Mascara (16 page)

That is right. Unless I kept the secret of that skin till more propitious
days. Unless I simply let the wrapping paper with which that child had come to this earth, unless I let it grow with all the dark liberty it could muster, and I were able to appropriate it much later, when I would have the resources to insure its adequate exploitation. It did not occur to me and you can see that I was not amiss—that someone half visible would have any trouble surviving.

I proceeded to tell the nurse, therefore, that the child could not be in a healthier condition, and that she was the one in need of medical attention, preferably of the psychiatric variety, because she seemed on the verge of a
surmenage
. As for me, I was nobly ready to overlook her repeated failure to care well for the infant. If she talked about the matter with anyone else, however, I would be obliged to bring charges against her. So this consultation was not even noted in your files or in mine. That is why you did not discover it when you began to research your past.

Which does not mean, my friend, that I let you go your merry way without following your trail. Although you were not to produce dividends until twenty years later, you were somewhat of an investment, were you not, a future factory? I can remember that at a certain moment one of my more subtle interventions even became necessary. The first time they took you back to the hospital for a harried checkup, I took care to alter the results of the laboratory tests—making sure that nobody investigated what ailed you. I am not attributing to myself credit that in all fairness belongs mainly to you. But neither do I deny that, with all discretion, whenever it became indispensable, I spent my scant revenue to close the door that might have led you into the public light. And, in effect, here you are, like a tiger ready to be embalmed.

At first I would visit you regularly, with a mixture of gratification and anguish similar to that with which people open the stockmarket pages in the paper, sure that no matter how long it might take, a day would come when your hide, like that tiger’s, would again be available and, this time, profitable. But later, my visits became less frequent. On my own, without having to skin you for a profit, I was getting on splendidly in my profession. I may have been overly confident. I was inspired by the vision of a world where the people who appear in the news, the prominent people, the people that matter, yes, indeed, that they should all be as shining
and bubbly as the unbelievably enticing angels who each day provoke us in the soft-drink ads.

As a child, I had always hated ugly people, with their defective eyes, their tortured nostrils, their repugnant pelt. It was an unfair imposition, especially if they happened to be the sort of person who had acquired some degree of notoriety. Repulsive insects like them, I told myself, should conceal themselves, or at least should make the effort to transfigure their visage. I would be, I swore, the instrument for that transfiguration. I would be the provider of embellishment and grace for the pre-eminent men and women of our time. Quite a responsibility, wouldn’t you say?

This crusade for a society in which power would always be exercised with the accountability of beauty did not make me forget you totally, but I will be the first to admit that you began to grow distant, perhaps pale, setting behind the horizon of my priorities. It had always been irksome to follow your wake, but now, as I concentrated on matters that seemed more immediately advantageous, to locate you was becoming more difficult and impractical. In some page of my inner calendar, I knew that your high school graduation was drawing near and that it would be the key date to present myself to you, to propose a covenant. But when you graduated, I was in the middle of the most promising transaction of my whole career. You boast of the fact that you care not a bit about politics, so I will not tire you. Nor would confidentiality allow it. But there are certain things you might as well know—it will affect the way in which you consider the counteroffer that I soon shall put before you. So you can realize that I do have the means to defend you and, if you insist, your transient mate as well.

Some time after I left the hospital, a rather grayish sort of client came to see me. Quite a common person—but with one idea that I do not hesitate to qualify as an act of sheer genius. You are not interested in names or you forget them, so I do not intend to fill your head with insignificant syllables. It is enough to say that the man knew only one thing well in the world: he knew the face that he wanted to have manufactured for himself. He had invested all his money in polls. But not in order to guess people’s tastes, their opinions, their political preferences. The only thing that mattered, he said, the only thing he needed in order to be successful, was the
exact face that people at a certain moment in history were expecting. And at that moment he had discovered the popular demand for a curious blend of juvenile features with a serene and mature gaze. That is what everybody longed for at the time. I rearranged his grandfatherly sunken cheeks, I made his eyes so sweet a blue that they would seem incapable of swatting a fly, I grafted determination and innocence onto his bland jaw. He specified what he wanted, but I made the sauce. And his success was spectacular.

It was auspicious that I had already elaborated the revolutionary method whereby we can curtail the time it takes to alter a face. What my ads say—that we can change everything in somebody’s physiognomy in less than half an hour—happens to be absolutely true. But what started out as a strategy for the industrialization of gorgeousness ended up by allowing me, in the case of this client, to compose incessantly, without interfering with losses of time, the everyday adjustments that he required. An early fifteen minutes with me and he was remodeled for the day. An austere wrinkle added over here, a mischievous radiance over there, and the man he saw in the mirror was exactly the one that the opinion polls suggested would be popular. What was he? A senator, a president, a lieutenant colonel, a
TV
anchorman, the manager of the largest corporation? That should not concern us here. Thanks to the skill of his opinion polls and of my hands, we had discovered a way to keep him in his post forever.

Or at least that is what we believed. But one day my client, venerable as a statesman, exuberant as an adolescent, came to see me, rather perturbed. For some time now his secret polls stubbornly insisted on the weariness of his multiple admirers or fans. They wanted a new face. And now a man had appeared who was threatening him. You are not interested in these details, are you? Enough to say it was someone who was going to strip him of his most valuable asset, his popularity. It was not the first time. My client had already, by then, eliminated several rivals. That, however, was no longer sufficient. Physical elimination, I mean. The problem had to be confronted on a more permanent basis. And his solution was drastic and simple: it had become essential to steal the face of the person who was preparing to replace him. In effect. Transfer it to my client. You will agree with me that to abduct a
face is considerably less arduous than people imagine. Nobody realizes what has happened. Fascinated by the luxuriant surface, the differences that do not transcend, the ups and downs of presumed distinctions, the so-called citizens or consumers or
TV
viewers gulp down the same old medicine over and over in splendid new bottles. How many are there like you, who can perceive the old face repeating the old tics and tricks under the face that has recently been renovated?

