Mascara (15 page)

So some days later I sat Oriana down, she with the typical demeanor of a small child, at her mother’s feet, and then I made her lips flourish into the puerile demand for a story, that Mama should retell the one about the most ancient of our grandparents, and I disposed her body to receive and transfer each syllable from
that woman who had given us birth. That was when, without the slightest warning of what Oriana intended to do, I found myself enclosed once again in this kingdom with no gates. I don’t know how long it lasted this time. A long time. The time it took mama to complete her story. Because only at that moment, only when mama’s thousand and one words had concluded, did Oriana let me go back to her body. She let the slit of an indolent window swing slightly open. Through her distant eyes I could see mama getting up from the sofa, her vocabulary lost forever in the air of the approaching night.

I did not cross toward Oriana.

I remained here in the room where mama’s fullness should have been reposing. This empty room inside me, like a womb that cannot bear anything alive.

Thinking, for the first time, of my own extinction.

I had experienced how irremediable the world could be without Oriana. That is how I would remain, vulnerable, bridgeless, shoreless, if something happened to her. And if what happened to her happened to be death, the day in which those men came to get the hands Oriana and I had rented before our birth, that day they would follow her traces underground and into our earth, that day they would also obtain the maps of my kingdom. One by one, threshold by threshold, without my being able to do anything to protect them, house by house, they would exterminate my memories, until my hands would be ready to be hung from some child about to be born, some remote perishing child who would not know of my existence.

If Oriana would not allow me to rescue my mama’s hands, would not allow me to come near mama’s hands, then, was it not then too late to find someone with whom to deposit all the stories I had gathered, all the stories I remembered so they would not be lost, so I could be the one to pierce forth into a smile when those men approached? I had glimpsed women in the mirror of my dreams, faces that multiplied themselves and reminded me of my own. How could I reach them, exiled from Oriana? How could I join that chain of women I longed for, a chain of women who were not deaf, who had not been born defeated, who had agreed to take charge of the howls of other human beings when they are leaving, leaving?
Did they not exist out there, in some kingdom less invisible than the one I had dreamt?

It was too late.

There is not much more to tell.

Mama began to get worse. She was unable to care for the creature who looked like a mature woman but was only five years old. They began to leave Oriana in strange houses, one hand to another, as if she were a package. A cousin would deposit her at a friend’s and perhaps return for her, perhaps not, and from there she would be taken to a psychologist and then to an asylum and to another person or maybe to the same one, or who knows who would come to fetch her. Masks in the fog. More difficult each time to know in whose hands we were being placed.

Oriana must have been enchanting and the people must have had quite a bit of fun with her. For a week. Or two. But people tire quickly of the innocent, as they do of the ailing and the crestfallen, and then, you can be sure that to another refuge and another home and another period of playing she went, as if Oriana herself was one of the many lives that we had both given shelter to in other times, so it went, just so.

From time to time we would see Mama again, the anchor that Mama still was, and I would try to leap toward her, to relieve her, to prepare her hands for the day when—but the walls of Oriana are white and cold, as my hands will be in the future after they have been boiled. I do not know how to climb them. The occasions when she would allow me out to breathe, to gather the next to the last music in a dry throat, were becoming less and less frequent, until one day they ceased entirely.

And I could not guess the identities of those who harbored her, as if she were a daughter who never writes home. But here in this growing darkness I wondered if she had not learned on her own how to give refuge to strange voices, if that was not the way in which she was paying for her safekeeping.

Because the last time she allowed me to share her gaze, the last time I awoke outside my kingdom in an alien place, a terribly transitory and real place, there was in front of us a high window and a street. Through her eyes I saw the plague of those two men advancing. But they were not coming for me or for her. I knew it because
of the absence of an approaching death in the reflection that Oriana returned to me from the glass of the window. They were coming for the hands of someone whom Oriana had comforted, the hands of someone, a man or a woman, who had taken care of her.

And now that person could no longer help her and Oriana did not know how to save herself. So she had called on me. I forced her to look at those men rolling toward us like a sickening tide.

“Run,” I told her legs, but they would not immediately obey me. The two of us watched, with eyes that were almost crippled, the avalanche of those men. “Run,” I repeated, with the fierceness one must summon to shout at morons who would let themselves burn to death in the middle of a house in flames. “And tell everybody that they are looking for you. Don’t forget.”

I have not heard from her since. I must suppose that she fled. I must suppose that she listened to me. I suppose it is because those men have not invaded Oriana’s body, have not found me. Yet.

It is my only hope. That she will not forget. In the few moments of liberty that she left me, I would demand that she repeat this to her fleeting guardians. Though they might think her mad. But they would not. Her terror could not evoke doubts or frivolous replies. They were going to believe her. It is possible, then, that someone else knows we are in danger.

But would that be a person in whom I could put my trust?

I go to the outskirts of my kingdom and I call from there. Like a wolf that wants to make the sky give birth to the dead moon with its screams. But who will hear me? And if they hear me, who will answer? Who will gather my words as I gathered those who were dying without a moon for their hands in the night?

Even if no one answers, I do not repent.

I did what I had to do. As soon as I was born I knew things that others take a lifetime to learn, that some never know at all. In front of my eyes a trainload of passengers was derailing. In front of my eyes the passengers were bleeding to death. And if I had to soil my immaculately washed sheets, if I had once again to clean that blood with the sheets of my recent birth, I would do it all over again. It is nothing to be proud of. That’s the way my life turned out. When a bird falls from a tree, you must return it to its nest. Some do not see the bird, they do not see the tree.

I do not blame them. If they do not answer. If they do not come.

