The Face of Another - Kobo Abe [5]
But, for a moment, I suspected I had mistaken the record. If not, certainly the machine was out of kilter. The music sounded insane. I had never heard such Bach. If you suppose Bach to be balm for the soul, imagine it as nothing but a lump of clay, neither poison nor balm. It was meaningless and stupid; every phrase played seemed to me quite like a dusty, sticky lollipop.
At precisely that moment you filled two cups with black tea and brought them into the room. When I said nothing, you must have thought I was absorbed in my listening, and you left, keeping your footsteps as quiet as possible. Then, it appeared that I was the one who was mad! Even so, I could not believe it. How should a wound on the face have any effect on one’s sense of hearing? But the deformed Bach, no matter how I listened, would not go back to normal again; I could only assume the wound had produced this effect. I stuck a cigarette through the slit in the bandage and asked myself with a nervous fidget what I had lost along with my face. Apparently my philosophy about faces stood in need of fundamental revision.
Then, suddenly, as if the floor of time had slipped away, I found myself in a memory of thirty years ago. The event I had thought of not even once since then abruptly and vividly came back. It concerned my elder sister’s false hair. I don’t quite know how to put it, but I felt the wig to be unspeakably indecent and immoral. One time I sneaked it away and burned it up. My mother discovered this. She was strangely insistent. She questioned me, and although my action had been intended to do right, when it came to being examined I did not know what to answer and just stammered and blushed. No, if I had tried perhaps I might have been able to answer. But such things are sullied by being spoken aloud; I think my very strict moral sense made me be silent.… And if I replaced false hair with the word face the same unbearable feeling of frustration would fit in perfectly with the crumbling and empty sounds of the Bach.
When I stopped the record and came out of the study, as if impelled, you were just in the act of polishing some glasses lined up before you in the dining room. I cannot trace back what happened to me. But coming up against your resistance, I was at last able to grasp the meaning of my own position. I bore down on your shoulder with my right hand and tried to thrust my left hand up under your skirt. You gave a shriek and, suddenly straightening your legs, jumped up. The chair fell over and a glass crashed to the floor.
We stood transfixed, breathless, with the fallen chair between us. Admittedly my action must have been too headstrong. But I also had some excuse. It was a desperate effort to regain all at once what I was beginning to lose because of my ravaged face. Since the accident, the two of us had completely stopped sexual relations. In theory, I conceded that my face was an incidental reason, but in reality perhaps I was sneaking around trying a direct test of your response. I had been driven into a corner, and there was nothing to do but launch a frontal counterattack. Apparently I had tried to convince you by my action that the face was a mere screen, an illusion of no importance.
The feel of your inner thigh still glowed like powdered alabaster on my finger tips. A cry stuck in my throat like a bundle of thorns. How much I wanted to say … but I could not form a single word. Excuses? Consolation? Blame? If we had talked about it, we would have had to decide on one or the other, and such a decision would hardly have been enough. If it were a question of excuses and consolation, I would have preferred to melt away like smoke. Supposing I chose to attack.… Well, if I tore your face off, at least you would be the same as I … or some even more horrible goblin. Suddenly you began to sob. It was an unnerving sound, like air escaping from a faucet when the water stops.
Suddenly, a deep hole