Mascara by Ariel Dorfman Read Free Book Online

Enriqueta would never again confuse me with a giggle—not Enriqueta, not anybody else, would ever again make me drunk with her pretty face. It was too easy for her to recapture me with the foreplay of her illusory lips. A bulwark, that’s what I needed—a bulwark against time.
    I did not know yet that what I was looking for was nothing other than a photograph.
    Meanwhile, Mentirelli, I had no better defense against people than to become more submissive, to await someone’s remote generosity and to start licking his shoe. It was the lap dog’s hope of nuzzling into the nook of somebody’s affections. But not even a speck of dust bothering an eyelid, not even a draft that makes you get up to shut the door—I was less than those things to them. I was trapped in the worst of dependencies: at the mercy of someone else’s love. Leftovers from other smiles, the residue of a happiness meant for another, the last floating particle in a universe without its own light. Darkness, the darkness of those years in the basement of somebody else’s mind. A candy bar in an old shop where no one buys anything, anymore, a candy bar which always remains for some reason in even next year’s stock, which grows stale, which is on sale and discounted over and over again, until it goes for free and still nobody wants it, not even a beggar would touch it. Clearance sale and everything is sold, except that item. There I am, waiting for anyone, in the empty shop that the carpenters begin to dismantle. Nobody to take me home. Nobody to take me to some plastic surgeon so I could grow the face I needed.
    The long blankness of those years before I got my camera: humiliations that were all the worse because nobody actively desired them. I lived as if I were missing. The teachers were surprised when I returned my written tests—as if, for an instant, they realized that I did exist, the brief flash of a match light against the horizon, as if, for an instant, I would appear like a satellite on the sky of their conscience, with only the purpose of quickly setting, my days in their conscience instantaneously created and immediately extinguished. Surprised that I was in their class, because they neverspoke to me or asked me a question, they never expelled me, they never called on my uplifted hand. Anybody sitting next to me at the cafeteria was always talking to the kid on the other side. What I would have given, like a used-up cigarette butt, for someone to have put me to their lips for a last—or in my case, a first—puff. For someone to put their lips to the ashes of my lips.
    I had decided—although I doubt it could really be called a decision, Doctor, it was more of an inevitable conclusion—to live like this for the rest of my mediocre existence. When, at the age of twelve, perhaps thirteen, my organ for what is called love began to grow, when that part of my body rebelled and did not want to accept the solitude to which the rest of my being had resigned itself, I asphyxiated it. It stretched out with hunger, it filled with rampaging blood, it hardened against my hand and my skin, which were trying to pacify it. No moist sponge with soap would do, no reproductions of the Venus of Milo, no promises of dolls like Enriqueta’s. It had to be Enriqueta herself. Enriqueta or nobody.
    And it would have been, undoubtedly, nobody, if the art of photography had not come to my rescue at just about that time.
    Each year there was some stupid family reunion, which culminated in an equally imbecilic final ceremony: the neighbor would come by, all false benevolence, to act as official photographer. Which is precisely why photography held no interest for me—because it had always been the authoritative voice of the adult world, the collector of discardable memories. Another cheater of the senses, a new falsifier of time past so that people would not have to make the effort to remember it as it really had been. The worst make-up trick of all. I felt this so