Mascara by Ariel Dorfman

checkbook, his toilet paper. The things people have been told that they need to live, the things somebody else always has to furnish. So that once my victim’s face appeared—on the street, in the paper, lost and twisted, lightning-like, in a crowd filmed by a TV crew—and once I had followed that face into the bowels of my endless files, where her name and address were always awaiting me, the next step was to locate the men and women who surrounded and serviced her. If you can get those people to cooperate, the perfect irreplaceable snapshot is not only within reach. It is as easy as spitting.
    I had the telephone repairman, with direct access to such and such an apartment—I had that man at my beck and call. Not because of a photo I had taken of him. I wasn’t going to run around snapping everybody, the vilest and least interesting people who crawl this earth—just as you, Doctor, would not dream of operating on a blind beggar. To do so would have exhausted our energies quite quickly. Just a couple of brief reports on him, his police record, his bank account, his kid’s school grades, his mother’s medical ups and downs—enough to enlist him in a supporting role for my assault. Each person, no matter how insignificant he may seem, has the key to some door—and it is by opening doors, Mirvallori, that you take photographs. You’re an expert at closing doors and closing faces, excluding others from your operating room so nobody can tell how you play the piano of each face, how you recompose the obscure music of each face. I know your statements and I know your habits, Doctor. For me, on the other hand, doors are like water, Doctor. The mailmen, the maids and the help, the dry cleaner, delivery boy, janitor, the old schoolmarm: all of them, keys to some kind of lock. Keys that do not know my fingers turning them, keys that do not remember my features.
    How were they to retain me in their memory if not even my closest contacts, not even my parents, were able to do that? After fattening those agents for years, after having been the only architect of their fortunes—and I followed them because it was their turn, as well, to be photographed by me—would you believe that they did not realize I was present, as if I were a total stranger? I’lladmit it, this ended up bothering me: it came to a point where, finally, if I needed some message from them that they could not entrust to the phone or the mail, rather than go myself I would send Tristan Pareja to pick it up.
    They have been so dependent on me these years that it has been difficult for me to conceive of their betrayal. I’ve seen it more as an act of suicide on their part than as an act of aggression against me. The fact that someone now knew their identity and had been insinuating terrible things about the hollow of my face, insinuations that were all the more terrible because they may have approached the truth of what I was, that fact did not overly alarm me. I thought that Monday I would rein them in. As soon as I could investigate you, Mavirelli, slip into your home one night or wide-angle you from a corner of your operating room at the very moment when you began to intervene inside someone else’s body, as soon as I had you in my little machine, Doctor, as soon as I had pierced your power as if it were a suppuration, stripping your mask from you with the same brutality with which you press it down upon others. That would be enough, I thought—and I still think so, Doctor—to transform myself once more into the magnet for those poor floating fragments of nothingness. Then they would come in supplication, as Tristan Pareja had come into the schoolyard some weeks after he had indignantly rejected my proposal that he sell the news I was giving him. And if not them, then others—because that network was entirely replaceable by any other. I had lifted them up from an anonymous sewer, and if I felt like it, that is where they would return, drop by drop.
    Or at