The Face of Another (30 page)

I
T WAS NOT
the mask that died among the boots, but you. The girl with the yoyo was not the only one to know about your masked play. From the very first instant, when, elated with pride, you talked about the distortion of the magnetic field, I too saw through you completely. Please don’t insult me any more by asking how I did it. Of course, I was flustered, confused, and frightened to death. Under any circumstances, it was an unimaginably drastic way of acting, so different from your ordinary self. It was hallucinatory, seeing you so full of self-confidence. Even you knew very well that I had seen through you. You knew and yet demanded that we go on with the play in silence. I considered it a dreadful thing at first, but I soon changed my mind, thinking that perhaps you were acting out of sympathy for me. Then, though the things you did seemed a little embarrassing, they began to present the appearance of a delicate and suave invitation to a dance. And as I watched you become amazingly serious and go on pretending to be deceived, my heart began to fill with a feeling of gratitude, and so I followed after you meekly.

But you went from one misunderstanding to the next, didn’t you? You write that I rejected you, but that’s not true. Didn’t you reject yourself all by yourself? I felt that I could
understand your wanting to. In view of the accident and all, I had more than half resigned myself to sharing your suffering. For that very reason, your mask seemed quite good to me. In a happy frame of mind, I reflected that love strips the mask from each of us, and we must endeavor for those we love to put the mask on so that it can be taken off again. For if there is no mask to start with, there is no pleasure in removing it, is there? Do you understand what I mean?

I think you do. After all, don’t even you have your doubts? Is what you think to be the mask in reality your real face, or is what you think to be your real face really a mask? Yes, you do understand. Anyone who is seduced is seduced realizing this.

But the mask did not return. At first you were apparently trying to get your own self back by means of the mask, but before you knew it you had come to think of it only as your magician’s cloak for escaping from yourself. So it was not a mask, but somewhat the same as another real face, wasn’t it? You finally revealed your true colors. It was not the mask, but you yourself. It is meaningful to put a mask on, precisely because one makes others realize it is a mask. Even with cosmetics, which you abominate so, we never try to conceal the fact that it is make-up. After all, it was not that the mask was bad, but that you were too unaware of how to treat it. Even though you put the mask on, you could not do a thing while you were wearing it. Good or bad, you could not do a thing. All you could manage was to wander through the streets and write long, never-ending confessions, like a snake with its tail in its mouth. It was all the same to you whether you burned your face or didn’t, whether you put on a mask or didn’t. You were incapable of calling the mask back. Since the mask will not come back, there is no reason for me to return either.

Nevertheless, these notes were a terrible confession. I felt
as if I had been forced onto an operating table, although I was not sick, and hacked up indiscriminately with a hundred different knives and scissors, even the uses of which were incomprehensible. With this in mind, please read through what you have written once again. Surely even you will be able to hear my cries of pain. If I had the time, I should like to explain the significance of those cries one by one. But it would be dreadful if I were so careless as to let you return while I was still here. It really would be dreadful. While you spoke of the face as being some kind of roadway between fellow human beings, you were like a snail that thinks only of its own doorway. You were showing off. Even though you had forced me into a compound where I had already been, you set up a fuss as if I had scaled a prison wall, as if I had absconded with money. And so, when you began to focus on my face you were flustered and confused, and without a word you at once nailed up the door of the mask. Indeed, as you said, perhaps death filled the world. I wonder if scattering the seeds of death is not the deed of men who think only of themselves, as you do.

You don’t need me. What you really need is a mirror. Because any stranger is for you simply a mirror in which to reflect yourself. I don’t ever again want to return to such a desert of mirrors. My insides have almost burst with your ridicule. I shall never be able to get over it, never.

(And then came about two and a half lines of erasures, obliterated to the point of illegibility.)

W
HAT
a surprise attack. To imagine that you perceived that my mask was a mask and nevertheless went on pretending to be deceived. A swarm of shame, centipede-legged, streamed out, choosing the parts of me most subject to goose flesh—my armpits, my back, my sides. Indeed, my nerves, feeling the humiliation, seemed to be at the very surface of my skin. I became flacid as a drowned man with the hives of my shame. It was stupid of me, however normal it may have been, to say that I had not wanted to be a clown and unaware of it; but these very lines have become those of a clown. To imagine that you had seen through everything! It was as if I were putting on a play in which I was the only actor, thinking I was invisible, believing in a fake spell. I was completely oblivious to the fact that I had been seen by a spectator. My swarming shame plowed my skin. Sea urchin spines sprouted in the turned-up furrows. Soon I should be obliged to join the ranks of spiny creatures.…

I stood swaying in blank amazement. When I saw my shadow teetering with me, I realized that it was not my imagination but that I actually was swaying. I had made a terrible blunder. I had taken the wrong bus someplace. How far back would I have to go to change for one in the right direction, for God’s sake? As I stood wavering, I tried to retrace the route of my memories with the help of a stained, illegible map.

The jealousy-filled night when I decided to write these
notes. The afternoon of the seduction when I first spoke to you. The time I thought I was becoming a lecher. The faintly smiling dawn when I had at last completed the mask. The evening with its promise of rain when I began making the mask. And then the long period of bandages and scar webs that had led to all this. Still not enough? Though I had come this far, if I had taken the wrong route, I should have to find another point of departure in yet another direction. I wonder whether I was really stagnant water within, despite the outside container, as you imply.

