I am sure you will forgive me, my friend, if I answer you with a slight tinge of familiarity in my voice. I do have my reasons: it could almost be stated that we are already partners. You do not like the idea? Please. I did not interrupt you until you had finished. And you were not brief.

So, with all due respect, let me inform you that it is my considered opinion that you underestimate us both. You do not demand all that I can give; and you proffer far less than you yourself can deliver. What else am I to deduce? Being the privileged proprietor of that special face, what do you submit as your part of the deal? A miserable batch of photographs. When I have within my reach all those live bodies, you offer these miserable photographs. And knowing the power I have to grant your most extravagant and outrageous desires, what do you ask of me? To travel abroad. Not a good way of doing business, my dear fellow. Not when both sides end up losing.

You decidedly need someone to look after your interests.

I do not blame you for your misgivings. Like you, during all these years I could not conceive that a partner might be an equal. A partner would inevitably sell you to the highest bidder, as your Pareja did when the opportunity arose. Even at the period I would like to talk to you about, even then, when I was a young doctor, just out of medical school, squandering my time as an intern in that mediocre hospital for insignificant people, the certainty I had already formed of my own worth would not allow me to entertain even the notion of an associate. A brilliant career beckoned to me from the future. Someone with your avid eyes would have understood it right away: I was going to be the most eminent plastic surgeon of all time. Yes. Of all time. You do not have the slightest drop of ambition in your veins. You cannot understand anybody’s longing to shine. What I yearned for was to defeat even rivals who would appear after my death.

On that afternoon, therefore, when a child was brought to me, a baby who had just been born, it mattered that I knew who I would someday be. The baby seemed ordinary, one might almost venture that it was immeasurably ordinary and yet the nurse who shoved it onto my weighing scales assured me that there was something strange about it, perhaps in its face. She was, she informed me, an extremely responsible employee, but in regard to this little child, she would forget the most elementary tasks. She was not giving him his bottle on time, she wasn’t bathing him on schedule, she wasn’t taking his temperature.

Oh, no, you don’t. Not one interruption. No. Not a word. I let you speak as long as you wanted. It is my turn now.

True, it has been my turn all these years. My turn began at that moment, so many decades ago when that nurse offered up that child into these hands, which you are watching with such intensity. But that’s my privilege.

I did not, on that occasion, intend to waste more than five minutes on the case. Why should I attend to that child’s problems? Or worry about the nurse’s fatigued, overwrought brain? But just in case, I sent her out into the corridor. I might have been inexperienced, but I had already warned myself that it is indispensable to be alone with any patient: our consulting rooms are like temples. Our privacy is what protects us.

So that day, fortunately, there was no one to witness how I examined the boy. His skin, particularly the skin on his face, turned out to be special. What need is there to describe it? You know better than any other human being both its defects and its virtues. I will not lie to you: I was very excited. Never, in the most obscure bibliography or the most meticulous notes, had I ever read of anything quite like this. A chameleon, after all, a butterfly altering its colors, a rabbit shedding its fur according to the seasons, all are creatures programmed for a limited, cyclical register of environments and habitations. But that a human being would be able to fuse with his ever-changing backgrounds, could mix in to the point of invisibility …

Even at that moment I was aware that the commercial possibilities were, for all practical purposes, infinite. For leisure, for love, for work, for journalism, for military uses: unlimited. Do not interrupt. I know what you are about to say: of course nobody in their right mind would wish to remain in that condition permanently. I had chosen my specialization precisely because I knew that people kill, lie, betray, accumulate millions, decide whom they will marry and who will be their friends, with the sole objective of achieving prominence, of being seen. Show me a beggar who does not dream of becoming an emperor.

Who would want to admit, as you already have, in fact, that one is dead before having had the chance to live? But on a transitory basis, my good man—that is altogether another story. For a criminal or a policeman, for a spy or someone who fears spies, for a husband who cheats on his wife or who wants to see with his own eyes if she is faithful to him. I had, as yet, not one client; nevertheless, I knew what they would give to be able to saunter unseen among their employees, their subjects, their voters, their pupils, their rivals. I could already picture myself. Having altered their faces into loveliness and instant media recognition, I would invest them with an additional momentary invisibility, so that they could find out whom to trust and against whom to act, so that they could have private vacations where nobody could identify them, so that they could wield more power than they had ever conceived of.

