The Face of Another (7 page)

A
GAIN
about portraits. The paleontologist had made light of my ideas, but I could not help clinging to them. I think that the concept of portraiture, be what it may artistically, embodies a philosophy worthy of deeper inquiry.

For example, in order for a portrait to be a universal representation you have to accept as a premise the universality of the human expression. That is, it is necessary for the majority of people to be in general agreement that certain identical traits are to be seen behind a given expression. What supports this belief, of course, is doubtless the empirical understanding that face and heart stand in a fixed relation to each other. Of course, there is no proof that experience is always reality. Yet it is likewise impossible to conclude that experience is always a pack of lies. Rather, isn’t it more correct to assume that the more earthy the experience the greater the degree of truth it contains? Within these limits, I think it is impossible to deny completely that there is some good in an objective standard of values.

On the other hand, we cannot disregard the fact that the same portrait changes its personality with the centuries. Our vision shifts from the classical harmony of heart and face to the representation of character devoid of harmony, completely collapsing into Picasso’s eight-sided faces and Klee’s
False Face
.

Which in God’s name should one believe, then? If I may express my own personal preference, of course, it would be
the latter standpoint. I think that applying objective standards to the face is, at all events, too naïve; this isn’t a dog show. When I was young, even I used to associate a given face with the ideal personality I wanted to be.

M
ARGINAL NOTE:
That is, this demonstrated a high degree of inclination toward others, stemming from my high degree of viscosity
.

Naturally, a romantic, unordinary face comes into focus through a blurred lens. However, it would never do to be forever addicted to such dreams. Indeed, hard cash is worth more than any kind of promissory note. There was nothing to do but pay what I could with the face I actually had. Don’t men shun cosmetics because they believe in taking responsibility for their own faces? (Of course, with women—that is, women’s make-up—it seems to me they use it because their cash has reached rock bottom, hasn’t it?)

I
COULD
not come to any decision at all—I felt queasy, as if I was about to catch a cold—but nevertheless I continued to make progress in technical areas, where my concern was only with the surface of the face.

After the materials came the casting of the back of the mask. No matter how permissive my colleagues were I could not do that in the laboratory, and I decided to take my equipment home with me and set up a workshop in my study. (Ah!
You seemed to think that my enthusiasm for work was in compensation for my face, and, moved to tears, you tried to help me. Indeed, it was compensation, but it was not the kind of enthusiasm you thought it was. I closed the door of the study and went so far as to turn the key; I shut out even your affection when you tried to bring me my evening snack.)

The work in which I immersed myself on the other side of the closed door was this.

First, I prepared a basin large enough to contain my whole face and poured into it potassium alginate, plaster of Paris, sodium phosphate, and silicon. Then, with all my facial muscles completely relaxed, I quickly thrust my face into the mixture. Within three to five minutes the solution changed into calcium alginate in a plastic state. Since I could not be expected to hold my breath all this time, I had inserted in my mouth a slender rubber tube that led out of the basin. However, just imagine having to immobilize your expression for a time exposure. That is difficult enough. With repeated failures—a twitching under the eyes or an itchy nose—I was at it four days before I got anything satisfactory.

When I had finished, I began work on vacuum plating the inner side with nickel. Since obviously I couldn’t do that at home, I surreptitiously took the die to the laboratory and, keeping it out of sight, completed the plating there.

At length, I came to the finishing touches. One evening, after making certain you had gone to bed, I placed an iron crucible filled with an alloy of lead and antimony over a propane flame. The melted antimony took on the color of cocoa mixed with too much milk. When I poured it carefully into the hollow of the mold plated with potassium alginate, drops of white steam gently eddied up. A transparent blue smoke first spurt forcefully from the hole of the rubber breathing tube, then rose from all around the circumference of the mask. Perhaps the potassium alginate was scorching.
There was a terrible stench; I opened the window, and the chill January wind suddenly snapped at my nostrils with its claws. I turned the mold upside down and shook it, separating the hardened antimony cast, and extinguished the still-smoking potassium alginate base by submerging it in water. Silvery white scar webs, gleaming dully, flickered back at my own flesh-colored ones.

Somehow I could not believe that this was my face. It was different … too different.… These could not possibly be the webs so familiar to me that I could scream, the ones I always saw in my mirror. Of course, since the left and right of the antimony cast were the reverse of my face reflected in a mirror, some feeling of difference was unavoidable. Yet, I had already experienced this much variation with photographs without acutely sensing a difference.

