The Face of Another (26 page)

M
ARGINAL NOTE:
Oh yes, I remember at that time being overcome with panic lest my real self be discovered behind the mask
.

Surely, there was no proof at all that the mask had committed the seduction and that you were the one who had been seduced. Regardless of the wiles of the mask, which had gone about the matter with surprising adeptness, you had wanted to be seduced, hadn’t you? Nevertheless, there was no possibility of doing things over at this point, and in order to spur itself on, the mask acted the seducer even more boldly.

However, that was beside the point, for the fact was that you were seduced. There is a saying that if you overcome one arm then you are revenged only one arm’s worth; if you overcome both arms then you are revenged two arm’s worth. All during the time we were in the restaurant the mask tried its utmost not to bring up again the subject of your husband. Thus, it felt it could even bring up the subject of the scar webs with composure, and though it might convince itself that the story concerned some one else, it was still a horrible thing. It was an annoying situation, because when you showed no disposition at all to mention your husband, I became blindly angry. Indeed, it was ignoring him—that is, me. Perhaps it was bitter contempt for him. I was very distressed, for I could not say positively whether it would have been better to get you to discuss him or not. Your bringing “him” up, however disagreeable, would have functioned as a check to the mask. I could only hope, as the seducer, that you would go on being the accomplice you were.

I was worried by the curious way you had of smiling with
only your lower lip … I was worried by your staring through me, beyond me into the distance … I was reproachful at your refusing the beer I had offered … yet I was opposed to your drinking too much … it was as if boiling water had been poured over me as I lay soaking in ice. While my left eye looked longingly at you, as at some spoils of war, at your fingers that were crumbling bread—at your soft, sleek fingers, except for the cut from your button work—what I saw with my right eye made me writhe in pain. I was a cuckold present at his wife’s adultery. This was a triangular relationship with one actor playing two parts. If one were to make a drawing of “me,” “the mask, that is, the other me,” and “you,” it would be a non-Euclidean triangular relationship, existing on a single straight line.

When we finished dinner, time suddenly began to jell around us. Perhaps it was the weight of the ceiling. The disproportionately massive concrete pillars standing in the middle suggested great heaviness. In addition, the underground restaurant was windowless. These was no place for the sun and its twenty-four-hour cycle to stray in here. There was only a timeless, artificial illumination. Time measured in units of tens of thousands of years flowed along right outside the wall in subterranean water courses and through the layers of earth, slicing vertically straight down. But your “husband,” who was urging our time on, would never return as long as we waited like this. Oh time, suspend your flight, be a vessel containing only us. And we shall cross the street together as we are and reach our new home.

However, neither my mask nor I actually knew what you were thinking. You had put up no resistance to my transparent tactics of inviting you first to coffee and then to dinner—you were so completely without resistance that I wondered if you had not expected things to happen as they did—then you accepted, and the mask was completely optimistic
that things were going as planned. But your resolute attitude, as if you had poured mortar into the nooks and crannies of your conscience, at once cast the mask into the bedevilment of suspicion again. Of course, it was not only your abruptness. If you were curt in accepting my invitation, that would be proof that you were more than aware of the sexual barrier and I could easily handle you, but you were tender and showed a delicate consideration for me. You were straightforward and natural, not the slightest bit bashful. In short, you were quite yourself, not a bit different from your usual self.

On the other hand, this lack of change perturbed the mask. Where in God’s name were you concealing the excitement of anticipation, the inner flashings, dazzling glances, the breathing, of someone awaiting seduction?

The waiter cleared the table with obvious incivility. Ripples formed on the surface of the water in our glasses doubtless from the tremor of a subway train. The mask was flustered and chattered meaninglessly, trying to insert here and there sexually suggestive words, but you showed not even the reaction of refusal, not to mention consent. As I surreptitiously watched the mask’s confusion, I inwardly offered sarcastic congratulations, but unfortunately I was unable to convince myself of your unfaithfulness.

However, after this had been going on about twenty minutes—I wonder if you remember—the mask, coming out of his paralysis, stretched out his foot and accidentally touched your ankle with the tip of his shoe. An almost imperceptible expression of agitation passed over your face. Your gaze was fixed in the void. A shadow formed on your forehead and your lips trembled. But like the generosity of a morning sky gradually suffused with light, you quite calmly ignored his blunder. Inside, the mask was filled with laughter. The laughter, without outlet, became as if charged with electricity. The mask
had apparently succeeded in bringing down its prey. I needn’t have worried so much. As I concentrated on the sensation of you which was transmitted by the tip of my toe, even the mask shut its mouth and recovered its pleasure in silent conversation.

Actually, it was really quite dangerous to attempt small talk. On the subject of garden plants, for example, our two conversations were in strange agreement; the subject of childless couples accidentally came up; without my being aware of it, technical chemical terms cropped up among my figures of speech; if I relaxed my attention there would be enough evidence to give the mask away. It would seem that man befouls his daily life with his own excretions far more than a dog does.

But for me your conduct was a brutal shock. Your self-possession while being seduced was a part of you I should never have imagined, although I could see that the mask was fascinated. It was a severe shock. Moreover, the foot that was touching your ankle was definitely my foot. But if I did not concentrate with all my strength I had no more than an indirect impression of things, as if they were out-of-focus, faraway, imaginary events. If my face were different from me, then so was my body. I had foreseen this, but when confronted with the fact, the thought was nonetheless painful. If I felt this way about your ankle, how would I be able to keep my senses when I touched your whole body? Could I resist the impulse to rip off my mask on the spot? Could this surrealist triangle of ours, which was already straining us to the limit, maintain itself against even greater pressure?