But my own dreams of fortune and fame did not last long. A few seconds, to be exact. The chemical substance (or if you want to call it magical, I don’t mind) within that skin would be useless to me if I told the hospital about it. Just as I had automatically chosen to discard that silly nurse, just as it had never crossed my mind to let her share one cent of the profits, that is just how my superiors would exclude me from the deal. I was as new to that profession as that little boy was new to the world. Other surgeons would operate on him, others would get their pictures in the papers and on the evening news. I would get—if I was lucky, that is—a footnote, some trivial reference in a medical encyclopedia. Unless …

That is right. Unless I kept the secret of that skin till more propitious days. Unless I simply let the wrapping paper with which that child had come to this earth, unless I let it grow with all the dark liberty it could muster, and I were able to appropriate it much later, when I would have the resources to insure its adequate exploitation. It did not occur to me and you can see that I was not amiss—that someone half visible would have any trouble surviving.

I proceeded to tell the nurse, therefore, that the child could not be in a healthier condition, and that she was the one in need of medical attention, preferably of the psychiatric variety, because she seemed on the verge of a surmenage. As for me, I was nobly ready to overlook her repeated failure to care well for the infant. If she talked about the matter with anyone else, however, I would be obliged to bring charges against her. So this consultation was not even noted in your files or in mine. That is why you did not discover it when you began to research your past.

Which does not mean, my friend, that I let you go your merry way without following your trail. Although you were not to produce dividends until twenty years later, you were somewhat of an investment, were you not, a future factory? I can remember that at a certain moment one of my more subtle interventions even became necessary. The first time they took you back to the hospital for a harried checkup, I took care to alter the results of the laboratory tests—making sure that nobody investigated what ailed you. I am not attributing to myself credit that in all fairness belongs mainly to you. But neither do I deny that, with all discretion, whenever it became indispensable, I spent my scant revenue to close the door that might have led you into the public light. And, in effect, here you are, like a tiger ready to be embalmed.

At first I would visit you regularly, with a mixture of gratification and anguish similar to that with which people open the stockmarket pages in the paper, sure that no matter how long it might take, a day would come when your hide, like that tiger’s, would again be available and, this time, profitable. But later, my visits became less frequent. On my own, without having to skin you for a profit, I was getting on splendidly in my profession. I may have been overly confident. I was inspired by the vision of a world where the people who appear in the news, the prominent people, the people that matter, yes, indeed, that they should all be as shining and bubbly as the unbelievably enticing angels who each day provoke us in the soft-drink ads.

As a child, I had always hated ugly people, with their defective eyes, their tortured nostrils, their repugnant pelt. It was an unfair imposition, especially if they happened to be the sort of person who had acquired some degree of notoriety. Repulsive insects like them, I told myself, should conceal themselves, or at least should make the effort to transfigure their visage. I would be, I swore, the instrument for that transfiguration. I would be the provider of embellishment and grace for the pre-eminent men and women of our time. Quite a responsibility, wouldn’t you say?

This crusade for a society in which power would always be exercised with the accountability of beauty did not make me forget you totally, but I will be the first to admit that you began to grow distant, perhaps pale, setting behind the horizon of my priorities. It had always been irksome to follow your wake, but now, as I concentrated on matters that seemed more immediately advantageous, to locate you was becoming more difficult and impractical. In some page of my inner calendar, I knew that your high school graduation was drawing near and that it would be the key date to present myself to you, to propose a covenant. But when you graduated, I was in the middle of the most promising transaction of my whole career. You boast of the fact that you care not a bit about politics, so I will not tire you. Nor would confidentiality allow it. But there are certain things you might as well know—it will affect the way in which you consider the counteroffer that I soon shall put before you. So you can realize that I do have the means to defend you and, if you insist, your transient mate as well.

