Each human being has around him a hive of almost infinite relationships, people stuck to his life as if it were flypaper, people mixed into his jam, his clothing, his checkbook, his toilet paper. The things people have been told that they need to live, the things somebody else always has to furnish. So that once my victim’s face appeared—on the street, in the paper, lost and twisted, lightning-like, in a crowd filmed by a TV crew—and once I had followed that face into the bowels of my endless files, where her name and address were always awaiting me, the next step was to locate the men and women who surrounded and serviced her. If you can get those people to cooperate, the perfect irreplaceable snapshot is not only within reach. It is as easy as spitting.
I had the telephone repairman, with direct access to such and such an apartment—I had that man at my beck and call. Not because of a photo I had taken of him. I wasn’t going to run around snapping everybody, the vilest and least interesting people who crawl this earth—just as you, Doctor, would not dream of operating on a blind beggar. To do so would have exhausted our energies quite quickly. Just a couple of brief reports on him, his police record, his bank account, his kid’s school grades, his mother’s medical ups and downs—enough to enlist him in a supporting role for my assault. Each person, no matter how insignificant he may seem, has the key to some door—and it is by opening doors, Mirvallori, that you take photographs. You’re an expert at closing doors and closing faces, excluding others from your operating room so nobody can tell how you play the piano of each face, how you recompose the obscure music of each face. I know your statements and I know your habits, Doctor. For me, on the other hand, doors are like water, Doctor. The mailmen, the maids and the help, the dry cleaner, delivery boy, janitor, the old schoolmarm: all of them, keys to some kind of lock. Keys that do not know my fingers turning them, keys that do not remember my features.
How were they to retain me in their memory if not even my closest contacts, not even my parents, were able to do that? After fattening those agents for years, after having been the only architect of their fortunes—and I followed them because it was their turn, as well, to be photographed by me—would you believe that they did not realize I was present, as if I were a total stranger? I’ll admit it, this ended up bothering me: it came to a point where, finally, if I needed some message from them that they could not entrust to the phone or the mail, rather than go myself I would send Tristan Pareja to pick it up.
They have been so dependent on me these years that it has been difficult for me to conceive of their betrayal. I’ve seen it more as an act of suicide on their part than as an act of aggression against me. The fact that someone now knew their identity and had been insinuating terrible things about the hollow of my face, insinuations that were all the more terrible because they may have approached the truth of what I was, that fact did not overly alarm me. I thought that Monday I would rein them in. As soon as I could investigate you, Mavirelli, slip into your home one night or wide-angle you from a corner of your operating room at the very moment when you began to intervene inside someone else’s body, as soon as I had you in my little machine, Doctor, as soon as I had pierced your power as if it were a suppuration, stripping your mask from you with the same brutality with which you press it down upon others. That would be enough, I thought—and I still think so, Doctor—to transform myself once more into the magnet for those poor floating fragments of nothingness. Then they would come in supplication, as Tristan Pareja had come into the schoolyard some weeks after he had indignantly rejected my proposal that he sell the news I was giving him. And if not them, then others—because that network was entirely replaceable by any other. I had lifted them up from an anonymous sewer, and if I felt like it, that is where they would return, drop by drop.
Or at least that is what I thought until I saw Tristan Pareja’s face in my living room. Only at that moment, when I came down the stairs, leaving Oriana’s wonders—and what wonders they are, Doctor—only then did I understand that my situation was much more exposed than I had believed it to be.
I did not steer Tristan to the bar because I ever imagined that I personally would need a lawyer someday. So public an occurrence as a lawsuit was practically inconceivable. What I wanted was someone who could glide his way through the pores of society just as you, Doctor, slime your way through the skin of your patients, just like that. But when I returned home that night of the accident, Marverelhi, and after the phone rang and your unidentifiable underling hung up on me, the first person I tried to contact was Tristan Pareja.
