Mascara by Ariel Dorfman Read Free Book Online Page B

my brain and the world. There it was, confirmed in something alien to me, a shining sheet of broken celluloid—the evidence.
    I had found my calling.
    And had simultaneously lost the instrument that would allow its fulfillment.
    Because my parents never again loaned me the camera. Still less would they have thought of buying me one. I have wondered if their denial was due to their having realized that the photographs my mother had destroyed were dangerous. Did they catch a glimpse of themselves as they really were? And could they not bear that someone, in particular their own son, would journey through the world with a machine that captured the black nakedness in their soul, in each person’s soul? Did they understand instinctively, as I did, that if I had been able to keep intact that proof of their vileness and hypocrisy, I would have entangled them forever in my eyes, that I would have been able to seize them and hold them ransom-less forever? Probably not: they were too arrogant to suppose that a nonentity such as myself would be able to do anything of the sort. Their denial was merely to punish me for having called attention to my existence, for having bothered them with my presence.
    “It would be a waste of good money,” my father had declared. “Like giving an armless man a piano.”
    To complicate matters, I didn’t want just any camera. I needed the best equipment in the world. And a darkroom that I could use without any interference: so that nobody would ever again be able to tear up what I had seen. I was going to have to acquire these things, plus an abundant supply of virgin film, all on my own. Like everything I have ever gotten in life. Without anyone else’s help.
    It took me almost three years.
    I had to tell myself to be patient. I silenced the galloping needs of my sex with the primitive, undeniable certainty that Enriqueta already belonged to me.
    That prediction was to be verified to my complete satisfaction. To own another human being, the only thing necessary is to kidnap her intimacy, to deflower with my camera what my eyes had already explored. But initially my intuition about the future was still darkened by an illusion that continued to prey upon me. Normality. That illusion. Yes, I still dreamt of betrothing Enriqueta, of becoming my parents’ prodigal son, of arriving with fanfare at a party. In a word, I was still submitting myself to the fiction that it was possible, and even desirable, for me to become permanently visible, a loyal member of your world, Doctor, the world where you reign.
    Three years later, when the camera’s hidden premiere deprived Enriqueta of her façade, I began to realize that I might be mistaken. And one week after that, when my sex had its own avid premiere inside the slime between Enriqueta’s legs, I confirmed that the quest for normality was definitely a mistake.
    Of course those people started to flutter their eyes on my forgettable face. Of course Enriqueta, as soon as I had gathered the evidence of her falsehood, as soon as the collection of her most abject moments were in my hands, gave herself up to me. But when she took off her clothes and her nakedness turned out to be less exciting and far less splendid than the photograph of her that I had slipped underneath my bedroom wallpaper, I grasped that making love to her was not going to liberate me. As long as I was obsessed with the need that she, that others, register my features in their fragile, blind contact lenses, as long as I had no other objective in life, I would continue to be chained to an orbit whose primary was someoneelse. Did I want to live the rest of my life extracting love from other people as if I were milking a cow? What value could her glance at me have if it depended on something as transitory as a photograph, if it was produced by her primitive, inexplicable fear of the photograph that she did not even know existed but that gave me power over her? What value is that, if she forgot