Mascara (17 page)

Because it is true that she is in danger.

How can I be so sure?

A woman who was much too similar to the one you have called Patricia arrived—that same Friday that she stuck you with your defenseless playmate—at the office of a colleague of mine. It must have been Patricia because she brought with her the identical photo of your lover at four-and-a-half, the one you have handed to me. She came to ask for an urgent operation for that girl. I hope you understand, therefore, that you are not the only one who has conceived this brilliant idea. My colleague did what he always does when somebody acts suspiciously. He gave her an appointment for next week and then consulted me, as he must if he wants to retain his license to practice medicine. And since the woman was no one I knew, nor could I guess that she was someone who might interest you, I naturally authorized him to warn the police. What they do later is up to them.

You wonder about confidentiality? I am surprised that someone like you is asking that sort of question, but I’ll answer it, anyway. I am scrupulous about confidentiality, thank you very much. I apply it to my habitual clientele, as well as to any person who comes well recommended. But you, of all people, cannot tell me that all the faces in the world have the same rights. If we did not relinquish, once in a while, information about some unknown, petty person, we would be breaking our pact with the authorities of this country who happen to be, as you must have realized by now, some of my best friends. Those in charge of public order respect our autonomy as doctors—as long as they know they can count on our most thorough cooperation. Or did you expect me to sacrifice my business for someone like your Alicia? Did she have anyone to protect her? Not that I knew of. Again, if I had been aware that she was a friend
of yours, if we had been partners at the time, my lips would still be sealed. And in the case of Patricia it could even be stated that I did you a favor: if the police had not arrested her that very Friday afternoon, she might have pestered you to get the girl back.

But you need not worry. I don’t think you’ll be seeing her again. And I am also certain that she did not let your name slip out. They would have come to see you, wouldn’t they? But beyond that elementary reasoning, I have more evidence. Yesterday a detective came to visit this same colleague to ask him more about the girl who appeared in the photo. They would not have frittered away their time if they knew who was keeping her. And he also happened to relinquish some information about your—what is it that you call her?—your Oriana?

You have complained that nobody has ever given you friendly advice. Let me be the first. What I think you should understand is that women are the monarchs of deceit. I hope this paternal tone does not disturb you, but as you have had such a paltry experience with the opposite sex, I would not want you to awaken someday with the bitter certitude that this little girl of yours had been dissembling all this time, playing you like a saxophone until she could find someone more powerful to guard her. Why this blind confidence in a person you know nothing about? You said she is an amnesiac. I would like to tell you, however, that they are searching for her because she has an excess, rather than a diminishment, of memory. It seems that she possesses—or used to, once upon a time, if you are correct—possesses, I say, a remarkable mnemonic faculty. Somewhere in that mind, unbeknownst to you, she hides what appears to be a kind of tape recorder, which reproduces with minute faithfulness what people say. Not astonishing, is it, that with that exceptional talent so many people want to get their hands on her? If she were not the woman of a business associate, I myself, let me warn you, would be making every effort I could to smuggle my hands into that brain.

But I shall not do it. She is the one who holds you hostage for me. If you were alone, nothing could stop you from disappearing again, restoring your subterranean empire. The eruption into your life of that … let me call her a child, of that child, has made you visible. While you are tied to her, forget about leaving the country
or even of slipping into a multitude to snap the shot that you could sell for a fortune.

That is your real position. Take a careful look at it. Objectively. Calmly. No more network. Not a friend in the world. That softhearted and affectionate Jarvik, whom you compute as a last reserve, is precisely one of the men who are after your lover. And if he were to be told that you have made a fool of him, I do not think he would offer you his friendship again.

To put things clearly: without my help, there is no way in which you can save your plaything. That does not mean that I approve. But if she gives you satisfaction, if you can find in one little woman the whole world of females, all the possibilities, all the dimensions, it remains for me, as one of your principal creators, to be the best man at the wedding and to congratulate you.

You can count on me.

You can count on me. Do you know anyone else in the universe who could repeat that phrase to you?

Now you show me—silently show me—the photo you took. You do not yet let me touch it. I know what you are thinking. I may not be able to read faces as well as you, but I know what I would think in these circumstances … How can you trust me? What sort of guarantees can I give?

Just think a minute.

If I had wanted to capture you, would it not have been easier to blow your cover, to get one of those men who are chasing your doll to take her away, and to be left alone to excavate your skin at my leisure?

I am ready to confess that if I had believed that this plan could have been successful, I would have executed it without the slightest hesitation. But quite frankly, my man, how do I keep you? If I put you to sleep, if I extinguish the cold semen in your eyes, your skin would stop renewing itself—you would stagnate and so would our business. There is not a jail, a hospital, an asylum, that could retain you. Of course they would begin by following my instructions down to the last detail: fasten you tight, watch you day and night, surround you with reflectors as if we were about to operate. Inevitably, however, they would soon forget how dangerous you are, their attention would be distracted, and, all of a sudden, you
would have escaped. And it is unpleasant to contemplate what you would do to me that night. No, my dear man, my former patient, I do not wish our little partnership to end like an action film where the hero finally, when everything seems lost, unties his bonds and wreaks a terrible revenge. No doubt gratifying to the passive, inert audience in the darkness, but not so to the one who receives the blows. Far better, wouldn’t you say, to keep you happy?

Now you do pass me the photo. Without a word. Strange, to see oneself so clearly from eyes that are so alien, the lightning flash of my hands entering the mysterious waters behind that face. A memorable photo, indeed. I will try not to deny what my face is proclaiming—you have captured exactly what someone, what I myself think on those occasions. All right, I admit it, I start to think that I am possessing that face: that small apparatus is like a metallic clitoris, which I am inserting into the precise intersecting line of the brain. The photo’s admonition to harbor suspicions is not misplaced.