Some time after I left the hospital, a rather grayish sort of client came to see me. Quite a common person—but with one idea that I do not hesitate to qualify as an act of sheer genius. You are not interested in names or you forget them, so I do not intend to fill your head with insignificant syllables. It is enough to say that the man knew only one thing well in the world: he knew the face that he wanted to have manufactured for himself. He had invested all his money in polls. But not in order to guess people’s tastes, their opinions, their political preferences. The only thing that mattered, he said, the only thing he needed in order to be successful, was the exact face that people at a certain moment in history were expecting. And at that moment he had discovered the popular demand for a curious blend of juvenile features with a serene and mature gaze. That is what everybody longed for at the time. I rearranged his grandfatherly sunken cheeks, I made his eyes so sweet a blue that they would seem incapable of swatting a fly, I grafted determination and innocence onto his bland jaw. He specified what he wanted, but I made the sauce. And his success was spectacular.

It was auspicious that I had already elaborated the revolutionary method whereby we can curtail the time it takes to alter a face. What my ads say—that we can change everything in somebody’s physiognomy in less than half an hour—happens to be absolutely true. But what started out as a strategy for the industrialization of gorgeousness ended up by allowing me, in the case of this client, to compose incessantly, without interfering with losses of time, the everyday adjustments that he required. An early fifteen minutes with me and he was remodeled for the day. An austere wrinkle added over here, a mischievous radiance over there, and the man he saw in the mirror was exactly the one that the opinion polls suggested would be popular. What was he? A senator, a president, a lieutenant colonel, a TV anchorman, the manager of the largest corporation? That should not concern us here. Thanks to the skill of his opinion polls and of my hands, we had discovered a way to keep him in his post forever.

Or at least that is what we believed. But one day my client, venerable as a statesman, exuberant as an adolescent, came to see me, rather perturbed. For some time now his secret polls stubbornly insisted on the weariness of his multiple admirers or fans. They wanted a new face. And now a man had appeared who was threatening him. You are not interested in these details, are you? Enough to say it was someone who was going to strip him of his most valuable asset, his popularity. It was not the first time. My client had already, by then, eliminated several rivals. That, however, was no longer sufficient. Physical elimination, I mean. The problem had to be confronted on a more permanent basis. And his solution was drastic and simple: it had become essential to steal the face of the person who was preparing to replace him. In effect. Transfer it to my client. You will agree with me that to abduct a face is considerably less arduous than people imagine. Nobody realizes what has happened. Fascinated by the luxuriant surface, the differences that do not transcend, the ups and downs of presumed distinctions, the so-called citizens or consumers or TV viewers gulp down the same old medicine over and over in splendid new bottles. How many are there like you, who can perceive the old face repeating the old tics and tricks under the face that has recently been renovated?

At some point, however, more or less at the time when you were supposed to graduate, I was asked to a secret meeting at my client’s office. He had died. A sudden death. His closest associates were shocked. An extremely dangerous vacuum of power was opening—in the enterprise, in the country, in the army, in the party, in the TV network? You do not care to go into these details, do you? It’s not your cup of tea? What does matter for the understanding of our affairs is that they demanded a new transplant.

In effect. Hush up my client’s demise, scrape off the pieces of his face and sew them onto the face of his younger successor, the man he himself had designated to continue his work if something happened to him. The new man would then assume his new responsibilities behind the refuge of a mask of more traditional authority. And when he had accumulated the necessary experience, his original face could then be returned to him—adjusted, naturally, in accordance with the latest polls. That is what is called fresh blood, my friend.

And that is why I was in no condition, at the time, to spend my days watching your movements and anticipating your plans. What was opening up for me was a way to intervene surgically in the lives of the most important people of our era, to institute a foundation for their permanent power, to make death or generational change but transitory destabilizers. Because if that was the first operation of the sort that I attempted, you will of course understand that it was not the last. That grayish client, whose face at least would not rest in peace, had chosen me. From that point on, it was I who started to choose which clients I would renovate, which features offered stability to the social order. So I also established, as you once did, a network: only mine is less assailable than yours.

