The Face of Another - Kobo Abe [55]
Abruptly, I began to feel jealous of the living room light. It was nothing so precise as thinking there was some guest taking my place; I was apparently jealous of the very light burning when evening came, of the living room the same as it had always been. I should be reading the evening paper by that light as I waited for dinner, and apparently I felt it somehow unfair and unacceptable that I should have to loiter outside the window, my face concealed by a mask. The living room light, whose calm brightness remained unchanged even though I was not there … just as you did.…
Then I suddenly realized the shabbiness and the unreliability of the mask, which until now had given such satisfactory results, on which I had placed so much hope. My big scene, in which I had imagined putting on the mask and becoming someone else, was after all merely a scene; and with the coming of evening, a switch had been turned and the living-room light lit. The mask was a poor weak thing before such everyday certainties. When it saw you smile it would dissolve like unseasonable snow.
In order to get over this feeling of defeat, I decided to let my mask dream as it would for a while. The dreams would be somewhat crude, like the mask, but I could not complain if it was filled with fancies, or delusions—these were its daily fare. In the meantime, pretending to ignore what was going on in the mask, I again began to circle around the house with the air of being there on business.
But these musings, far from emboldening the mask, had the effect of demonstrating the treacherous impassability of the deep channel that separated me from it.
The instant the chains were loosened, the mask would boldly march toward the house. That would place me in the position of a pimp. The gate off its hinges … the mud-clogged gravel path … the diseased entry door from which the paint had begun to peel … the half-rotted rain barrel, beginning to collapse in a corner of the entryway.… None of your business, this is somebody else’s house! I would strain my ears for your presence as I rang the doorbell and step back, controlling my breathing. At length, the sound of footsteps would draw near, the porch light would go on and then the sound of your voice would ask who was there.…
No. No matter in how much detail I tell such a story, it is all quite hopeless. There is no need to tell it, and furthermore, it would be impossible. It might turn into something funny, if by hook or by crook I could apply logical syntax to the wild fancies; but they were like scribblings on a blackboard, all mixed up, disregarding time or sequence, writing and erasing, erasing and writing—their order was like graffiti on the wall of a public toilet. I should like to extract two or three fragments, restricting myself to what is necessary to make you understand the impact these thoughts had on me.
Well, the first one is a scene that follows the point when I hear the murmuring of your voice. Thrusting my foot into the door, which you have cautiously opened halfway, I push my way in and abruptly thrust my pistol in your face, which is blank with amazement as if you had swallowed a sudden gust of wind. I would like you to realize my perplexity. The act was simply too shameful. Indeed, I have often been irritated by your imperturbability, but even so it was unnecessary to act like some movie villain. If I were a seducer couldn’t I invent some pretext for approaching you, something more in keeping with a seducer? Since this was fancy, even a transparent lie would do … something like pretending to be an old classmate of your husband’s. Far from being a seducer, was I not an intimidator really? Furthermore, had there not been concealed in my mask from the beginning a scheme of revenge? There was at work here a justifiable feeling of vengeance, of defiance, of abhorrence for the worldly prejudice that deprived a man of citizenship along with