Mascara Read Online Free PDF Page B

learned a law that you certainly knew, Doctor, when you chose your profession: the more illusions you have about someone, the more captive you are. I was Enriqueta’s prisoner. A prisoner without the right to enter her castle. Her castle? Not even the cellars of that castle.
    If I began to send drawings to her, it was because I wanted to be invited to her birthday. No matter how unsightly those drawings might be, they were a way of asking for attention. Each morning, when she arrived at her desk, she found the gawky colors I had worked on so hard. It is true that she never thanked me for them, not even casting me one of those smiles which you fabricate, Doctor; but I comforted myself with the thought that she was receiving them like a remote queen who, however accustomed to the cheers of the multitude, nevertheless could feel gratified by an offering from a worm. Each morning she would put the drawing away in her schoolbag. If she was taking it home, it had to have some specialvalue to her, and my hopes grew that I would receive, for the first time in my existence, proof that someone had noticed me. What I wanted, Doctor, if you allow the distinction, was not to go to the party so much as to be invited.
    The only child in the class who did not get a dainty little card with seven pink elephants dancing on the cover was yours untruly.
    So you can understand, Doctor, even Alicia—Alicia with her face like a moon’s crater, with her leatherworks smell, with her voice like barbed wire on a record—even she had gotten an invitation. Strange how one can suffer, at that age, all the humiliations of the universe and still not give up. We seem to need more. Otherwise, why in heaven did I, the day of the party, having calculated that all the other children had already left, direct my shoes to scuffle toward Enriqueta’s house? It wasn’t that I had decided something as drastic as breaking my silent promise not to spy on her. It just turned out that way.
    At the back of her garden, her father had built a playhouse for her. There was a watchdog, but I wasn’t scared: not even the dogs bother to look at me. It was as if I were a stone for that mutt. I approached the playhouse slowly and, noticing a gap in the boards, I put my eye to it. The house was empty. In a corner, next to a pile of sprawling dolls, I saw my drawings, shipshape and intact. It was surprising that they should be there, as if they were being saved for some special occasion. Perhaps she was also in love with me but did not want to confess it. The idea that if someone loves you, she’ll make you hurt—that sort of shit, Mirdovellez.
    All of a sudden, I saw her come in, and instead of withdrawing my eyes, as my unilateral pact not to spy on her demanded of me, I stayed there, as if transfixed. Enriqueta was worn out, flushed from so much excitement. She was carting along a colossal doll, which seemed new—they had just bought it for her.
    She sat it in front of a mirror and began to put make-up on its face. Those weren’t play cosmetics she was using. Even at that age I knew more than enough about beauty products to realize that she had rifled her mother’s boudoir.
    I would never have dared do anything like that. My mother’s powder and mascara were inviolable. Sitting in a babyseat in the mirrored room of the TV studio where the woman who had carriedmy unmemorable body inside her for nine months worked, only two years old, I figured out that cosmetics were not for me. If my mother was so busy preparing the businessmen, the politicians, the priests, the movie stars, for their interviews and banquets and debates, what sort of skin care was going to be left for her son? One face after the other, all afternoon and evening, painting the smile on one to deceive the other and the smile on the other to continue the deception and both smiles to deceive the fools in the audience, expending on her craft and clients all the time and tricks she never spent on me, not a