There is no reason for me to accept this assertion of yours. I absolutely cannot agree with the opinion that someone who plants the seeds of death is a selfish person thinking only of himself. The expression “selfish person” is an extremely happy and interesting one, I think, but however you consider it you lend it too much significance when you think of it as anything more than a result. Thinking only of oneself is forever a result, never a cause. Because—I wrote this in my notes—what contemporary society needs is essentially abstract human relationships, so that even faceless people like me can earn their wages with no interference. Naturally, human relations are concrete. One’s fellow man is increasingly treated as useless and at best continues a piecemeal existence in books and in solitary islands of family groups. No matter how much television dramas go on singing the cloying praises of the family, it is the outside world, full of enemies and lechers, that passes on a man’s worth, pays his wages, and guarantees him the right to live. The smell of poison and death clings to any stranger, and people have become allergic to outsiders without realizing it. Loneliness is terrible, of course, but being betrayed by the mask of one’s fellow man is much worse. We are awkward at espousing the illusions of our fellow men, but we do not want to be so stupid as to drop out of step. Our habitual, daily routines appear merely as common, everyday
battles. People strive to protect themselves against the encroachments of others, dropping a Venetian blind over their faces and fastening it tight. And if things go well they dream up impossible desires—just as my mask tried to do—wanting to escape from themselves, to be invisible beings. No stranger is so tractable that one can know him just by wanting to. Was it not rather you who were seriously afflicted with this obliviousness to strangers, you who were possessed with the idea that you could make the conquest of a stranger by thinking only of yourself?

Of course, it serves no purpose to cling to such trivial thoughts at this point. The essential thing is the truth, not arguments or complaints. There are two indications that your sniping at me was fatal. One is the cruel revelation that while you had seen through the real character of the mask, you had nonetheless gone on pretending to be deceived. The other is the merciless chastisement of claiming that I tediously talked on and on about alibis, anonymity, pure goals, and the destroying of taboos. In actual fact I did not perform a single real act but simply went round in circles writing these notes.

My mask, which I had expected to be a shield of steel, was broken more easily than glass. I cannot refute you on that. As you said, I had come to feel that the mask was closer to being a new face for me than a mask. If I still intended to persist in believing that my real face was an incomplete copy of the mask, then I had gone to a lot of trouble to make a fake mask.

Perhaps this was so. Abruptly I recalled the primitive mask I had seen some days before in the newspaper. Certainly that must be a real mask. Perhaps one could only call something which completely got away from the real face a mask. The popping, bug-like eyes, the great mouth filled with fangs, the nose set with shiny buttons.… Down the sides of the nose a number of tendrils had swirled out over the whole face, and the entire circumference was stuck with long bird feathers,
like a quiver for arrows. The more I had looked at it, the more weirdly strange, the more unreal it had appeared. As I had stared at it, wanting to put it on myself, I had gradually begun to grasp its meaning. It was the expression of a poignant aspiration to go beyond man, an effort to consort with the gods. What a horrible imagination! It was a violent compression of will in an attempt to combat a natural taboo. Perhaps I should have made a mask like that. If I had, from the very beginning I should have been able to dispense with my feeling of deceiving others.

Not at all. Since I had spoken rashly, I had been subjected to your sarcasm when you spoke of complicated scissors and knives of incomprehensible uses. If it was all right to be a monster, weren’t my scar webs enough without the mask? Gods change, and so do men. Man has gone through periods of covering up his face, like the ladies in
The Tale of Genji
or veiled Arabian women, and at last we have arrived at the period of the real face. Of course, I do not claim that this is progress. It may be thought of as man’s victory over the gods; but at the same time it may be a sign of his allegiance to them. We never know what tomorrow will bring. Surprisingly, it is not altogether impossible that the future may see a period of rejecting the face again. But the present age belongs to man rather than to the gods. There was a reason why my mask was identical with my real face.

No, that’s enough. Enough of reasoning. If I searched, I could certainly find as many pretexts as I wanted. But no matter how many objections I marshalled, I should not be able to reverse the two facts that you pointed out to me. I should have gradually come round to the second one: that my mask had complained without ultimately doing anything. Enough of this coat of shame. It would be all right if it were only a question of clowns and fiascos, but since the experience had turned out to be worthless I was too wretched and
embarrassed even to justify it. It would be meaningless to call it desperation. I had had a perfect alibi, unrestricted freedom, yet I had gained nothing. In addition, I had been ridiculous to destroy my own alibi by writing up such a detailed report. I was like some wretched creature in ideal sexual prime, but without a penis.

Yes, perhaps I should write about the movie. I think it was around the first of February. I did not name the movie in my notes, but rather than being unrelated to what I was writing about, it was much too pertinent. I had the feeling it would be ludicrous to mention it when I was making the mask, and I deliberately avoided it. However, as things have come to this pass, there is no purpose in being superstitious. Or perhaps the situation has changed; anyway, my impressions of it have completely altered. Surely it was not simply cruelty. The film was eccentric and did not create much of a sensation, but I think you will recall the title,
One Side of Love
.