Mascara (7 page)

“I don’t remember that or anything else.”

The next question, the automatic next and decisive question—I was unable to ask it, because suddenly, like an injection piercing directly to the nerve, like the claw of some surgeon intersecting my eardrums, the doorbell rang. Once again somebody was bothering me on a holiday at my own home.

“Don’t open.”

Nor was that fear a lie, that murmur on my cheek, those trembling arms which wouldn’t let me go. I had no intention of opening it, but I wanted to measure her reaction: “Why not?”

“Maybe it’s them.”

“Them.”

For an instant it was like being in front of Patricia all over again, like watching, again, an iceberg penetrated by an infection of light, again seeing the image of a dead woman in the backdrop of her terror. But this time the victim was Oriana and not Patricia. What did those men seek in Oriana? They wanted her voice filled with blood. They wanted her voice never to tell certain things.

I deplored, for the first time, my lack of foresight. I had let go, without chasing it, the image Patricia had opened to me, let go of the shadows that could reveal what those men were looking for in Oriana’s throat. What is deposited in a throat? Melodies? Memories? Stories? Words that others are scared of keeping? Had they been given over to Oriana so she could keep them? And her amnesia, was it precisely a way of trying to avoid those men? So that, if they ever found her, they would not be able to slowly drain from her the memories she had accumulated? If there had been time to explore her before someone downstairs, maybe one of those very men that …

“Them?” I asked once more, to see if that shook her memory.

“Patricia can tell you.”

“And if it’s Patricia who’s come to get you?”

She put a finger to my lips: Hush, hush, her fingers said. “She’s not that gentle when she knocks.”

“But if it were Patricia?”

“She doesn’t need me, anymore.”

“Whereas I …”

“You’ll be better at taking care of me. But why talk, anymore: it isn’t her.”

It wasn’t.

Because all of a sudden we heard the door open and the placid footsteps of a man and then, out of the silence, the voice of Tristan Pareja, calling to me.

It was partly my fault: I had called Pareja that very morning. But if the bitch Patricia hadn’t left the door unlatched …

“It’s my lawyer,” I grumbled into Oriana’s ear.

“Make him go away.”

“I can’t. I need him.”

“ ‘What for?”

“I’ll tell you later.”

“Tell me now.”

Downstairs, Pareja’s voice could be heard ever louder. I heard one of his shoes creaking on the stairs. He was coming up!

“Coming, I’m coming,” I yelped, trying to feign sleepiness. And to her, barely above a murmur: “They’re going to catch us. You want them to catch us? Then into that room. Right away. That one. At the end of the hall.”

“Be careful,” she said, giving me a quick kiss on my neck, moist as a bird flying from the rain. “He might be one of them.”

And she started off down the corridor to my bedroom.

I grabbed one of her hands and drew her toward me. The swiftness with which she had obeyed me when so much authority had crept into my voice resurrected for me that question I had been on the point of asking when the buzzer interrupted us. But first I said to her, “Don’t you dare come down until I give you permission. Understand?”

She nodded.

And after that the question that now, more than ever, was burning up my mouth:

“How old are you, Oriana? Or are you going to tell me you don’t know that, either?”

I was not so surprised by her answer. A suspicion had been swirling in my head since I was bowled over by her as soon as I saw her. But it still was difficult to believe that purring, indignant, luxurious voice of hers when it announced:

“Of course I know how old I am. I’m four years old.” But she ended up by convincing me when she added, with her eyes unsullied by the slightest shadow of a lie, “But I’ll be celebrating my fifth birthday next month.”

Y
ou haven’t got a partner, Mavirelli. No need to be a genius to find that one out. I may no longer commandeer, for now, perhaps for some time to come, the channels through which I would usually have investigated an interloper, even one so familiar as you; so I merely looked it up in the phone directory. There you are, replete with all your titles, but without an associate. I don’t blame you: to submerge oneself in the water that stagnates beneath a stranger’s face, it is best to be alone.

