Mascara Read Online Free

name over the phone and then laughs and then hangs up, that guy wouldn’t stand a chance: once I’d captured his voice, I’d follow it to his hideaway, I’d squeeze his face out, drop by drop, onto celluloid as I have done with so many others in this land. But I am utterly unable to discern one tone from another. It isn’t a form of deafness. It’s just that I hate music. Or—to put it more mildly—I’m indifferent to music. When Alicia wanted to know why I didn’t have a record or a cassette at home, my answer perhaps was not a lie: the only music I can distinguish is the kind that flickers in through the eyes. My brain doesn’t seem to distinguish sounds by their vibrations, shades, tone, colors. There it is. Shades, tone, colors. Even the words I use for music are visual.
    There’s nothing wrong in living for the nourishment of your eyes, Doctor. It’s got its compensations. To be brief: just as there are those who can easily remember melodies, I am absolutely unable to forget a face. Ever. Nobody can deceive me, Doctor, understand? Nobody can slip on a disguise that I won’t see through. Nobody can alter his face, Doctor, nobody can pass under the swirl and eddy of your hands, Mardavelli, without my discovering them. But music? Not a note. A monster? Far from it. I’m merely living ahead of my time. That’s where we are heading. Music is receding into the background in these times. This is not the century of sounds. I’m not denying that people still listen to songs, sure they do, but what really matters is elsewhere: the image, the lipstick, the tanning lotions. Sounds are like maids: they travel second-class.
    So my indifference to the noises and jabbering that others spew forth is no deprivation. That I wasn’t able even to discern the sex of the person talking to me that day in the bank was no cause for shame. On the contrary: I almost felt like inventing a smile for my face so I could inflict it upon that intruder behind me. I may not know you by your voice, but it is enough to turn toward you the deep furrow of my eyes and—if I feel like it—dredge your life from you.
    I moved my head to look at whoever might own that voice. But while I was doing it, underneath the idea of a smile, I was assailed by a slight uneasiness. Because I had never heard words like those pronounced by anybody. That was my phrase, the question I had been repeating all these years, first timidly and then with despair—remember me? Remember me?—until finally it was transformed into, I know you don’t remember me but … and of course they never remembered and in my case did not even pretend to remember. When Alicia spoke those words on the bank line that day, it had been many years since I had fallen back onto that phrase. Many years since I had decided I would never again ask that question or precede that question with an explanation. I would not give the rest of them one detail, one key to understanding who I was. It is true that by the time I gave up asking, I already possessed other instruments to amuse me … I was living alone, I had already changed my name, I was settled in at the Department of Traffic Accidents; but above all my camera stalked the city as freely as if I had been the Chief of Police. And Alicia had come to disturb the calm I had acquired. She was restoring for me that obscene phrase, almost as if someone wanted to make fun, at this late date, of what I had once desired: to be a man like any other man, who misplaces one person and remembers another one, who is recognized by most people and is ignored by a few. Alicia made me feel like that man. That is why I never followed her, I never took her photo, I never bedded her. If she had been able to avoid the temptation of your propaganda, Doctor, to acquiesce forever to the gross and demeaning features that she had been given, perhaps this would have been a different story. Perhaps I would have grown to love someone who would accept me as I was.