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.
That was why there was no risk in my witnessing the multiple couplings and treacherous entanglements that others call love. Anybody can do it. I had practiced it with my own parents. When human beings shipwreck themselves in an erotic ocean storm, they lose all sense of what is happening around them. They are too absorbed in that self-love which they disguise as love for someone else. Not that I’m denying that it helps to be someone like me, transparent like a piece of glass that you can’t see through because it leads nowhere, which you can’t use as a mirror because it reflects nobody back.
Those fragments of glass that I have for eyes enjoyed the rejection that Tristan had made of my first offer. It allowed me to establish, surreptitiously, who was in charge. If I did not feed him his quota of hints and innuendoes, he would sink back into his acquiescent ragtag role. You treat faces, Doctor, as if they were car motors, greasing them every six months, replacing a worn-out part. You know better than anyone else that the real owner—of a car, of a face, of a person—is the one who keeps the thing going. Tristan’s acquaintances had grown accustomed to him: they expected from him a certain conduct, a performance, which was dependent upon my servicing him. It wasn’t long before he was back, fawning at my heels.
I have kept him by my side since then, a dog of uncertain loyalty, a dog who has grown fat on the crumbs of the data I have lavis
hed on him.
Because even after I had acquired my camera, even after I had uselessly excavated inside the false quagmire that Enriqueta passed off as her sex, almost immediately, as soon as I left school, I realized that just as the others were graduating, in the same way it was necessary for me to change the direction of my life. And I supposed, correctly it turns out, that Tristan would accompany me wherever I went.
Up until then my activities had been carried out in the world I already knew. Easy, after all: to ransack someone who is as familiar as the scenery. Like masturbating. Not much to it. Quite another matter to dare choose a stranger, randomly, or because something in her, once in a while in him, intrigued me. That would really be splicing the umbilical cord—to comprehend that the whole world belongs to you, that there is nobody that you cannot shutter up inside your eyes.
But pleasurable as it may be to take over a face, it ends up as repetitive as the toilsome sexual rites with which so many human beings cloak their solitude. Those hands of yours, Doctor, know what I’m talking about.
Of all the features that my future victims presented to the world I extracted one above all others, like an unclean tooth inside the whitest mouth—and then what? The camera lens had stripped them—and now what? Then and now, in order to avoid boredom, it would become necessary to go beyond the mere everyday use of somebody else’s body and progress to a more profound form of possession. If I could imagine an exhaustive story for that unknown face, and if my diagnosis turned out to be true, that would be, indeed, not only great fun and a challenge but a way of dredging the treasures from inside that person, leaving her as dry as an abandoned mine shaft. Behind my game was the wager that anybody’s inner biography could be reconstructed by comparing her deep hidden face with the ways in which she tried to cover and dissemble it. An amusement that confronted me, however, with the inevitable and final question to which I had no answer: how to find out if my invention had any substance?
The need to find discrete, objective answers to that question hastened my search for the job that now, decades later, I still hold. Smile away, Doctor. You have the right to smile. I’m using the present tense again, and I should be speaking only of the past. The job that, until a few days ago, until I crashed into you, I still held. That’s all right, your smile. But you must understand that gaining independence from my family was, by then, an obsession: I wanted never again to interrupt the flow of their lives with my dimness, never again to listen to my father outraged at a toneless voice protesting once more that someone had put a visiting relative to sleep in my bed, never again to watch my mother, wondering what stranger had placed those dirty trousers and shirts in the hamper to be washed, and then meticulously leaving them aside.
It was not easy to find the sort of work that would serve my purpose. Three conditions had to be met. The first, and most obvious, was that I should be able to exert the only real talent I have at my disposal, my capacity to remember any face that crosses my vision. The second was that the job should give me access to all the available data on this city’s residents, so that I could set up a network of informers as vast as my growing photo collection. At school, my own means had been amply sufficient, but if the whole universe was now to be my hunting ground, I would need resources that would be just as unlimited. A detective? A journalist? A spy? Those professions were canceled out by the third and last of my conditions. The work should not imperil me in any way, or bring me—it is the same thing—any public recognition. I needed a post as burned out and monotonous as my own face.
When I saw the ad for an apprentice to the archivist of photography files at the Department of Traffic Accidents, I knew right away that I had found what I wanted. It was satisfying also to realize that my recommendation—which amounted to an order—that Tristan Pareja study law, a career so close to power and its secrets, was beginning to bear fruit. I wasn’t going to suggest that he become a plastic surgeon, now, was I, Doctor? The man had already woven a ring of law school classmates and their parents who could be influenced because of the juicy reports that I had obtained for him. Now, almost effortlessly, he managed to meet Pompeyo Garssos, the Director of the Archives, and to put in a good word for me that guaranteed me the position. Although the first few days don Pompeyo was bothered by the fact that the new employee never seemed to be at work—his eyes would slip over me, unseeing, and roam somewhere else—he soon began to appreciate my skills. Never before had that collection been as immaculately well organized: each photo easy to find, each piece of information at the tip of his fingers.
