to describe it so I won’t appear, myself, as a sentimental bastard, so you won’t get the wrong idea about me, Doctor—there was something almost affectionate, almost sweet. It was the first friendly advice anyone had ever offered me in my entire life. I did not answer him, but something that was not neutral in my eyes must have stimulated him, because he continued:
“If you really want to win over a little woman, there is one sort of strategy that never fails. Do you know what it might be?” And when he realized that I was not disposed to answer, that I had no notion of what he was talking about: “A smile,” Jarvik said. “Just that. Everybody remembers somebody who smiles. And I have noticed, if you don’t mind my observation, that you never smile. Or am I wrong?”

Perhaps in another life, on another planet, inside another universe, I could have been the friend of a man like that. Now it was not possible. Nor would it be possible tomorrow. If he was softly opening up the doors of an affection that I did not need, it was his problem, not mine. What I needed from him I had already gotten: a promise of his help. I kicked shut, I closed, I locked those sterile doors. “I am not diseased, Inspector,” I said to him, and if he felt it like a slap in the face, I felt it to be a farewell at the very moment when I said it. “I will smile when I have reason to smile.”

So I treated him as I have treated everybody else who has crossed my vision. Like a sleeping woman that you can do anything to. Because he was blind and I was awake. He pitied me and I despised him. Because it was my fate to survive and his fate to serve me.

So he was that observant? He never conjectured that the woman he was looking for so importunately was none other than the friend with the bandaged face who accompanied me the next day to the hospital, who passed with us all the barriers you have set up to keep out the curious, Doctor. So analytic, was he? He didn’t realize that, not content with poking my camera into your private operating room, I used the occasion to quickly copy the supposedly nonexistent list of your more important patients, Doctor. So implacable, the former inspector? I made him play the cuckold’s role of my beloved’s guardian, taking care of her while I was inside, aware that, chained to his honor, he would not direct one word to the nameless woman he had by his side.

Just so you don’t get the wrong impression, Doctor: I did not trust him. Not him, not anybody, Doctor. Jarvik could not have coaxed even a phrase out of Oriana. Nor could your nurse out there, at this very moment as we talk to each other in here, make her open her mouth. I have trained her well. Whoever asks you about your bandages, I told her repeatedly, you answer that if it
had been your wish to reveal details about your identity, you would not wear them. Or do you want those men to find you?