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By Root 462 0

at last, going down the stairs toward the underground passage chock-full of strangers, I felt stifled with unutterable anguish, bewilderment, and confusion, carried away by the overwhelming feeling of your presence. Isn’t it generally rare to imagine by a sense of touch? I did not conceive of you as a glass doll or as abstract word symbols, but had a tactile sense of your presence as I got within touching distance of you. The side of my body next to you was as sensitive as if it had been overexposed to the sun, and each one of my pores panted for breath like dogs sweltering in the heat. And when I realized that you, a refined woman, were prepared to accept a stranger, I felt intolerably sad. I was being cuckolded by my own self, and at the same time I was a good-for-nothing who had been dismissed without reason. If that were the case, my shameful fantasies yesterday in which I had ignored my companion were far sounder. Wasn’t even rape more wholesome than this? I began to feel enmity and seething hatred for this hunter-type face, wearing its sunglasses and its strange affected clothes and sporting a beard, making me realize again that the features of the mask were those of a stranger. At the same time I felt that you were a completely different person because you did not at once reject the face; and you gave me a feeling of oppressiveness, as if I were seeing poison smeared on jewels.

But the mask was different. The mask absorbed my anguish and seemed to have a capacity of turning it into nourishment, making the leaves and branches of my desires thick and luxuriant, like some jungle plant. Simply not having been rejected by you was to say that I had already got you, and I sank the fangs of my imagination into the nape of your neck, which rose smoothly from the collarless, buff-colored blouse. Since for me you were you, but for the mask you were simply a pleasing woman, there was no point in censuring its impoliteness. Yes, a vertiginous abyss lay between the mask and me. There was a difference between us, but it was only a few inches of facial surface, and for the rest we were the same. Think of the groove of a record. From such a simple device as that one can reproduce scores of tones. It is all the less surprising that man’s heart should strike two opposing notes at the same time.

Of course, I should not have been surprised. Actually, you yourself were split into several parts. Just as I had a double existence, you did too. If I was another person wearing a stranger’s mask, you were another person wearing the mask of yourself. Another wearing the mask of himself … a gruesome combination.… Although I intended to lay plans to bring about a second meeting, the results, to the contrary, would probably be a second good-bye. Perhaps I had made a slight miscalculation.

If I had suspected things would be like this, how much better to have pulled out at once. No, how much better, rather, simply to have got you to tell me the location of the stop as I had asked and let the rest of my plans go. Why in heaven’s name was I shamelessly following around after the mask? Actually my confidence was not up to my explanation; my betrayed love had been drawn into a corner and changed to hate, my desire to reestablish the roadway had been frustrated and turned into a desire for revenge. Since I had come this far and had made quite sure of your infidelity, even though it had not been my motive to do so, the result was that my actions had fallen into step with the mask’s. But just a minute. I have the feeling that, toward the beginning of these notes, I used the word “revenge” quite often. Yes, I did indeed. At that time, the main pretext for making the mask was to try to seek revenge on the arrogance of faces by deceiving you. But then it shifted to reestablishing relations with others, and the significance of seducing you changed to something mental, contemplative; furthermore, something physical was added, and there occurred an emotional explosion in the form of jealousy. Through this jealousy I was seized by a spasm of love as if I were