The man without a face
A short story by Marcela Santos Brigida
Last night I dreamt that among all the parts you showed me that weren’t real, you had a different face. You didn’t look younger; you were not older: you were somebody else entirely. The eyes I adored were shaped differently. Gone were your remarkable eyelashes. You seemed taller; or shorter, I’m not sure.
Were your fingers longer? I think you might even have had another profession, perhaps a different name, like those men in mid-century plays who are both travelling salesmen and gun manufacturers. But of all that I’m not sure.
That could’ve just been an aftershock from the one definitive change: your face. Whose eyebrows were those? In the dream I was startled into telling a friend, but he already knew. Everybody knew about your face-instability issue but me.
He told me I should be flattered, proud even. In only a couple of years he had seen you go through several faces: the one with eyes close together I had just seen; one had a Roman nose; you’d had receding chins and receding hairlines; once you even got dimples; but the face you had on for me was the prettiest you ever had, the nicest you would ever manage to put together.
Everybody agreed: it’s nice, isn’t it a kindness, that he’d give her his nicest face. He can’t help it, they said. It just changes, it goes from one thing to the other and all he can do is take it and go on living, the same but different, changed but not. He tries to be nonchalant about it, but there’s only one averagely sized man underneath the faces. It just keeps getting harder; they last less and less each time. I went through photo albums on unknown accounts and began to recognise something of you in those other men you had been.
As the pages went on, as I scrolled down and onwards, I could not tell anymore which one was you because all the faces collapsed together. All the stories they told me sounded the same. It wore me out. They were about love or maybe about you, but I’m not sure.
I was both curious and repulsed. I wanted to learn the inner workings of it. Did you feel a lot of pain or nothing at all? Was it laborious or effortless? Did a new face just grow out of the one that preceded it or did you go completely faceless until the process was complete? I wanted to know whether you felt self-conscious, or undesirable. If the reason you were so unstable in your life was the instability of your face.
I was shocked but also not. And then I found myself wondering what the face you had on for me had ever looked like. Had it looked like anything at all? I could not tell whether you ever actually had a face on for me. I tried to conjure it up but there was only a blank. I lost feeling because I simply could not be sure.
It feels strange, does it not? Missing a face you’re not sure was ever there. They assure me that it was. It was and it was also the prettiest but ask me if I remember how it felt to touch it and I could not answer you. The eyelashes I loved. I cannot find them anywhere inside my head. When I try to recollect, all I see is the face with eyes too close together and not the face that was mine.
The man without a face did not call. He never bothered to explain. That was a relief. He was a master in the art of subterfuge and to be honest, so was I. So by all means that had always been his face and that face had never known me. We performed as strangers for the rest of our days, lives running forever in parallel lanes, never crossing. You had to get a little embarrassed occasionally. Who could ever have taken it seriously? I seemed to recall some tenderness, surely there had been warmth. This was a man whose average lifespan was three to five weeks. A brown moth, a fruit fly. His was a life forever in the present. Time made sure I stopped flinching each time a new face appeared. To me, I said again and again, he was a stranger. My best friend said we should call him the faceless man as a joke, but I’m not sure.
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