Mascara

by Ariel Dorfman

  “A false name, madam. He’s an N.N. As anonymous as any of the drunkards who die on the street. More anonymous.”

  “What I don’t understand is that a person like that—I mean, he couldn’t have had a very gratifying existence, sir, if you see what I mean … how he could smile like that. I had never seen a smile like that one, sir. So serene, so peaceful. An unforgettable face, sir. Because of the smile. It’s—it’s enough to make you feel envious, you know. If you could have seen it.”

  “If we could have seen it? If we could have seen it?”

  “What my colleague is trying to explain is that we have seen any number of smiles like that one. Over and over and over again. Even in our dreams, madam, we see those smiles.”

  “But we’d rather not speak about that smile, Mrs. Lynch. It’s a fucking smile, lady, if you pardon my language. At first it obsessed me, of course it did. Just like it does you. Then I said to myself, if these poor assholes want to die happy, what do I care? And I began to treat that smile as if it were a member of the family who’s dying and whom no one wants to talk about. Like a fart that someone lets loose in a cathedral and that no one wants to notice. If you pardon my language.”

  “So let’s not refer to that smile, anymore, madam, not one more word, if you don’t mind. There’s in fact something else we’re interested in, if you want to know the truth …”

  “Yes, ma’am. Those eyes you mentioned …”

  “Those eyes? The dead man’s eyes?”

  “The dead man’s eyes? Well, if that’s what you want. Certainly, ma’am. Let’s talk about those eyes, if those are the ones you’d like to talk about.”

  “In effect, Mrs. Lynch. What color did you say they were?”

  Afterword

  Mascara, first published in Spanish (in Argentina) and English in 1988, is a challenging, intricately constructed novel. Its time scheme is particularly complex, even labyrinthine. The most useful first step a commentator can undertake is to lay out in simple form the story material that Ariel Dorfman has worked with.

  One day, in a year that we can perhaps pin down as 1973, a house in a city that may be Santiago, Chile, is raided by police agents who in the course of their depredations do something to a four-year-old child, Oriana, that amounts to rape. As a result she appears to suffer an arrest in her mental growth: she remains frozen in childhood, even though her body continues to grow normally.

  In fact Oriana has undergone a split. Henceforth she will have two selves; more and more sternly the arrested child self will deny the developing self access to their joint physical body.

  The growing self goes out among the despised and rejected of her country, hears their stories—the stories, as she puts it, of their hands—and stores them up in her memory for some longed-for future. If she could only find a community of like minds, she thinks, she could begin the salvation of the country. But she is alone; the stories are doomed to die with her.

  The last time this growing self is allowed to see the world through physical eyes is when, on the street, men advance toward her to arrest her for her activities. Thereafter the body the two had shared is taken over entirely by the child self.

  There is a gap in time. The next we know, a woman named Patricia brings Oriana to what is meant to be a safe house.

  The safe house belongs to a strange being, a man who was born faceless and is therefore, as he puts it, “semi-invisible.” His facelessness is not a physical deformity such as we find in medical textbooks. It is rather a nullity, an absence of feature. Photographed, he leaves no trace on the film. If we as readers have trouble in visualizing such a being, that is because his face cannot be represented. It is beyond the reach of language.

  The faceless man, who is never named, suffered a miserable childhood. His parents were successful members of the middle class. His father sold surgical instruments that allow doctors to explore the interiors of bodies; his mother was a makeup artist who created faces for the media. They neglected him; most of the time they did not even register his presence.

  As a child he developed a passion for photography, in which he found erotic pleasure. In fact, while “normal” sex filled him with revulsion, taking a picture brought him to orgasm.

  Ignored on all sides, the faceless man has in the course of time been taken over by a spirit of vengefulness. He has given up his vain longing to be seen, to become part of the social world. Instead he embraces his own invisibility and the power it gives him. Like Shakespeare’s Iago, he in effect says, “Evil, be thou my good.”

  At the time when Oriana comes into his life, he is working as an archivist in the Department of Traffic Accidents, where he uses his superhuman memory for faces, a collection of compromising photographs he has taken, and threats of blackmail, to create a clandestine network of power.

  Oriana is not the first woman the faceless man has known. Two years ago there had been Alicia, with whom he had spent a brief, happy week. Alicia, an ugly person herself, had brought him back to humanity by looking at him and recognizing him. But Alicia, a member of the political underground, had been betrayed to the police by a plastic surgeon who had worked on her, Dr. Miravelli. For this act the faceless man has marked Miravelli down for retribution.

  Now Patricia, an old associate of Alicia’s, brings Oriana to the faceless man’s home. The net is closing: in a few days Patricia herself will be hunted down by the state and murdered.

  Unlike adults, Oriana has not constructed a face for herself. She is the only person the faceless man has met who is her true self. During her stay with him, he learns that she lives entirely in the present. Each day the previous day is wiped from her memory. Thus her life is a perpetual adventure of discovery.

  He has no identity, she has no past. They are like twins. In her company he feels he is becoming young again.

  But there is a threat to his happiness. What if the mature Oriana returns to take over the body he loves? What if this menacing self is lurking nearby, or lies beside them in their bed while they make love, biding her time?

  In order to locate and destroy the adult Oriana, the faceless man seeks for a photograph of her in the archives of the state. But Miravelli is a step ahead of him. Miravelli has penetrated and taken over his network, and cut off his access to the archives.

  Using his last resources, the faceless man purloins the photograph of Oriana in Miravelli’s own files. It is useless to him: it shows a child of four.

  Who is Miravelli?

  Dr. Miravelli has made his fortune creating faces for the rich. His powers are almost magical. When his most famous patient dies, for instance, he is able to transfer his face to the body of a younger man and thus prolong this politician’s career indefinitely.

