Mascara (8 page)

That was why there was no risk in my witnessing the multiple couplings and treacherous entanglements that others call love. Anybody can do it. I had practiced it with my own parents. When human beings shipwreck themselves in an erotic ocean storm, they lose all sense of what is happening around them. They are too absorbed in that self-love which they disguise as love for someone else. Not that I’m denying that it helps to be someone like me, transparent like a piece of glass that you can’t see through because it leads nowhere, which you can’t use as a mirror because it reflects nobody back.

Those fragments of glass that I have for eyes enjoyed the rejection that Tristan had made of my first offer. It allowed me to establish, surreptitiously, who was in charge. If I did not feed him his quota of hints and innuendoes, he would sink back into his acquiescent ragtag role. You treat faces, Doctor, as if they were car motors, greasing them every six months, replacing a worn-out part. You know better than anyone else that the real owner—of a car, of a face, of a person—is the one who keeps the thing going. Tristan’s acquaintances had grown accustomed to him: they expected from him a certain conduct, a performance, which was dependent upon my servicing him. It wasn’t long before he was back, fawning at my heels.

I have kept him by my side since then, a dog of uncertain loyalty, a dog who has grown fat on the crumbs of the data I have lavished on him.

Because even after I had acquired my camera, even after I had uselessly excavated inside the false quagmire that Enriqueta passed off as her sex, almost immediately, as soon as I left school, I realized that just as the others were graduating, in the same way it was necessary for me to change the direction of my life. And I supposed, correctly it turns out, that Tristan would accompany me wherever I went.

Up until then my activities had been carried out in the world I already knew. Easy, after all: to ransack someone who is as familiar as the scenery. Like masturbating. Not much to it. Quite another matter to dare choose a stranger, randomly, or because something in her, once in a while in him, intrigued me. That would really be splicing the umbilical cord—to comprehend that the whole world belongs to you, that there is nobody that you cannot shutter up inside your eyes.

But pleasurable as it may be to take over a face, it ends up as repetitive as the toilsome sexual rites with which so many human beings cloak their solitude. Those hands of yours, Doctor, know what I’m talking about.

Of all the features that my future victims presented to the world I extracted one above all others, like an unclean tooth inside the whitest mouth—and then what? The camera lens had stripped them—and now what? Then and now, in order to avoid boredom, it would become necessary to go beyond the mere everyday use of
somebody else’s body and progress to a more profound form of possession. If I could imagine an exhaustive story for that unknown face, and if my diagnosis turned out to be true, that would be, indeed, not only great fun and a challenge but a way of dredging the treasures from inside that person, leaving her as dry as an abandoned mine shaft. Behind my game was the wager that anybody’s inner biography could be reconstructed by comparing her deep hidden face with the ways in which she tried to cover and dissemble it. An amusement that confronted me, however, with the inevitable and final question to which I had no answer: how to find out if my invention had any substance?

The need to find discrete, objective answers to that question hastened my search for the job that now, decades later, I still hold. Smile away, Doctor. You have the right to smile. I’m using the present tense again, and I should be speaking only of the past. The job that, until a few days ago, until I crashed into you, I still held. That’s all right, your smile. But you must understand that gaining independence from my family was, by then, an obsession: I wanted never again to interrupt the flow of their lives with my dimness, never again to listen to my father outraged at a toneless voice protesting once more that someone had put a visiting relative to sleep in my bed, never again to watch my mother, wondering what stranger had placed those dirty trousers and shirts in the hamper to be washed, and then meticulously leaving them aside.

It was not easy to find the sort of work that would serve my purpose. Three conditions had to be met. The first, and most obvious, was that I should be able to exert the only real talent I have at my disposal, my capacity to remember any face that crosses my vision. The second was that the job should give me access to all the available data on this city’s residents, so that I could set up a network of informers as vast as my growing photo collection. At school, my own means had been amply sufficient, but if the whole universe was now to be my hunting ground, I would need resources that would be just as unlimited. A detective? A journalist? A spy? Those professions were canceled out by the third and last of my conditions. The work should not imperil me in any way, or bring me—it is the same thing—any public recognition. I needed a post as burned out and monotonous as my own face.

