The Face of Another (27 page)

As I lit my last cigarette, my real face, which had constantly been forced into bad roles, had begun speaking, touching on your guilty conscience, and I started involuntarily as you hesitatingly offered me a blue-green button. It was not the one I had picked up for you; it was one it had taken you half a month to do. At the time I was simply angry at your zealousness, but when I considered it again, I felt I understood you. Silver edged lines, as if scratched into a thick lacquered base with a nail, flickered in a lovely tangled skein. It was as if your voiceless cries were shut up within it. I thought the button was like a lonely cat raised by a doting old woman. Perhaps it was naïveté. But when I considered that it was a real challenge
to “him,” who had not even once glanced at your button, I realized this was a bold, determined act. I had intended to blame you but on the contrary was blamed myself; perhaps I was gradually getting used to my own defeatism. Who the deuce ever thought up the stupid proposition that women were anything to get carried away about? I wonder.

Outside, everything was shimmering in a light like plated chromium. The only reality was the odor of your perspiration that lingered in my nostrils. Back in my room, after hasty attention to my face, I threw myself onto the bed and did not awake until dawn had begun to break. I calculate that I had slept close to seventeen hours. My face was burning as if someone had been working on it with a file. I opened the window and, as I watched the sky, which was beginning to turn a clear blue, I held compresses of moistened towels to my face. At length the heavens became the very color of the button I had received from you, the color of the sea against which is outlined the vanishing stern of a ship. I felt unduly melancholy, and squeezing the flesh of my arms and my breast until it hurt, I involuntarily groaned in pain. What barren purity! Nothing could continue to exist in such a blue. I wished that yesterday and the day before could be eradicated. Actually, I suppose my plans had had some degree of success, but who in heaven’s name was going to reap the harvest? And what harvest? If anybody, you would reap, you, a shameless harlot, who had cut through the mask like some great, solid shadow. But what existed here and now was only the blue of the sky and the pain of my face.… The mask, that should be the victor, lay stupidly on the table, like an obscene picture that has drained all one’s desire; I wondered if I should start using it for target practice with my air pistol. And after that, what if I were to hack it utterly to pieces?

However, as I stood musing, the blue faded away, and the streets began to show their daytime face. My sentimental
grumbling too fell away like an old scab, and whether I wished it or not, I was again brought back to the inescapable reality of the scar webs. Even though, with the mask, I could not at this point dream dreams like the flashings of holiday fireworks, to give it up and bury myself alive in a windowless cell would be even more unthinkable. After yesterday, I was still vacillating, but I had ascertained the precise center of gravity of this three-cornered relationship, and it was altogether possible to acquire command of the mask by adroitly keeping my equilibrium. No matter how violent my passing emotions, there was definitely a point to plans that one had spent time refining.

I hurried through dinner and dashed out of my hideaway. Since I had to return to the role of my real self who was coming back from a week’s business trip, today I should have to put on the bandages, which I had not worn for some time. As I was leaving, I was startled at my reflection in the window-pane. I was terrifying! I had come to have a new and better opinion on the feeling of release that the mask provided. If I were to return straight home just as I was—it was a stimulating thought to me—I should produce a considerable effect on you in whom the sensations of last night were most surely still alive. It would definitely be worth trying. Providing I could stand it. Unfortunately I did not have the confidence. The sensations of the preceding night were still alive in me too. Perhaps I should have accused you, gone into a frenzy, and exposed everything in a fit of anger. No matter how agonizing, I wanted to leave this three-cornered relationship alone for the time being. I would meet you as “myself” after composing myself and accustoming myself to the ordinary world for a while.

But was the world really ordinary? I wonder. The gate to the Institute was still closed. When I entered through the side door, the guard, who was admiring a flowerpot as he
brushed his teeth, was startled into speechlessness for an instant. I restrained him from dashing to the entryway and simply asked for the key. The smell of chemicals was familiar as an old coat. But the deserted Institute building—was it the odor? the sound of my footsteps?—was like some ghostly precinct inhabited only by tree spirits. To restore my relation with the present, I turned my attendance tab up and hastily changed into my white work smock. The report of the experiment-in-progress that had been assigned to the Group C assistants was written on the blackboard. The results were excellent. I was interested in them but in nothing more. In this building people showed a spirit of competition, were driven by desire for fame, were prey to jealousies, maneuvered to get the start on others by secretly sending for foreign publications, were disturbed by private matters, and became frantic about experiments and budgets, yet I felt this was a life worth living. I had the feeling, however, that it was not actually I who was devoting myself so assiduously to this work, but someone else who resembled me, and that this me was merely another tree spirit. I had not bargained for that at all. For a given technique there are the laws of that technique, and they cannot be influenced by anyone. Or if one did not maintain human relationships on all kinds of levels—like water fleas with other water fleas, jellyfish with other jellyfish, parasites with other parasites, pigs with other pigs, chimpanzees with other chimpanzees, field mice with other field mice—then would not chemistry and physics be meaningless too? Of course not! Human relationships are merely trivial appendages of human endeavor. If they are not, the only thing left to do is to give up this makeshift masked play and commit suicide.

A scar on a section of skin, bothersome to no one, could have no effect on my work. This work, no matter what anyone said, was mine. Whether I were a transparent man, a noseless man, a hippopotamus-faced man, so long as I could think, so
long as I could manipulate my instruments, I should always fix my compass on this work.

Suddenly I thought of you. They say that women fix their compasses on love. I doubt the veracity of this, but women apparently can be happy with love alone. Well, then, I wonder if you are happy now. Suddenly I called to you aloud and longed to hear your voice answering me. I took the receiver off the hook and dialed the number but hung up on the second ring. In my heart I was not ready yet. I was still afraid.

