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speck of talcum, not an eyeliner, until one day I asked myself if my untouched face might be the reason no one ever paid any attention to me.
    But all too soon I understood that not all the make-up in the world would have saved me. I understood it, to be precise, the day on which my little sister was born. I had encouraged the illusion that when she arrived she would fulfill two of my desires. The first was that she should have no face. And the second, that she should bring me mine, the one that had perhaps been forgotten back there, in those moist ashes inside my mother’s stomach. But my sister was as complete as can be—bubbling over, pinkish—and brought me no other gift than the knowledge of my own loneliness. My mother, such an expert in the techniques of false eyelashes and wigs, did not need to wait so long. She must have guessed it instinctively in the instant of looking at me—or as she twisted her eyes away from me the first time. Unlike my brothers, I had nothing in my face that anybody could register, not a surface on which some improvement could be imagined, not the rag of a possible alteration. If someone like you, Doctor, a genius such as you, had seen me at the beginning, who knows if my life might not have changed. Or if some woman, many years later, Alicia perhaps, had given me birth with a permanent look instead of chasing the mirage of a face promised by the unhealing hands of the surgeons of this world.
    What is certain is that the woman who should have succored me did not do so. That she brought me into the world, that lady who cloaked faces, of that there was no doubt. But she had not continued with me for the rest of the voyage. She left me there, featureless, abandoned on the wharf—or on the ship that was departing—and I had to defend myself alone. Because what is superimposed uponthe blank blackboard children bring with them is their parent’s face. That is why—and not for some stupid biological reason—they look more and more like their fathers and mothers as the years grow by. At birth, parents and relatives and lovers coo, flattering themselves with some conceivable resemblance. Lies. For a real similarity, mere fornication, pressing one seed into service so it becomes an unwilling body, is insufficient. In order to secure that face, the adult must keep on interposing himself between the just-born baby and the world. For the rest of its life the child will pay for that protection against alien eyes. You must know what I’m talking about, Doctor, you must have studied it scientifically.
    The first face a little one sees is not something far away, outside, like a mirror in the sky. Not so. The first thing any child sees is the inside of his father’s face, he sees the maneuvers that his own features must start rehearsing and that are constantly being sewn onto him like an umbrella of skin against the rain. In order to keep out other, possibly worse, invaders, he adopts his father’s shell. Human beings are trapped inside the dead faces of their remote ancestors, repeated from generation to generation. From inside that chain, the grandparents of our grandparents watch us. Adults are their envoys, Doctor, the incessant, invisible remodelers of each baby born. So what every child inspires in the world is not a blessing, but a face lift. Every child, that is, except for me.
    I do not know if I was born without a face or if I refused to fashion one—refused to do to myself what Enriqueta was at that very moment doing to her doll. By then I already knew, as I watched her, that each morning adults compose their shields for the day, the walls they will inflict upon children and anybody else in the hours to come. I was tiny, I could hardly walk, I think, when I would get up on full-moon nights and toddle to my parents’ room to watch them sleep. At times I saw them making love. I wasn’t scared. Even if they had lifted their eyes, even if later on they had awoken, they wouldn’t have seen