Free Mascara by Ariel Dorfman Page B

employees arrived, very early in the morning, I would select from the multitude of applications that had been signed the previous day, the ones harboring suspicious features. I would recognize that the name was false right away, just as I realized that Patricia was lying about her own name as soon as I saw her face. Then I would let my memory loose in the enormous pit of photographs that shimmered in the nearby files, and I would, a few moments later, go straight to the original face and pick it out. Hours later, each fraudulent application for a driver’s license would find itself on top of Pompeyo Garssos’s desk, next to another photograph of the same person, taken from the archives, but with the real name attached.
    Just as I had with Tristan, I preferred letting someone else lap up all the credit: rather soon, the Director of the Archives had begun to acquire a legendary reputation for detecting false I.D.s. As for me, I got the only thing I wanted: to be his secretary.
    Of course I didn’t solve all the deceptive cases that came my way. It was indispensable to leave some in doubt, even if I already knew whom to look for, all the details of yet another sham life. Otherwise, what pretext could I use to start demanding data from other agencies and institutions, both public and private? Supposedly to check up on the delinquents, but in fact to establish my own network. I would ask, let’s say, the Drug Bureau for an inquiry onsomeone. I would then set up an initial contact with an agent at the Bureau; he would be offered a service, a tidbit of news, a confidential report, and that is the way, slowly and smoothly as ever, I would have him ready to work for me.
    It would be quite dull, Doctor, and even makes me want to yawn myself, to give you details about how I lured each puny informant into my web. Apply the Tristan Pareja model, with slight variations, and you can guess how it all happened. One source in each neuralgic information center—the Police Computer, the Insurance Agents’ Data Base, the Universal Health Care Office, the Division of Bank Accounts, the Credit Watchers’ Union, the Drug Bureau, the assistant to the assistant librarian at the most important newspaper in the country—no need for more than one person. Somebody who, without my intervention, would be less than nothing. Armed with the reports smuggled to me by the others, I snarled and tied up each one of them, I sugared their ambition and promised them power that their mediocre minds had not dared to envision. I let them crest on a steady wave of information until they were, each of them in their respective places, bound for glory, solving impossible enigmas, revealing the answers to cases that had been closed for years, detecting criminals with the facility of housewives identifying the rotten apple in the barrel. They became addicts of the celebrity I gave them. They could not escape from me.
    Until you called them on the phone, Doctor, until you destroyed what I thought were impregnable defenses.
    But you still have no idea who I am, Doctor. Because I destroyed every last file that contained a reference to my existence. I had been born as if dead. I would live as if dead, without leaving so much as a fingerprint on the world’s surface.
    The subjects chosen by my camera had left many prints, on the other hand, any number of school grades and medical reports; and with this and so much more it was easy to discover their whole itinerary. I could at least find out if the image I had captured corresponded at all to the story I had invented for them. I was on target, in general, Doctor, and getting better as time went on: each new expedition, each new darkened flash, brought me closer to perfection. And what is more, the taking of the photos themselves became an easier task.
    Each human being has around him a hive of almost infinite relationships, people stuck to his life as if it were flypaper, people mixed into his jam, his clothing, his