Mascara (2 page)

Because once you’ve opened a door, Maravillo, it’s almost impossible to shut it. You must know that. Once you begin to operate on a face, once you’ve transplanted one sliver of skin and everything
else that your butcher’s hands plunder underneath that skin, there is no way back to the person as she once was. Once you make that first thrust, Doctor, after that, the patient’s fucked. Just the tip. The tip of the shoe, the tip of the tongue, the tip of whatever it is we have between our legs, the tip of that bitch Patricia’s breasts—it’s enough that someone should pierce us with the tingle, the dawn of a scalpel, and we’re fucked. Who sticks it into whom, that’s the only question worth answering in this world—or have you got a different question, Mirlaveri?

“I’m not deaf, you know.”

“I’m in a hurry,” said the woman who had called herself Patricia the last time we had spoken. “Is the man of the house in?”

Not even forty-eight hours had passed since she had asked this same face exactly the same question in the same place, not more than forty-eight hours, and she no longer remembered. To her, I was less than a speck of dust that is washed away by a tear. I didn’t care. You won’t recognize me, either, Doctor, when you inspect me through the split-second frame of your door. Your eyes will slip over my face as if they were made of soap, sliding through my features like rain on a darkened waterfall.

It’s been happening to me since I can remember. Before I can remember. There’s proof that they used to forget to give that kid his bottle. Why’s that brat squealing? Suppose he’s hungry? Impossible—we gave him his—and then they realized that no, they hadn’t given that baby a piss of milk. These are not guesses, Doctor. I’ve read my own medical record. Don’t get so upset, Miralevi. I’ve got access to the records of all the citizens of this land. Surely you understand that I would consult my own—before I shredded it so nobody could ever find me. There were the notes of some nurse at whose window I will arrive one day with my implacable camera: a bottle every ten, every twelve, every eighteen hours, huh, nurse? Do you think she works for you, now, Doctor? Is she one of the staff who was aiming the reflectors in your operating room yesterday? Will I encounter her this afternoon presiding over your waiting room—and she won’t recognize me today, either? Is that what will happen?

I won’t make things easy for her, for you, for anybody. Or for Patricia. She had been, without a doubt, most amply replenished
with milk on the strictest of schedules, not to mention the probably generous tits of a mother who remembered her name and the color of her eyes. So I’ll let Patricia, just like you, Doctor, this afternoon—I’ll let you all figure out your mistake on your own.

She was clever, I’ll admit that, and quick. Ten seconds later, when she began to wonder if the man of the house wasn’t, in fact, standing composed right there in front of her, she took advantage of the fact that the accident had left me in a dreadful state, to excuse herself.

“Hey, now. What happened to you? Didn’t recognize you.”

That familiar hey, now, wasn’t to my liking. “An accident,” I answered. “My car is worth shit.” Measuring how much she needed my help, how much false sympathy she was ready to deal me. Just like you measure cheekbones and nostrils, Doctor.

“So why aren’t you inviting me in?”

“Should I? Have you got another letter for me?”

“The dead only write one good-bye letter. You’ve got yours.” But she added, “Poor little thing.”

There’s something that still melts, still becomes tender all over, Doctor, when a woman speaks to me softly. Even if I know it’s hypocrisy, that it was Patricia’s press agent spouting the words, that all that gentleness was cosmetic and calculated, even so … That someone in this world would treat me with the semblance of affection … It must happen to you all the time: being sucked in by somebody’s splendor although you are absolutely aware that, underneath the bronzed skin, one skeleton is just about as unenticing as another.

I let her in. Gave her just enough space so she would have to make a dancer’s flexible, imperfect twist to avoid this male body, so the feminine flesh in her left breast had to brush my arm. I was able to imagine the wave of heat further down, further inside. Patricia emerging from the shower, how she would dry herself out, slowly like a cat, or with the startled, nervous movements of a dog in heat. It’s something I’ll never know, Doctor. I wasn’t interested in knowing it. The mere idea of following her to her home, of adding her intimacy to my collection, was—to put it frankly—distasteful.

My hand was going to shut the door behind her when she stopped me.

