me immediately?
If I wanted to be permanently recognized, I would have to live like a hypnotizer among his victims—forcing them to look at me, violating them at every turn, pulling at their leashes, devouring them with my eyes so that they would obscurely apprehend that I had somehow gotten into their bloodstream, that there was no recourse against that sort of transfusion. If, on the other hand, I wanted only to know them, then I could know them better than they could themselves, I could know the image that no mirror would dare reveal, I could penetrate deeper than any hypodermic needle, microscope, or X-ray machine, or the hands of a plastic surgeon. And deeper, I thought, at the very moment when I entered into Enriqueta, deeper and better than this sad vulnerable sex depositing its vomit inside uncaring muscles.
For one last time I tried to fool myself. I closed my eyes while I was making love, aware that I would open them upon the trembling of her orgasm. There she was, sweating love underneath me—a twisted image of herself. If she had managed to accede to that secret face of hers that I had crammed inside the photograph, if in the act of love she had been able to rise into her real identity, a flash of herself, a revelation, I could have forgiven all the other thousand impassive faces with which she had ground me into nothingness during the last decade; I might even have put aside that shameful moment with the doll. It might, perhaps, have been possible for my sex to verify her hidden face. But only my camera had that skill. There was no hope. She was as false in love as she was in everything else—the contortions of her rapture were mere propaganda, one more attempt to mock whoever might be watching her. What need was there of going through the obscene rite of entering and leaving her body with a piece of my own body if what she revealed was murkier and less passionate than what existed in my black-and-white celluloid collection?
This does not mean that I ceased using my own rather demanding organ. I religiously carried out the terms of the covenant we had subscribed to: he had been quiescent all the long years it took me to procure the photographic equipment that could satisfy his longings, and it was now my turn to serve at his pleasure. But it was a pleasure localized in the sad trigger itself, a pleasure that never fulfilled its threat of flooding the rest of my body with the violence of hot, remote waves, that could never compare with the total jubilation of a pair of eyes sucking the truth from a picture. You get me, Doctor, the jubilation of gnawing piece by piece the secrets that those women did not even tell their best friends. What a sense of well-being, to have inverted the roles at last: to act toward those women as if I were the visible one and they were the blind shadows. Sex ended up being no more than a trivial pursuit: far less interesting than the game I played with each face; inventing a history for it and then spending weeks researching the woman whose face it was, finding out how faithfully my imagination had constructed her story. That’s why I turned my back on Alicia when she chose her artificial face. I did not want to risk the disappointment of seeing her cheeks glow with falsehood at the culminating moment of love-making. I did not want to steal her face from her or keep it forever in a photograph.
And that was also why, years later, I did not want to spy on Oriana; I would not treat her as I had treated the other women before her. She was the first woman in the world I did not fear. The first I would not have to photograph in order to coax an erection from my body.
“Oriana? Oriana, do you need something?”
She’d been in the bathroom for about half an hour and not a sound could be heard. Had something happened to her?
“Yes.” Her answer came quite faintly through the door.
“You need something?”
“Permission.”
“Permission for what?”
“Where’s
If I wanted to be permanently recognized, I would have to live like a hypnotizer among his victims—forcing them to look at me, violating them at every turn, pulling at their leashes, devouring them with my eyes so that they would obscurely apprehend that I had somehow gotten into their bloodstream, that there was no recourse against that sort of transfusion. If, on the other hand, I wanted only to know them, then I could know them better than they could themselves, I could know the image that no mirror would dare reveal, I could penetrate deeper than any hypodermic needle, microscope, or X-ray machine, or the hands of a plastic surgeon. And deeper, I thought, at the very moment when I entered into Enriqueta, deeper and better than this sad vulnerable sex depositing its vomit inside uncaring muscles.
For one last time I tried to fool myself. I closed my eyes while I was making love, aware that I would open them upon the trembling of her orgasm. There she was, sweating love underneath me—a twisted image of herself. If she had managed to accede to that secret face of hers that I had crammed inside the photograph, if in the act of love she had been able to rise into her real identity, a flash of herself, a revelation, I could have forgiven all the other thousand impassive faces with which she had ground me into nothingness during the last decade; I might even have put aside that shameful moment with the doll. It might, perhaps, have been possible for my sex to verify her hidden face. But only my camera had that skill. There was no hope. She was as false in love as she was in everything else—the contortions of her rapture were mere propaganda, one more attempt to mock whoever might be watching her. What need was there of going through the obscene rite of entering and leaving her body with a piece of my own body if what she revealed was murkier and less passionate than what existed in my black-and-white celluloid collection?
This does not mean that I ceased using my own rather demanding organ. I religiously carried out the terms of the covenant we had subscribed to: he had been quiescent all the long years it took me to procure the photographic equipment that could satisfy his longings, and it was now my turn to serve at his pleasure. But it was a pleasure localized in the sad trigger itself, a pleasure that never fulfilled its threat of flooding the rest of my body with the violence of hot, remote waves, that could never compare with the total jubilation of a pair of eyes sucking the truth from a picture. You get me, Doctor, the jubilation of gnawing piece by piece the secrets that those women did not even tell their best friends. What a sense of well-being, to have inverted the roles at last: to act toward those women as if I were the visible one and they were the blind shadows. Sex ended up being no more than a trivial pursuit: far less interesting than the game I played with each face; inventing a history for it and then spending weeks researching the woman whose face it was, finding out how faithfully my imagination had constructed her story. That’s why I turned my back on Alicia when she chose her artificial face. I did not want to risk the disappointment of seeing her cheeks glow with falsehood at the culminating moment of love-making. I did not want to steal her face from her or keep it forever in a photograph.
And that was also why, years later, I did not want to spy on Oriana; I would not treat her as I had treated the other women before her. She was the first woman in the world I did not fear. The first I would not have to photograph in order to coax an erection from my body.
“Oriana? Oriana, do you need something?”
She’d been in the bathroom for about half an hour and not a sound could be heard. Had something happened to her?
“Yes.” Her answer came quite faintly through the door.
“You need something?”
“Permission.”
“Permission for what?”
“Where’s
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