Mascara by Ariel Dorfman Page B

Each face you recomposed, I returned to its original in the laboratory that seethed in my head. That was first. Next, I messed up your car and, along the way, your reputation. And third. Third: you pay me with the dividends debauched from faces that never belonged to you.
    Understand, Doctor: it was a way of kicking your mug in, a way of stripping you naked in public, a way of showing who owns this city, you who disguise people or I who open the shutters of their pretense. And I would do this, besides, without recourse to photography: to defeat someone that powerful, to make him concede my existence in the world without having to use my camera. It is proof of your strength, Doctor, that I ended up taking a picture of you.
    The first case, at any rate, for Tristan Pareja.
    I started to call him from the police precinct where both of us had been taken so as to stamp our contradictory statements. When I saw that you, Marcarelsohn, were closely watching me dial, your eyes flashing with mistrust, as if you doubted that someone so patently vulgar and second-rate could have any sort of important friend, I hung up before speaking. But I fell into the trap that vanity once in a while opens for us. Perhaps for the first time in my life I wanted to impress someone with something as discardable and superficial as an influential contact. I bragged about my relationship with Pareja,that famous lawyer, so that you, Doctor, would spend a whole night thinking you had crashed with a dangerous adversary. Now I know that you spent the night thinking about other things.
    But it didn’t seem suspicious, when, upon returning home, Pareja’s phone was busy and stayed that way for the next few hours. I was worn out with the pain and the excitement, and I lay down, unhooked the receiver so the hidden caller wouldn’t awaken me, and fell asleep. When I managed to get hold of Tristan the next day, he insisted there was nothing to worry about. It was enough that I obtain three witnesses who swore that I was telling the truth. They would be pitted against the equally fraudulent witnesses, three of them, that Doctor Mavirelli was going to introduce (Pareja made no mistake while pronouncing your name, Doctor)—and we would win hands down, because it was then that we would threaten our enemy with revealing the presence of his lover that night of the crash. I assigned no importance to the fact that Pareja did not rush over immediately, that same day. It was Christmas, after all, when everybody, except for you-know-who, spends the day with their family.
    Nor did it seem difficult, even in my limping condition, to secure the three witnesses. Each one of my contacts could get me ten times that number. But when a whole day of busy telephones passed, when my contacts systematically one after the other refused to talk to me, it was then, on Friday morning, precisely one hour before Patricia returned with such insolence to ring my bell, that I decided to call Tristan Pareja again and tell him to drop in as soon as possible. A quick visit by him to the homes of my contacts, an allusion to their children’s vulnerability, the mention of a secret that they thought was well concealed, any one of these would rapidly reduce them to what they essentially were: my captives.
    I insist I was not alarmed. I understood that the same henchman of yours who was calling me was calling them, as well; it was almost with joy—if you would allow someone like me the use of such a word—that I guessed your role in the affair, your panic: each telephone that did not answer was a genuflection that you made in my direction, Doctor. For the first time somebody was accepting me as a gigantic rival, worthy of the battle which, unfortunately for you, I am about to win.
    Although when I saw Tristan, the first doubts arose in my mind. Perhaps because I knew instantly—I knew it in images, I knew it, one photo after another announcing what had happened in his house, which might be far from