As I classified the photographs, I took a couple of seconds to look intensely at each one. A few, the more interesting ones, I would set aside; would explore the owners of those faces at my pleasure during the years to come. It was as if the whole country had become my schoolyard, allowing me to stalk an almost infinite variety of orgasms, the faces of men who beat their children and smile at their neighbors, the eyes of a woman who knows her husband is cheating but doesn’t dare tell him to get out because she needs the money.
Of course, to take that initial tour of this city’s adults and the countless malevolent adventures their faces promised was only the first step in a more ambitious plan, just as you, Doctor, without any doubt, gain something more than personal gratification when you alter the features of your patients.
To make headway within the Department of Traffic Accidents until I was in the exact place where I could carry out my projects, I specialized in exposing the people who had obtained fake drivers’ licenses. Until I arrived at the archives, it had basically been impossible to discover if a person had filled out an application under an assumed name. Any name—which is no more than a sad jumble of sounds, at least you’ll agree with me on that, Doctor—can be hidden in the great jungle of unknown names, as a tree can be hidden in a forest. You know as well as I do that the most ordinary of noses can be used to conceal the strangest face. Or am I wrong, Mardivelle? Those impostors were so sure that nobody could identify them that they didn’t even take the trouble to disguise their features, they didn’t even seek your help, Doctor. Later, of course, you must have made a fortune, trying to paste innocence on the most guilty faces. I could go so far as to declare that I have been at the origin of some of your most lucrative contracts. Our two careers run a parallel course—each one of us working with the counterfeit currency that shines in faces that are not ours. Attempting to make them pass the test of my eyes. Not bad at your work, Doctor. I owe you some thanks. You’ve made my work more entertaining. More challenging.
But at the time it was as easy as can be. Before the other employees arrived, very early in the morning, I would select from the multitude of applications that had been signed the previous day, the ones harboring suspicious features. I would recognize that the name was false right away, just as I realized that Patricia was lying about her own name as soon as I saw her face. Then I would let my memory loose in the enormous pit of photographs that shimmered in the nearby files, and I would, a few moments later, go straight to the original face and pick it out. Hours later, each fraudulent application for a driver’s license would find itself on top of Pompeyo Garssos’s desk, next to another photograph of the same person, taken from the archives, but with the real name attached.
Just as I had with Tristan, I preferred letting someone else lap up all the credit: rather soon, the Director of the Archives had begun to acquire a legendary reputation for detecting false I.D.s. As for me, I got the only thing I wanted: to be his secretary.
Of course I didn’t solve all the deceptive cases that came my way. It was indispensable to leave some in doubt, even if I already knew whom to look for, all the details of yet another sham life. Otherwise, what pretext could I use to start demanding data from other agencies and institutions, both public and private? Supposedly to check up on the delinquents, but in fact to establish my own network. I would ask, let’s say, the Drug Bureau for an inquiry on someone. I would then set up an initial contact with an agent
at the Bureau; he would be offered a service, a tidbit of news, a confidential report, and that is the way, slowly and smoothly as ever, I would have him ready to work for me.
It would be quite dull, Doctor, and even makes me want to yawn myself, to give you details about how I lured each puny informant into my web. Apply the Tristan Pareja model, with slight variations, and you can guess how it all happened. One source in each neuralgic information center—the Police Computer, the Insurance Agents’ Data Base, the Universal Health Care Office, the Division of Bank Accounts, the Credit Watchers’ Union, the Drug Bureau, the assistant to the assistant librarian at the most important newspaper in the country—no need for more than one person. Somebody who, without my intervention, would be less than nothing. Armed with the reports smuggled to me by the others, I snarled and tied up each one of them, I sugared their ambition and promised them power that their mediocre minds had not dared to envision. I let them crest on a steady wave of information until they were, each of them in their respective places, bound for glory, solving impossible enigmas, revealing the answers to cases that had been closed for years, detecting criminals with the facility of housewives identifying the rotten apple in the barrel. They became addicts of the celebrity I gave them. They could not escape from me.
Until you called them on the phone, Doctor, until you destroyed what I thought were impregnable defenses.
But you still have no idea who I am, Doctor. Because I destroyed every last file that contained a reference to my existence. I had been born as if dead. I would live as if dead, without leaving so much as a fingerprint on the world’s surface.
The subjects chosen by my camera had left many prints, on the other hand, any number of school grades and medical reports; and with this and so much more it was easy to discover their whole itinerary. I could at least find out if the image I had captured corresponded at all to the story I had invented for them. I was on target, in general, Doctor, and getting better as time went on: each new expedition, each new darkened flash, brought me closer to perfection. And what is more, the taking of the photos themselves became an easier task.
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