The Face of Another Read Free Page A

unspeakably indecent and immoral. One time I sneaked it away and burned it up. My mother discovered this. She was strangely insistent. She questioned me, and although my action had been intended to do right, when it came to being examined I did not know what to answer and just stammered and blushed. No, if I had tried perhaps I might have been able to answer. But such things are sullied by being spoken aloud; I think my very strict moral sense made me be silent.… And if I replaced
false hair
with the word
face
the same unbearable feeling of frustration would fit in perfectly with the crumbling and empty sounds of the Bach.
    When I stopped the record and came out of the study, as if impelled, you were just in the act of polishing some glasses lined up before you in the dining room. I cannot trace back what happened to me. But coming up against your resistance, I was at last able to grasp the meaning of my own position. I bore down on your shoulder with my right hand and triedto thrust my left hand up under your skirt. You gave a shriek and, suddenly straightening your legs, jumped up. The chair fell over and a glass crashed to the floor.
    We stood transfixed, breathless, with the fallen chair between us. Admittedly my action must have been too headstrong. But I also had some excuse. It was a desperate effort to regain all at once what I was beginning to lose because of my ravaged face. Since the accident, the two of us had completely stopped sexual relations. In theory, I conceded that my face was an incidental reason, but in reality perhaps I was sneaking around trying a direct test of your response. I had been driven into a corner, and there was nothing to do but launch a frontal counterattack. Apparently I had tried to convince you by my action that the face was a mere screen, an illusion of no importance.
    The feel of your inner thigh still glowed like powdered alabaster on my finger tips. A cry stuck in my throat like a bundle of thorns. How much I wanted to say … but I could not form a single word. Excuses? Consolation? Blame? If we had talked about it, we would have had to decide on one or the other, and such a decision would hardly have been enough. If it were a question of excuses and consolation, I would have preferred to melt away like smoke. Supposing I chose to attack.… Well, if I tore your face off, at least you would be the same as I … or some even more horrible goblin. Suddenly you began to sob. It was an unnerving sound, like air escaping from a faucet when the water stops.
    Suddenly, a deep hole popped open in my face. It seemed gouged out so deep that with my whole body in it there would still have been more room. A liquid, like pus from a decayed tooth, dribbled down. Terrific stenches in the room, catching the sound, came swarming out like cockroaches—from inside the chair, from the corner of the cabinet, from the drain of the sink, from the lampshade discolored with the dead bodiesof insects. I wanted a stopper for the hole in my face—anything would do. How I longed to put an end to this anguish, this game of blindman’s buff with no blindman.

    I T WAS a mere hair’s breadth from this point to making plans for a mask. Basically, the idea was not at all extraordinary; like some windblown seed, it needed only a speck of ground and a drop of water to grow. And so the next day, without much enthusiasm or seriousness, as if the whole thing had been predetermined, I began looking through the indices of old scientific journals. It must have been the year before last, sometime in the summer, that there had been an article on artificial organs made of plastic. I would cover up the holes in my face with a plastic mask. Of course, according to one theory a mask is apparently the expression of an extremely metaphysical aspiration to give oneself a kind of transcendental disguise, for the mask is not simply something compensatory. Even I did not regard it as anything like a shirt or a pair of pants