The Face of Another - Kobo Abe [18]
The work in which I immersed myself on the other side of the closed door was this.
First, I prepared a basin large enough to contain my whole face and poured into it potassium alginate, plaster of Paris, sodium phosphate, and silicon. Then, with all my facial muscles completely relaxed, I quickly thrust my face into the mixture. Within three to five minutes the solution changed into calcium alginate in a plastic state. Since I could not be expected to hold my breath all this time, I had inserted in my mouth a slender rubber tube that led out of the basin. However, just imagine having to immobilize your expression for a time exposure. That is difficult enough. With repeated failures—a twitching under the eyes or an itchy nose—I was at it four days before I got anything satisfactory.
When I had finished, I began work on vacuum plating the inner side with nickel. Since obviously I couldn’t do that at home, I surreptitiously took the die to the laboratory and, keeping it out of sight, completed the plating there.
At length, I came to the finishing touches. One evening, after making certain you had gone to bed, I placed an iron crucible filled with an alloy of lead and antimony over a propane flame. The melted antimony took on the color of cocoa mixed with too much milk. When I poured it carefully into the hollow of the mold plated with potassium alginate, drops of white steam gently eddied up. A transparent blue smoke first spurt forcefully from the hole of the rubber breathing tube, then rose from all around the circumference of the mask. Perhaps the potassium alginate was scorching. There was a terrible stench; I opened the window, and the chill January wind suddenly snapped at my nostrils with its claws. I turned the mold upside down and shook it, separating the hardened antimony cast, and extinguished the still-smoking potassium alginate base by submerging it in water. Silvery white scar webs, gleaming dully, flickered back at my own flesh-colored ones.
Somehow I could not believe that this was my face. It was different … too different.… These could not possibly be the webs so familiar to me that I could scream, the ones I always saw in my mirror. Of course, since the left and right of the antimony cast were the reverse of my face reflected in a mirror, some feeling of difference was unavoidable. Yet, I had already experienced this much variation with photographs without acutely sensing a difference.
Was it a question of color then? According to Henri Boulan’s Le Visage, which I had found in the library, a surprisingly intimate relationship apparently exists between facial color and expression. For example, a plaster-of-Paris death mask of a man will become that of a woman simply by the control of color. Again, one can detect the disguise of a man dressed as a woman if his photograph is taken in black and white. When I thought about this, color seemed a plausible answer. The ridges in the antimony cast were so slight as to be imperceptible if not held to the light; such faint un-evenness would probably be nothing to fuss about in a mask. For an instant I again started at the imprint of my scars, but wasn’t I unnecessarily wrestling with myself? Even these metal scar webs would have their own fine repulsiveness, I suppose, if they were tinted a flesh color. Perhaps. It’s a shame man isn’t made of metal.
If color was that important, tinting at the time of the final flesh modeling would have to be done with the utmost care. As I passed my hand, almost in consolation, over the surface of the still-warm antimony