Confessions of a Mask Read Free Page B

sickroom. But not a single person was visible to my eyes. My frenzy was focused upon the consciousness that, through my impersonation, Tenkatsu was being revealed to many eyes. In short, I could see nothing but myself.
    And then I chanced to catch sight of my mother's face. She had turned slightly pale and was simply sitting there as though absent-minded. Our glances met; she lowered her eyes.I understood. Tears blurred my eyes.
    What was it I understood at that moment, or was on the verge of understanding? Did the motif of later years—that of "remorse as prelude to sin"—show here the first hint of its beginning? Or was the moment teaching me how grotesque my isolation would appear to the eyes of love, and at the same time was I learning, from the reverse side of the lesson, my own incapacity for accepting love? . . .
    The maid grabbed me and took me to another room. In an instant, just as though I were a chicken for plucking, she had me stripped of my outrageous masquerade.
     
    My passion for such dressing-up was aggravated when I began going to movies. It continued markedly until I was about nine.
    Once I went with our student houseboy to see a film version of the operetta Fra Diavolo. The character playing Diavolo wore an unforgettable court costume with cascades of lace at the wrists. When I said how much I should like to dress like that and wear such a wig, the student laughed derisively. And yet I knew that in the servant quarters he often amused the maids with his imitations of the Kabuki character Princess Yaegaki.
    After Tenkatsu there came Cleopatra to fascinate me. Once on a snowy day toward the end of December a friendly doctor, yielding to my entreaties, took me to see a movie about her. As it was the end of the year, the audience was small. The doctor put his feet up on the railing and fell asleep. All alone I gazed avidly, completely enchanted: The Queen of Egypt making her entry into Rome, borne aloft on an ancient and curiously wrought litter carried on the shoulders of a multitude of slaves. Melancholy eyes, the lids thickly stained with eye-shadow. Her other-worldly apparel. And then, later, her half-naked, amber-colored body corning into view from out the Persian rug. . . .
    This time, already taking thorough delight in misconduct, I eluded the eyes of my grandmother and parents and, with my younger sister and brother as accomplices, devoted myself to dressing up as Cleopatra. What was I hoping for from this feminine attire? It was not until much later that I discovered hopes the same as mine in Heliogabalus, emperor of Rome in its period of decay, that destroyer of Rome's ancient gods, that decadent, bestial monarch.
     
    The night-soil man, the Maid of Orleans, and the soldiers' sweaty odor formed one sort of preamble to my life. Tenkatsu and Cleopatra were a second. There is yet a third that should be related.
    Although as a child I read every fairy story I could lay my hands on, I never liked the princesses. I was fond only of the princes. I was all the fonder of princes murdered or princes fated for death. I was completely in love with any youth who was killed.But I did not yet understand why, from among Andersen's many fairy tales, only his "Rose-Elf" threw deep shadows over my heart, only that beautiful youth who, while kissing the rose given him as a token by his sweetheart, was stabbed to death and decapitated by a villain with a big knife. I did not yet understand why, out of Wilde's numerous fairy tales, it was only the corpse of the young fisherman in "The Fisherman and His Soul," washed up on the shore clasping a mermaid to his breast, that captivated me.
    Naturally I was also fond enough of other childlike things. There was Andersen's "The Nightingale," which I liked well, and I delighted in many childish comic books. But my heart's leaning toward Death and Night and Blood would not be denied.
    Visions of "princes slain" pursued me tenaciously. Who could have explained for me why I was so