When I saw the ad for an apprentice to the archivist of photography files at the Department of Traffic Accidents, I knew right away that I had found what I wanted. It was satisfying also to realize that my recommendation—which amounted to an order—that Tristan Pareja study law, a career so close to power and its secrets, was beginning to bear fruit. I wasn’t going to suggest that he become a plastic surgeon, now, was I, Doctor? The man had already woven a ring of law school classmates and their parents who could be influenced because of the juicy reports that I had obtained for him. Now, almost effortlessly, he managed to meet Pompeyo Garssos, the Director of the Archives, and to put in a good word for me that guaranteed me the position. Although the first few days don Pompeyo was bothered by the fact that the new employee never seemed to be at work—his eyes would slip over me, unseeing, and roam somewhere else—he soon began to appreciate my skills. Never before had that collection been as immaculately well organized: each photo easy to find, each piece of information at the tip of his fingers.

As I classified the photographs, I took a couple of seconds to look intensely at each one. A few, the more interesting ones, I would set aside; would explore the owners of those faces at my pleasure during the years to come. It was as if the whole country had become my schoolyard, allowing me to stalk an almost infinite variety of orgasms, the faces of men who beat their children and smile at their neighbors, the eyes of a woman who knows her husband is cheating but doesn’t dare tell him to get out because she needs the money.

Of course, to take that initial tour of this city’s adults and the countless malevolent adventures their faces promised was only the first step in a more ambitious plan, just as you, Doctor, without any doubt, gain something more than personal gratification when you alter the features of your patients.

To make headway within the Department of Traffic Accidents until I was in the exact place where I could carry out my projects, I specialized in exposing the people who had obtained fake drivers’ licenses. Until I arrived at the archives, it had basically been impossible to discover if a person had filled out an application under an assumed name. Any name—which is no more than a sad jumble
of sounds, at least you’ll agree with me on that, Doctor—can be hidden in the great jungle of unknown names, as a tree can be hidden in a forest. You know as well as I do that the most ordinary of noses can be used to conceal the strangest face. Or am I wrong, Mardivelle? Those impostors were so sure that nobody could identify them that they didn’t even take the trouble to disguise their features, they didn’t even seek your help, Doctor. Later, of course, you must have made a fortune, trying to paste innocence on the most guilty faces. I could go so far as to declare that I have been at the origin of some of your most lucrative contracts. Our two careers run a parallel course—each one of us working with the counterfeit currency that shines in faces that are not ours. Attempting to make them pass the test of my eyes. Not bad at your work, Doctor. I owe you some thanks. You’ve made my work more entertaining. More challenging.

But at the time it was as easy as can be. Before the other employees arrived, very early in the morning, I would select from the multitude of applications that had been signed the previous day, the ones harboring suspicious features. I would recognize that the name was false right away, just as I realized that Patricia was lying about her own name as soon as I saw her face. Then I would let my memory loose in the enormous pit of photographs that shimmered in the nearby files, and I would, a few moments later, go straight to the original face and pick it out. Hours later, each fraudulent application for a driver’s license would find itself on top of Pompeyo Garssos’s desk, next to another photograph of the same person, taken from the archives, but with the real name attached.

Just as I had with Tristan, I preferred letting someone else lap up all the credit: rather soon, the Director of the Archives had begun to acquire a legendary reputation for detecting false I.D.s. As for me, I got the only thing I wanted: to be his secretary.

Of course I didn’t solve all the deceptive cases that came my way. It was indispensable to leave some in doubt, even if I already knew whom to look for, all the details of yet another sham life. Otherwise, what pretext could I use to start demanding data from other agencies and institutions, both public and private? Supposedly to check up on the delinquents, but in fact to establish my own network. I would ask, let’s say, the Drug Bureau for an inquiry on
someone. I would then set up an initial contact with an agent at the Bureau; he would be offered a service, a tidbit of news, a confidential report, and that is the way, slowly and smoothly as ever, I would have him ready to work for me.

