The Face of Another - Kobo Abe [71]
When I told a lie, so did she. Apparently she began to think of something else at once, and of course I pretended not to notice. Should I make this girl just for this once, tonight, in revenge for the scars, for you, and for my real face? No, no need to worry, for while anything at all could happen here, nothing at all would. I told a lie and she told another, and then for some reason she suddenly took me aback by suggesting that I might be an artist.
“Why? Is there something that makes me look as if I painted pictures?”
“But, in general, artists don’t want to appear special, do they?”
“True enough … but then is make-up something to show oneself off or conceal oneself with?”
“Both,” she said, nibbling a pebble-like cocktail cracker, which she held with the tips of her fingers. “Both intentions are sincere, after all, aren’t they?”
“Sincere?” Suddenly I felt dispirited, as if I had been shown the secret of a sleight-of-hand trick. “That’s all shit!”
The girl wrinkled up her nose: “Disgusting! Must you be so obvious?”
True! Any real thing is a fake here, and any fake passes for the genuine article. Amusing oneself with painting pictures of holes on taboo fences just before getting aroused was apparently what one did in a place like this (if I got any more drunk than I was, my very realization that I had a mask on would be dangerous) and under the palm of my hand the girl’s thighs, as if bored, began to yawn. The psychological moment had apparently come for me to leave. Nothing had happened, but it made no difference. I should consider it benefit enough to have approached the forbidden fence and ascertained its strength. However disagreeable, tomorrow I should have to try a desperate assault on my fence.
I felt no distance between this experience and the subsequent events; it was as if I were looking through a telescope. However, I did not make the mistake of giving in to my drunken impulses and tearing off the mask; I told the taxi driver to take me not to my own house, but to my hideaway. It would appear that the distance between my real face and the mask, no matter how precisely I tried to match the surfaces, no matter how strong the adhesive materials I used, could not be filled in simply. All night long I dreamed of you, between short intervals of wakefulness. In the dreams, you seemed to be continually appealing to me for something. I thought you were warning me about how close I was to lechery, but later that seemed mere imagination. Once I dreamt of being in a jail.
THE next day, as I had anticipated, I had a terrible hangover. My whole face was swollen and smarting. Perhaps I had been poisoned by the adhesive materials, for I had not taken the proper care of my face after coming home. When I had vomited and then washed my face, I felt better. But it was still before ten. Since I was not to go out until after three, I decided to lie down for two or three hours more.
What a sorry thing it was to put off even for a few hours the great moment on which I had staked the efforts of a year. Thrashing wretchedly around on the bed, seeking some cool place on the mattress, I couldn’t fall asleep. How stupid of me to have poured down the drinks. What in God’s name was so enjoyable about tearing around as I had? I felt there was something I had to remember … roaming the streets, wearing my mask, trying to be a transparent being … fences … taboos.… Yes, I was on the verge of becoming a lecher.… Save for being the acting head of a high-molecular-research institute, I was completely insipid and inexcusably harmless.… Yes, come what may, I had to be a lecher in order to get over the fences.
I frantically tried to scrape the remains of my drunkenness out of the back of my cranium by recalling in detail my impressions of the preceding night. But the erotic feelings, so vivid then, would not come back. Was it because I was not wearing my mask? That