Mascara (3 page)

The joy I felt at having received her promised dispatch was mitigated by a lash of indignation against Patricia. How dare she take this long to contact me?

“Two years,” I said, not touching the damned letter with even the tip of a finger. “Couldn’t you have brought it before?”

“Didn’t need to,” said Patricia. And before this throat of mine could accuse her of irresponsibility—what if there had been some important message?—she interrupted me as if she could read my thoughts: I didn’t like that much, either—it’s something I prefer to do to others. “Nothing important,” she said.

“What? What’s that you said?”

“Nothing important,” Patricia repeated.

“And how come you know that?”

“Because I read it. You could almost say I dictated it. There’re only a couple of lines and a photo.”

A photo! The photo had finally come. Would it show her face before you remodeled it, before you ruined her life? Or would it be the newer version—the falsified features you dolled her up with and which, for my part, I refused to look at? Such an urgent question, and the answer could come only from Patricia’s bitter tongue, from this unknown woman who, for two years, had kept my correspondence inside a drawer in her room, opening it and reading and rereading it over and over whenever it tickled her cunt. While I had thought, all this time, that Alicia had forgotten me.

It wasn’t that I expected her to die with my name on her lips. But she was the one, after all, who was consuming a big bite of my existence. She was leaving me in an uncomfortable position: from now on the only confirmation of that brief week of friendship we had lived was to be found in the sterile memories dammed up inside my
brain. She owed me some sort of souvenir. Something that would allow me to fool and retain the past that was departing with her. Because I did not have even one photograph of her: no one has ever been given a greater token of my affection. I won’t take one, I won’t accept one, I told her. But if you happen to die, send me one, so I won’t be alone with my memories. Memories, I said to her, are like ham: you can slice them, devour them, digest them, shit them. A photograph: now, you can fuck a photograph forever. How romantic, she had replied sarcastically. But she cared a bit for me, Alicia, and here was the evidence. Though if she had really given a damn about me, Doctor, she wouldn’t have gone ahead with the operation. She preferred the future you were offering her, Mavarillo: be someone else, alter your nose, be someone else, slip out of your skin, change your life in fifteen minutes. Confidentiality guaranteed. Never met a face I couldn’t fix. She was already convinced by your commercials, Doctor. It was too late by the time we had met. A week later I dropped her off at the door to your consulting room, Doctor, with her face already bandaged. She went in. I never saw her again. She was already—that’s right—someone else.

I took the photo out of the envelope. I placed it face down on the carpet. Until I was alone I didn’t want to look at those eyes of hers that had already died—whether they were the ones I remembered or the more recent ones that you had sewn under her eyelids to make them beautiful. I read her letter as if someone were kicking me in the stomach.

Instead of feeling glad because Alicia had remembered me, I was beginning to hate her. What she had never done to me while she was alive, she was doing to me from her grave, manipulating me with the typical selfishness of the dead. What had attracted me to her in the first place was precisely that difference from others. That, and the fact that she was the first woman, and let me confess that she was the only one, who recognized me in my life. It may have been because she herself was so left out and on the side lines at school that she had no alternative but to take a good look at each kid, including that one kid who was on the edge of invisibility.

“Hello. Remember me?”

I was on line at a bank. The voice came from behind me, and there was no way, of course, that I could identify its owner. If I had
that talent, the guy who calls me up to murmur my name over the phone and then laughs and then hangs up, that guy wouldn’t stand a chance: once I’d captured his voice, I’d follow it to his hideaway, I’d squeeze his face out, drop by drop, onto celluloid as I have done with so many others in this land. But I am utterly unable to discern one tone from another. It isn’t a form of deafness. It’s just that I hate music. Or—to put it more mildly—I’m indifferent to music. When Alicia wanted to know why I didn’t have a record or a cassette at home, my answer perhaps was not a lie: the only music I can distinguish is the kind that flickers in through the eyes. My brain doesn’t seem to distinguish sounds by their vibrations, shades, tone, colors. There it is. Shades, tone, colors. Even the words I use for music are visual.