After a while, the office workers gradually began to come in, greeting me one by one with surprised, sympathetic words. The building—and I too—at length took on its human aspect. I had been too anxious. Being here was not particularly good, but it was not especially disagreeable. If I could make my work at the Institute a roadway to others, supplementing my deficiencies with my mask, and get used to the double life, then by putting them together I could become a complete man. No, a mask was no substitute for a real face. It gave to a real face the unreal privilege of free passage through the barriers of sexual taboos, and so, far from becoming a complete man, I would doubtless lead the fragmented lives of several different men. Anyway, I would get used to a double life. I would adopt the habit, quite nonchalantly, of changing my clothes to suit different times and places. Just the way a single groove in a record can produce a number of different sounds at the same time.

In the afternoon, there was a trivial incident. In a corner of the laboratory a group of four or five men had put their heads together, and as I casually approached, one of the younger men in the middle hastily tried to conceal something. When I questioned them, I found that it was really nothing to hide: it was a petition about what to do concerning the problem of Korean immigration and emigration. In addition,
although I did not censure him, he began to apologize profusely, while the other men watched us with distaste.

Was it that a faceless man is not competent to sign his name on behalf of Koreans? Of course, the assistant bore me no ill will; perhaps he was rather being respectful out of a feeling of pity for me. If men from the very beginning had not had faces, the problem of racial differences would never have arisen, whether one were Japanese, Korean, Russian, Italian, or Polynesian. But still, why did this so magnanimous young man make such a distinction between me who had no face and Koreans who had a different kind of face? When man evolved from the monkey, he did not do so by his use of tools, as is usually claimed, but because he had come to distinguish himself from monkeys by his face.

However, I asked to sign the petition. Everyone held his breath in expectation. But there was a lingering feeling of distaste. Why did I have to do something so meaningless? This invisible wall called “face” stood barring my way. Could you call this an ordinary world?

Suddenly I was aware of an unbearable fatigue, and, producing some suitable excuse, I returned home earlier than usual. I still was not completely confident of regaining the feeling of my real face, and even if I waited longer, there might well be no great improvement. Since I was wearing the bandage covering, as long as I did not talk I need have no fear that my agitation would be discernible; and, moreover, the agitation would not be mine alone. Would it not rather be far more painful for me to pretend not to see your agitation? I said to myself over and over again that even if I did encounter obvious confusion on your part, I should not be provoked by it and lose control of myself.

But even though you had not seen me for a week, you smiled at me just as before I left, without showing the slightest sign of embarrassment in your acts or in your expression; and
I could only stand for a moment dumfounded at this lack of concern. It was as if you had been kept in cold storage for a week. Had I become for you, I wonder, such a meaningless entity that you did not even feel the need to conceal your secrets? Or was this extraordinary shamelessness, this devil’s heart in saint’s clothing, your true character? Well, at last becoming rather ill-tempered, I demanded an account of the time I had been away; but without the slightest change of expression as you busied yourself with my clothes, you started in talking about the enlargement of the house next door, which was a violation of the building code, and of the war of letters that was raging between us and its owner; then you kept up a chatter in an innocent tone, like some child playing alone with his blocks, about domestic matters: a rumpus in the neighborhood over children who had not been able to sleep because of barking dogs, the branches of the trees in the garden that hung over into the street, should you close the window when the television set was on, should we buy a new washer because the old one made noise.… Were you the same person as the one last night who, like some fountain, profusely overflowed with the feelings of a mature woman? I could not believe it. Although I had fought bitterly against the division of my self into the mask and the face, for which I had had to prepare myself well, you endured the instantaneous split with composure and showed not the slightest regret. What did this mean, for heaven’s sake? It was too unfair! How would it affect you, I mused, if I told you everything I knew? If I had had the button in my hands at that moment I should have thrust it in your face without a word.

But in the end, I could only keep silent like a fish. To show you the trick of the mask was nothing but disarming myself. If I could pull you down to my level, it might be all right to disarm. But the sacrifice was too great. Even though I might tear the mask off of your hypocrisy, you had a thousand layers
of masks, and one after another a new one would appear; but my mask was only a single ply, and under that there remained not even a layer of ordinary face.

Our house, which I had not been in for a week, completely soaked up my daily life like a sponge; the walls, the ceilings, the floor matting seemed secure and solid; but for someone who had had the experience of the mask I could not help but perceive, however disagreeable it might be, that this solidity was merely a kind of sexual barrier that had become custom. And just as the existence of the barrier was merely a promise rather than a reality, I who had taken off the mask found my existence also shallow and illusory. And I thought of the mask—of the other world that I touched upon through the mask—as having a far greater reality. This feeling did not concern the house alone but also you. Although twenty-four hours had not yet passed since my desperate feeling of defeat, comparable only to death, incorrigibly I was already beginning to feel a withering hunger for the reality of you that I had been able to discover through my sense of touch. I began to tremble. They say that when a mole fails to touch anything with the ends of its whiskers, it develops a neurosis; I too required something to touch and was apparently already beginning to develop withdrawal symptoms, just as a drug addict whose source has been cut off still yearns for narcotics though he realizes they are a virulent poison.

I had exhausted my patience. I wanted to swim back to firm land quickly any way I could. I thought this was our house, but it was only a temporary shelter; and the mask itself—it was far from being a temporary face, for it had cured me of my seasickness while I was wearing it—seemed to be real land. I decided to go out as soon as we had finished supper, on the pretext of having suddenly remembered an urgent experiment, that I could not leave half done. I said that I should perhaps be staying away for the night. Although this was quite
unprecedented, you did not seem to disapprove, nor did your face with its vaguely commiserating expression show any suspicion. There was no need to be concerned, whatever the excuse, if a faceless monster was going to spend the night out.