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me. It was the faces that flickered on them during their nightmares that captivated me, the only faces that were not spruced up, the only faces without a mother—mine or any other—to intervene at dawn, without an inner plastic surgeon preparing the façade as the body’s ambassador. There was no insurance agent in those faces, no selling of them in the stock exchange or the futuresmarket of everyday life. Doctor, there are no fairy godmothers. They don’t exist. But stepmothers of your body, yes, there are those, Doctor, reconstructing at the moment of awakening our daily mask, defeating the truths that the night has permitted the brain to distill, our daily looks, amen. Watching Enriqueta’s rouge-stained doll, I understood that what I had needed was a loving hand to shed upon me a benediction of colors. I was born without a surgeon godfather—and no mother to furnish my lips with flowers for the day’s long funeral. The woman who had spawned me was too busy with the faces of strangers to make that special effort to rescue me, and so I sunk ever more into anonymity.
    Enriqueta lay her cosmetic-slurred doll on a small cot and took out a series of medical instruments from a bag—these, at least, were playthings. She shook the baby to make it cry, and when a broken, almost human, hiccup sputtered up, “My little love,” Enriqueta lullabied. “Are you sick?”
    She set about to discover—the daughter of a doctor, after all—what was wrong with the doll. She sounded it and pinched it and scratched its underarms brutally; she explored the nasal channels with a flashlight and the eardrums with a little hammer. I had been through that—the medical exams. My father sold medical equipment to hospitals: hypodermic needles, stethoscopes, things that penetrate the body and try to emerge with a representation of what is happening inside. I had heard him talk about something called an X ray, which took photographs of people’s innards. I wondered if maybe those photos might reveal why nobody paid any attention to me, if they would reveal that something was wrong. In order to get them taken, I faked tremendous tummy pains—which had the added advantage of allowing me to go to the bathroom ten, eleven times, each day and to spy on whomsoever was in it while I awaited my turn outside.
    When the results were brought in, I was disappointed. Sorry to have to tell you this, Doctor—for you, after all, those plates are like maps, the secret topography onto which you graft your false buildings. But believe me—and you may agree with me here—that gray rubbish, those inert shadows, those sterile ghosts, were anything but the truth. They were just as much a sham as the knuckles of doctors drumming on one’s thorax, guessing at the dark, sick lightthat lodges in our lungs. I aspired to different depths, depths that everyone can see. That was not me on those negatives. Because in there, in our intestines, we are all equal. So are frogs fried dry by the sun. Trying to find the difference between human beings in the bones—what madness. What each of us really means rises to the surface, yes, right there, for everybody to see—or would you disagree, Doctor? There is a hidden something that will at any moment emerge and will pose itself, just so, Moravelli, like a blister on a mouth that is about to be punctured, and if you happen not to be present, if you do not know ahead of time that this supreme moment is on the verge of briefly blossoming, then that truth will submerge itself all over again. But it will surge outward once more, it will, no matter how much people such as you try to cover it or suffocate it or whatever it is that you do to it.
    Was that when I began to hate doctors, the day I was shown those plates? No, I hated them long before that. I think that I portended that you would be my great rival, Doctor Marviralle, that you would be awaiting me in the future, ready to practice to its utmost that capacity for camouflage