There’s nothing wrong in living for the nourishment of your eyes, Doctor. It’s got its compensations. To be brief: just as there are those who can easily remember melodies, I am absolutely unable to forget a face. Ever. Nobody can deceive me, Doctor, understand? Nobody can slip on a disguise that I won’t see through. Nobody can alter his face, Doctor, nobody can pass under the swirl and eddy of your hands, Mardavelli, without my discovering them. But music? Not a note. A monster? Far from it. I’m merely living ahead of my time. That’s where we are heading. Music is receding into the background in these times. This is not the century of sounds. I’m not denying that people still listen to songs, sure they do, but what really matters is elsewhere: the image, the lipstick, the tanning lotions. Sounds are like maids: they travel second-class.

So my indifference to the noises and jabbering that others spew forth is no deprivation. That I wasn’t able even to discern the sex of the person talking to me that day in the bank was no cause for shame. On the contrary: I almost felt like inventing a smile for my face so I could inflict it upon that intruder behind me. I may not know you by your voice, but it is enough to turn toward you the deep furrow of my eyes and—if I feel like it—dredge your life from you.

I moved my head to look at whoever might own that voice. But while I was doing it, underneath the idea of a smile, I was assailed by a slight uneasiness. Because I had never heard words like those pronounced by anybody. That was my phrase, the question I had been repeating all these years, first timidly and then with despair—
remember me? Remember me?—until finally it was transformed into, I know you don’t remember me but … and of course they never remembered and in my case did not even pretend to remember. When Alicia spoke those words on the bank line that day, it had been many years since I had fallen back onto that phrase. Many years since I had decided I would never again ask that question or precede that question with an explanation. I would not give the rest of them one detail, one key to understanding who I was. It is true that by the time I gave up asking, I already possessed other instruments to amuse me … I was living alone, I had already changed my name, I was settled in at the Department of Traffic Accidents; but above all my camera stalked the city as freely as if I had been the Chief of Police. And Alicia had come to disturb the calm I had acquired. She was restoring for me that obscene phrase, almost as if someone wanted to make fun, at this late date, of what I had once desired: to be a man like any other man, who misplaces one person and remembers another one, who is recognized by most people and is ignored by a few. Alicia made me feel like that man. That is why I never followed her, I never took her photo, I never bedded her. If she had been able to avoid the temptation of your propaganda, Doctor, to acquiesce forever to the gross and demeaning features that she had been given, perhaps this would have been a different story. Perhaps I would have grown to love someone who would accept me as I was. But she was at that bank to deposit the money for the surgery that you had sold her, Doctor.

“So …” Patricia had waited, unruffled, for me to read the good-bye letter.

“It says the carrier of the letter will come to visit if she has any need of my aid and—”

“I know what it says,” interrupted the selfsame carrier. “What I’m interested in is if you’re going to help.”

“That depends,” my throat answered, but I already knew I wouldn’t do it. By allowing a woman such as Patricia to meddle in my life, to come to my doorstep, to read my correspondence, Alicia had betrayed the pact of our intimacy. I wondered if she had really recognized me that day at the bank or if it was all just a trick to get me to hide her away at my house during the week before the operation. It was true that she had opened that post office box for
me abroad—a delicate mission I could not have entrusted to anybody else. That was true. But hadn’t I, on the other hand, destroyed all her files so she could leave the country without being arrested, when someone—do you know who I’m talking about, Doctor?—turned a picture of her most recent face over to the police? So we were even. I owed her nothing.

“I have someone whom I’d like you to keep. Just for a night. She’s … a friend.”

I could read her panic. What an actress—Patricia; what a performance: she was the kind who doesn’t need to study a role in front of the mirror, the dangerous kind who ends up believing her own lies. But nobody sewed
my
eyelids together. Her serenity was as false as her words, as false as her name. If I felt like it, one of these days I’d drain you like a gutter, Patricia, I’d unfasten every button in your life, I’d leave you with nothing more than a smear of skin to hide in. Thank Alicia, whose memory still protects you—or I would capture you, each inch of your garbage. Your most undesirable and indecorous moment would be put out to dry in my darkroom, and then I would send you to join all the other photos in that post box Alicia herself rented for me abroad. I abstained from prowling out Patricia’s motives, from anticipating, as I always do when somebody intrigues me, a past, a probable biography. Her schemes did not interest me. I was, in fact, beginning to feel bored. It was time to polish the whole matter off.