I was adamant about getting you declared guilty at the Police Court this coming Wednesday, Doctor. It would have been prudent to accept that I had made a mistake, that this disobedient foot of mine had pushed down on the accelerator instead of on the brake; and if you had been anybody else, that’s how things would have ended up. Let the insurance take care of the damages, hush up any complications with a couple of phone calls. That there might have been some minor scandal weighed on me—a newspaper headline (which, strangely enough, you have not planted anywhere, Doctor) screaming about officials of the Department of Traffic Accidents so flagrantly ignoring the signals. But nothing that we couldn’t fix like gentlemen.
What moved me was something else. You didn’t have to be a mastermind—and if there is one thing I can do, it is to read situations as gypsies read the future in cards—to realize that you were in an uncomfortable predicament: rushing your lover to her home before having to run back to your own place, on Christmas Eve, no less. Not a good time to have an accident, Doctor. And if you did not know me, Marvirelli, I had no trouble recognizing you. Even if you did not owe me for Alicia’s absence, even if you had not been provoking me all these years with your front-cover interviews in glossy magazines, I had already noted you down for some weekend, some vacation, when I could take the time to work on a particularly intricate case. Just as others look forward to visiting a city full of museums or theaters, that’s how I had kept you, Doctor, in the back of my mind, like a succulent dessert that one always saves for the end. If I had not yet indulged myself, it may have been because something inside warned me that you were no ordinary adversary, that you were more dangerous, and that I should drink you up and down only at the right moment.
So if it had been anybody else, I’d have acted with my normal caution. Win the big battles, never lose a minute or waste an effort on marginal issues. But it was my desire, Doctor, to impose myself upon you ignominiously, to defeat you barefacedly—if you are not annoyed by the wordplay.
With a strange woman in your car and no Alicia in mine, you were in a losing position. For once, someone else was going to wreak upon you a face that was not yours. And that person was none other than this nonentity who is speaking to you right now from afar. Let the bastard pay the damages, I thought to myself. As if I was asking you to endorse a check. Money scratched from each face that you had approached with your scalpel, the white light glowing behind you; it was like expropriating your cosmetics, as if you had been working as my menial all these years. The final act of the patient acts of sabotage I had been carrying out. First, Moronevi, I had been fingering your patients day in and day out, no matter what you did with them, no matter the about-faces, the silicone cheek implants, the thickened, sticky lips, the disappearing crow’s-feet, the metastasis of the nostrils, the shifted teeth, the tightening of the skull bones, the foreshortening of the hairline. Each face you recomposed, I returned to its original in the laboratory that seethed in my head. That was first. Next, I messed up your car and, along the way, your reputation. And third. Third: you pay me with the dividends debauched from faces that never belonged to you.
Understand, Doctor: it was a way of kicking your mug in, a way of stripping you naked in public, a way of showing who owns this city, you who disguise people or I who open the shutters of their pretense. And I would do this, besides, without recourse to photography: to defeat someone that powerful, to make him concede my existence in the world without havi
ng to use my camera. It is proof of your strength, Doctor, that I ended up taking a picture of you.
The first case, at any rate, for Tristan Pareja.
I started to call him from the police precinct where both of us had been taken so as to stamp our contradictory statements. When I saw that you, Marcarelsohn, were closely watching me dial, your eyes flashing with mistrust, as if you doubted that someone so patently vulgar and second-rate could have any sort of important friend, I hung up before speaking. But I fell into the trap that vanity once in a while opens for us. Perhaps for the first time in my life I wanted to impress someone with something as discardable and superficial as an influential contact. I bragged about my relationship with Pareja, that famous lawyer, so that you, Doctor, would spend a whole night thinking you had crashed with a dangerous adversary. Now I know that you spent the night thinking about other things.
