The Face of Another - Kobo Abe [82]
As I lit my last cigarette, my real face, which had constantly been forced into bad roles, had begun speaking, touching on your guilty conscience, and I started involuntarily as you hesitatingly offered me a blue-green button. It was not the one I had picked up for you; it was one it had taken you half a month to do. At the time I was simply angry at your zealousness, but when I considered it again, I felt I understood you. Silver edged lines, as if scratched into a thick lacquered base with a nail, flickered in a lovely tangled skein. It was as if your voiceless cries were shut up within it. I thought the button was like a lonely cat raised by a doting old woman. Perhaps it was naïveté. But when I considered that it was a real challenge to “him,” who had not even once glanced at your button, I realized this was a bold, determined act. I had intended to blame you but on the contrary was blamed myself; perhaps I was gradually getting used to my own defeatism. Who the deuce ever thought up the stupid proposition that women were anything to get carried away about? I wonder.
Outside, everything was shimmering in a light like plated chromium. The only reality was the odor of your perspiration that lingered in my nostrils. Back in my room, after hasty attention to my face, I threw myself onto the bed and did not awake until dawn had begun to break. I calculate that I had slept close to seventeen hours. My face was burning as if someone had been working on it with a file. I opened the window and, as I watched the sky, which was beginning to turn a clear blue, I held compresses of moistened towels to my face. At length the heavens became the very color of the button I had received from you, the color of the sea against which is outlined the vanishing stern of a ship. I felt unduly melancholy, and squeezing the flesh of my arms and my breast until it hurt, I involuntarily groaned in pain. What barren purity! Nothing could continue to exist in such a blue. I wished that yesterday and the day before could be eradicated. Actually, I suppose my plans had had some degree of success, but who in heaven’s name was going to reap the harvest? And what harvest? If anybody, you would reap, you, a shameless harlot, who had cut through the mask like some great, solid shadow. But what existed here and now was only the blue of the sky and the pain of my face.… The mask, that should be the victor, lay stupidly on the table, like an obscene picture that has drained all one’s desire; I wondered if I should start using it for target practice with my air pistol. And after that, what if I were to hack it utterly to pieces?
However, as I stood musing, the blue faded away, and the streets began to show their daytime face. My sentimental grumbling too fell away like an old scab, and whether I wished it or not, I was again brought back to the inescapable reality of the scar webs. Even though, with the mask, I could not at this point dream dreams like the flashings of holiday fireworks, to give it up and bury myself alive in a windowless cell would be even more unthinkable. After yesterday, I was still vacillating, but I had ascertained the precise center of gravity of this three-cornered relationship, and it was altogether possible to acquire command of the mask by adroitly keeping my equilibrium. No matter how violent my passing emotions, there was definitely a point to plans that one had spent time refining.
I hurried through dinner and dashed out of my hideaway. Since I had to return to the role of my real self who was coming back from a week’s business trip, today I should have to put on the bandages, which I had not worn for some time. As I was leaving, I was startled at my reflection in the window-pane.