The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore - Benjamin Hale [194]
There was some initial business to discuss. After that was over with and the DaSilvas (Dr. DaSilva was the husband of Cecília, who ran the legitimate half of their business) were sufficiently convinced I was trustworthy, Cecília returned to the front of the store and I left Audrey and Sasha in the waiting room to follow Dr. DaSilva back to his office, a cramped but clean, windowless room with a desk, a sink, and an operating table. An assortment of surgical equipment lay gleaming on the counter. The operating table had a white bedsheet draped over it, with fluorescent lamps C-clamped to its edges. Dr. DaSilva decompressed into the office chair behind his desk, and I sat across from him in a small wooden chair facing it. There was a distinct sense of Old World gentility to Dr. DaSilva. Seen close up, he looked even more like a silent film star: he even seemed to move like a man in an old movie, too slowly when standing still and too quickly when walking, and sometimes, while in transit, popping instantaneously from one place to another; you could almost hear the crackle of decaying film as he moved around the room.
“I need your help, Dr. DaSilva. I want a nose.”
“I believe I can provide that,” he nodded. He sat in his cheap wheeling office chair with his elbows anchored on the thighs of his crossed legs and his fingers making a cage, each fingertip leaning on its corresponding fingertip. Dr. DaSilva looked like a man of science. Something about his mannerisms reminded me at that moment of Dr. Norman Plumlee.
“Look at my nose!” I half-wailed. “It’s hideous! I want to put a new nose on my face.”
“What sort of nose are you imagining, Mr. Littlemore?”
“A nice big one.”
“Hm. Would you like, say, a nose like this one?” He tapped the side of his own nose.
“I simply want a nose, Doctor, that will make me look more—um—well—more like a normal person.” I refrained from telling him my whole story. Usually my faculties of speech were enough to convince people that I was just a very weird-looking human. He seemed to believe that I was human, and so I did not tell him that what I wanted, what I really wanted, was a nose to make me more humanlike. I even dared to crack a joke: “Whenever I talk to someone, I see them staring at this aberration between my eyes, and I know they’re thinking: ‘Look at that nose—this guy looks like a chimp!’ ”
Dr. DaSilva smiled warmly and laughed, laughing with me, until he adjusted his wireframe glasses, looked at me a little closer, and quit laughing. He cleared his throat.
“This will be a tricky one,” he said.
“Please, Doctor!”—my fast-beating heart screamed out within my breast—“I don’t care where you get it! Cut it off a corpse for all I care, I just want the nose of a man, a man!”
Dr. DaSilva pulled a big three-ring binder from beneath his desk and flopped it open under his desk lamp. The book was full of photographs of all the nose surgeries he had performed. These were the kinds of noses he could shape with his knife. It functioned as a catalog. They were pre- and postoperative pictures of his clients, with the eyes scribbled out of the pictures to protect their anonymities. These pictures were nothing short of astounding to me. These women went under Dr. DaSilva’s knife and woke up with brand-new faces. He must have been a genius of the craft of plastic surgery. He was an artist—a sculptor—but his medium was not clay nor marble; it was the fragile union of flesh and nonflesh, the fluid marriage of the animate with the inanimate. He was like the Rodin of the corporeal—instead of kneading nonliving matter into forms suggesting life, he manipulated the very matter of life. I flipped through the glossy photographs