The Face of Another Read Free

face seen through the girl’s eyes. A false face, seen but unable to look back. It was intolerable to think that I appeared to the girl like this.
    Suddenly, I ripped the book in two. And with it my heart. From the tear my insides came running out like a rotten egg. I became an empty, cast-off skin. Piling the torn pages together, I regretfully handed them back to the girl. But it was too late. The thermostat of the isothermic tank, which in normal circumstances was inaudible, made a tremendous noise like the bending of a zinc plate. The girl’s knees knocked together with such force under her skirt that they might well have fused.

    I T SEEMED that I could not yet really comprehend the meaning behind my confusion at that time. I was so ashamed I writhed in anguish, still I did not rightly grasp what I had to be ashamed about. No, if I had tried I might have been able to understand, but perhaps I was taking refuge in what is commonly called “childish behavior,” instinctively avoiding a deeper search. I can hardly believe that the face is so important to a man’s existence. A man’s worthshould be gauged by the content of his work; possibly the convolutions of the surface of the brain have something to do with it, but his face certainly does not. If the loss of a face can cause conspicuous change in the scale of evaluation, it may well be owing to a fundamental emptiness of content.
    But soon afterwards—several days after the incident of the picture—I was forced to realize to my dismay that the relative importance of a face far exceeds such wishful thinking. The warning came from the inside, stealthily. Absorbed in my defences against the outside, I was taken by surprise and easily overcome. The attack was so sharp and sudden that even while I was being overcome I was unable to grasp it at once.
    That evening when I returned home I had an unusual longing to listen to Bach. It did not have to be Bach necessarily, but in my hangnail, wound-up mood, I wanted no jazz, no Mozart—Bach was indeed the most appropriate. I have never been a connoisseur of music, but perhaps I use it well. Sometimes, when my work was not making much headway, I chose music in keeping with my needs. If I chose to interrupt my thinking for a while there was piquant jazz; when I wanted impetus for a spurt there was the speculative Bartok; if I desired a feeling of freedom, there was the Beethoven of the quartets; when I wished to concentrate on a point, there were the spiral movements of Mozart; and then, Bach. He was the best for times when I needed spiritual balance.
    But, for a moment, I suspected I had mistaken the record. If not, certainly the machine was out of kilter. The music sounded insane. I had never heard such Bach. If you suppose Bach to be balm for the soul, imagine it as nothing but a lump of clay, neither poison nor balm. It was meaningless and stupid; every phrase played seemed to me quite like a dusty, sticky lollipop.
    At precisely that moment you filled two cups with blacktea and brought them into the room. When I said nothing, you must have thought I was absorbed in my listening, and you left, keeping your footsteps as quiet as possible. Then, it appeared that I was the one who was mad! Even so, I could not believe it. How should a wound on the face have any effect on one’s sense of hearing? But the deformed Bach, no matter how I listened, would not go back to normal again; I could only assume the wound had produced this effect. I stuck a cigarette through the slit in the bandage and asked myself with a nervous fidget what I had lost along with my face. Apparently my philosophy about faces stood in need of fundamental revision.
    Then, suddenly, as if the floor of time had slipped away, I found myself in a memory of thirty years ago. The event I had thought of not even once since then abruptly and vividly came back. It concerned my elder sister’s false hair. I don’t quite know how to put it, but I felt the wig to be