Free Confessions of a Mask by Yukio Mishima Page A

visit to the medical office provided us with a good reason for being tardy, and we were anxious to shorten even by a little the boring time we would have to spend watching the gymnastics.
    "My, it's hot, isn't it?" I said, taking off the jacket of my uniform.
    "You'd better not do that, not with a cold. And they'll make you do gymnastics anyway if they see you that way."
    I put my jacket on again hurriedly.
    "But it'll be all right for me, because its only my stomach." And, instead of me, it was my friend who ostentatiously took off his jacket, as though taunting me.
    Arriving at the gymnasium, we saw by the clothing hanging on the hooks along the wall that all the boys had taken off their sweaters, and some even their shirts. The area round the outdoor exercise bars, where there was sand and grass, seemed to be blazing brightly as we looked out at it from the dark gymnasium. My sickly constitution produced its usual reaction, and I walked toward the exercise bars giving my petulant little coughs.
    The insignificant gymnastics instructor scarcely glanced at the medical excuses which we handed him. Instead he turned immediately to the waiting boys and said:
    "All right now, let's try the horizontal bar. Omi, you show them how it's done."
    Friendly voices began calling Omi's name stealthily. He had simply evaporated, as he often did during gymnastics. There was no knowing what he did on these occasions, but this time again he came lounging out from behind a tree whose young green leaves were trembling with light.
    When I saw him my heart set up a clamor in my breast. He had taken off his shirt, leaving nothing but a dazzlingly white, sleeveless undershirt to cover his chest. His swarthy skin made the pure whiteness of the undershirt look almost too clean. It was a whiteness that could almost be smelled from a distance, like plaster of Paris. And that white plaster was carved in relief, showing the bold contours of his chest and its two nipples."The horizontal bar is it?" he asked the instructor, speaking curtly, with a tone of confidence. "Yes, that's right."
    Then, with that haughty indolence so often exhibited by the possessors of fine physiques, Omi stretched his hands down leisurely to the ground and smeared his palms with damp sand from just beneath the surface. Rising, he brushed his hands together roughly, and turned his face upward toward the iron bar. His eyes flashed with the bold resolve of one who defies the gods, and for a moment their pupils mirrored the clouds and blue skies of May, along with a cold disdain.
    A leap shot through him. Instantly his body was hanging from the iron bar, suspended there by those two strong arms of his, arms certainly worthy of being tattooed with anchors.
    "Ahhh!" The admiring exclamation of his classmates arose and floated thickly in the air.
    Any one of the boys could have looked into his heart and discovered that his admiration was not aroused simply by Omi's feat of strength. It was admiration for youth, for life, for supremacy. And it was astonishment at the abundant growth of hair that Omi's upraised arms had revealed in his armpits.
    This was probably the first time we had seen such an opulence of hair; it seemed almost prodigal, like some luxuriant growth of troublesome summer weeds. And in the same way that such weeds, not satisfied to have completely covered a summer garden, will even spread up a stone staircase, the hair overflowed the deeply carved banks of Omi's armpits and spread thickly toward his chest. Those two black thickets gleamed glossily, bathed in sunlight, and the surprising whiteness of his skin there was like white sand peeping through.
    As he began the pull-up, the muscles of his arms bulged out hard, and his shoulders swelled like summer clouds. The thickets of his armpits were folded into dark shadows, gradually becoming invisible. And at last his chest rubbed high against the iron bar, trembling there delicately. With a repetition of these same motions,