All of a sudden, here inside, a warning. Here inside, an unknown desire, so unrecognizable and dangerous that it felt like a slap. What I wanted was their return. Correction: I didn’t want them ever to leave. Correction again: Patricia and her contact lenses could go to hell. The one I didn’t want to leave was the other one, the new one, the woman who at that moment did not yet have a name.
Describe her, Doctor? Beautiful, Doctor? Let’s suppose that she is. For you, for other men, it matters that you should be seen with a flashy woman, who awakens everybody else’s envy. But these eyes know, and yours should as well, Doctor, of what tricks and shades the loveliness of human beings is composed. And she—well, it was as if she came from a world where nobody had ever heard of Helena Rubinstein, where the touched-up portrait had not been invented, where the yellow gloves of surgeons such as you, Marvirelli, are forbidden. She was hiding nothing. Which did not mean that she was mere wrapping paper. An enigma, but not one of those easy enigmas you can explore through a keyhole or a concealed camera or the recording of sighs and creaks in the bed from the next room in some second-class dive.
This is not how Oriana should be described.
I won’t explain it to you this afternoon. After lunch, as your nurse pointed out. And if you could listen to me right now, I wouldn’t do it, either. But since you can’t hear a word I’m saying, I’ll take my time. Once on the radio they announced that the vice-president of some bank had committed suicide. Blew his brains out. It happens every day. To people whose face—the one they have constructed for themselves—fails them. Or to people whom even you doctors can’t help by giving them a new identity. Yes, it happens every day. But in this case, he did it in front of the TV cameras, in front of a dozen photographers. They had nailed the guy in some sleazy deal: he was registering the dead as if they were alive and collecting their pensions, or he simply wasn’t recording the deaths of people and was still collecting, or something of the sort, or both things. I can’t remember. Conning people just like you do, Mardovelli. Swindlers. He called a press conference, and after having protested his innocence, he very serenely took a revolver from his attaché case and he ruined his make-up forever. Or his plastic surgery, Doctor, if he had ever passed under the lights of your clinic.
Too bad I had only one television set. The two newscasts are transmitted at the same time, so that evening I had to switch from one channel to the other, back and forth. A fruitless search. The damned journalists had reached an agreement among themselves. On the first channel, all the preliminaries, to be sure, almost the whole press conference—but no final big-bang moment. On the other, a brief news item, accompanied by a photo of the dead man before he—A fraud. A fraud. Much worse than the one that the suicide banker had perpetrated. That’s how the clients of a night club must feel when the strip tease stops at the waist. Everywhere you look, censorship. At that very moment, the journalists, the personnel of each network, were enjoying the scene, enjoying their supposed horror of the scene. What right did they have to interpose themselves between the dead man and these eyes of mine? If he wanted to go public with his departure from this earth, how did they dare steal that from me?
I switched on another channel, one that wasn’t transmitting anything. Like a face without skin, Doctor. I stayed there, looking at that colorless shit, that meaningless static for a long time—that’s what they had transformed the man’s act into, that’s what they made of my eyes. To tune in to the other news made no sense. Lies, only lies. Everything a lie—except that instant which was the only truthful act that banker had ever committed in his dissembling life, his sleight-of-hand existence. A treasure that those journalists, his only spectators, because they had camouflaged it, had proven to be unworthy of. On the other hand, me—if he had decided to commit suicide in front of me …
And Oriana?
The brief flash of her sudden appearance was sufficient: it was as if she were exclusively made up of culminating moments, like that banker’s. As if in each instant of her existence, she lived that exposed, that openly daring—but without hastening the proof, without having to kill herself, death as the only road to revelation. And there was not one inch of a bad check in her, not one internal P.R. man burning the less flattering photographs, not the hint of one vice-president inside her trying to pass the dead for the living or vice versa. The proof? I couldn’t invent one scene about her in my head, I couldn’t imagine, as I can with all the other women in the universe, as I just had with trumped-up Patricia, the towel with which she dries her armpit. She hasn’t got—the idea zigzagged in my head like a white serpent—more than this instant, more than this face. No investigation, no file on her past, no photograph, would reveal anything different. Never in my life had I seen a transparent adult, with nothing to hide, without an artificial smile to fashion her. A person whom you—especially you, Doctor—couldn’t add to or detract from. A person who never needed to retreat from other eyes. It can’t be, I said to myself. It can’t be.
But it could be, it was.
Patricia had taken a seat on the sofa without so much as waiting for an invitation. She crossed her legs and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. Oriana, clear as a crystal, just stood there, on one foot, scratching it with the scruff of her other shoe, as if she were expecting us to decide what we were going to play next.
“Oh, no, you don’t. Not in this house—no smoking here … Patricia? Is that still your name?”
“Why not?” she answered brazenly. It didn’t worry her that she had just admitted using an assumed name. How could she know that, merely having glimpsed her twice, if I felt like it, I could ferret out her true identity this very Monday. If I were the kind who smiles, perhaps something would have crept onto my face to let her know. But I’m not. Nobody has ever detected what I’m thinking by my lips. “Hey, Oriana, the bathroom’s upstairs.” That clean miracle called Oriana began to disappear up the stairway. “And don’t come out till I tell you, okay?”