In this kingdom there are no faces, not even my own. Here even the birds that fall from their nests exist only in the memories that were lived by others. People do not walk, traffic signals are not put up, parks are unnecessary. There are only houses and musings and pathways which lead from house to house, and in each house a family of memories sleeps, waiting for me to come visit them. And soon the lights will start to go out, one after the other, like a city that has spent its energy. Going out as the sky went out that night in my dream. And then Oriana’s door will open. It will open, not so that I may leave but so that those men may finally enter my last home.

I want you to know it, ladies of my dreams. Though you cannot hear me, though you do not dare open your kingdoms to my voice. I want you to know that the one who is dying now is me. I want you to ask yourselves if I do not have the right to a miracle. If I cannot be rescued, just once, just once, just one single time, the way it came to pass in the fairy tales my father told me.

I want you to ask yourselves.

While in some corner of this city where I cannot walk, my mother and all the mothers of the universe are dying without anybody to listen to their song.

I
am sure you will forgive me, my friend, if I answer you with a slight tinge of familiarity in my voice. I do have my reasons: it could almost be stated that we are already partners. You do not like the idea? Please. I did not interrupt you until you had finished. And you were not brief.

So, with all due respect, let me inform you that it is my considered opinion that you underestimate us both. You do not demand all that I can give; and you proffer far less than you yourself can deliver. What else am I to deduce? Being the privileged proprietor of that special face, what do you submit as your part of the deal? A miserable batch of photographs. When I have within my reach all those live bodies, you offer these miserable photographs. And knowing the power I have to grant your most extravagant and outrageous desires, what do you ask of me? To travel abroad. Not a good way of doing business, my dear fellow. Not when both sides end up losing.

You decidedly need someone to look after your interests.

I do not blame you for your misgivings. Like you, during all these years I could not conceive that a partner might be an equal. A partner would inevitably sell you to the highest bidder, as your Pareja did when the opportunity arose. Even at the period I would like to talk to you about, even then, when I was a young doctor, just out of medical school, squandering my time as an intern in that mediocre hospital for insignificant people, the certainty I had already formed of my own worth would not allow me to entertain even the notion of an associate. A brilliant career beckoned to me from the future. Someone with your avid eyes would have
understood it right away: I was going to be the most eminent plastic surgeon of all time. Yes. Of all time. You do not have the slightest drop of ambition in your veins. You cannot understand anybody’s longing to shine. What I yearned for was to defeat even rivals who would appear after my death.

On that afternoon, therefore, when a child was brought to me, a baby who had just been born, it mattered that I knew who I would someday be. The baby seemed ordinary, one might almost venture that it was immeasurably ordinary and yet the nurse who shoved it onto my weighing scales assured me that there was something strange about it, perhaps in its face. She was, she informed me, an extremely responsible employee, but in regard to this little child, she would forget the most elementary tasks. She was not giving him his bottle on time, she wasn’t bathing him on schedule, she wasn’t taking his temperature.

Oh, no, you don’t. Not one interruption. No. Not a word. I let you speak as long as you wanted. It is my turn now.

True, it has been my turn all these years. My turn began at that moment, so many decades ago when that nurse offered up that child into these hands, which you are watching with such intensity. But that’s my privilege.

I did not, on that occasion, intend to waste more than five minutes on the case. Why should I attend to that child’s problems? Or worry about the nurse’s fatigued, overwrought brain? But just in case, I sent her out into the corridor. I might have been inexperienced, but I had already warned myself that it is indispensable to be alone with any patient: our consulting rooms are like temples. Our privacy is what protects us.

So that day, fortunately, there was no one to witness how I examined the boy. His skin, particularly the skin on his face, turned out to be special. What need is there to describe it? You know better than any other human being both its defects and its virtues. I will not lie to you: I was very excited. Never, in the most obscure bibliography or the most meticulous notes, had I ever read of anything quite like this. A chameleon, after all, a butterfly altering its colors, a rabbit shedding its fur according to the seasons, all are creatures programmed for a limited, cyclical register of environments and habitations. But that a human being would be able to
fuse with his ever-changing backgrounds, could mix in to the point of invisibility …

Even at that moment I was aware that the commercial possibilities were, for all practical purposes, infinite. For leisure, for love, for work, for journalism, for military uses: unlimited. Do not interrupt. I know what you are about to say: of course nobody in their right mind would wish to remain in that condition permanently. I had chosen my specialization precisely because I knew that people kill, lie, betray, accumulate millions, decide whom they will marry and who will be their friends, with the sole objective of achieving prominence, of being seen. Show me a beggar who does not dream of becoming an emperor.

Who would want to admit, as you already have, in fact, that one is dead before having had the chance to live? But on a transitory basis, my good man—that is altogether another story. For a criminal or a policeman, for a spy or someone who fears spies, for a husband who cheats on his wife or who wants to see with his own eyes if she is faithful to him. I had, as yet, not one client; nevertheless, I knew what they would give to be able to saunter unseen among their employees, their subjects, their voters, their pupils, their rivals. I could already picture myself. Having altered their faces into loveliness and instant media recognition, I would invest them with an additional momentary invisibility, so that they could find out whom to trust and against whom to act, so that they could have private vacations where nobody could identify them, so that they could wield more power than they had ever conceived of.

But my own dreams of fortune and fame did not last long. A few seconds, to be exact. The chemical substance (or if you want to call it magical, I don’t mind) within that skin would be useless to me if I told the hospital about it. Just as I had automatically chosen to discard that silly nurse, just as it had never crossed my mind to let her share one cent of the profits, that is just how my superiors would exclude me from the deal. I was as new to that profession as that little boy was new to the world. Other surgeons would operate on him, others would get their pictures in the papers and on the evening news. I would get—if I was lucky, that is—a footnote, some trivial reference in a medical encyclopedia. Unless …