Mascara by Ariel Dorfman Page A

least that is what I thought until I saw Tristan Pareja’s face in my living room. Only at that moment, when I came down the stairs, leaving Oriana’s wonders—and what wonders they are, Doctor—only then did I understand that my situation was much more exposed than I had believed it to be.
    I did not steer Tristan to the bar because I ever imagined that I personally would need a lawyer someday. So public an occurrence as a lawsuit was practically inconceivable. What I wanted was someone who could glide his way through the pores of society just as you, Doctor, slime your way through the skin of your patients, just like that. But when I returned home that night of theaccident, Marverelhi, and after the phone rang and your unidentifiable underling hung up on me, the first person I tried to contact was Tristan Pareja.
    I was adamant about getting you declared guilty at the Police Court this coming Wednesday, Doctor. It would have been prudent to accept that I had made a mistake, that this disobedient foot of mine had pushed down on the accelerator instead of on the brake; and if you had been anybody else, that’s how things would have ended up. Let the insurance take care of the damages, hush up any complications with a couple of phone calls. That there might have been some minor scandal weighed on me—a newspaper headline (which, strangely enough, you have not planted anywhere, Doctor) screaming about officials of the Department of Traffic Accidents so flagrantly ignoring the signals. But nothing that we couldn’t fix like gentlemen.
    What moved me was something else. You didn’t have to be a mastermind—and if there is one thing I can do, it is to read situations as gypsies read the future in cards—to realize that you were in an uncomfortable predicament: rushing your lover to her home before having to run back to your own place, on Christmas Eve, no less. Not a good time to have an accident, Doctor. And if you did not know me, Marvirelli, I had no trouble recognizing you. Even if you did not owe me for Alicia’s absence, even if you had not been provoking me all these years with your front-cover interviews in glossy magazines, I had already noted you down for some weekend, some vacation, when I could take the time to work on a particularly intricate case. Just as others look forward to visiting a city full of museums or theaters, that’s how I had kept you, Doctor, in the back of my mind, like a succulent dessert that one always saves for the end. If I had not yet indulged myself, it may have been because something inside warned me that you were no ordinary adversary, that you were more dangerous, and that I should drink you up and down only at the right moment.
    So if it had been anybody else, I’d have acted with my normal caution. Win the big battles, never lose a minute or waste an effort on marginal issues. But it was my desire, Doctor, to impose myself upon you ignominiously, to defeat you barefacedly—if you are not annoyed by the wordplay.
    With a strange woman in your car and no Alicia in mine, you were in a losing position. For once, someone else was going to wreak upon you a face that was not yours. And that person was none other than this nonentity who is speaking to you right now from afar. Let the bastard pay the damages, I thought to myself. As if I was asking you to endorse a check. Money scratched from each face that you had approached with your scalpel, the white light glowing behind you; it was like expropriating your cosmetics, as if you had been working as my menial all these years. The final act of the patient acts of sabotage I had been carrying out. First, Moronevi, I had been fingering your patients day in and day out, no matter what you did with them, no matter the about-faces, the silicone cheek implants, the thickened, sticky lips, the disappearing crow’s-feet, the metastasis of the nostrils, the shifted teeth, the tightening of the skull bones, the foreshortening of the hairline.