Mascara

by Ariel Dorfman

  The first face a little one sees is not something far away, outside, like a mirror in the sky. Not so. The first thing any child sees is the inside of his father’s face, he sees the maneuvers that his own features must start rehearsing and that are constantly being sewn onto him like an umbrella of skin against the rain. In order to keep out other, possibly worse, invaders, he adopts his father’s shell. Human beings are trapped inside the dead faces of their remote ancestors, repeated from generation to generation. From inside that chain, the grandparents of our grandparents watch us. Adults are their envoys, Doctor, the incessant, invisible remodelers of each baby born. So what every child inspires in the world is not a blessing, but a face lift. Every child, that is, except for me.

  I do not know if I was born without a face or if I refused to fashion one—refused to do to myself what Enriqueta was at that very moment doing to her doll. By then I already knew, as I watched her, that each morning adults compose their shields for the day, the walls they will inflict upon children and anybody else in the hours to come. I was tiny, I could hardly walk, I think, when I would get up on full-moon nights and toddle to my parents’ room to watch them sleep. At times I saw them making love. I wasn’t scared. Even if they had lifted their eyes, even if later on they had awoken, they wouldn’t have seen me. It was the faces that flickered on them during their nightmares that captivated me, the only faces that were not spruced up, the only faces without a mother—mine or any other—to intervene at dawn, without an inner plastic surgeon preparing the façade as the body’s ambassador. There was no insurance agent in those faces, no selling of them in the stock exchange or the futures market of everyday life. Doctor, there are no fairy godmothers. They don’t exist. But stepmothers of your body, yes, there are those, Doctor, reconstructing at the moment of awakening our daily mask, defeating the truths that the night has permitted the brain to distill, our daily looks, amen. Watching Enriqueta’s rouge-stained doll, I understood that what I had needed was a loving hand to shed upon me a benediction of colors. I was born without a surgeon godfather—and no mother to furnish my lips with flowers for the day’s long funeral. The woman who had spawned me was too busy with the faces of strangers to make that special effort to rescue me, and so I sunk ever more into anonymity.

  Enriqueta lay her cosmetic-slurred doll on a small cot and took out a series of medical instruments from a bag—these, at least, were playthings. She shook the baby to make it cry, and when a broken, almost human, hiccup sputtered up, “My little love,” Enriqueta lullabied. “Are you sick?”

  She set about to discover—the daughter of a doctor, after all—what was wrong with the doll. She sounded it and pinched it and scratched its underarms brutally; she explored the nasal channels with a flashlight and the eardrums with a little hammer. I had been through that—the medical exams. My father sold medical equipment to hospitals: hypodermic needles, stethoscopes, things that penetrate the body and try to emerge with a representation of what is happening inside. I had heard him talk about something called an X ray, which took photographs of people’s innards. I wondered if maybe those photos might reveal why nobody paid any attention to me, if they would reveal that something was wrong. In order to get them taken, I faked tremendous tummy pains—which had the added advantage of allowing me to go to the bathroom ten, eleven times, each day and to spy on whomsoever was in it while I awaited my turn outside.

  When the results were brought in, I was disappointed. Sorry to have to tell you this, Doctor—for you, after all, those plates are like maps, the secret topography onto which you graft your false buildings. But believe me—and you may agree with me here—that gray rubbish, those inert shadows, those sterile ghosts, were anything but the truth. They were just as much a sham as the knuckles of doctors drumming on one’s thorax, guessing at the dark, sick light that lodges in our lungs. I aspired to different depths, depths that everyone can see. That was not me on those negatives. Because in there, in our intestines, we are all equal. So are frogs fried dry by the sun. Trying to find the difference between human beings in the bones—what madness. What each of us really means rises to the surface, yes, right there, for everybody to see—or would you disagree, Doctor? There is a hidden something that will at any moment emerge and will pose itself, just so, Moravelli, like a blister on a mouth that is about to be punctured, and if you happen not to be present, if you do not know ahead of time that this supreme moment is on the verge of briefly blossoming, then that truth will submerge itself all over again. But it will surge outward once more, it will, no matter how much people such as you try to cover it or suffocate it or whatever it is that you do to it.