I don’t know what shocked me more: the fact that Patricia was treating her like a defenseless little brat or the fact that a woman as mature, yes, and as splendid as Oriana would turn out to be so docile, so submissive.
I didn’t bother to hide my distaste for Patricia and her tinsel-assed bossiness. She was taking over my house with the same high-handedness with which she was ordering Oriana around. Her only cordial act had been her first—that slackish, demure, almost cowardly way of knocking at my door two days before. Dissembling slut. If she had rung the bell frantically, I wouldn’t have let her in, even if I had thought, as in fact I did, that it was Divine Providence herself who was sending me this tidbit the day before a Christmas that announced itself as usual, lonely and austere. No sign of Oriana that day. A pity. Because if I had caught a glance of her that Wednesday, there can be no doubt I would have told Patricia I was ready to keep her friend for a day, for a couple of days. Really a pity, because instead of going out in my car that evening, I’d have stayed at home and avoided burning that red light and colliding head on with the grand limousine, Doctor Miravelli, in which you were parading around with your lover.
But I’ve never been a man with luck. On that occasion, rather than extracting Oriana from her coat pocket, Patricia had taken out a letter.
“From your friend Alicia,” she said.
Alicia. That’s not her name, Doctor. But if I were to describe her to you, Doctor, you might remember. Not because you care about your patients, but this one—well, she was, according to the rules of fashion that you go by, a real crone. I bet you have her in your files: before and after. To persuade other hags. But that’s as far as your files go, right, Doctor? You don’t want to find out what becomes of your clients later on, I guess. Although you may have learned that, with the face you loaned her, she had to leave the country; you probably don’t know that four years later she was dead.
The joy I felt at having received her promised dispatch was mitigated by a lash of indignation against Patricia. How dare she tak
e this long to contact me?
“Two years,” I said, not touching the damned letter with even the tip of a finger. “Couldn’t you have brought it before?”
“Didn’t need to,” said Patricia. And before this throat of mine could accuse her of irresponsibility—what if there had been some important message?—she interrupted me as if she could read my thoughts: I didn’t like that much, either—it’s something I prefer to do to others. “Nothing important,” she said.
“What? What’s that you said?”
“Nothing important,” Patricia repeated.
“And how come you know that?”
“Because I read it. You could almost say I dictated it. There’re only a couple of lines and a photo.”
A photo! The photo had finally come. Would it show her face before you remodeled it, before you ruined her life? Or would it be the newer version—the falsified features you dolled her up with and which, for my part, I refused to look at? Such an urgent question, and the answer could come only from Patricia’s bitter tongue, from this unknown woman who, for two years, had kept my correspondence inside a drawer in her room, opening it and reading and rereading it over and over whenever it tickled her cunt. While I had thought, all this time, that Alicia had forgotten me.
It wasn’t that I expected her to die with my name on her lips. But she was the one, after all, who was consuming a big bite of my existence. She was leaving me in an uncomfortable position: from now on the only confirmation of that brief week of friendship we had lived was to be found in the sterile memories dammed up inside my brain. She owed me some sort of souvenir. Something that would allow me to fool and retain the past that was departing with her. Because I did not have even one photograph of her: no one has ever been given a greater token of my affection. I won’t take one, I won’t accept one, I told her. But if you happen to die, send me one, so I won’t be alone with my memories. Memories, I said to her, are like ham: you can slice them, devour them, digest them, shit them. A photograph: now, you can fuck a photograph forever. How romantic, she had replied sarcastically. But she cared a bit for me, Alicia, and here was the evidence. Though if she had really given a damn about me, Doctor, she wouldn’t have gone ahead with the operation. She preferred the future you were offering her, Mavarillo: be someone else, alter your nose, be someone else, slip out of your skin, change your life in fifteen minutes. Confidentiality guaranteed. Never met a face I couldn’t fix. She was already convinced by your commercials, Doctor. It was too late by the time we had met. A week later I dropped her off at the door to your consulting room, Doctor, with her face already bandaged. She went in. I never saw her again. She was already—that’s right—someone else.
I took the photo out of the envelope. I placed it face down on the carpet. Until I was alone I didn’t want to look at those eyes of hers that had already died—whether they were the ones I remembered or the more recent ones that you had sewn under her eyelids to make them beautiful. I read her letter as if someone were kicking me in the stomach.
Instead of feeling glad because Alicia had remembered me, I was beginning to hate her. What she had never done to me while she was alive, she was doing to me from her grave, manipulating me with the typical selfishness of the dead. What had attracted me to her in the first place was precisely that difference from others. That, and the fact that she was the first woman, and let me confess that she was the only one, who recognized me in my life. It may have been because she herself was so left out and on the side lines at school that she had no alternative but to take a good look at each kid, including that one kid who was on the edge of invisibility.
“Hello. Remember me?”
