Mascara (6 page)

My mother was red with anger. “Look at this spendthrift. He’s wasted the whole roll.” She was angrier still, some days later, when she had the photos developed. The seven of the family were clouded over, as if a paraplegic had taken them. “This brat can’t do anything right.”

And the others?

My mother waved her hand in disgust. “Dreadful.”

“Let me see.”

“You are not going to see anything. We’re—why, we’re … ugly. Horrible, if you must know. As if somebody had spat us out.”

“Let me see, Mom.”

“Everything this brat does comes out wrong. This’ll be the first family gathering we won’t have a photograph of.”

To punish me, she didn’t even let me peek at them. I saw those claws of hers tearing up each photo, grinding them, searching out the weakest part of the paper—and sending all the pieces to the garbage.

That night I went down to retrieve my photographs. As if I were apprenticed to some plastic surgeon, Doctor, I spent several days putting the pieces together again. Sloppy with strands of squash, frying oil, peelings, buttered over with foul-smelling salad dressing, punctured by pork bones. I felt no revulsion. For years I had been salvaging food from plastic bags. I was an expert in junk.
But even I did not know enough to recompose all those mustard-stained photos. A mirror that has cracked and is repaired can never give out the same light as a normal mirror. There were the faces I remembered, devastated by the acid in my mother’s fingers, washed by my cousins’ gastric juices, sickened by sauces for a banquet to which I was never invited. But none of that could stop me from realizing that these photographs were marvelous. Not the ones clouded over, the official ones. The other ones, where my relatives had been caught off guard.

I went through them and over them and into them with a love that was infinite. Once again I felt the total joy I had contracted at the moment when I had pressed that button. They corresponded exactly, shade by shade, to the image I still kept in my head. I knew that if I had them now, without a tear, without a stain, they would have been the exact and mathematical replica of what I had seen through that magic eye in the howling instant when the button had clicked. More than that, I knew that if I was the owner of a camera, I would be able to reach the most absolute harmony between my brain and the world. There it was, confirmed in something alien to me, a shining sheet of broken celluloid—the evidence.

I had found my calling.

And had simultaneously lost the instrument that would allow its fulfillment.

Because my parents never again loaned me the camera. Still less would they have thought of buying me one. I have wondered if their denial was due to their having realized that the photographs my mother had destroyed were dangerous. Did they catch a glimpse of themselves as they really were? And could they not bear that someone, in particular their own son, would journey through the world with a machine that captured the black nakedness in their soul, in each person’s soul? Did they understand instinctively, as I did, that if I had been able to keep intact that proof of their vileness and hypocrisy, I would have entangled them forever in my eyes, that I would have been able to seize them and hold them ransom-less forever? Probably not: they were too arrogant to suppose that a nonentity such as myself would be able to do anything of the sort. Their denial was merely to punish me for having called attention to my existence, for having bothered them with my presence.

“It would be a waste of good money,” my father had declared. “Like giving an armless man a piano.”

To complicate matters, I didn’t want just any camera. I needed the best equipment in the world. And a darkroom that I could use without any interference: so that nobody would ever again be able to tear up what I had seen. I was going to have to acquire these things, plus an abundant supply of virgin film, all on my own. Like everything I have ever gotten in life. Without anyone else’s help.

It took me almost three years.

I had to tell myself to be patient. I silenced the galloping needs of my sex with the primitive, undeniable certainty that Enriqueta already belonged to me.

That prediction was to be verified to my complete satisfaction. To own another human being, the only thing necessary is to kidnap her intimacy, to deflower with my camera what my eyes had already explored. But initially my intuition about the future was still darkened by an illusion that continued to prey upon me. Normality. That illusion. Yes, I still dreamt of betrothing Enriqueta, of becoming my parents’ prodigal son, of arriving with fanfare at a party. In a word, I was still submitting myself to the fiction that it was possible, and even desirable, for me to become permanently visible, a loyal member of your world, Doctor, the world where you reign.