  Was that when I began to hate doctors, the day I was shown those plates? No, I hated them long before that. I think that I portended that you would be my great rival, Doctor Marviralle, that you would be awaiting me in the future, ready to practice to its utmost that capacity for camouflage that people learn from their parents, ready to fling counterfeit faces in my direction to see if I would be able to decipher them. The instinctive hatred of plastic surgeons—the worst of the lot, because they do not even respect the outer trimmings, because all their efforts are made in order to suppress a revelation. Not that the others are any better, with their god of pills, their smell like a pharmacist’s thumbs, believing that they can sound out what moves slowly in our depths, inserting their instruments into the mouth and beyond the asshole and under the fingernails, into the swamp of a heart we have each inherited. Cleavers that open you as if you were a can of food. To open, to open, to make you bleed, to enter and then—what? Then, nothing. Then they proclaim that they have discovered what is corrupting us, when they are the ones responsible for having made us sick in the first place. That’s their strategy—to make people suffer, just as Enriqueta was now making the doll suffer, in order to explore a sickness that was no more real than the one I had feigned, and all so that the patients would be grateful. A smile from the doll, because Enriqueta’s left hand was now beginning to give comfort for what her own right hand had been visiting upon it.

  Enriqueta sang to the doll in a throaty voice. I allowed something inside me to feel—perhaps for the last time—devastated by the promise of tenderness, the illusion that she would hum this to a child of mine or, better still, directly to me. That zone inside me that listened to the song, was that the section of my being, the clefts of my eyes, that could recognize the seductive force of music, that had the capacity to listen to melodies, but that later on began to close down on me? How can I know? It may be possible that the lullaby of a woman like Enriqueta could have awoken those sounds in my optic nerves. If so, what my eyes witnessed immediately cut off that possibility forever: Enriqueta began to feed the doll with a bottle. The substance inside was wormlike and white, as if someone had mixed dust, lime, even some milk. She poured it into the doll’s mouth and lifted its dress and took off its underpants. Then I saw how she sat it down on a tiny mock toilet seat.

  And then I realized why Enriqueta was taking my drawings home. I knew it before I had to watch how the flow of that liquid mix tapered from the doll’s meager underbelly, I knew it before I had to see the hand of the woman whom I had just been dreaming of as my mate for life snake toward the stock of drawings and … It wasn’t that she used my homages to her as toilet paper. If she had used them for her own rivulets and apertures, I might have convinced myself that she was attempting at least some form of intimacy. But the doll. I swore that one day I would … I would what? What would I do to her? What would I do with my life?

  Of the years that followed, Doctor, the six, seven years that followed, I do not even want to evoke a memory. If I had been able to brand that doll’s dirty bottom forever in my mind, if I had been able to bring it to my eyes without time’s destroying it, as it destroys and menstruates everything, if I could have kept intact that pure implacable flame of hatred I felt … Memory is always a fraud—erased, manipulated, sweetened by somebody, somebody always swearing it was some other wa
y until you are not sure yourself. The past is like one of those faces captured by hands such as yours, Doctor—always subject to alterations. Standing in front of adults, how many times had I desired to return to the past, where I had been so humiliated, to prove to myself that my resentment was no fantasy. It was impossible to go back, impossible to free myself from those older people. Instead, I had to submit, I had to cast down my discolored eyes. Equally impossible, I thought, to bring that piece of the past to my own present. If I could have done that, a girl like Enriqueta would never again confuse me with a giggle—not Enriqueta, not anybody else, would ever again make me drunk with her pretty face. It was too easy for her to recapture me with the foreplay of her illusory lips. A bulwark, that’s what I needed—a bulwark against time.

  I did not know yet that what I was looking for was nothing other than a photograph.

