The Face of Another (23 page)

Thereupon, the mask soothed me; with my continual worrying, it was I, not it, who would end up a means to an end. Even though I did wear a mask on my face, my body was the same as before. Well, I might just as well close my eyes and blot out the light from the world around me. Suddenly the mask and I became one, and there was no “other one” to be jealous of. If it was I myself who was touching you, then it was I too who was being touched by you; and there was no need to falter.

M
ARGINAL NOTE:
On consideration, this is rather selfish reasoning. If one supposes that for oneself one is a set person and that for others one is an unknown person, half of me is a stranger. Even we yellow-skinned men were not originally a yellow race. We were first called yellow by a race of men whose skin was of a different color. Disregarding the promise of the face and making the lower half of the body the basis of personality are equally deceptive. If I maintain that the lower half of my body is unchanged, then I shall have to assume absolute responsibility for the erotic acts of the mask. In my fancies I accused you of shamelessly betraying me, and my body was wracked with the poison of jealousy; yet as soon as it was a question of myself, I called it a pure expenditure of freedom and was too selfish to think how much it might hurt you. In the final analysis, jealousy itself is something like a pet cat that insists on its rights but does not accept its duties
.

Soothing me thus, blankly, as if it felt nothing at all, the mask had to make me understand that sifting desires through sieves would leave nothing like what was hoped for. Pure desires are surprisingly few and simple, and it is no trouble to spot them, if we leave out the destructive ones. For example, let me enumerate some here as they occur to me.

First, food, sleep, and sex are the three great cravings. After them come general cravings, such as evacuation, thirst, escape, possession, leisure. Coming to rather special cases, we have desires for alcohol, tobacco, drugs, and suicide. And, if we interpret cravings in a wider sense, we can include the desire for work and for fame.

But what I have called “expenditure of freedom” is eliminated with the first sifting. No matter how overpowering drowsiness may be, it is not a goal in itself; it should doubtless be classified as a preserving of freedom. And no matter how you consider it, basically sleep itself is simply a transition to waking up. For the same reason, it would be best to place
outside the present investigation such things as evacuation, thirst, possession, escape, fame, and work. One would surely be criticized if one treated the last item, work, in the same category as evacuation. Surely considering the results, work dominates among the desires. If one did not create things, there would be no history, no world either, and perhaps indeed man himself as a thinking being would not have evolved. Moreover, through self-denial, work may become more than simple labor. Though one may make it a personal goal, unlike desire for possessions or fame, it will not make a poor impression. People nod approval and say: “He’s a hard worker.” And though they may be envious, they will hardly be censorious, as long as the work is gainful and reputable. (Actually, I was sixty percent satisfied with my work at the Institute—if I were deprived of it, I suppose I should experience a ninety-percent affection for it—but I could get along without the mask.) Even if work for the sake of work were somehow to slip through the first sieve, inevitably it would be culled in the second sifting. May I remind you that I am not talking about values, but of the immediate cravings of an escaped prisoner whose alibi is guaranteed.

Among the remaining cravings, the desire for food apparently is also eliminated in the second sifting. Let’s exclude the jumping of a restaurant bill, since that is a means rather than a goal; but it seems to me I have heard somewhere about a law that says you can’t go on stuffing yourself. Suppression of appetite is conceivable, but not suppression of desire for food. Still, if one ventured to carry this suppression of appetite to the ultimate, couldn’t it result in cannibalism? But with cannibalism, the element of killing would seem to be stronger than the desire for food. And I have already decided not to talk about murder.

For the time being suicide was a forbidden escape; I could perform it with my real face, but the mask had just made a
heroic escape from being “buried alive.” If I were going to commit suicide, it would have been better to have done nothing from the first. Moreover, rather than consider the desire for leisure as an independent unit, I should like to take the view that it is something composite, sometimes a form of escape, sometimes a sort of work that has no object. Further drug addiction like alcoholism is merely a bad copy of the mask—and thus there was no need to discuss the problem again.

So my siftings finally left, most suitably for my condition, these sacrificial compulsions.

B
Y THE WAY
, I wonder what you think of this reasoning. Yes, of course I mean reasoning. While that night I intended to expend freedom purely by succeeding in reasoning that there was nothing for me but a sexual crime, actually I committed no act that might possibly be construed as a crime. It was not that I felt no inclination to do so, nor that there was no opportunity, but one way or another I did not translate my thinking into action. So the only thing I am asking you about is my reasoning.

I was not so optimistic as to expect to gain your approval. Perhaps, as you see it, this clearly reflects some foolish deficiency in me. Since I am already in fact experiencing the failure of reasoning, I cannot but accept the existence of a
deficiency. At that time it was not apparent to me, however, and I cannot grasp it even now. Didn’t all this reasoning mean, perhaps, that while I pretended to submit reluctantly to the forceful persuasions of the mask, I was covering up to myself the fact that the mask’s wish was my own.

