The Face of Another - Kobo Abe [47]
“All right … all right,” she repeated in a sing-song voice. And rubbing the gold yoyo wistfully on the sleeve of her jacket, she said: “If you’ll really buy me another, I’ll return this one. But … I didn’t really steal this one without saying anything. It was promised a long time ago. But I’ll return it. I’ll go and return it right now. I really love it. Whenever I get any present from anybody I really love it.”
She sidled along with her back to the wall and slipped by me. Children were children. Just as I was beginning to feel relief, the girl passed me and whispered: “Let’s play secrets!”
Play secrets? What did she mean? There was nothing to worry about. A retarded girl like her would never understand such involved tactics. It would be easy to put it down to a restricted field of vision, yet a dog with a restricted field of vision compensates by a keener sense of smell. In the first place, the very fact that I had to be so worried seemed to prove that my self-confidence had again begun to waver.
I had a terribly bad aftertaste. Just making my face look as if it were new, with my memories and my habits unchanged, was quite like dipping up water with a bottomless dipper. Since I had put a mask over my face, I needed one that would fit my heart. If possible, I wanted to be so perfect in my inventions and my acting as to be undetectable even by a lie detector.
WHEN I took the mask off, the adhesive material, musty with sweat, gave off an odor like overheated grapes. At that very moment an unbearable fatigue flowed over me, eddying in my joints like syrupy tar. But everything depends on how you think of it. For a first trial, things had not gone altogether badly. The pain of giving birth to a child is no ordinary thing. Since a full-grown man was trying to be reborn as a completely different person, I should realize all the more that a certain amount of setback and friction was natural. I should be grateful rather that I hadn’t been fatally injured.
I wiped off the back of the mask, replaced it on the antimony cast, washed my face, and rubbed in some ointment. Then I stretched out on the bed with the thought of giving my features the rest they had not had for a time. Perhaps as a reaction to the strain that had lasted too long, I fell into a deep sleep, although the afternoon sun was still bright. When I awakened darkness had already begun to fall.
It was not raining, but a thick fog screened the backs of the stores that cut off my vision of the street itself. It seemed like some gloomy forest. Perhaps because of the fog the sky had taken on a faint rosy-to-purple tint. I opened the window wide, filling my lungs with the air, which was heavy like a salt breeze; this period of seclusion when I had no need to fear the eyes of others was like a seat reserved for me alone. Yes, wasn’t the real form of human existence apparent in this very fog? My real face, my mask, my scar webs—all such evanescent adornments were diaphanous as if pierced with light. Substance and essence were cleansed of all affectation. Man’s soul became something one could taste directly with the tongue, like a peeled peach. Of course, I doubtless had to pay the price in loneliness. But even that made no difference, did it? Perhaps my companions who had faces were as lonely as I. Whatever signboard of a face I hung out, I certainly had no need to select some shipwrecked castaway for the inside.
Loneliness—since I was trying to escape it—was hell; and yet for the hermit who seeks it, it is apparently happiness. All right then, what about putting an end to acting like some maudlin, tragic hero and give the hermit’s role a try? Since I had deliberately put the stamp of loneliness on my face, there was no reason why I should not put it to good use. With advanced nuclear chemistry as my god, rheology as the words of my prayer, and the laboratory as