  Meanwhile, Mentirelli, I had no better defense against people than to become more submissive, to await someone’s remote generosity and to start licking his shoe. It was the lap dog’s hope of nuzzling into the nook of somebody’s affections. But not even a speck of dust bothering an eyelid, not even a draft that makes you get up to shut the door—I was less than those things to them. I was trapped in the worst of dependencies: at the mercy of someone else’s love. Leftovers from other smiles, the residue of a happiness meant for another, the last floating particle in a universe without its own light. Darkness, the darkness of those years in the basement of somebody else’s mind. A candy bar in an old shop where no one buys anything, anymore, a candy bar which always remains for some reason in even next year’s stock, which grows stale, which is on sale and discounted over and over again, until it goes for free and still nobody wants it, not even a beggar would touch it. Clearance sale and everything is sold, except that item. There I am, waiting for anyone, in the empty shop that the carpenters begin to dismantle. Nobody to take me home. Nobody to take me to some plastic surgeon so I could grow the face I needed.

  The long blankness of those years before I got my camera: humiliations that were all the worse because nobody actively desired them. I lived as if I were missing. The teachers were surprised when I returned my written tests—as if, for an instant, they realized that I did exist, the brief flash of a match light against the horizon, as if, for an instant, I would appear like a satellite on the sky of their conscience, with only the purpose of quickly setting, my days in their conscience instantaneously created and immediately extinguished. Surprised that I was in their class, because they never spoke to me or asked me a question, they never expelled me, they never called on my uplifted hand. Anybody sitting next to me at the cafeteria was always talking to the kid on the other side. What I would have given, like a used-up cigarette butt, for someone to have put me to their lips for a last—or in my case, a first—puff. For someone to put their lips to the ashes of my lips.

  I had decided—although I doubt it could really be called a decision, Doctor, it was more of an inevitable conclusion—to live like this for the rest of my mediocre existence. When, at the age of twelve, perhaps thirteen, my organ for what is called love began to grow, when that part of my body rebelled and did not want to accept the solitude to which the rest of my being had resigned itself, I asphyxiated it. It stretched out with hunger, it filled with rampaging blood, it hardened against my hand and my skin, which were trying to pacify it. No moist sponge with soap would do, no reproductions of the Venus of Milo, no promises of dolls like Enriqueta’s. It had to be Enriqueta herself. Enriqueta or nobody.

  And it would have been, undoubtedly, nobody, if the art of photography had not come to my rescue at just about that time.

  Each year there was some stupid family reunion, which culminated in an equally imbecilic final ceremony: the neighbor would come by, all false benevolence, to act as official photographer. Which is precisely why photography held no interest for me—because it had always been the authoritative voice of the adult world, the collector of discardable memories. Another cheater of the senses, a new falsifier of time past so that people would not have to make the effort to remember it as it really had been. The worst make-up trick of all. I felt this so strongly that I do not appear in any family album—or in any photo, for that matter. I cannot tell, Doctor, if that is due to my own sneaking away, preferring to be a spectator of the others’ deluded quest for immortality; or if it was the camera itself which understood that my function was not to be snarled into a photograph but to photograph someone else, and which therefore automatically excluded me from the panorama it was taking.

  So when the neighbor let us know at the last moment that he could not come that day and the family had to search for a replacement, I didn’t mind that they chose me. I patiently waited while they carried out a typical adult discussion among hypocrites. They all wanted to be in the photo and offered to sacrifice their interest so that the others would say no, and finally, as I expected, one of them—it must have been my mother—said, But he (she would not even deign to pronounce my name), but he won’t mind. Of course. Why should I mind?

  They all got into the appropriate positions.

  I snapped some seven shots, one after the other, as if I were drugged. Okay, they said, that’s enough. I did not obey. It was as if a couple about to explode in an orgasm was asked to cease their movements. As they disbanded, I went on pressing the camera’s button, gorged inside the camera’s gigantic sexual eye, throbbing madly inside that camera. I kept on pressing the button and still was pressing it spasmodically when there was no more film. I had to stuff into the sweet cavern of that black machine all my memories just as I was seeing them.

  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 shinin
g 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.”