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eyes.
    “Say good-bye for me, will you? Tell her I’ll come for her tomorrow—for sure.”
    And with these words, she left.
    I am glad to be able to inform you, Doctor, that I have not seen her since. They must have killed her rather soon.

H ow did Oriana sit on the toilet?
    It is not a trifling question, Doctor. If she were one of those women who wrinkles her skirt up till it presses in on her like an old strait jacket, her panties locking one knee to the other, and then proceeds to loosen a gush as narrow and miserly as those faces you operate, if she were one of those who wants to protect herself from the drafts of air and the eyes in the wallpaper, if she had been one of those, I wanted nothing to do with her. I required openness: getting rid of her skirt with a kick, tossing the panties away as if she would never use them again, absolutely delighted with the fluids that were about to drop from her body. I required her without fear.
    To contemplate how a woman lets go on the toilet seat is one of the best ways, though not the only way, to avoid making a mistake with her.
    In Oriana’s case, destiny—or at least destiny with the sham name of Patricia—had offered me the perfect possibility of confirming that my intuition about her was correct. She had been banished to my own bathroom, no less, to await our decisions about her immediate future. All I had to do was drag my aching leg up the stairs with all necessary quietness and put one periscopic eye to the blessed keyhole, the best friend of every man who wants to discover the quicksands that women hide. What else are your operations, Doctor, other than an attempt to close that marvelous slot, to make sure that nobody will ever again be able to read the real face of one of your patients?
    The fact that I did not give in to the temptation of spying on Oriana in the bathroom, the fact that I awaited her presence downstairs, could almost be called an act of recklessness. Recklessness? I can already hear you, Mavrelli, making fun of me. Reckless? To respect the privacy of a guest? And yet, I was taking an enormous risk, breaking one of my most sacred customs. You know what I’m talking about, Doctor. You’ve boasted ponderously in newspapers that you could operate on anyone—even someone with no face, someone like me, unsalvageable. But if I were to appear to challenge your claim, would you really risk it? I don’t think so. And in my case, I was betting that Oriana was so absolutely different from other women I had known in my life that it would be worth approaching her in a different manner. What I was abandoning, in fact, was a method that, since my earliest days, had helped me to examine, one after another, an endless beehive of vixens, a method that had proved infallible.
    I was six years old the first time I had ever decided not to apply such a profitable procedure, and it took me almost a decade to recover from the disastrous results. I was in love with a little girl called Enriqueta and, forgetting everything I had learned while squinting at my mother, sisters, cousins, aunts, or female family friends—following them as they discretely stood up to leave the room—against every instinct in my retinas, as a supreme token of adoration and trust of Enriqueta, I abstained. Temporarily, Doctor.
    At the beginning, that abstention was the only homage I could pay her. I’ll admit it is not the best way to win the heart of the prettiest girl in our class—the silent sacrifice of not watching her while she’s pissing. But what other offering could I surrender?
    Nobody paid any attention to me, and why should she, the most popular of all the girls I knew, with her wealthy parents, her father who was a doctor just like you, have been an exception? I was nothing, no one, less than one. Other than my furtive convergences upon the keyhole, I did not have, at the time, even one weapon with which to defend myself.
    Photography? I had not yet realized the pleasures it