  Miravelli came across the faceless man as a baby, and realized at once that through him he could attain limitless power. He wants to use the faceless man as a source of skin cells which can then be fused to other surfaces, making them invisible.

  Using his own powers, the faceless man has thus far evaded Miravelli. But now a fateful event occurs. The faceless man and Miravelli come together in a traffic accident, and the faceless man—rashly, as it turns out—determines to sue Miravelli and use the publicity of the courts to expose him.

  With the aid of an Oriana swathed in bandages, he has gained access to Miravelli’s surgery, copied Miravelli’s patient lists, and photographed a vampire-like Miravelli performing an operation during which he implants a mysterious little device inside the reconstructed face of his patient.

  He threatens to publish this photograph unless Miravelli implants one of his devices in Oriana, freezing her for ever in her child state.

  Miravelli, whose secret plan is to take over the faceless man’s face and become invisible himself, agrees to meet him. Shortly before their rendezvous, the faceless man writes what turn out to be his last words, the history that forms the first part of Mascara.

  Of what happens at the meeting we learn only indirectly, from the interrogation
of Miravelli’s secretary by two state operatives that constitutes the Epilogue. The faceless man has died on Miravelli’s operating table, but appeared to die with a smile on his face (and therefore with a face). His body has disappeared, whisked away by Miravelli’s underlings.

  Mascara IS SET in a police state of a Chilean or Argentine variety, replete with a thuggish secret police, networks of informers, unexplained deaths and disappearances, and a slavish media.

  It is clear from even a summary of the novel that its characters come from popular genres: the horror story, the thriller, the fantasy romance. Dorfman has been a pioneer, in Latin America, in the deconstruction of imported popular culture, in particular the mythic stories that originate in the culture factories of the USA. His widely influential How to Read Donald Duck was first published in Chile in 1971.

  One of the targets of Mascara is the intrinsic superficiality of a political culture based on television images. In such a culture, a creator and manager of images like Dr. Miravelli becomes the power behind the throne.

  But Dorfman’s analysis of the superficies goes further (one hesitates to say “deeper”) than this. In the shifting area between the real and the fantastic in which the action of Mascara takes place, the face is no longer part of our natural self but belongs instead to culture. The face is a mask that we inherit, largely from our parents. The son inherits and renews his father’s face/mask. Thus is the patriarchal order perpetuated.

  Our face is part of our self-presentation, like our clothes, but we cannot take it off as we take off our clothes. Yet it is an error to think that beneath the face we wear is our true self, for there is no such thing as not wearing a face. One exception to this rule is a young child whose face has not yet set, particularly a young girl child like Oriana. Another is the faceless man. But neither a young child nor a faceless man can participate in the social order.

  Not only is the face we had thought part of our natural self now, in Mascara, detached from nature and reallocated to culture. Our hands too are not part of our natural selves, as we see in the second part of the book, the part devoted to Oriana. What we think of as our hands are shells; they conceal secret hands with a life of their own.

  In the fantastic and sometimes surreal world of Mascara, which mirrors the surreal underlife of the modern world we have created for ourselves, the organs of pleasure are in the process of migrating from the genitals to the eyes and brain. Both the faceless man, sent into orgasmic transports by photographs, and Miravelli, gloating over the bodies of insensible patients, exemplify the shift toward scopophilia.

  One of the notable aspects of Mascara is thus its exploration of the metamorphoses of power, political and sexual and political-sexual, an exploration which looks toward William Burroughs in one direction and Jacques Lacan in another. Mascara puts in question such natural-seeming distinctions as between exterior and interior, appearance and truth, image and reality.

  Like such monsters as Dr. Frankenstein’s creature and the hunchback of Notre Dame, the faceless man is a figure of both horror and pathos. He longs to be loved, but more fundamentally he longs to be seen: “We require someone to look at us in order to exist,” he says. He dies at Miravelli’s hands, but the comic-book ending seems to promise a resurrection: “TO BE CONTINUE.”

  Mascara is the fourth novel in the oeuvre of a bilingual writer who has contributed to both the Hispanic and the English-language literature of our times. Born in Argentina of Jewish immigrant parents, Ariel Dorfman spent some of his childhood and youth in the United States, some in Chile, his successive migrations dictated by successive waves of right-wing repression. His career as a writer had barely begun when he was forced into exile by the Pinochet coup: his first novel, the (revised) English version of which is known as Hard Rain, appeared in 1973. The next three novels were written in exile: Widows (Mexico City, 1981, revised 1985), The Last Song of Manuel Sendero (Mexico City, 1982, revised 1989), and Mascara (Buenos Aires, 1988). Notable works since Mascara include the play Death and the Maiden, first performed in 1990, the novels Konfidenz (1994) and The Nanny and the Iceberg (1999), and the memoir Heading South, Looking North (1998).

  J. M. Coetzee

  ——————

  J. M. COETZEE, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003, is the author of eight novels. He lives in Australia, where he is a research fellow at the University of Adelaide.

  About the Author

  ARIEL DORFMAN has been hailed by the Washington Post as a “world novelist of the first order” and by Newsweek as “one of the greatest Latin American novelists.” A Chilean expatriate, now professor at Duke University, Dorfman has seen his works translated into more than thirty languages and his plays performed in over one hundred countries. His play Death and the Maiden was made into a film by Roman Polanski. His most recent books are Exorcising Terror: The Incredible Unending Trial of General Augusto Pinochet (Seven Stories Press, 2003) and Desert Memories: Journeys through the Chilean North (National Geographic Books, 2004). His novels Widows, Konfidenz, and The Nanny and the Iceberg have just been reissued. Two of Dorfman’s new plays will appear in 2005, The Other Side in London’s West End, and Purgatorio on Broadway. He lives with his wife, Angélica, in Durham, North Carolina.