The Face of Another - Kobo Abe [75]
I caught up with you at the traffic light on the other side of the station. In the few minutes’ time it would take to get from here to the station, I had to win you over somehow. I could not be abrupt, but there was no time to be indirect. As if I had picked it up, I casually held out one of your leather buttons which I had smuggled out of the house in advance, and flung at you the line I had prepared.
“Isn’t this something you dropped?”
Without concealing your surprise, you attempted to find out where it had come from, lifting your handbag and looking at the bottom, checking the clasp; and with an uncomprehending expression, you glanced quickly at me. Once I had spoken, I followed up immediately, not wanting to lose the opportunity on which I was determined.
“Wasn’t it from your hat?”
“My hat?”
“Even a rabbit comes out of a hat with a pass of the hand, doesn’t it?”
But you didn’t even smile. Far from that, you nailed my mouth shut with a glance like surgical forceps. You looked at me with an unflinching stare, of which you yourself were perhaps unconscious, as if you had forgotten yourself. If the look had gone on three seconds more I should have concluded that I had been seen through and would have beaten a quick retreat. But that could not be. My mask had already been proved successful in every situation. There was absolutely no fear that I would be suspected as long as you did not tear the mask off by force as the tattooed man did or put your lips directly to it—the difference in temperature could probably not be hidden. Moreover, I had consciously made my voice lower than usual, and even if I hadn’t, my labials, the b’s, p’s, and m’s, were quite transformed.
Perhaps, indeed, I had been too worried; at once your gaze fell away, and your usual, far-away expression returned. But my erotic feeling seemed to slip away when I met your look, and if you had left on the spot I too should doubtless have given it up with good grace, thinking that after all it would be best for us both. At any rate, it was broad daylight, and the efficiency and expediency of the mask seemed to be fading. But you too hesitated for an instant. And the crowd, undulating around us like some greedy marine protozoan, sucked up our oozing thoughts from the edges. There was no time to explore in detail the significance of the distortion in the magnetic field that had sprung up between us as a result of your momentary hesitation, and with my sights fixed on this hesitation, I instantly delivered the second prepared line.
MARGINAL NOTE: The expression “distortion in the magnetic field” is actually quite precise. Perhaps I had had a dim premonition of the grave significance of this instant. I could be neither proud of, nor justified in, the prophecy; but if these few lines were missing I would have had no premonition—I shudder at the very thought—that I would be sentenced to the punishment of being ridiculous, because of the crime of insensitivity. Whatever I did would merely provoke laughter, and these notes would not be the record of the mask, but those of a simple clown. Being a clown would be all right, but I did not want to be a clown unaware that he was one.
I wonder if you remember. I casually asked, in a tone as if weary from too many inquiries, where buses on a certain line arrived and departed. I did not know whether you knew the answer or not, but choosing that stop was not a plan to kill time; it was a far-sighted, clever trap.
First of all, that stop was the only one at which one could reach the station from an affiliated bus line, and it lay in an inconvenient and inconspicuous location.
Next, it was located on the other side of the station, and to get to it one had to take a long, circuitous route via the overpass if one did not know the way through the underground passages. Third, the layout of the underground passages was terribly complicated, and it was difficult to explain the several exits in simple words. Finally, if you made good use of the underground