Free Mascara by Ariel Dorfman

allowed me to establish, surreptitiously, who was in charge. If I did not feed him his quota of hints and innuendoes, he would sink back into his acquiescent ragtag role. You treat faces, Doctor, as if they were car motors, greasing them every six months, replacing a worn-out part. You know better than anyone else that the real owner—of a car, of a face, of a person—is the one who keeps the thing going. Tristan’s acquaintances had grown accustomed to him: they expected from him a certain conduct, a performance, which was dependent upon my servicing him. It wasn’t long before he was back, fawning at my heels.
    I have kept him by my side since then, a dog of uncertain loyalty, a dog who has grown fat on the crumbs of the data I have lavished on him.
    Because even after I had acquired my camera, even after I had uselessly excavated inside the false quagmire that Enriqueta passed off as her sex, almost immediately, as soon as I left school, I realized that just as the others were graduating, in the same way it was necessary for me to change the direction of my life. And I supposed, correctly it turns out, that Tristan would accompany me wherever I went.
    Up until then my activities had been carried out in the world I already knew. Easy, after all: to ransack someone who is as familiar as the scenery. Like masturbating. Not much to it. Quite another matter to dare choose a stranger, randomly, or because something in her, once in a while in him, intrigued me. That would really be splicing the umbilical cord—to comprehend that the whole world belongs to you, that there is nobody that you cannot shutter up inside your eyes.
    But pleasurable as it may be to take over a face, it ends up as repetitive as the toilsome sexual rites with which so many human beings cloak their solitude. Those hands of yours, Doctor, know what I’m talking about.
    Of all the features that my future victims presented to the world I extracted one above all others, like an unclean tooth inside the whitest mouth—and then what? The camera lens had stripped them—and now what? Then and now, in order to avoid boredom, it would become necessary to go beyond the mere everyday use ofsomebody else’s body and progress to a more profound form of possession. If I could imagine an exhaustive story for that unknown face, and if my diagnosis turned out to be true, that would be, indeed, not only great fun and a challenge but a way of dredging the treasures from inside that person, leaving her as dry as an abandoned mine shaft. Behind my game was the wager that anybody’s inner biography could be reconstructed by comparing her deep hidden face with the ways in which she tried to cover and dissemble it. An amusement that confronted me, however, with the inevitable and final question to which I had no answer: how to find out if my invention had any substance?
    The need to find discrete, objective answers to that question hastened my search for the job that now, decades later, I still hold. Smile away, Doctor. You have the right to smile. I’m using the present tense again, and I should be speaking only of the past. The job that, until a few days ago, until I crashed into you, I still held. That’s all right, your smile. But you must understand that gaining independence from my family was, by then, an obsession: I wanted never again to interrupt the flow of their lives with my dimness, never again to listen to my father outraged at a toneless voice protesting once more that someone had put a visiting relative to sleep in my bed, never again to watch my mother, wondering what stranger had placed those dirty trousers and shirts in the hamper to be washed, and then meticulously leaving them aside.
    It was not easy to find the sort of work that would serve my purpose. Three conditions had to be met. The first, and most obvious, was that I should be able to exert the only real talent I have at my disposal, my capacity to remember any face that crosses my vision. The