Was it a question of color then? According to Henri Boulan’s
Le Visage
, which I had found in the library, a surprisingly intimate relationship apparently exists between facial color and expression. For example, a plaster-of-Paris death mask of a man will become that of a woman simply by the control of color. Again, one can detect the disguise of a man dressed as a woman if his photograph is taken in black and white. When I thought about this, color seemed a plausible answer. The ridges in the antimony cast were so slight as to be imperceptible if not held to the light; such faint un-evenness would probably be nothing to fuss about in a mask. For an instant I again started at the imprint of my scars, but wasn’t I unnecessarily wrestling with myself? Even these metal scar webs would have their own fine repulsiveness, I suppose, if they were tinted a flesh color. Perhaps. It’s a shame man isn’t made of metal.

If color was that important, tinting at the time of the final flesh modeling would have to be done with the utmost care. As I passed my hand, almost in consolation, over the surface
of the still-warm antimony of the molded face, with the pleasure of a blind man in his sense of touch, I was awed by the complexities in the manufacture of this mask. The completion of one operation immediately prepared the way for another difficult problem. Of course, I had devised an extraordinary challenge. I had already come quite far in amount of time and work, but the essential choice of a facial type was still hanging. And now there was the additional difficulty of coloring. With such problems, I wondered when I would realize my dream of being reborn in another face.

No, certainly all the signs were not bad. The creases of the metallic scar webs made me reflect on the irrational role of the face: one must be sent packing like a mangy mongrel because of extra protuberances of barely two or three millimeters. Suddenly I discovered the really vulnerable spot in my enemy.

These metallic scar webs could exist only as a negative picture for making the back of the mask. How shall I put it: it was a negative existence which was to be covered over by the mask and thus wiped out. But was that all? It was indeed a negative existence, but even a mask that would wipe out the scar webs could not possibly exist without using them as a base. In short, this metal base was the point of departure for constructing the mask, and at the same time the mask’s objective was to obliterate the base.

Let’s try thinking a little more concretely. For example, I could simply use the eyes as they were, making no change in position, shape, or size. Suppose I went about it boldly; should I make a jutting forehead; or should I make the lower part of the face project; or, if neither of the two, should I make the whole thing bulge out, with goggle eyes? The same went for the nose and the mouth. Indeed, the choice of a facial type was apparently not the ambiguous thing I had imagined until now. Perhaps this manner of thinking was limiting, compared
to a slapdash, grab-bag freedom in choosing, but it was far more suited to my nature. In any event, this way I could see what had to be done. Even though I might take the long road of trial and error, first I had to try actually modeling and studying what facial type was possible with the finished mask. This way of doing things really suited me. (Apparently my colleagues’ criticism of me—that I was more of a technician than a scientist—was not altogether off the mark.)

Unawares, I became totally absorbed, plotting the metal base from every angle with my finger, holding my two hands over it, covering and shading it. The molded face was such a delicate thing … with the touch of a finger it turned into a different person, more strange than a brother or a cousin … with a turn of the palm, an utter stranger.

I dare say this was the first time I was able to have such a positive feeling since I had started making the mask.

Y
ES
, I guess I could say that my experience that night was indeed one of the important and crucial points. It wasn’t all that impressive, but I considered it a decisive landmark, much like the point at which the water of a catchment basin takes a determined direction that leads at last into the river.

For the experience of that night was at least a turning point; and it was a fact that something like a channel, however
uncertain, opened between the problem of the technical realization and the selection of a face, which until then had been nothing more than parallel lines. Even though I had no method in view for making the mask, I actually felt encouraged and confident that one way or another the possibility was there, precisely because I was accumulating concrete data.

I decided the following morning to purchase some clay and begin to practice modeling. I had not determined my goal, but I groped my way along fumblingly. Guided by an anatomical chart of the facial muscles, the work of carefully building up the thin clay layer by layer was dramatic, quite as if I were assisting at the birth of an adult, sentient human; and I felt that the rather pointless standard of choice itself was beginning to jell, gradually assuming palpable form. Some detective geniuses track their man from an armchair; others gather their evidence by laborious footwork: being on the move seemed to suit me best, too.

About that time, I began to take renewed interest in Henri Boulan’s
Le Visage
, which I mentioned before. Previously, I had the impression that his plausible analysis smacked rather of the scholar’s habit of classification, and I, driven by purely concrete motives, was plagued by the irritating question of just what use such explanations could be. However, when I came down to the manual task of fashioning the face, I discovered more in Boulan than classifications. There seemed to be quite a difference between the map of a country one knew and that of some unknown foreign land.