Confessions of a Mask (8 page)

"What's the matter with you, you bunch of cowards! Isn't there anyone else?"

Omi's body was gently swinging to the right and left, his hips bending with the motions of the log. He placed his white-gloved hands on his hips. The gilded badge on his cap glittered in the morning sun. I had never seen him so handsome as at that moment.

"I'll do it!" I cried.

My heartbeats had steadily increased in violence, and using them as a measure, I had exactly estimated the moment when I would finally say these words. It has always been thus with moments in which I yield to desire. It seemed to me that my going and standing against Omi on that log was a predestined fact, rather than merely an impulsive action. In later years, such actions as this misled me into thinking I was "a man of strong will."

"Watch out! Watch out! You'll get licked," everyone shouted.Amid their cheers of derision I climbed up on one end of the log. While I was trying to get up, my feet began slipping, and again the air was full of noisy jeers.

Omi greeted me with a clowning face. He played the fool with all his might and pretended to be slipping.

Again, he would tease me by fluttering his gloved fingers at me. To my eyes those fingers were the sharp points of some dangerous weapon, about to run me through. The palms of our white-gloved hands met many times in stinging slaps, and each time I reeled under the force of the blow. It was obvious that he was deliberately holding back his strength, as though wanting to make sport of me to his heart's content, postponing what would otherwise have been my quick defeat.

"Oh! I'm frightened—How strong you are!—I'm licked. I'm just about to fall—look at me!" He stuck out his tongue and pretended to fall.

It was unbearably painful for me to see his clownish face, to see him unwittingly destroy his own beauty. Even though I was now gradually being forced back along the log, I could not keep from lowering my eyes. And just at that instant I was caught by a swoop of his right hand. In a reflex action to keep from falling, I clutched at the air with my right hand and, by some chance, managed to fasten onto the fingertips of his right hand. I grasped a vivid sensation of his fingers fitting closely inside the white gloves.

For an instant he and I looked each other in the eye.It was truly only an instant. The clownish look had vanished, and, instead, his face was suffused with a strangely candid expression. An immaculate, fierce something, neither hostility nor hatred, was vibrating there like a bowstring. Or perhaps this was only my imagination. Perhaps it was nothing but the stark, empty look of the instant in which, pulled by the fingertips, he felt himself losing his balance. However that may have been, I knew intuitively and certainly that Omi had seen the way I looked at him in that instant, had felt the pulsating force that flowed like lightning between our fingertips, and had guessed my secret—that I was in love with him, with no one in the world but him.

At almost the same moment the two of us fell tumbling off the log.

I was helped to my feet. It was Omi who helped me. He pulled me up roughly by the arm and, saying not a word, brushed the dirt off my uniform. His elbows and gloves were stained with a mixture of dirt and glittering frost.

He took my arm and began walking away with me. I looked up into his face as though reproving him for this show of intimacy.

At my school we had all been classmates since lower-school days, and there was nothing unusual about putting arms about each other's shoulders. As a matter of fact, at that moment the whistle for class formation sounded and everyone hurried off in just that intimate way. The fact that Omi had tumbled to the ground with me was for them nothing but the conclusion of a game they had already gradually become bored with watching, and even the fact that Omi and I walked away together with linked arms could hardly have been a sight worthy of particular notice.

For all that, it was a supreme delight I felt as I walked leaning on his arm. Perhaps because of my frail constitution, I usually felt a premonition of evil mixed in with every joy; but on this occasion I felt nothing but the fierce, intense sensation of his arm: it seemed to be transmitted from his arm to mine and, once having gained entry, to spread out until it flooded my entire body. I felt that I should like to walk thus with him to the end of the earth.

But we arrived at the place for class formation, where, too soon, he let go of my arm and took his place in line.

Thereafter he did not look around in my direction. During the ceremony that followed, he sat four seats away from me. Time and time again I looked from the stains on my own white gloves to those on Omi's. . . .

My blind adoration of Omi was devoid of any element of conscious criticism, and still less did I have anything like a moral viewpoint where he was concerned. Whenever I tried to capture the amorphous mass of my adoration within the confines of analysis, it would already have disappeared. If there be such a thing as love that has neither duration nor progress, this was precisely my emotion. The eyes through which I saw Omi were always those of a "first glance" or, if I may say so, of the "primeval glance." It was purely an unconscious attitude on my part, a ceaseless effort to protect my fourteen-year-old purity from the process of erosion.

Could this have been love? Grant it to be one form of love, for even though at first glance it seemed to retain its pristine form forever, simply repeating that form over and over again, it too had its own unique sort of debasement and decay. And it was a debasement more evil than that of any normal kind of love. Indeed, of all the kinds of decay in this world, decadent purity is the most malignant.

Nevertheless, in my unrequited love for Omi, in this the first love I encountered in life, I seemed like a baby bird keeping its truly innocent animal lusts hidden under its wing. I was being tempted, not by the desire for possession, but simply by unadorned temptation itself.

To say the least, while at school, particularly during a boring class, I could not take my eyes off Omi's profile. What more could I have done when I did not know that to love is both to seek and to be sought? For me love was nothing but a dialogue of little riddles, with no answers given. As for my spirit of adoration, I never even imagined it to be a thing that required some sort of answer.

One day I had a cold and, even though it was not at all serious, stayed home from school. Upon returning to school the next day, I discovered that the day I had chosen to miss had been nothing less than the day of the first spring physical examination in our third year. Several other students had likewise missed the examination, and we all went along together to the medical office.

