The Face of Another - Kobo Abe [89]
I collapsed limply on the matting of the living room, like some marionette whose strings have been cut, trying not to resist the flow of time. A rectangular piece of whitish sky, cut out between the window frame and the eaves of the house next door, seemed quite like the extension of a jail wall. Without taking my eyes from it, I persuaded myself that this was so. I was not the only one who had been shut in; considering the whole world a jail was quite in keeping with my feelings at the time. Even more, I imagined that everyone was frantically trying to escape from the world. The real face becoming useless, like a vestigial tail, was an unexpected fetter, and apparently one from which not a single person had succeeded in escaping. But … I was different. I alone—it had lasted but a moment—had experienced life beyond the wall. Unable to stand the overconcentrated air there, I had come running back; still, I had had the experience. As long as I could not deny existence beyond the wall, my real face, which was merely an incomplete copy of the mask, could never overwhelm me. Since you have heard my confession, you can surely have no objection to these points at least, but.…
But the concrete wall that cut off the sky gradually lost its luminosity, and as it dissolved into the darkness, I was overcome with an uncontrollable irritation at my efforts to defy the passage of time. For God’s sake, how far have you got in your reading? I should have some idea if I knew the average number of pages you read per hour, but.… Suppose you did a page a minute: that would make sixty. Then since four hours and twenty minutes have gone by, you should be reaching the end pretty soon. Of course, you would be distracted and bored at times. You will probably just have to grit your teeth and put up with it, as if you were seasick. But no matter what the delays, you can’t need more than another hour. I suddenly jumped up and then remembered that there was no reason to, except that I did not feel like sleeping. I turned on the light and put the kettle on the gas burner. On my way back from the kitchen, I unexpectedly caught your odor—the smell of your cosmetics, coming from the dressing table at the entrance to the bedroom.
I was overcome by a paroxysm of nausea, as if I had had the inside of my throat painted with iodine. It was apparently an immediate reaction of the scar webs that had been laid bare. But at this point, was I qualified, I wondered, to look down on another’s cosmetic equipment, I who had already once taken the main role in a masked play? I must be more generous. Once and for all, I should have to graduate immediately from this childish state in which I clung to make-up and wigs. Then I decided to concentrate all my attention on the psychology of make-up, seeking a cure for my deep abhorrence of cosmetics. Make-up—making a face—is indeed a denial of the real face, but a gallant effort to get a little closer to others by transforming the expression. But when a woman’s make-up obtains the desired effect, is she jealous of it? Women do not particularly seem to be. It is a very curious thing. Why do deeply jealous women not show the slightest reaction to others who have imitated their faces? Is it a lack of imagination, or a spirit of self-sacrifice? Or is it that they have an excess of self and imagination, and that the distinction between self and others has ceased to exist? All this was pretty wide of the mark and apparently quite incapable of curing my abhorrence of make-up. (Of course, it is different now. I’ll continue in the light of my present feeling. The fact that women get along without being jealous of their own make-up is perhaps the result of instinctively perceiving the drop in value of their own face. It is because they instinctively realize that the