It would be quite dull, Doctor, and even makes me want to yawn myself, to give you details about how I lured each puny informant into my web. Apply the Tristan Pareja model, with slight variations, and you can guess how it all happened. One source in each neuralgic information center—the Police Computer, the Insurance Agents’ Data Base, the Universal Health Care Office, the Division of Bank Accounts, the Credit Watchers’ Union, the Drug Bureau, the assistant to the assistant librarian at the most important newspaper in the country—no need for more than one person. Somebody who, without my intervention, would be less than nothing. Armed with the reports smuggled to me by the others, I snarled and tied up each one of them, I sugared their ambition and promised them power that their mediocre minds had not dared to envision. I let them crest on a steady wave of information until they were, each of them in their respective places, bound for glory, solving impossible enigmas, revealing the answers to cases that had been closed for years, detecting criminals with the facility of housewives identifying the rotten apple in the barrel. They became addicts of the celebrity I gave them. They could not escape from me.

Until you called them on the phone, Doctor, until you destroyed what I thought were impregnable defenses.

But you still have no idea who I am, Doctor. Because I destroyed every last file that contained a reference to my existence. I had been born as if dead. I would live as if dead, without leaving so much as a fingerprint on the world’s surface.

The subjects chosen by my camera had left many prints, on the other hand, any number of school grades and medical reports; and with this and so much more it was easy to discover their whole itinerary. I could at least find out if the image I had captured corresponded at all to the story I had invented for them. I was on target, in general, Doctor, and getting better as time went on: each new expedition, each new darkened flash, brought me closer to perfection. And what is more, the taking of the photos themselves became an easier task.

Each human being has around him a hive of almost infinite relationships, people stuck to his life as if it were flypaper, people mixed into his jam, his clothing, his checkbook, his toilet paper. The things people have been told that they need to live, the things somebody else always has to furnish. So that once my victim’s face appeared—on the street, in the paper, lost and twisted, lightning-like, in a crowd filmed by a
TV
crew—and once I had followed that face into the bowels of my endless files, where her name and address were always awaiting me, the next step was to locate the men and women who surrounded and serviced her. If you can get those people to cooperate, the perfect irreplaceable snapshot is not only within reach. It is as easy as spitting.

I had the telephone repairman, with direct access to such and such an apartment—I had that man at my beck and call. Not because of a photo I had taken of him. I wasn’t going to run around snapping everybody, the vilest and least interesting people who crawl this earth—just as you, Doctor, would not dream of operating on a blind beggar. To do so would have exhausted our energies quite quickly. Just a couple of brief reports on him, his police record, his bank account, his kid’s school grades, his mother’s medical ups and downs—enough to enlist him in a supporting role for my assault. Each person, no matter how insignificant he may seem, has the key to some door—and it is by opening doors, Mirvallori, that you take photographs. You’re an expert at closing doors and closing faces, excluding others from your operating room so nobody can tell how you play the piano of each face, how you recompose the obscure music of each face. I know your statements and I know your habits, Doctor. For me, on the other hand, doors are like water, Doctor. The mailmen, the maids and the help, the dry cleaner, delivery boy, janitor, the old schoolmarm: all of them, keys to some kind of lock. Keys that do not know my fingers turning them, keys that do not remember my features.

How were they to retain me in their memory if not even my closest contacts, not even my parents, were able to do that? After fattening those agents for years, after having been the only architect of their fortunes—and I followed them because it was their turn, as well, to be photographed by me—would you believe that they did not realize I was present, as if I were a total stranger? I’ll
admit it, this ended up bothering me: it came to a point where, finally, if I needed some message from them that they could not entrust to the phone or the mail, rather than go myself I would send Tristan Pareja to pick it up.