Faceless Story

Each morning, accompanied by the vapor of my frozen breath, I saw her resting against the dirty wall of the house in front of mine. Although her face was not visible, underneath those abraded clothes, I was able to distinguish the silhouette of a person. There was a body hidden by the red wool “chompa”; the legs pressed against the chest underneath a great old skirt and the feet, hibernating in bored blue slippers, allowed occasional or habitual travelers to know that was a person and not only a pile of sweepings bags crowded together by some neglecting citizen.

When I walked past her, at the beginning of the day, I stared waiting for some kind of answer; but there was never one. When I returned home, exhausted and doubtful about my vocation, the only invariable constant was its presence. Camouflaged between the shades that a solitary light pole provided, there she was, perennial, eternal; a mummy without burial of an antediluvian culture. The light looked maliciously trying to show one strip of skin, a corner of a lip, a grimace at least; only to face immobility, stillness and the murderous shade that ends it.

The pattern repeated itself day after day unchanged. See her, doubt her existence for a second; gain some dollars that I would not enjoy; return home. Feel sorry for her and not to do anything about it, until I doubt her existence the following morning. There were moments at night, lying in my bed hoping for Morfeus's blessing, that I wondered inventing a life for her. I saw her as a child, playing in some wasteland of the Limean periphery. Her sprinkled earth braids and their tiny hands plastered in mud. When adolescent she worked in the streets, first selling treats; and soon, her body. Men dampening her with the sweat that dripped from their inflamed stomachs and cavernous navels. I was present in the childbirth of her first daughter, one that she had to abandon breaking her heart forever. But all my visions were only forms to fill the emptiness of my own insipid life; she was a novel that I read, mine being thousands of empty pages.

The days were piled up in weeks. The space occupied in my brain by her story increased absorbing everything. I had already written tens of chapters, invented hundreds of characters and solved dozens of plots. Soon my job performance began to suffer, since instead of developing the strategic plan for a new product, my mind was entertained imagining her in a street of Chorrillos where she found her first love, or in an attic in Pueblo Libre where she received the blows of a ruthless mother. An obsession began to bloom in me and its thorny roots were entangled febrile in all the nerves of my body causing terrible restlessness. My life sank inevitable to the bottom. I found myself in a catatonic state and couldn´t find a solution.

It arrived from the most innocent source: my son. One night, reacting to my absolute ignorance to his words he shouted: Dad, you aren´t even looking at my face! I knew what I had to do to exorcise the demons that tormented me for months. I needed a face for my stories. Eyes to be moved, a mouth to laugh and a nose to delineate. I couldn´t wait for the light of day. I ran to the street and approached her more than ever. Even so she didn´t react to my presence. Mam, I said. Nothing broke silence. Mam, I repeated standing almost next to her. A stench flooded my lungs, drowning me. Trembling, I moved its shoulder. This small rubbing caused the head to fall to the side freeing her from anonymity.

Empty orbits, the dark and chipped orifice in the middle and yellowish and nibbled teeth were everything that was left; everything she was. Some tufts of black hair fell languid on the bony surface. I watched her, trying to create a face from this ruins; I failed to make one. My character remained faceless and her stories would perish in my head with me as their only reader.

I understood change was a necessity. My life was an empty vessel and I could not travel the world trying to fill my own voids through others. That was the day I woke up, that was the day I took control of my life; that was the day I became a writer and started smiling just a few more times a day.