How hard I strove to endure the penance in the cheap hotel room. Without taking off my mask, without strangling you, I had to go on witnessing your being violated. I was as if bound hand and foot, with my head stuck in a bag with openings only for the eyes. I felt like shrieking. It was too easy! It
was much too easy! Five hours had not yet gone by since I had met you. How easy it was! If only you had shown at least a modicum of resistance. Well, how long should you have resisted to satisfy me? Six hours? Seven? Eight? I was being stupid and ridiculous. Your licentiousness would be the same, if you held back for five, fifty, or five hundred hours.

Well, why didn’t I have the courage to put an end to this festering triangle? Because of a desire for revenge? Perhaps. But I think there was a different motive. Had it been simply desire for revenge, would it not have been more effective to tear the mask from my face on the spot? But I was afraid. Of course, the behavior of the mask, which was demolishing my calm everyday life, was cruel, but returning to the faceless, enclosed days was even more terrifying. Fear strengthened fear, and like a bird that has lost its feet and is unable to alight upon the ground, I would have to keep endlessly hovering. But that was not the end of it. If I really could not endure the situation, the mask, alive as it was, might well kill you. Your fornication would be difficult to deny, which gave me an alibi.

But I did not kill you. Why? I wonder. Because I did not want to lose you? No, precisely not wanting to lose you was reason enough for killing you. It would be senseless to seek rationality in jealousy. Just look at yourself. You who had rejected me so positively, who had rebelled against my face, now lay broken beneath the mask! It was too bad that the lights had been turned off, for I could not satisfy myself with my own eyes—your chin where maturity and immaturity existed strangely together, the grey wart in your armpit, the scar from your appendectomy, the tuft of frizzled hair mixed with something white, the chestnut-colored lips between your spread legs—all of them were about to be possessed, violated. I should like to see every last detail with my own eyes in the full light of day. You had seen and rejected the scar webs,
seen and accepted the mask; surely you have no objection to being seen yourself. But light did not suit my purposes either. I would not have been able to take off my glasses, and I carried all kinds of physical marks, like the scar on my hip I had got when we went skiing together long ago—and perhaps some I didn’t know about but you did. I concentrated on capturing you in every way other than sight: legs, arms, palms, fingers, tongue, nose, ears. I did not miss a single signal that was emitted from your body: your breathing, sighing, the working of your joints, the flexing of your muscles, the secretions of your skin, the vibrations of your vocal cords, the groaning of your viscera.

I could not get used to being a man condemned to death. As all the juices were being wrung from my body and I was drying up, I had to continue to put up with this immorality, this struggle. In my anguish, the thought of death lost its usual solemnity, and homicide seemed no more than a slight barbarism. What in God’s name were you thinking? What made me decide to be so patient—perhaps it was rather strange—was the dignity you maintained even while you were being violated. No, dignity seems a curious term for it. It was not at all a question of rape, nor was it a one-sided lawbreaking by the mask. Since you did not once make any pretense of refusing me, I must consider rather that we were partners in crime. It is comical when a partner in crime maintains dignity with his accomplice—it might be more precise to say a very assured partner in crime. Yet no matter how desperately the mask struggled, it was not ultimately able to be a fornicator, to say nothing of a rapist. You were literally inviolable. This did not change the fact that you were immoral and unfaithful. It also did not change the fact that you had stirred up my fierce jealousy, like boiling tar in a cauldron, like smoke from chimneys just after rain, like the water of hot springs seething up together with mud. The unexpected event that, by your
attitude of inviolability, you did not in the ultimate sense submit to the mask, completely amazed and overwhelmed me.

It would seem that I had not yet fully grasped the significance of your assurance in the act of fornication with a stranger. There was apparently no lust involved. If there were, you would have been more obviously flirtatious. But, quite as if you were performing some ceremony, you never lost your seriousness from beginning to end. I do not really understand. What was happening inside you? I did not have a clue. Moreover, my sense of defeat, firmly rooted at that time, has unfortunately remained as an indelible blot to the very end—at least until this moment I write this. This insidious disease of self-persecution was worse than my fits of jealousy. Although I had deliberately put on the mask, opened up the roadway to you, and beckoned you in, you had passed me by and hastened along somewhere else. And I was left alone with my loneliness, quite the same as before I had donned the mask.

Ah, I do not understand you. I could not think that just because there was temptation you would respond, paying no attention to who the partner was, like a shameless streetwalker. But there was no proof against this. Had I been unaware of the natural-born harlot in you? If you were a real harlot, you would satisfy your violator, neither spurring him on when he was inadequate nor making him feel mistreated. What in God’s name were you? Although the mask had frantically tried to break down the barrier, you had slipped through it without touching. Like the wind … or a spirit.

I do not understand you. Putting you to any further tests would be nothing more than my own destruction.

T
HE
following morning—well, it was already close to noon—we hardly spoke to each other until we left the hotel. Between spells of wakefulness, worried lest my mask might have come off, and snatches of sleep, when I dreamed repeatedly that I was rushing to leave for somewhere but had lost my ticket, fatigue pierced my forehead like a stake. However, thanks to the mask, signs of fatigue or shame showed on my face no more than on yours. But, also thanks to the mask, I could neither wash my face nor shave. My swollen features were agonizingly painful. Compressed by the unyielding mask, the ends of my beard, which had begun to grow, were obstructed and had begun to push back in. I wanted as quickly as I possibly could to get away from you and return to my hideaway.