You could afford the luxury. Though I was more lonely, I couldn’t. I’ve got a—all right, right, I can see your smile, Miravello, if you had heard me using the verb in the present tense, so I’ll correct myself; during many years I had, yes, as you well know, I used to have a partner. I procured him when it became essential to obtain the money for the camera. Even if I had not been cursed by my singular condition of semivisibility, the sort of business I was setting upon would have demanded it. Dangerous trade. But I could think of no other way to produce long-term dividends. I might have been young, but I already understood how vital it was that nobody should ever guess the power that these eyes of mine bestow upon me. You know what? I still think the same thing today: if people were to suspect who I am, they would liquidate me. Even you, with all the spies you have on my tail, do not begin to surmise what I hide. Soon, though, you will find out.

Unlike those who get involved with a partner blindly, commending themselves to fluctuating laws and ineffectual contracts to protect them from mistrust, mockery, and theft, I had, my cunning Doctor, an advantage. I could examine the defects of my
schoolmates, one by one, till I discovered the right person. And I could take all the time required. Not only that. The more time I took, the deeper I foraged into their lives—and naturally into the lives of our teachers—the more profitable my business. Not a dirty closet, not a furtive nose picker, not a concealed perversion, escaped me. They had treated me as if I did not exist; this was vengeance of a scrupulous nature, to use my insignificance to witness their animal grunts as they learned the first steps of sex, the sounds that came from them as they lost control over their shaking bodies. Oh, yes: without knowing it, they defiled themselves every night in front of an audience of one.

The person I needed had to be my reverse, a human being absolutely befuddled by the urgency to be loved. Perhaps someone who many years ago had started out from the same gray indifference that others showed me but who had overcome it by other methods, who had chosen to gain affection by doing tricks, as if the world were a circus and his life had been created in order to entertain the spectators. Someone supposedly benevolent, a great jokester, whom nobody would ever suspect. Someone whom everybody liked a little bit but who really, deep inside (my eyes followed him there, even though I hadn’t yet the film with which to fix his excesses), hated all those around him. The essence of resentment, someone who—with the hope of piling up a something of money and an anything of fame—had become a pleasant-enough fellow, a garden of fraudulent smiles.

That person’s name was Tristan Pareja, and to me he owes everything he has conquered in life.

He was the one who was going to be the front for my ambitions. It was a matter of playing upon the cords of his real ambition, giving him a mirror in which he would be able to recognize his most intimate longings—and then of waiting. The genie of the magic lamp, or the demon, could not have shown more patience than I. It was slow in developing: let him take the bait every week, swallow it over and over, until his gizzard was so full of hooks and lures that it would be enough to pull serenely on the string and I would have him gasping at my feet.

I began by sending him information. Every Monday a new tidbit. Though he had no idea who the source was, the information
was shattering in its precision. He might have been a buffoon, but he was at least a clever buffoon. I watched him carefully so that I could be present when he decided to employ one of my messages to some purpose. And one day I saw how Tristan paralyzed the class bully with a phrase that was apparently innocent but that referred to the fact that the bastard had been masturbating on the principal’s desk after hours. While my camouflaged face silently observed the bully’s twitchings and moans. I almost felt like congratulating Tristan. That was the way to do things. Subtly, administering what you find out about others to gain ascendancy over them, without making them panic, letting them love you and speak well of you, controlling them so they don’t realize. I felt even better about my choice when I garnered that Tristan was preparing his campaign to be class president. I kept on tossing him handy morsels, each week for months, until one day I dared suggest to him that we meet after class. He agreed, of course—he was hunting for votes—but I measured his perplexity: I could see how he probed his memory to find some trace of me, and came away with none.

