Mascara by Ariel Dorfman Read Free Book Online Page A

strongly that I do not appear in any family album—or in any photo, for that matter. I cannot tell, Doctor, if that is due to my own sneaking away, preferring to be a spectator of the others’ deluded quest for immortality; or if it was the camera itself which understood that my function was not to be snarled into a photograph but to photograph someone else, and which therefore automatically excluded me from the panorama it was taking.
    So when the neighbor let us know at the last moment that he could not come that day and the family had to search for a replacement, I didn’t mind that they chose me. I patiently waited while they carried out a typical adult discussion among hypocrites. Theyall wanted to be in the photo and offered to sacrifice their interest so that the others would say no, and finally, as I expected, one of them—it must have been my mother—said, But he (she would not even deign to pronounce my name), but he won’t mind. Of course. Why should I mind?
    They all got into the appropriate positions.
    I snapped some seven shots, one after the other, as if I were drugged. Okay, they said, that’s enough. I did not obey. It was as if a couple about to explode in an orgasm was asked to cease their movements. As they disbanded, I went on pressing the camera’s button, gorged inside the camera’s gigantic sexual eye, throbbing madly inside that camera. I kept on pressing the button and still was pressing it spasmodically when there was no more film. I had to stuff into the sweet cavern of that black machine all my memories just as I was seeing them.
    My mother was red with anger. “Look at this spendthrift. He’s wasted the whole roll.” She was angrier still, some days later, when she had the photos developed. The seven of the family were clouded over, as if a paraplegic had taken them. “This brat can’t do anything right.”
    And the others?
    My mother waved her hand in disgust. “Dreadful.”
    “Let me see.”
    “You are not going to see anything. We’re—why, we’re … ugly. Horrible, if you must know. As if somebody had spat us out.”
    “Let me see, Mom.”
    “Everything this brat does comes out wrong. This’ll be the first family gathering we won’t have a photograph of.”
    To punish me, she didn’t even let me peek at them. I saw those claws of hers tearing up each photo, grinding them, searching out the weakest part of the paper—and sending all the pieces to the garbage.
    That night I went down to retrieve my photographs. As if I were apprenticed to some plastic surgeon, Doctor, I spent several days putting the pieces together again. Sloppy with strands of squash, frying oil, peelings, buttered over with foul-smelling salad dressing, punctured by pork bones. I felt no revulsion. For years I had been salvaging food from plastic bags. I was an expert in junk.But even I did not know enough to recompose all those mustard-stained photos. A mirror that has cracked and is repaired can never give out the same light as a normal mirror. There were the faces I remembered, devastated by the acid in my mother’s fingers, washed by my cousins’ gastric juices, sickened by sauces for a banquet to which I was never invited. But none of that could stop me from realizing that these photographs were marvelous. Not the ones clouded over, the official ones. The other ones, where my relatives had been caught off guard.
    I went through them and over them and into them with a love that was infinite. Once again I felt the total joy I had contracted at the moment when I had pressed that button. They corresponded exactly, shade by shade, to the image I still kept in my head. I knew that if I had them now, without a tear, without a stain, they would have been the exact and mathematical replica of what I had seen through that magic eye in the howling instant when the button had clicked. More than that, I knew that if I was the owner of a camera, I would be able to reach the most absolute harmony between