The Face of Another - Kobo Abe [37]
Thus both the desire to restore the roadway between us and vengeful craving to destroy you fiercely contended within me. At length I could not distinguish between them, and drawing the bow on you became a common, everyday thing; then suddenly in my heart was graven the face of a hunter.
A hunter’s face could not possibly be “introverted and harmonious.” With such a face I would end up at best as a friend to little birds, or failing that, bait for wild animals. In this light, my solution, far from sudden, might rather be called inevitable. I was dazzled perhaps by the double aspect of the mask—was it the negation of my real face or actually a new face?—and I had been obliged to take an unavoidably circuitous road because I had forgotten the essential point that even this daze was a form of action.
In mathematics there are “imaginary numbers,” strange numbers which, when squared, become minus. They have points of similarity with masks, for putting one mask over another would be the same as not putting on any at all.
ONCE I had decided on the type, the rest was simple. I had already accumulated sixty-eight modeling pictures, and it so happened that more than half of them belonged to the “protruding-center” type. Everything was ready—almost too ready.
I decided to start work at once. I had no special model, but I nevertheless tried to sketch a face, as from some invisible picture, groping my way along from the inside for the expression that might appeal to you. First I applied a spongy resin to the part of the antimony cast with the scar webs and smoothed it down. Over that, I placed layers of a thin plastic tape instead of clay along the Langer lines to provide directional control. From a half year of practice my fingers were as versed in the details of the face as a watchmaker’s are in finding the bend of a mainspring. I took the area around my wrist as my standard for skin color and used a greater quantity of titanous oxide to whiten the temples and the point of the chin, adding cadmium red to give a blush to the cheeks. Moreover, I deliberately used conspicuous color blotches as I drew near to the surface and went so far as to apply some grey spots especially around the nostrils, thus contriving to produce a naturalness consonant with my age. Last of all, I applied liquid resin to the transparent layer, that is, the thin fluorescent membrane to which I had transferred the skin surface I had bought and which had a ratio of refraction close to that of ceratin. When I applied compressed steam to it for a very short time, it contracted and set in a perfect fit. Since I had not yet put in the wrinkles, it was too smooth, but one had the feeling of something living, as if it had been a moment ago stripped from a living person. (I had spent a good twenty-two or twenty-three days to bring the mask this far.)
The next problem was the treatment of the edging of the skin. Around the forehead I could devise something with my hair (fortunately it was plentiful and also somewhat curly). Around the eyes I decided to make a number of small wrinkles and to hide the edge by darkening the skin pigmentation and wearing sunglasses. As for the lips, I would insert the flange up underneath and attach it to the gums. I could manage the nostrils by attaching two rather stiff tubes and inserting them into my nose. But the jaw line was a little troublesome. There was only one way. I should have to conceal it with a beard.
I planted each strand, carefully observing the angle and direction, using only the thinner hair from my head and planting some fifty to sixty filaments per square inch. The labor was time-consuming—I spent another twenty days on the beard alone—but even more, I was plagued by a psychological resistance to the device. Fifty years ago beards were all too common, but now they are unusual. When I hear the word “beard” the first thing I think of,