He was even more startled when that very afternoon I told him that standing in front of him was none other than his informant. He wasn’t ready to believe me. I mentioned a couple of incidents in his life, confidential and embarrassing, which only he knew, or at least, that is what he had thought up till this moment. About how he listened to his mother’s menstrual pains, how he took her underwear out of the wash. About the neighbor’s shaggy dog. Then he believed me. But never fully. He always supposed that someone was behind me, that I was fronting for someone just as he was fronting for me, a chain of hidden manipulators. It strikes me even now, thirty or so years later, that he still underestimates me, looks down on me. How could somebody as insignificant as I, less substantial than a shadow, be able to acquire so much vicious and verifiable gossip about people? I’m not bothered that he may think that: I even stimulate and encourage it.

At first, Tristan was insulted by my demand that he begin to use my information to get money. People are like that. You propose what they need, what should be absolutely clear to them, and it takes them weeks to accept it. They’ve got—I’m not sure if this is the right word, Doctor, because I have never felt anything
like it—qualms, I guess. They need time to subdue what they call their conscience. Ridiculous to spend so much energy denying something that you’re going to end up doing, anyway. Tristan was souring his life with a false squeamishness. He resisted selling the news I had been giving him. Poor thing must have thought that I had constructed my whole spy network merely so that he could be named the most popular kid in school.

“How can you ask me to blackmail my own friends?”

“Blackmail?”

The truth is that the idea had never come near my eyes. Not even now do I concur with that sort of tactic. But this photo, you’ll say, the one that shortly you will have in your sweltering hands? And this demand of mine for a couple of favors? Not blackmail, Doctor. It’s called war reparations: what a vanquished person, in this case you, Doctor, pays the victorious army.

I was against blackmail then, just as I am now, for reasons that had nothing to do with ethics: simply a matter of security. Nothing is riskier than offering to silence insinuations about someone in exchange for cash. They’ll end up seeking revenge. Or, if they’re too scared for that, they’ll steal or commit some other crime to get some impossible sum, and when one of them is caught, as is bound to happen, the whole building comes tumbling down. You clean up today, you’re broke tomorrow. Blackmail is a fundamentally unstable system, which can bring only ruin to all those involved.

It’s much better to sell that secret information to others. That’s what the press moguls have done—the inexpensive sale to curious mobs of what is unknown. To establish an extended net of prying minds and hook them with the sort of bait that I fed to Tristan; to reel in a couple of coins at a time, slowly, very slowly. Don’t call attention to yourself, don’t provoke catastrophes or melodramas. Instruct them about things they themselves could unearth if they were more observant, less vociferous, more ubiquitous. Satisfy their mania for trivia—what smudge-colored hairs that girl begins to tuft between her thighs, the fact that Carlos secretly wants to play in Jorge’s position on the team and the maneuvers he’s exercising to get his way, how long it takes the language teacher to evoke a whimper from the school secretary on their couch. The breasts of
that secretary, the damp stain of her nipples, the way in which she calls the name of her uncle at the climax. I’d have made a great journalist, I think, but I’d have screwed myself. Better to be like this, behind the crowd, far from the madding eyes. Nobody was jealous of me. Nobody threatened me. Until I met up with you, Doctor Marvirelli.

So Tristan was refusing to cooperate with me. I had anticipated that sort of reaction. I knew that, within a couple of weeks, he would return with his mouth watering, to beg for a new crop of malice. People are trapped by what others start to expect of them; trapped, my dear Doctor, you who are such an expert in pigmentation, by the image they themselves have tried to introduce into everybody else’s pupils. Do you understand now why I am a slave to no one?

Although, I’m really not sure if others fail to perceive me or if, one fraction of a second after my face interferes with their horizon, a millionth of a second after they have cast their gaze upon me, they already begin to wash me from their memory: forgotten before arriving at the scant, sad archangel of a remembrance. It’s all the same how it happens. We require somebody to look at us in order to exist. As nobody can imagine me or even conjecture the possibility that I may be present, as this mistake that I turned into should not be there in front of their eyes, as it is clear to me that my mother should have aborted and maybe did, as my father instead of opening a bottle of champagne at my birth overlooked my existence and went to sleep, because of all this, since then, since before then, I have been an erasure. Everybody will go through this process of disappearance, once dead. I am the only one who has had to experience it while still alive.