The Face of Another - Kobo Abe [25]
Suddenly the seats in the row in front of me began to shake unnaturally. The suppressed, cynical laugh of a woman rose to me from out of the darkness immediately in front and to the side. A man shushed her, and the shaking stopped. Perhaps no one else noticed, for the music at full volume made the hall tremble, and the spectators were few. Although it was none of my business, I drew a long sigh of relief. I stared fixedly in the direction of the voices, unable to take my eyes away, try as I might. The screen brightened, and the outlines of two people were distinctly revealed. The fringe of the girl’s hair, turned under in back, in the fashion of a child’s, fell over the collar of her white mohair coat, and a man’s head was lying on her shoulder. But both of them were completely enveloped from the shoulders down in a man’s black overcoat. However were they interlaced together beneath it?
The conspicuous thing was the white nape of the woman’s neck. The white area seemed to melt into the coat collar, which was the same white, and yet it also seemed to come floating out of it. Actually, the woman may have been moving up and down, but it may well have been that my own eyes were giddy and unfocused. However, the man’s form was even more equivocal. The position of his head was such that he seemed to be looking straight at the woman—if he could move his left arm, which was pressed against her, around under her armpit, he would be able to reach her buttocks, I suppose—her free right shoulder dipped sharply down. They could be doing anything. I concentrated my gaze on the right shoulder until my eyes watered. But it was like a picture drawn in India ink on a blackboard. If the shoulder appeared to be undulating, it was because I wanted it to be so; and if it seemed to be doing it rhythmically, it was definitely because I wished it. In short I was apparently infatuated with my own eagerness.
Suddenly the woman gave a loud laugh. I started as if I had been slapped and was seized by the illusion that it was I who was responsible for the unexpected outburst. But actually it was not the woman who had laughed but the loud-speaker behind the screen. An exciting, voluptuous scene was being enacted on the screen, as if in collusion.
A close-up of a woman’s white throat filled the screen. The picture gradually shifted as she violently twisted her neck to the right and left as if in pain, and at length her lips appeared, like piping hot sausages; they were vigorously contorted into a terrible, excessive smile. Then nostrils like cross-sections of squashed rubber hose … eyelids so tightly closed that they seemed lost in bundles of wrinkles. There was a laugh that changed into the raucous breathing of some frantic wild bird.
I was unhappy. Why show a face to such a degree? Originally movies were supposed to be a show in the dark. Since the person looking at them had no face, the one being looked at wouldn’t need one either, I should think, but.…
Actually, however, though actors do take off their clothes, not a single one tries to take off his face. On the contrary, they even appear to consider that a performance centers on the face. Isn’t it much the same as fraud if they deliberately entice spectators into the darkness? Moreover, peeping is a shameful thing, and can you call it wholesome to act out peeping? I wish they would put a stop to such absurd affectation and hypocrisy! (Isn’t it comic for a cripple who has lost his face to be so self-assertive on such a point? Still, the one who best understands the significance of light is not the electrician, not the painter, not the photographer, but the man who has lost his sight in adulthood. There must be the wisdom of deficiency in deficiency, just as there is the widsom of plenty in plenty.)
As if asking for help, I brought my gaze back to the pair in front of me. This time both of them were absolutely quiet and motionless. Why? Had the voluptuous commotion been nothing but my fancy? A sticky perspiration, crawling