And to this, I have dedicated my years, while you collected useless photographs. So do not come here and threaten me with your snapshot of my hands placing minuscule devices in the basement of a face. Those clients owe everything to me. The elder ones, that they may continue to reign under the newer faces. And the youngest, that they may aspire someday to infiltrate the proudest faces of ancient power. Overlaying and undersetting, sewing on top and in between and by the side, excavating and eroding, I know who is who better than any guide that is sold in the bookstores. A snail crossing an eight-lane highway has more chances of surviving than you do. Especially if you are with that little woman. All I have to do is make a call and my friends will make sure you are suppressed, you, your photos, your former inspector, your lover’s hands.

But why should I lose you again? I already made that mistake once before. I was obsessed—quite rightly—with an operation that saved the country from widespread upheaval. So I do not blame myself for disregarding your graduating ceremony—where I doubt that you received a prize. The day, I remember it as if it were yesterday, I went to take a look at you—and you will agree that even half a look is not easy—your disappearance surprised me. Yes. As simple as that. Disappeared. It was not a matter, as it had so often been, of not being able to locate you, your face dissolving into the color of the crowd. No, this time you had really left.

You were not living with your parents, and they even became obnoxious when I sent a detective to sniff out where you had gone, as if we were reminding them of some second cousin who had died of leprosy an eternity ago and whom they preferred not to remember. Something similar, though worse, happened with the neighbors, with your former schoolmates: the majority hardly believed you had ever existed, their eyes going blank with the effort to fix your face. They had not noticed you when you lived among them. Why should they recall you now?

The detective I hired could not catch even a scent of you. A faceless man who changes his name—because that is what you did, is it not?—is impossible to find. Particularly if he destroys all his files, all his fingerprints, any bureaucratic trail that could indicate he had ever slouched through this planet.

I was confident, nevertheless, that our paths would cross. At times, in fact, I would make some arrogant remark in the papers about my ability to operate even on someone with no countenance, to see if you might read it and come to see me on your own. It does not matter that you did not fall into that trap. You were destined to me. You do understand that, I hope? That is why you pushed your foot down on the accelerator at that intersection. Because I had been speeding through green lights for twenty years in the expectation that you would crash into me, that you would make yourself somehow manifest, if not visible. And it is better that you should have taken this long, because I am now able to offer you conditions never before possible, and for your part, weighed down as you are by that sweet woman’s burden, you will have to accept what, at the time of your graduation, you might well have rejected.

You always pined for normality. Inside you there still must be someone who wants to live as the rest of us do. So what I am, in fact, suggesting is that we should revert to the first page of this book we are writing, that initial moment in which the nurse brought you to my hospital room like Moses in a basket, and I, instead of taking you in and transforming that baby into a prince, I returned you to the turbulent rivers of your life. If I am not your progenitor, I am at least a member of your family. And you have known it—fascinated by me since our crash. Otherwise, why have you been muttering your story to my absent ears all these days? Why do you come to see me, demanding favors as if I were some sort of uncle? Why should I help you if, after all calculations have been made, the only thing you have occasioned are disasters, costs without benefits, injuries to my own body?

Because you know that in me you will find a home. Maybe those extinguished eyes of yours guessed it that first day when my step-fatherly face was reflected in the remoteness of the face that you did not yet know was yours. By not intervening, I allowed you to develop your own life, which is, when you think of it, a very rich one, indeed. I used to wonder, with scientific interest, what could a child without a face make of his life? Now I know, and it seems admirable that you have defended yourself with your faculty for reading alien faces and capturing them with your camera. It could almost be said that I feel proud of you.

During that first encounter of ours in the hospital I could have committed the mistake of fixing your nose, of painting your cheeks pink, I could have reformed your features any way I wanted. The whole world would have been fascinated by you. That silly Enriqueta would have invited you not only to her birthday party but into her very conjugal bed. Everyone says that happiness cannot be bought. What can be bought, my friend, is a face. And I have got the face that you need. And I can also protect your walkingtalking doll, if that is your desire, I can also give her a new face so that nobody, except for you, will recognize her.

Because it is true that she is in danger.

How can I be so sure?