“Impossible,” I said.

“There’s no danger,” Patricia lied.

“Then you take care of her.”

“I can’t.”

“And why can I?”

“Alicia told me that … you were special. That nobody would ever think of looking in your house.”

“Alicia told you that?”

“It’s only for a day. I’ll come get her tomorrow. For sure.”

“You won’t need to come tomorrow. Or the day after, for that matter. To be clear, don’t ever come back. Not with your friend. Not without her.” I stood up: she could understand this was no light decision. I passed her Alicia’s photograph. I still hadn’t looked at it. “And take this with you. I won’t be needing it.”

Not knowing that two days later I would have that very Patricia, as insolent as ever, in front of me again, repeating the same bravura performance:

“Only for a night.”

Strange that I should not be bothered by her duplicity, more visible now than the last time. If she left Oriana with me, she wasn’t going to return tomorrow. Who knows how many days she had been trying to get the afflicted girl off her back. Maybe someone had stuck her with Oriana just the way she was trying to stick her with me now. That’s how I perceived Oriana’s life for months, deposited and transferred from house to house like a package. Until nobody knew who had her or who was responsible for collecting her again. I was, at any rate, the last stop. Because if Patricia, as seemed likely, did not return, I really didn’t have any other place where I could leave the burden, not if these eyes of mine were unable to get themselves even one paltry witness in the whole universe, and with a witching doctor like you, Mivalleri, chasing the light out of them. That same reasoning should have moved me to repeat: “Impossible, impossible,” to befuddle her with some stupid excuse, perhaps more rational than any the two of them had heard during these last endless days. No. There was no way she would be coming back tomorrow. Because if I was the last name on a list that had already failed her hour by hour, who was Patricia to obtain tomorrow? How could she sincerely guarantee that someone would relieve me of this prize so soon? That some one would ever relieve me? The panic, the weariness in Patricia’s hands, not even trying to disguise themselves as something else, should have warned me.

Instead, as usual, I felt quite confident that I would be able to confront any problem that would develop. I could not deny that Patricia had not given me her real name, but on the other hand, she couldn’t know that I had, that I still have, her face in my memory and that this could lead me to her more efficiently than any erasable smudge of fingerprints. If I had to locate her to return this piece of cargo, a quick consultation of my office files would be enough.

None of which I told Patricia when she stood up to say good-bye.

“There’s something else,” she said. “Don’t let her out of the house, not for any reason. They’re—well, somebody’s looking for Oriana.”

If I had had my camera in order to capture the crack of fear with which her face split open. It was only for a moment. What was inside her opened and shut as if a ray of light had sliced a block of ice and revealed, for less than an instant, the thing that had been caught, in there, dead and dying. What I saw in Patricia was more than that vague terror which from the start had been as noticeable as the sweat on her face. What she had allowed herself now, because she knew that I was going to take custody of the luggage called Oriana no matter what happened, was the image of her own ending. Someone was going to kill her. If I had that abyss of her face in a photo, I could have continued exploring it, asking questions of its gray areas, I could have questioned Patricia’s corpse in order to extricate from her eyes that were setting the image of her murderers, and what they were hunting in Oriana. Because they were going to kill Patricia because of Oriana, due to something that Oriana was hiding, due to—it was my guess—something Oriana may perhaps not even have, anymore. But the ray of light passed and was swallowed up. And there was no more investigating I could do. Afterward I would lament my reluctance, but at the moment I found it unimportant. I thought that Oriana’s past would be there, as always, on the surface of her skin—that I could suck it out of her as easily as a nurse’s syringe draws blood from a body before an autopsy.