But there is no possibility that I would do something like that to you. What function do you attribute to that piece of metal? Is it for spying? Is it a way of controlling the patient? Not at all. It is an integral part of the therapy, what we might call the postoperative treatment. Tell me: of what use is it to change somebody’s twisted nose if his memory persists in remembering the old one and, therefore, continues to twist the new one until it resembles the nose that will not vanish from that memory? That is why my operations have such an incredible degree of success: because along with the old skin, they eliminate the old habits, the past. It is as if I strained my patients through a filter: like one of those that converts the dirtiest river into the most transparent drinking water. And you drink the old and purified liquid without giving a second thought to where it has been, what it has touched. My tiny device is merely guarding that new face from the ghost of the old face, making sure it cannot be recomposed. Just as we change our phone number so old lovers cannot call and make a scandal, interrupting us as we prepare to make love to our wives. But forgive that image: I forget that you would not know what I am talking about. Of course.

It is here that our interests coincide. Both of us want that sleeping beauty of a girl to stay with you, never to awaken. If that face
enthuses you so, certainly, we shall make her once again into a five-year-old. And if you choose to suffocate her other faces, I will certainly not voice any opposition. But I am again appalled at your lack of ambition, my man. Why demand a dossier of her past when you can burn the memory in her? Why suffocate what you can extirpate? Irreversibly.

So she will remember only what you want her to remember.

Which does not mean that you should worry about something like that being done to you.

I would have to be insane to try to make you forget the deep pit of your previous face, that pit which has no bottom. On the contrary, what I require is that you recall it every night, that you continue to reproduce it inside over and over. My only desire is that under the faces I will settle upon you, which I have been preparing all these years, under the multiple masks, there, deep under, the cells of your original facelessness will replicate themselves like serpents during an eternity. So that each time it becomes necessary, I may descend like a miner toward the inexhaustible treasure which grows like moss on the inner wall of your most recent features.

Why should I wish to erase the incrustations that coat your skin and your memory, if your face is the only capital that you are contributing to this enterprise?

I have plans for that face.

And they are not, at this moment, the ones I dreamt of when I first saw it. Even if during all these years I have reminded myself why I should search for it. Even if up to the instant before you limped through that door I repeated that reason and no other. But now I know that we are going to postpone the distribution of those small doses of your cells among my clients, no matter how large the payments might have been. That sort of exchange will come, it will come: later.

No, my plans have changed. Your eyes have illuminated my own life as if until now I had been blind, murmuring to me that, with all my almightiness, I had been up until now a slave controlled by others, captured by their looks, relegated to exercising power through indirect, remote intermediaries. As you spoke, I managed to understand fully that thing I had glimpsed only as a weak intuition on the day I had you in these hands and dared to find
in myself the courage to postpone our glory for another occasion, when you had refined the instrument of your anonymous skin and I had acquired the means to insure its use: the intuition of another future for your face.

I knew it halfway then and I know it fully at this moment and I will know it beyond any doubt within a few minutes.

I want that face for myself.

I do not know how long I will need it. A few days, a week, a year. It makes no difference. I will return it when I have tired of its exercise. I want to roam the world without anyone knowing me. I want you to open up. Open up. Open up, and let me see that which only you have seen.

Why do you look at me that way, with those forgettable eyes? With those eyes that so soon will sink into my sockets?

Let us go. If that is your desire, let us go first to undress Oriana so her memories can never more rebel. If that is your desire, if you are still doubtful, you can by yourself insert into her this apparatus, which will erase her previous faces. I shall be no more than your silent assistant, I will do no more than pass the instruments. Are you not the person who knows most about faces in the universe? Is there any other way to insure that I will not invade, with my hands, the intimate world of Oriana? Or would you prefer another sort of insurance before we operate on her? Would you prefer that before that happens we undress, you and I, underneath the lights which stream forth from the reflectors?

Here is proof of my trust.

Here is your first face.

Look at it carefully. You dimly saw it that day when the nurse brought you to the consulting room of a poor plastic surgeon. There it was, floating above your waters on the first day of your creation. Can there be more eloquent evidence of our partnership? That you should put on the only face I did not extract from nothingness, the only face that was given to me already made, that I inherited, and that now, thanks to you, I can bestow as a gift and someday recover for myself? My face.

To whom else could I offer it?

My son.

“G
ood evening, Mrs. Lynch.”

“What are you doing in my house? How did you get in?”

“You are Mrs. Lynch, aren’t you? Mrs. Maya Lynch?”

“But what right do you—”

“It’d be better if you sat down, madam. And please take off your raincoat. We wouldn’t want your rug to get ruined.”

“Though it won’t be long. Just a couple of questions, ma’am, and we’ll be on our way. It’s about yesterday afternoon.”

“But I just got back from the police. It’s the third time I’ve had to speak to …”

“There are always odds and ends to clear up, Mrs. Lynch. You are Mrs. Maya Lynch, I take it?”

“I’m Maya, but no longer Mrs. Lynch. My husband and I, we’ve—”

“Two years ago, ma’am. We know that. But since your divorce still hasn’t come through, we’ll continue to call you by your married name, if you don’t mind. You are, at any rate, Doctor Mavirelli’s nurse. You’re not denying it?”

“Why should I deny it? What I still don’t know are your names.”

“You do not know our names, madam, for the simple reason that we have not told them to you. Not only doctors have the privilege of confidentiality.”

“Doctor Mavirelli has insisted that I see an I.D. before talking about this matter. He doesn’t want journalists finding out about …”