Three years later, when the camera’s hidden premiere deprived Enriqueta of her façade, I began to realize that I might be mistaken. And one week after that, when my sex had its own avid premiere inside the slime between Enriqueta’s legs, I confirmed that the quest for normality was definitely a mistake.

Of course those people started to flutter their eyes on my forgettable face. Of course Enriqueta, as soon as I had gathered the evidence of her falsehood, as soon as the collection of her most abject moments were in my hands, gave herself up to me. But when she took off her clothes and her nakedness turned out to be less exciting and far less splendid than the photograph of her that I had slipped underneath my bedroom wallpaper, I grasped that making love to her was not going to liberate me. As long as I was obsessed with the need that she, that others, register my features in their fragile, blind contact lenses, as long as I had no other objective in life, I would continue to be chained to an orbit whose primary was someone
else. Did I want to live the rest of my life extracting love from other people as if I were milking a cow? What value could her glance at me have if it depended on something as transitory as a photograph, if it was produced by her primitive, inexplicable fear of the photograph that she did not even know existed but that gave me power over her? What value is that, if she forgot me immediately?

If I wanted to be permanently recognized, I would have to live like a hypnotizer among his victims—forcing them to look at me, violating them at every turn, pulling at their leashes, devouring them with my eyes so that they would obscurely apprehend that I had somehow gotten into their bloodstream, that there was no recourse against that sort of transfusion. If, on the other hand, I wanted only to know them, then I could know them better than they could themselves, I could know the image that no mirror would dare reveal, I could penetrate deeper than any hypodermic needle, microscope, or X-ray machine, or the hands of a plastic surgeon. And deeper, I thought, at the very moment when I entered into Enriqueta, deeper and better than this sad vulnerable sex depositing its vomit inside uncaring muscles.

For one last time I tried to fool myself. I closed my eyes while I was making love, aware that I would open them upon the trembling of her orgasm. There she was, sweating love underneath me—a twisted image of herself. If she had managed to accede to that secret face of hers that I had crammed inside the photograph, if in the act of love she had been able to rise into her real identity, a flash of herself, a revelation, I could have forgiven all the other thousand impassive faces with which she had ground me into nothingness during the last decade; I might even have put aside that shameful moment with the doll. It might, perhaps, have been possible for my sex to verify her hidden face. But only my camera had that skill. There was no hope. She was as false in love as she was in everything else—the contortions of her rapture were mere propaganda, one more attempt to mock whoever might be watching her. What need was there of going through the obscene rite of entering and leaving her body with a piece of my own body if what she revealed was murkier and less passionate than what existed in my black-and-white celluloid collection?

This does not mean that I ceased using my own rather demanding organ. I religiously carried out the terms of the covenant we had subscribed to: he had been quiescent all the long years it took me to procure the photographic equipment that could satisfy his longings, and it was now my turn to serve at his pleasure. But it was a pleasure localized in the sad trigger itself, a pleasure that never fulfilled its threat of flooding the rest of my body with the violence of hot, remote waves, that could never compare with the total jubilation of a pair of eyes sucking the truth from a picture. You get me, Doctor, the jubilation of gnawing piece by piece the secrets that those women did not even tell their best friends. What a sense of well-being, to have inverted the roles at last: to act toward those women as if I were the visible one and they were the blind shadows. Sex ended up being no more than a trivial pursuit: far less interesting than the game I played with each face; inventing a history for it and then spending weeks researching the woman whose face it was, finding out how faithfully my imagination had constructed her story. That’s why I turned my back on Alicia when she chose her artificial face. I did not want to risk the disappointment of seeing her cheeks glow with falsehood at the culminating moment of love-making. I did not want to steal her face from her or keep it forever in a photograph.

And that was also why, years later, I did not want to spy on Oriana; I would not treat her as I had treated the other women before her. She was the first woman in the world I did not fear. The first I would not have to photograph in order to coax an erection from my body.