As far as sex was concerned, from the beginning my inclination to kick over the off-limits sign was as violent as my reticence about doing so. That was as it should be. I had tried not to mention this, but as long as I did not agree to a sexual crime, my plans to let the mask seduce you could not actually come off. If it were a question of a single seduction, perhaps there was no problem. But if I intended to create a new world by continuing the relationship between you and the mask, I should certainly have to live as a sexual lawbreaker. If not, how could I put up with this double life without being eaten away to the marrow of my bones by jealousy? Perhaps, the mask’s tedious persuasions were due to my own conscious provocation.

Yes, oddly enough, the instant I was given any reasonable support, I at once completely sympathized with the aspirations of the mask. Remember that I was not famished for sex, as if it were hunger or thirst. What concerned the mask was a transgression of sexual taboos. If I had no consciousness of taboos, it would be doubtful whether I could feel such shuddering fascination. And when I looked at this fascination without blinking, the poison of my jealousy, by which I was most troubled, suddenly seemed to lose its virulence; and I began to wallow in erotic impulses, quite as if I were taking an antidote.

Through my new, lecherous eyes, the whole town appeared like some mysterious fortress composed of sexual off-limit signs. It would have been fine if the fences had been strong, but every one, worm-eaten, nails missing, looked as though it would collapse at any moment. Even though these very
fences with their air of preparation against invasion pricked the interest of the people in the streets, when one approached and looked carefully, the worm holes and traces of nail holes were sham, yet no one ventured too close. What in heaven’s name were sex and sexual taboo? To think about the meaning of the sham, the origin of the fences, would inevitably make one a lecher. Of course, the lecher himself was only one of the fences. And precisely because of this, he would have to shed tears of remorse and anguish over his own desires. When he broke the sexual taboo he would be pulverizing his own fences at the same time. However, once one has become interested in the existence of the fence one’s mind will never be at ease until one has ascertained its real origin. The lecher in general is like an honest, hard-working investigator who, once aware of a mystery, will go to any length to solve it.

I too, a novice investigator, dropped into a bar, anticipating nothing special. As a place that openly displayed its fake wormholes and nail holes, it had a certain interest. Moreover, what they sold in the bar was the fake mask of alcohol. It was just the place for me now.

There was the comfortable feeling I had anticipated. Fake darkness that shut out fake light … suspended desires incapable of doing good or of perpetrating evil, dream-like … the proper mixture of hypocrisy and evil.… When I had taken my seat and ordered a whiskey and water, and the pores of my whole body had begun to open, I began to toy with the finger of a girl in navy blue seated next to me. No, it was not I, but the mask. Although the girl’s fingers were sweaty, the sweat was rough, as if starchy. Of course, the girl just let herself be played with. She was neither angry nor not angry. It was the same whether I did something or nothing; nothing or everything, it was all the same.

When I told a lie, so did she. Apparently she began to think of something else at once, and of course I pretended not to
notice. Should I make this girl just for this once, tonight, in revenge for the scars, for you, and for my real face? No, no need to worry, for while anything at all
could
happen here, nothing at all would. I told a lie and she told another, and then for some reason she suddenly took me aback by suggesting that I might be an artist.

“Why? Is there something that makes me look as if I painted pictures?”

“But, in general, artists don’t want to appear special, do they?”

“True enough … but then is make-up something to show oneself off or conceal oneself with?”

“Both,” she said, nibbling a pebble-like cocktail cracker, which she held with the tips of her fingers. “Both intentions are sincere, after all, aren’t they?”

“Sincere?” Suddenly I felt dispirited, as if I had been shown the secret of a sleight-of-hand trick. “That’s all shit!”

The girl wrinkled up her nose: “Disgusting! Must you be so obvious?”

True! Any real thing is a fake here, and any fake passes for the genuine article. Amusing oneself with painting pictures of holes on taboo fences just before getting aroused was apparently what one did in a place like this (if I got any more drunk than I was, my very realization that I had a mask on would be dangerous) and under the palm of my hand the girl’s thighs, as if bored, began to yawn. The psychological moment had apparently come for me to leave. Nothing had happened, but it made no difference. I should consider it benefit enough to have approached the forbidden fence and ascertained its strength. However disagreeable, tomorrow I should have to try a desperate assault on my fence.

I felt no distance between this experience and the subsequent events; it was as if I were looking through a telescope. However, I did not make the mistake of giving in to my
drunken impulses and tearing off the mask; I told the taxi driver to take me not to my own house, but to my hideaway. It would appear that the distance between my real face and the mask, no matter how precisely I tried to match the surfaces, no matter how strong the adhesive materials I used, could not be filled in simply. All night long I dreamed of you, between short intervals of wakefulness. In the dreams, you seemed to be continually appealing to me for something. I thought you were warning me about how close I was to lechery, but later that seemed mere imagination. Once I dreamt of being in a jail.

T
HE
next day, as I had anticipated, I had a terrible hangover. My whole face was swollen and smarting. Perhaps I had been poisoned by the adhesive materials, for I had not taken the proper care of my face after coming home. When I had vomited and then washed my face, I felt better. But it was still before ten. Since I was not to go out until after three, I decided to lie down for two or three hours more.