“Wait,” she said. “I’m not alone.”

It was then, Doctor, that I saw her for the first time. Oriana. She appeared, she materialized, she came like a miracle to my threshold. Later, I realized that both of them had planned that ambush down to the last detail. As soon as Patricia was inside the house, the woman whom I still call Oriana today, because I have no better name for her, was to turn the protective corner, cross the street, enter my life. But at that moment what I felt was admiration for the way in which Patricia had managed to fool me, the way she had found to extract a full-grown woman with dark glasses out of thin air.

Those dark glasses of Oriana’s. It wasn’t necessary to read her eyes in order to surmise what the morning, probably the preceding week had been, the slow exhausting of possible sanctuaries, the boarding of the next bus, the act of getting off at an unknown stop, of gauging how many people were still left until they returned to this house which they had visited before, how many people would observe them still from the heights of some window without the slightest show of pity, until they had drained the list and found themselves returning dispassionately to the surname my parents gave me as their only gift—which I didn’t want, anyway—when they pushed me into this world. My surname, which Patricia had already crossed off her list once two days ago. And if the door had not opened, what would they have done? Would they have stood there in front of the house, like a couple of tombstones or dead horses? Or would they return, punctual, insistent, sterile, every two days?

All of a sudden, here inside, a warning. Here inside, an unknown desire, so unrecognizable and dangerous that it felt like a slap. What I wanted was their return. Correction: I didn’t want them ever to leave. Correction again: Patricia and her contact lenses could go to hell. The one I didn’t want to leave was the other one, the new one, the woman who at that moment did not yet have a name.

Describe her, Doctor? Beautiful, Doctor? Let’s suppose that she is. For you, for other men, it matters that you should be seen with a flashy woman, who awakens everybody else’s envy. But these eyes know, and yours should as well, Doctor, of what tricks and shades the loveliness of human beings is composed. And she—well, it was as if she came from a world where nobody had ever heard of Helena
Rubinstein, where the touched-up portrait had not been invented, where the yellow gloves of surgeons such as you, Marvirelli, are forbidden. She was hiding nothing. Which did not mean that she was mere wrapping paper. An enigma, but not one of those easy enigmas you can explore through a keyhole or a concealed camera or the recording of sighs and creaks in the bed from the next room in some second-class dive.

This is not how Oriana should be described.

I won’t explain it to you this afternoon. After lunch, as your nurse pointed out. And if you could listen to me right now, I wouldn’t do it, either. But since you can’t hear a word I’m saying, I’ll take my time. Once on the radio they announced that the vice-president of some bank had committed suicide. Blew his brains out. It happens every day. To people whose face—the one they have constructed for themselves—fails them. Or to people whom even you doctors can’t help by giving them a new identity. Yes, it happens every day. But in this case, he did it in front of the
TV
cameras, in front of a dozen photographers. They had nailed the guy in some sleazy deal: he was registering the dead as if they were alive and collecting their pensions, or he simply wasn’t recording the deaths of people and was still collecting, or something of the sort, or both things. I can’t remember. Conning people just like you do, Mardovelli. Swindlers. He called a press conference, and after having protested his innocence, he very serenely took a revolver from his attaché case and he ruined his make-up forever. Or his plastic surgery, Doctor, if he had ever passed under the lights of your clinic.

Too bad I had only one television set. The two newscasts are transmitted at the same time, so that evening I had to switch from one channel to the other, back and forth. A fruitless search. The damned journalists had reached an agreement among themselves. On the first channel, all the preliminaries, to be sure, almost the whole press conference—but no final big-bang moment. On the other, a brief news item, accompanied by a photo of the dead man before he—A fraud. A fraud. Much worse than the one that the suicide banker had perpetrated. That’s how the clients of a night club must feel when the strip tease stops at the waist. Everywhere you look, censorship. At that very moment, the journalists, the personnel of each network, were enjoying the scene, enjoying their
supposed horror of the scene. What right did they have to interpose themselves between the dead man and these eyes of mine? If he wanted to go public with his departure from this earth, how did they dare steal that from me?