But it didn’t seem suspicious, when, upon returning home, Pareja’s phone was busy and stayed that way for the next few hours. I was worn out with the pain and the excitement, and I lay down, unhooked the receiver so the hidden caller wouldn’t awaken me, and fell asleep. When I managed to get hold of Tristan the next day, he insisted there was nothing to worry about. It was enough that I obtain three witnesses who swore that I was telling the truth. They would be pitted against the equally fraudulent witnesses, three of them, that Doctor Mavirelli was going to introduce (Pareja made no mistake while pronouncing your name, Doctor)—and we would win hands down, because it was then that we would threaten our enemy with revealing the presence of his lover that night of the crash. I assigned no importance to the fact that Pareja did not rush over immediately, that same day. It was Christmas, after all, when everybody, except for you-know-who, spends the day with their family.
Nor did it seem difficult, even in my limping condition, to secure the three witnesses. Each one of my contacts could get me ten times that number. But when a whole day of busy telephones passed, when my contacts systematically one after the other refused to talk to me, it was then, on Friday morning, precisely one hour before Patricia returned with such insolence to ring my bell, that I decided to call Tristan Pareja again and tell him to drop in as soon as possible. A quick visit by him to the homes of my contacts, an allusion to their children’s vulnerability, the mention of a secret that they thought was well concealed, any one of these would rapidly reduce them to what they essentially were: my captives.
I insist I was not alarmed. I understood that the same henchman of yours who was calling me was calling them, as well; it was almost with joy—if you would allow someone like me the use of such a word—that I guessed your role in the affair, your panic: each telephone that did not answer was a genuflection that you made in my direction, Doctor. For the first time somebody was accepting me as a gigantic rival, worthy of the battle which, unfortunately for you, I am about to win.
Although when I saw Tristan, the first doubts arose in my mind. Perhaps because I knew instantly—I knew it in images, I knew it, one photo after another announcing what had happened in his house, which might be far from my gaze but was so near my imagination—that he had betrayed me. His phone had been busy because you, or your subservant, Doctor, were talking to him, you were the one who was acquiring his list of my assistants, you were the one who was joining them in a parallel circuit from which I, like a tumor in the brain, could be eliminated. Busy because perhaps there was no hireling at all and it was the selfsame Pareja who had been calling each of them with the message that it was to their advantage to deny me. Busy because he was taking over my network for his own benefit or even—he has always been such a coward, this Pareja—for your exclusive use, Doctor. Busy because if he joined them into a group outside my controlling center, I would no longer be indispensable to them, to him, or to any of the other disparate contacts I had so laboriously sought out. Busy because I myself had given them too much power, allowing them to grow refractory and independent. Busy, finally, because it might well have been Pareja himself who dialed my number in order to hang up after mocking me with a chuckle, leaving me with that sterile receiver in my hand.
And if I was in want of any more proof of his villainy and of my lack of further ascendancy in his life, he gave it to me without blinking an eyelash. Tristan Pareja did not recognize me.
“I was looking for—” he said, as if looking at me through a haze, and added my name, glancing around everywhere, as if I might be hidden behind some piece of furniture rather than standing there directly in view of the insolent laziness of his eyes. Tristan was apt to remember me better than most other human beings: after all, his prestige, his career, depended on it. Which did not mean that we did not have misencounters, especially in public places, where he could remain at my side, without seeing me, for hours. But never had such clumsiness surfaced at a place where he expected to find me, and certainly never in my own dwelling. Patricia remembered me more clearly than he did. Not to mention Alicia. There was no doubt: his memory of me was growing pale. He no longer knew who I was, no longer recalled the lackluster color of my hair, these dull, blurred eyes of mine.
The fact that he could not salvage my face from the thousands of faces withering in his mind caused me no indignation. On the contrary, it may have been precisely that forgetfulness which bathed me in a strange tranquility. I had always contemplated the eventuality that I would part ways with Pareja: there was no reason, considering, why he should demonstrate toward me affection or loyalty or any other of those cunning attitudes that humans swear will be eternal and that last only so long as convenience demands. We were—we had been—partners because it was suitable to us both. It was now advantageous for him to seek refuge under the wing of a plastic surgeon who had sculpted and sewn up the most pre-eminent faces in the country, the public faces with which the powerful governed, the looks that the history books would gather for the admiration of future generations. But his blindness toward me, along with my absolute certainty that I could still read his every wrinkle, indicated to me at the same time that I was as much the master of my own destiny as I had been that fatal day when I had collected the scraps of those smelly photos and had realized what extraordinary predaceousness over others they might afford me. If I felt like it, I could follow him with my camera without his perceiving me—there was nothing to stop me from sending the most outrageous snapshots to all his clients; from letting his lovely wife examine the evidence of his encounters with animals; from sending to the school principal the image of his son shoplifting at the local drugstore. And I would keep for myself, Doctor Marcavelli, the instant photo in which he met with you. I would frame it over my bed as a reminder that we should never let a quarry go once we have it cooking over our fire.
