The Face of Another - Kobo Abe [81]
I could not get used to being a man condemned to death. As all the juices were being wrung from my body and I was drying up, I had to continue to put up with this immorality, this struggle. In my anguish, the thought of death lost its usual solemnity, and homicide seemed no more than a slight barbarism. What in God’s name were you thinking? What made me decide to be so patient—perhaps it was rather strange—was the dignity you maintained even while you were being violated. No, dignity seems a curious term for it. It was not at all a question of rape, nor was it a one-sided lawbreaking by the mask. Since you did not once make any pretense of refusing me, I must consider rather that we were partners in crime. It is comical when a partner in crime maintains dignity with his accomplice—it might be more precise to say a very assured partner in crime. Yet no matter how desperately the mask struggled, it was not ultimately able to be a fornicator, to say nothing of a rapist. You were literally inviolable. This did not change the fact that you were immoral and unfaithful. It also did not change the fact that you had stirred up my fierce jealousy, like boiling tar in a cauldron, like smoke from chimneys just after rain, like the water of hot springs seething up together with mud. The unexpected event that, by your attitude of inviolability, you did not in the ultimate sense submit to the mask, completely amazed and overwhelmed me.
It would seem that I had not yet fully grasped the significance of your assurance in the act of fornication with a stranger. There was apparently no lust involved. If there were, you would have been more obviously flirtatious. But, quite as if you were performing some ceremony, you never lost your seriousness from beginning to end. I do not really understand. What was happening inside you? I did not have a clue. Moreover, my sense of defeat, firmly rooted at that time, has unfortunately remained as an indelible blot to the very end—at least until this moment I write this. This insidious disease of self-persecution was worse than my fits of jealousy. Although I had deliberately put on the mask, opened up the roadway to you, and beckoned you in, you had passed me by and hastened along somewhere else. And I was left alone with my loneliness, quite the same as before I had donned the mask.
Ah, I do not understand you. I could not think that just because there was temptation you would respond, paying no attention to who the partner was, like a shameless streetwalker. But there was no proof against this. Had I been unaware of the natural-born harlot in you? If you were a real harlot, you would satisfy your violator, neither spurring him on when he was inadequate nor making him feel mistreated. What in God’s name were you? Although the mask had frantically tried to break down the barrier, you had slipped through it without touching. Like the wind … or a spirit.
I do not understand you. Putting you to any further tests would be nothing more than my own destruction.
THE following morning—well, it was already close to noon—we hardly spoke to each other until we left the hotel. Between spells of wakefulness, worried lest my mask might have come off, and snatches of sleep, when I dreamed repeatedly that I was rushing to leave for somewhere but had lost my ticket, fatigue pierced my forehead like a stake. However, thanks to the mask, signs of fatigue or shame showed on my face no more