In the office a gas stove was sending up such a feeble blue flame into the sunlight that one could not even be certain it was lit. There was nothing but the smell of disinfectants. Nowhere was there that pale-pink smell, like hot sugared milk, so characteristic of a room where a crowd of boys are awaiting a physical examination, their naked bodies pushing and jostling against each other. Instead there was only a handful of us, taking off our clothes in silence, shivering miserably. . . .

There was a skinny boy who, like me, was always catching cold. He was standing on the scales, and as I looked at his pale, bony back, covered with down, I suddenly remembered my everlasting, fierce desire to see Omi's naked body. I realized how stupid I had been not to have foreseen what a perfect opportunity the physical examination of the day before would have provided for achieving that desire. Now the opportunity was already lost; there was nothing to do but go on awaiting some random chance in the future.

I turned pale. In the pallid goose-flesh that suddenly covered me I was experiencing a form of regret like some piercing cold. I stared vacantly into the air, scratching the ugly vaccination scars on my thin arms. My name was called. The scales looked exactly like a scaffold proclaiming the hour of my execution.

"Eighty-eight," the assistant barked to the school doctor. This assistant had formerly been an orderly in a military hospital and still retained the bearing.

As the doctor entered the figure on my card, he was mumbling to himself :

"Wish he'd get to ninety pounds at least."

I had become used to undergoing this treatment at every physical examination. But today I was so relieved that Omi was not present to witness my humiliation that the doctor's words did not cause me the usual anguish. For an instant my feeling of relief amounted almost to joy. . . .

"All right—next!"

The assistant shoved my shoulder impatiently. But this time I did not glare back at him with the hateful and irritable look I usually gave him.

Nevertheless, even though dimly, I must have foreseen the ending of my first love. In all likelihood it was the uneasiness created by this foreboding that formed the nucleus of my pleasure.There came a day in late spring that was like a tailor's sample cut from a bolt of summer, or like a dress rehearsal for the coming season. It was that day of the year that comes as Summer's representative, to inspect everyone's clothing chest and make sure all is in readiness. It was that day on which people appear in summer shirts to show they have passed muster.

Despite the warmth of the day, I had a cold, and my bronchial tubes were irritated. One of my friends happened to be suffering with an upset stomach, and we went together to the medical office to get written excuses that would permit us merely to watch gymnastic exercises without having to participate.

On our way back, we walked along toward the gymnasium as slowly as possible. Our visit to the medical office provided us with a good reason for being tardy, and we were anxious to shorten even by a little the boring time we would have to spend watching the gymnastics.

"My, it's hot, isn't it?" I said, taking off the jacket of my uniform.

"You'd better not do that, not with a cold. And they'll make you do gymnastics anyway if they see you that way."

I put my jacket on again hurriedly.

"But it'll be all right for me, because its only my stomach." And, instead of me, it was my friend who ostentatiously took off his jacket, as though taunting me.

Arriving at the gymnasium, we saw by the clothing hanging on the hooks along the wall that all the boys had taken off their sweaters, and some even their shirts. The area round the outdoor exercise bars, where there was sand and grass, seemed to be blazing brightly as we looked out at it from the dark gymnasium. My sickly constitution produced its usual reaction, and I walked toward the exercise bars giving my petulant little coughs.

The insignificant gymnastics instructor scarcely glanced at the medical excuses which we handed him. Instead he turned immediately to the waiting boys and said:

"All right now, let's try the horizontal bar. Omi, you show them how it's done."

Friendly voices began calling Omi's name stealthily. He had simply evaporated, as he often did during gymnastics. There was no knowing what he did on these occasions, but this time again he came lounging out from behind a tree whose young green leaves were trembling with light.

When I saw him my heart set up a clamor in my breast. He had taken off his shirt, leaving nothing but a dazzlingly white, sleeveless undershirt to cover his chest. His swarthy skin made the pure whiteness of the undershirt look almost too clean. It was a whiteness that could almost be smelled from a distance, like plaster of Paris. And that white plaster was carved in relief, showing the bold contours of his chest and its two nipples."The horizontal bar is it?" he asked the instructor, speaking curtly, with a tone of confidence. "Yes, that's right."

Then, with that haughty indolence so often exhibited by the possessors of fine physiques, Omi stretched his hands down leisurely to the ground and smeared his palms with damp sand from just beneath the surface. Rising, he brushed his hands together roughly, and turned his face upward toward the iron bar. His eyes flashed with the bold resolve of one who defies the gods, and for a moment their pupils mirrored the clouds and blue skies of May, along with a cold disdain.

A leap shot through him. Instantly his body was hanging from the iron bar, suspended there by those two strong arms of his, arms certainly worthy of being tattooed with anchors.

"Ahhh!" The admiring exclamation of his classmates arose and floated thickly in the air.

Any one of the boys could have looked into his heart and discovered that his admiration was not aroused simply by Omi's feat of strength. It was admiration for youth, for life, for supremacy. And it was astonishment at the abundant growth of hair that Omi's upraised arms had revealed in his armpits.

This was probably the first time we had seen such an opulence of hair; it seemed almost prodigal, like some luxuriant growth of troublesome summer weeds. And in the same way that such weeds, not satisfied to have completely covered a summer garden, will even spread up a stone staircase, the hair overflowed the deeply carved banks of Omi's armpits and spread thickly toward his chest. Those two black thickets gleamed glossily, bathed in sunlight, and the surprising whiteness of his skin there was like white sand peeping through.

As he began the pull-up, the muscles of his arms bulged out hard, and his shoulders swelled like summer clouds. The thickets of his armpits were folded into dark shadows, gradually becoming invisible. And at last his chest rubbed high against the iron bar, trembling there delicately. With a repetition of these same motions, he did a rapid series of pull-ups.