I switched on another channel, one that wasn’t transmitting anything. Like a face without skin, Doctor. I stayed there, looking at that colorless shit, that meaningless static for a long time—that’s what they had transformed the man’s act into, that’s what they made of my eyes. To tune in to the other news made no sense. Lies, only lies. Everything a lie—except that instant which was the only truthful act that banker had ever committed in his dissembling life, his sleight-of-hand existence. A treasure that those journalists, his only spectators, because they had camouflaged it, had proven to be unworthy of. On the other hand, me—if he had decided to commit suicide in front of me …

And Oriana?

The brief flash of her sudden appearance was sufficient: it was as if she were exclusively made up of culminating moments, like that banker’s. As if in each instant of her existence, she lived that exposed, that openly daring—but without hastening the proof, without having to kill herself, death as the only road to revelation. And there was not one inch of a bad check in her, not one internal P.R. man burning the less flattering photographs, not the hint of one vice-president inside her trying to pass the dead for the living or vice versa. The proof? I couldn’t invent one scene about her in my head, I couldn’t imagine, as I can with all the other women in the universe, as I just had with trumped-up Patricia, the towel with which she dries her armpit. She hasn’t got—the idea zigzagged in my head like a white serpent—more than this instant, more than this face. No investigation, no file on her past, no photograph, would reveal anything different. Never in my life had I seen a transparent adult, with nothing to hide, without an artificial smile to fashion her. A person whom you—especially you, Doctor—couldn’t add to or detract from. A person who never needed to retreat from other eyes. It can’t be, I said to myself. It can’t be.

But it could be, it was.

Patricia had taken a seat on the sofa without so much as waiting for an invitation. She crossed her legs and pulled out a pack of
cigarettes. Oriana, clear as a crystal, just stood there, on one foot, scratching it with the scruff of her other shoe, as if she were expecting us to decide what we were going to play next.

“Oh, no, you don’t. Not in this house—no smoking here … Patricia? Is that still your name?”

“Why not?” she answered brazenly. It didn’t worry her that she had just admitted using an assumed name. How could she know that, merely having glimpsed her twice, if I felt like it, I could ferret out her true identity this very Monday. If I were the kind who smiles, perhaps something would have crept onto my face to let her know. But I’m not. Nobody has ever detected what I’m thinking by my lips. “Hey, Oriana, the bathroom’s upstairs.” That clean miracle called Oriana began to disappear up the stairway. “And don’t come out till I tell you, okay?”

I don’t know what shocked me more: the fact that Patricia was treating her like a defenseless little brat or the fact that a woman as mature, yes, and as splendid as Oriana would turn out to be so docile, so submissive.

I didn’t bother to hide my distaste for Patricia and her tinsel-assed bossiness. She was taking over my house with the same high-handedness with which she was ordering Oriana around. Her only cordial act had been her first—that slackish, demure, almost cowardly way of knocking at my door two days before. Dissembling slut. If she had rung the bell frantically, I wouldn’t have let her in, even if I had thought, as in fact I did, that it was Divine Providence herself who was sending me this tidbit the day before a Christmas that announced itself as usual, lonely and austere. No sign of Oriana that day. A pity. Because if I had caught a glance of her that Wednesday, there can be no doubt I would have told Patricia I was ready to keep her friend for a day, for a couple of days. Really a pity, because instead of going out in my car that evening, I’d have stayed at home and avoided burning that red light and colliding head on with the grand limousine, Doctor Miravelli, in which you were parading around with your lover.

But I’ve never been a man with luck. On that occasion, rather than extracting Oriana from her coat pocket, Patricia had taken out a letter.

“From your friend Alicia,” she said.

Alicia. That’s not her name, Doctor. But if I were to describe her to you, Doctor, you might remember. Not because you care about your patients, but this one—well, she was, according to the rules of fashion that you go by, a real crone. I bet you have her in your files: before and after. To persuade other hags. But that’s as far as your files go, right, Doctor? You don’t want to find out what becomes of your clients later on, I guess. Although you may have learned that, with the face you loaned her, she had to leave the country; you probably don’t know that four years later she was dead.