I read Face
back in 1985 when the novel was first published. I vividly recall many
memorable scenes from this story based on a true event that happened in a
Rio favela, where a thirty-six-year-old man fell down a long flight of
cement steps and obliterated his face. Following his release after
months in the hospital, he could immediately see nobody wanted anything
to do with him, not his former girlfriend, his boss at the barber shop,
his neighbors. Without money to pay the surgeons, all he could do was
learn as much as possible about faces and surgery and then set about
reconstructing his own face.
A number of passages stuck with me these past thirty years. Here they are:
Alone
at night in his room at a charity hospital, our unfortunate protagonist
Helio Cara catches sight of himself for the first time, bandages
removed, after his accident. “In the sudden light, someone stands
weaving before him on unsteady legs, something without nose or mouth,
eyes dark purple splotches, sealed almost shut, particles tattooed onto
the skin.”
The medical staff and students gather round Helio's
bed and listen to the Head Physician. “'Never has this service seen such
an injury. Mr. Cara...' and the swallowed giggles of the medical
students, standing at white starched attention, suppressing the
whispering of their linen, '...such an injury.'”
Helio is given a
rubber mask by the medical staff. However, the rubber quickly becomes
intolerable – the intense heat, the feeling of suffocation. Helio transitions to covering his face with a handkerchief. “The mask! He had
forgotten it was there! Certainly he lifts the edge as it lies against
his jaw. No pain. It lifts easily. Yet they had such trouble snapping it
tight against his chin. He peels it upward. Can it be he has grown used
to it already, like a second skin corseting his own bruised flesh?”
The
women and men and children he's lived with these past years in the
favela refuse to treat Helio as fully human. “Their grunts of fading
recognition gave way to silence. He became as one invisible. Finally it
seemed to him they no longer even see him.”
Helio confronts Lula,
his girlfriend of the past. “He tries to quiet her, but she screams
even louder. 'Everything, everything is spoiled now. I'm afraid to
look at you. I can't stand to kiss you. I don't want to see. I can't
make love to a monster.' ”
Helio goes to the restaurant where
Lula works as a waitress. He doesn't find her but speaks with the boss
who says the following – for me, THE most memorable line in the entire
novel: “Man, it's so hot in there, the roaches have to do the samba!”
Cecile
Pineda captures the pathos of a man stripped of his existential
identity, a man without the most critical part of one's sense of self in
the world – a face. “Would he have to accept this face like raw meat,
grotesque, his own mask, but one he could never remove, stuck to him
like a childhood nightmare, never to be taken off?”
The author
also relates, detail by detail, the harrowing sessions when Hilio sits
down with needle and thread and Procaine to reconstruct his own face.
“Why, if this is so, why does his scar tissue persist? Shouldn't it be
replaced by an entirely new and shining surface, one that no longer
bunches in rigid ropes and knots, patterned by hard ridges that glare an
angry white?”
The Face, a remarkable novel. Pick up the Wings Press edition since it includes an incisive interview with author Cecile Pineda.
American author Cecile Pineda, born 1932
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