But I would do none of these.
I quite simply let Tristan Pareja depart from my life by telling him that the gentleman whom he wished to speak with was not there for the moment. Later on I would call him to spread the lie that I had already obtained the three witnesses and that we should get together the afternoon of the court appearance to plan our strategy. I cannot say if I had decided by then not even to go. What is certain is that I had not yet realized it was time to seek an appointment with you, Mirvarelli. There was so much still to live through before that: I had to visit former Inspector Jarvik; I had to understand that the only way of keeping Oriana and protecting her was to journey abroad. I still did not know who Oriana was. But the hypocrisy that had taken over Pareja’s face confirmed the ruin you were planning for me. I knew that there was no longer anybody in the world who could front for me, and the idea that it might be imperative for both of us to meet without intermediaries, that distant idea, began to dawn in my eyes.
My helper for thirty years moved away from me without the slightest sign that he had recognized me.
It was the last time I saw him in my life.
Was I under the innocent influence of Oriana? Was that why I did not even think of an act of vengeance? Was it her sweet infancy that had produced
this calm?
Oriana was upstairs, Oriana who was a clean photograph of her own soul. Sitting on my bed, waiting obediently for me to mount up to her, not budging her body, her shoeless feet rhythmically swaying back and forth. Oriana upstairs, with nothing to hide. Oriana, waiting for me.
And so are you, Doctor. You, as well. Soon. But Oriana comes first.
Have you noticed, Doctor, the importance human beings attach to the act of baring themselves? As if to undress were a symbol of their vow not to cheat the other person, the man, the woman, who is watching, the symbol of the vow to display themselves without the shield of their previous lives, naked as if they had just been born. But as you know and your pockets full of money know, Doctor, those unclothed bodies never divest themselves of their face. They may swear the most eternal of devotions, but the truth is that they spend the rest of their short lives probing their lover’s eyes, wanting and not wanting to guess the coming betrayal. Trying to make believe that there is no shadow of a plastic surgeon falling between each man and each woman.
Oriana was once that sort of person. I have no doubt that somewhere in this city there are people who dispose of a report—which you shall get for me, have no doubt about it—where the falseness of what used to be her adult life is written out; a life as full of recesses and duplicity as that of any other human being. It is my luck that she does not remember that life. Oriana is the first woman I have ever met, Doctor, whom I do not need to photograph. The first in which the photo would reveal less than what she already has written all over the fullness of her face.
So I found myself uncovering the only thing that was left to be uncovered: that body, mature and sensual and feminine. I lay her bare slowly, with an almost tropical rhythm, a question about her past falling and an answer that she did not know falling with every garment, and then both of us murmuring that it did not matter if she, if I, if we, had no knowledge whatever about who she had once been, because we were going to enter the realm of who she was now. As if we had all the time in the world. Except that I, for one, do not have all the time in the world, Doctor. With the other women, yes, obviously, I did. From the moment that the camera was mine, they were all within reach, for as long as I liked. It was all the same if I captured them now or later: they would be no less dishonest with themselves tomorrow than today. It was all the same if they disappeared: they were infinitely replaceable by other images just as intoxicating. It was all the same if today the door to the shower was closed: the day after tomorrow, having found the subordinate who could usher me in, having discovered the right piece of information, having cornered the plumber, my lens would be waiting for her behind the bushes or near her bed.
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