“Oriana? Oriana, do you need something?”

She’d been in the bathroom for about half an hour and not a sound could be heard. Had something happened to her?

“Yes.” Her answer came quite faintly through the door.

“You need something?”

“Permission.”

“Permission for what?”

“Where’s Patricia?”

“Patricia left. She said she’d be back tomorrow to get you.”

“Then you’re the one who’ll have to give me permission.”

This little game didn’t bother me at all. It was a matter of putting my ear to the door and licking in the sound of her breathing on the other side, her body pulsating, itself drawn up to the wood. After so many years in which my eyes had been the only king of my body, there was a strange calmness in allowing them to rest. “I’ve never given something without getting something in return,” I said.

“What do you want me to do?”

“You could start by telling me your real name.”

“My real name?”

“Don’t go and tell me that you’re called Oriana. I don’t know anybody called Oriana.”

“And if I can’t tell you my real name, you won’t give me permission?”

“Did Patricia forbid it?”

“No. It isn’t that. It’s that … but you wouldn’t believe me.”

“Tell me and I’ll give you permission.”

“Promise that you’ll believe me.”

“Why shouldn’t I?”

“If I told you, for example, if I told you that I didn’t know, what would you say?”

“That you didn’t know your own name?”

“If I don’t know it, you won’t give me permission?”

“Let’s compromise. I’d settle for your nickname. They must have called you something when you were a kid, right?”

“I’m not going to speak one more word to you till you open this door.”

All of a sudden I realized that this was the permission that, in Patricia’s absence, she was expecting from me: permission to come out of the bathroom! Some laceration in the echo of her voice indicated to me—and I was not seeing her—that for her our playful interchange had never been a game.

“You open it,” I said. “I’m not the one who’s got you shut up inside.”

“You’ll give me permission to open it?”

“Yes.”

“Even if I don’t tell you my name.”

“I’ll give you all the permissions in the universe.”

“No. You open it.”

I opened the door.

Where did that air of innocence come from? I don’t believe it was the smile, ripe, full as her lips. Or that cascade of savage hair, which somehow contained the mouths that had passed through it, tasting it. Not even those eyes, in which, in spite of the lack of one lonesome tear, there shone a moist forlornness, as if something in her, very far away, had been crying.

She stretched her arms upward, as children do when they want to be carried or comforted.

I didn’t want to think about it, I didn’t want to, but it was inevitable—corrupting the moment, soiling it from the past.

That’s right, Doctor. It was that damn doll of Enriqueta’s that intercepted my memory at that very moment. As abandoned as Oriana was now, I demanded in that silence some sort of proof that it was really me those arms were begging for to save her, now that she was in distress—not Patricia, not some other man, not a doctor to the rescue, but me. I demanded proof that her eyes would not pass through me as though I did not exist.

I awaited a signal that I was the one she needed.

It came.

For the second time in one hour, perhaps in my life, I saw myself reduced to what my ears could apprehend in order to decipher the maps of the universe. From somewhere—but it had to be from inside her, from the darkness in her stomach, which had just had breakfast, which had recently oozed some element into my toilet as a sign of trust while I did not spy upon her—the slightest of laments slit the air to remind me of all that we already shared, a wail from her innerside which sounded, clearly, as a song for me. An invitation to invade the place where no eye could ever go and no camera roam—someplace warm and turbulent and digesting and murmuring inside her—a place which was, which had to be, for me.

I gathered her into my arms.

“It’s just that”—and her breath tickled my neck, made my hair stand up as if it had been charged with electricity—“it’s that … It’s not as if I didn’t want to tell you. My name. It’s just that I don’t remember.”

“You don’t remember?”

And when she answered, Doctor, there dawned in me the beginning of an understanding of what it was in her that attracted me so, though you won’t believe me. I began to see how it was possible that a person who didn’t have so much as a stain to hide, could simultaneously be one loud howl demanding exploration, the beginning of an explanation.