At some point, however, more or less at the time when you were supposed to graduate, I was asked to a secret meeting at my client’s office. He had died. A sudden death. His closest associates were shocked. An extremely dangerous vacuum of power was opening—in the enterprise, in the country, in the army, in the party, in the
TV
network? You do not care to go into these details, do you? It’s not your cup of tea? What does matter for the understanding of our affairs is that they demanded a new transplant.

In effect. Hush up my client’s demise, scrape off the pieces of his face and sew them onto the face of his younger successor, the man he himself had designated to continue his work if something happened to him. The new man would then assume his new responsibilities behind the refuge of a mask of more traditional authority. And when he had accumulated the necessary experience, his original face could then be returned to him—adjusted, naturally, in accordance with the latest polls. That is what is called fresh blood, my friend.

And that is why I was in no condition, at the time, to spend my days watching your movements and anticipating your plans. What was opening up for me was a way to intervene surgically in the lives of the most important people of our era, to institute a foundation for their permanent power, to make death or generational change but transitory destabilizers. Because if that was the first operation of the sort that I attempted, you will of course understand that it was not the last. That grayish client, whose face at least would not rest in peace, had chosen me. From that point on, it was I who started to choose which clients I would renovate, which features offered stability to the social order. So I also established, as you once did, a network: only mine is less assailable than yours.

And to this, I have dedicated my years, while you collected
useless photographs. So do not come here and threaten me with your snapshot of my hands placing minuscule devices in the basement of a face. Those clients owe everything to me. The elder ones, that they may continue to reign under the newer faces. And the youngest, that they may aspire someday to infiltrate the proudest faces of ancient power. Overlaying and undersetting, sewing on top and in between and by the side, excavating and eroding, I know who is who better than any guide that is sold in the bookstores. A snail crossing an eight-lane highway has more chances of surviving than you do. Especially if you are with that little woman. All I have to do is make a call and my friends will make sure you are suppressed, you, your photos, your former inspector, your lover’s hands.

But why should I lose you again? I already made that mistake once before. I was obsessed—quite rightly—with an operation that saved the country from widespread upheaval. So I do not blame myself for disregarding your graduating ceremony—where I doubt that you received a prize. The day, I remember it as if it were yesterday, I went to take a look at you—and you will agree that even half a look is not easy—your disappearance surprised me. Yes. As simple as that. Disappeared. It was not a matter, as it had so often been, of not being able to locate you, your face dissolving into the color of the crowd. No, this time you had really left.

You were not living with your parents, and they even became obnoxious when I sent a detective to sniff out where you had gone, as if we were reminding them of some second cousin who had died of leprosy an eternity ago and whom they preferred not to remember. Something similar, though worse, happened with the neighbors, with your former schoolmates: the majority hardly believed you had ever existed, their eyes going blank with the effort to fix your face. They had not noticed you when you lived among them. Why should they recall you now?

The detective I hired could not catch even a scent of you. A faceless man who changes his name—because that is what you did, is it not?—is impossible to find. Particularly if he destroys all his files, all his fingerprints, any bureaucratic trail that could indicate he had ever slouched through this planet.

I was confident, nevertheless, that our paths would cross. At times, in fact, I would make some arrogant remark in the papers
about my ability to operate even on someone with no countenance, to see if you might read it and come to see me on your own. It does not matter that you did not fall into that trap. You were destined to me. You do understand that, I hope? That is why you pushed your foot down on the accelerator at that intersection. Because I had been speeding through green lights for twenty years in the expectation that you would crash into me, that you would make yourself somehow manifest, if not visible. And it is better that you should have taken this long, because I am now able to offer you conditions never before possible, and for your part, weighed down as you are by that sweet woman’s burden, you will have to accept what, at the time of your graduation, you might well have rejected.

You always pined for normality. Inside you there still must be someone who wants to live as the rest of us do. So what I am, in fact, suggesting is that we should revert to the first page of this book we are writing, that initial moment in which the nurse brought you to my hospital room like Moses in a basket, and I, instead of taking you in and transforming that baby into a prince, I returned you to the turbulent rivers of your life. If I am not your progenitor, I am at least a member of your family. And you have known it—fascinated by me since our crash. Otherwise, why have you been muttering your story to my absent ears all these days? Why do you come to see me, demanding favors as if I were some sort of uncle? Why should I help you if, after all calculations have been made, the only thing you have occasioned are disasters, costs without benefits, injuries to my own body?

Because you know that in me you will find a home. Maybe those extinguished eyes of yours guessed it that first day when my step-fatherly face was reflected in the remoteness of the face that you did not yet know was yours. By not intervening, I allowed you to develop your own life, which is, when you think of it, a very rich one, indeed. I used to wonder, with scientific interest, what could a child without a face make of his life? Now I know, and it seems admirable that you have defended yourself with your faculty for reading alien faces and capturing them with your camera. It could almost be said that I feel proud of you.

During that first encounter of ours in the hospital I could have committed the mistake of fixing your nose, of painting your cheeks
pink, I could have reformed your features any way I wanted. The whole world would have been fascinated by you. That silly Enriqueta would have invited you not only to her birthday party but into her very conjugal bed. Everyone says that happiness cannot be bought. What can be bought, my friend, is a face. And I have got the face that you need. And I can also protect your walkingtalking doll, if that is your desire, I can also give her a new face so that nobody, except for you, will recognize her.