I was on line at a bank. The voice came from behind me, and there was no way, of course, that I could identify its owner. If I had that talent, the guy who calls me up to murmur my name over the phone and then laughs and then hangs up, that guy wouldn’t stand a chance: once I’d captured his voice, I’d follow it to his hideaway, I’d squeeze his face out, drop by drop, onto celluloid as I have done with so many others in this land. But I am utterly unable to discern one tone from another. It isn’t a form of deafness. It’s just that I hate music. Or—to put it more mildly—I’m indifferent to music. When Alicia wanted to know why I didn’t have a record or a cassette at home, my answer perhaps was not a lie: the only music I can distinguish is the kind that flickers in through the eyes. My brain doesn’t seem to distinguish sounds by their vibrations, shades, tone, colors. There it is. Shades, tone, colors. Even the words I use for music are visual.
There’s nothing wrong in living for the nourishment of your eyes, Doctor. It’s got its compensations. To be brief: just as there are those who can easily remember melodies, I am absolutely unable to forget a face. Ever. Nobody can deceive me, Doctor, understand? Nobody can slip on a disguise that I won’t see through. Nobody can alter his face, Doctor, nobody can pass under the swirl and eddy of your hands, Mardavelli, without my discovering them. But music? Not a note. A monster? Far from it. I’m merely living ahead of my time. That’s where we are heading. Music is receding into the background in these times. This is not the century of sounds. I’m not denying that people still listen to songs, sure they do, but what really matters is elsewhere: the image, the lipstick, the tanning lotions. Sounds are like maids: they travel second-class.
So my indifference to the noises and jabbering that others spew forth is no deprivation. That I wasn’t able even to discern the sex of the person talking to me that day in the bank was no cause for shame. On the contrary: I almost felt like inventing a smile for my face so I could inflict it upon that intruder behind me. I may not know you by your voice, but it is enough to turn toward you the deep furrow of my eyes and—if I feel like it—dredge your life from you.
I moved my head to look at whoever might own that voice. But while I was doing it, underneath the idea of a smile, I was assailed by a slight uneasiness. Because I had never heard words like those pronounced by anybody. That was my phrase, the question I had been repeating all these years, first timidly and then with despair—remember me? Remember me?—until finally it was transformed into, I know you don’t remember me but … and of course they never remembered and in my case did not even pretend to remember. When Alicia spoke those words on the bank line that day, it had been many years since I had fallen back onto that phrase. Many years since I had decided I would never again ask that question or precede that question with an explanation. I would not give the rest of them one detail, one key to understanding who I was. It is true that by the time I gave up asking, I already possessed other instruments to amuse me … I was living alone, I had already changed my name, I was settled in at the Department of Traffic Accidents; but above all my camera stalked the city as freely as if I had been the Chief of Police. And Alicia had come to disturb the calm I had acquired. She was restoring for me that obscene phrase, almost as if someone wanted to make fun, at this late date, of what I had once desired: to be a man like any other man, who misplaces one person and remembers another one, who is recognized by most people and is ignored by a few. Alicia made me feel like that man. That is why I never followed her, I never took her photo, I never bedded her. If she had been able to avoid the temptation of your propaganda, Doctor, to acquiesce forever to the gross and demeaning features that she had been given, perhaps this would have been a different story. Perhaps I would have grown to love someone who would accept me as I was. But she was at that bank to deposit the money for the surgery that you had sold her, Doctor.
“So …” Patricia had waited, unruffled, for me to read the good-bye letter.
“It says the carrier of the letter will come to visit if she has any need of my aid and—”
“I know what it says,” interrupted the selfsame carrier. “What I’m interested in is if you’re going to help.”
“That depends,” my throat answered, but I already knew I wouldn’t do it. By allowing a woman such as Patricia to meddle in my life, to come to my doorstep, to
read my correspondence, Alicia had betrayed the pact of our intimacy. I wondered if she had really recognized me that day at the bank or if it was all just a trick to get me to hide her away at my house during the week before the operation. It was true that she had opened that post office box for me abroad—a delicate mission I could not have entrusted to anybody else. That was true. But hadn’t I, on the other hand, destroyed all her files so she could leave the country without being arrested, when someone—do you know who I’m talking about, Doctor?—turned a picture of her most recent face over to the police? So we were even. I owed her nothing.
“I have someone whom I’d like you to keep. Just for a night. She’s … a friend.”
I could read her panic. What an actress—Patricia; what a performance: she was the kind who doesn’t need to study a role in front of the mirror, the dangerous kind who ends up believing her own lies. But nobody sewed my eyelids together. Her serenity was as false as her words, as false as her name. If I felt like it, one of these days I’d drain you like a gutter, Patricia, I’d unfasten every button in your life, I’d leave you with nothing more than a smear of skin to hide in. Thank Alicia, whose memory still protects you—or I would capture you, each inch of your garbage. Your most undesirable and indecorous moment would be put out to dry in my darkroom, and then I would send you to join all the other photos in that post box Alicia herself rented for me abroad. I abstained from prowling out Patricia’s motives, from anticipating, as I always do when somebody intrigues me, a past, a probable biography. Her schemes did not interest me. I was, in fact, beginning to feel bored. It was time to polish the whole matter off.
“Impossible,” I said.
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