she is, that she has even lost the previous day’s experience, lets me choose for her, upon our awakening, an original role. I don’t expect this to shock you too much, Doctor. You do the same thing. You select the face for each patient—and if you don’t like it, you change it. I also select a face; but mine, unlike yours, lasts only twenty-four hours. That Saturday, for instance, not knowing if the next day she would forget again, I told Oriana that her real name was Enriqueta and filled her in on the life of the girl who had twisted my destiny with her doll and my drawings. I had always wanted to possess Enriqueta—not through a photograph, not through the unfaithful steward of my sex, but to have her under my sway the way a character belongs to an author, to be able to give that story between us, if I so desired, an ending that supplied more satisfaction, to be able to relive once and again that scene in the playhouse in her garden until it came out exactly as I had dreamt it, so thatthe victim was Enriqueta and not me. Monday, yesterday morning, in fact, I let her play Alicia, and Alicia did not submit to you, Doctor. She stepped away from your office door and accepted me rather than the face which you had prepared for her.
Of course I will not select Enriqueta or Alicia each time. At the beginning of the day, and today indeed that is what I did, I can offer to Oriana one of those women who are in my files, one I have followed and explored, or tomorrow a woman I have invented from one of the thousand photographs I chanced upon in the archives, or the day after tomorrow one of the women I have read about who died thousands of years ago: a saint, a queen, a heretic, a witch, a whore, a movie star. She can be real, she can be fictional: the only circumstance that never changes is that she always ends up at my mercy, always ends up awaiting my indulgence, my forgiveness.
She disguises herself and we play until the sun goes down.
The last five days of my life, Doctor, have therefore been played out as a drama whose basic direction I have written ahead of time but whose variations and developments will be improvised by the two actors, a drama where I invariably control the final act of coupling. She doesn’t want to invent her own role. She couldn’t if she wanted to. With no memories to orient her, she is grateful that somebody else should guide her existence, she thanks me simply for not scolding her or leaving her locked up in a room.
Boring? For me?
Why, aren’t you bored by the same woman every day or by so many women who are all the same, all of them believing in the role written for them by some demon of their unhappiness inside their head, written by their P.R. agent inside, written by their need to please some man? Whereas Oriana knows that this pastime is provisional and fleeting, no matter how passionately she may practice it: at the end of the entertainment I will be waiting to return to her the gift of her childhood. Other women should envy her: who would not want to live the most perverse of aberrations, to descend to the sewers of the human soul, and emerge without a scratch, without having to ask questions or tremble in fear, able to awaken the next day soothed by forgetfulness, ready for yet another voyage of discovery?
Why should she feel unfortunate? For her, every day shall be as a first birth, with all the fresh air that came at the beginning of Creation. And the person who accompanies her, the person who can show her the perpetually recent contours of the universe, will be as a god.
Doctor, I had no childhood. I grew old all at once. My eyes forced the rest of my body to hurry. Now, with Oriana’s eternal fountain flowing through my life, I am becoming young again: it has been merely a matter of seeing the world with the fertility of those eyes of hers that dawn with such clarity each morning; it has been a matter of recreating each day from her nothingness a new personality. She is as Eve.
Of course I will not select Enriqueta or Alicia each time. At the beginning of the day, and today indeed that is what I did, I can offer to Oriana one of those women who are in my files, one I have followed and explored, or tomorrow a woman I have invented from one of the thousand photographs I chanced upon in the archives, or the day after tomorrow one of the women I have read about who died thousands of years ago: a saint, a queen, a heretic, a witch, a whore, a movie star. She can be real, she can be fictional: the only circumstance that never changes is that she always ends up at my mercy, always ends up awaiting my indulgence, my forgiveness.
She disguises herself and we play until the sun goes down.
The last five days of my life, Doctor, have therefore been played out as a drama whose basic direction I have written ahead of time but whose variations and developments will be improvised by the two actors, a drama where I invariably control the final act of coupling. She doesn’t want to invent her own role. She couldn’t if she wanted to. With no memories to orient her, she is grateful that somebody else should guide her existence, she thanks me simply for not scolding her or leaving her locked up in a room.
Boring? For me?
Why, aren’t you bored by the same woman every day or by so many women who are all the same, all of them believing in the role written for them by some demon of their unhappiness inside their head, written by their P.R. agent inside, written by their need to please some man? Whereas Oriana knows that this pastime is provisional and fleeting, no matter how passionately she may practice it: at the end of the entertainment I will be waiting to return to her the gift of her childhood. Other women should envy her: who would not want to live the most perverse of aberrations, to descend to the sewers of the human soul, and emerge without a scratch, without having to ask questions or tremble in fear, able to awaken the next day soothed by forgetfulness, ready for yet another voyage of discovery?
Why should she feel unfortunate? For her, every day shall be as a first birth, with all the fresh air that came at the beginning of Creation. And the person who accompanies her, the person who can show her the perpetually recent contours of the universe, will be as a god.
Doctor, I had no childhood. I grew old all at once. My eyes forced the rest of my body to hurry. Now, with Oriana’s eternal fountain flowing through my life, I am becoming young again: it has been merely a matter of seeing the world with the fertility of those eyes of hers that dawn with such clarity each morning; it has been a matter of recreating each day from her nothingness a new personality. She is as Eve.
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