A woman who was much too similar to the one you have called Patricia arrived—that same Friday that she stuck you with your defenseless playmate—at the office of a colleague of mine. It must have been Patricia because she brought with her the identical photo of your lover at four-and-a-half, the one you have handed to me. She came to ask for an urgent operation for that girl. I hope you understand, therefore, that you are not the only one who has conceived this brilliant idea. My colleague did what he always does when somebody acts suspiciously. He gave her an appointment for next week and then consulted me, as he must if he wants to retain his license to practice medicine. And since the woman was no one I knew, nor could I guess that she was someone who might interest you, I naturally authorized him to warn the police. What they do later is up to them.

You wonder about confidentiality? I am surprised that someone like you is asking that sort of question, but I’ll answer it, anyway. I am scrupulous about confidentiality, thank you very much. I apply it to my habitual clientele, as well as to any person who comes well recommended. But you, of all people, cannot tell me that all the faces in the world have the same rights. If we did not relinquish, once in a while, information about some unknown, petty person, we would be breaking our pact with the authorities of this country who happen to be, as you must have realized by now, some of my best friends. Those in charge of public order respect our autonomy as doctors—as long as they know they can count on our most thorough cooperation. Or did you expect me to sacrifice my business for someone like your Alicia? Did she have anyone to protect her? Not that I knew of. Again, if I had been aware that she was a friend of yours, if we had been partners at the time, my lips would still be sealed. And in the case of Patricia it could even be stated that I did you a favor: if the police had not arrested her that very Friday afternoon, she might have pestered you to get the girl back.

But you need not worry. I don’t think you’ll be seeing her again. And I am also certain that she did not let your name slip out. They would have come to see you, wouldn’t they? But beyond that elementary reasoning, I have more evidence. Yesterday a detective came to visit this same colleague to ask him more about the girl who appeared in the photo. They would not have frittered away their time if they knew who was keeping her. And he also happened to relinquish some information about your—what is it that you call her?—your Oriana?

You have complained that nobody has ever given you friendly advice. Let me be the first. What I think you should understand is that women are the monarchs of deceit. I hope this paternal tone does not disturb you, but as you have had such a paltry experience with the opposite sex, I would not want you to awaken someday with the bitter certitude that this little girl of yours had been dissembling all this time, playing you like a saxophone until she could find someone more powerful to guard her. Why this blind confidence in a person you know nothing about? You said she is an amnesiac. I would like to tell you, however, that they are searching for her because she has an excess, rather than a diminishment, of memory. It seems that she possesses—or used to, once upon a time, if you are correct—possesses, I say, a remarkable mnemonic faculty. Somewhere in that mind, unbeknownst to you, she hides what appears to be a kind of tape recorder, which reproduces with minute faithfulness what people say. Not astonishing, is it, that with that exceptional talent so many people want to get their hands on her? If she were not the woman of a business associate, I myself, let me warn you, would be making every effort I could to smuggle my hands into that brain.

But I shall not do it. She is the one who holds you hostage for me. If you were alone, nothing could stop you from disappearing again, restoring your subterranean empire. The eruption into your life of that … let me call her a child, of that child, has made you visible. While you are tied to her, forget about leaving the country or even of slipping into a multitude to snap the shot that you could sell for a fortune.

That is your real position. Take a careful look at it. Objectively. Calmly. No more network. Not a friend in the world. That softhearted and affectionate Jarvik, whom you compute as a last reserve, is precisely one of the men who are after your lover. And if he were to be told that you have made a fool of him, I do not think he would offer you his friendship again.

To put things clearly: without my help, there is no way in which you can save your plaything. That does not mean that I approve. But if she gives you satisfaction, if you can find in one little woman the whole world of females, all the possibilities, all the dimensions, it remains for me, as one of your principal creators, to be the best man at the wedding and to congratulate you.

You can count on me.

You can count on me. Do you know anyone else in the universe who could repeat that phrase to you?

Now you show me—silently show me—the photo you took. You do not yet let me touch it. I know what you are thinking. I may not be able to read faces as well as you, but I know what I would think in these circumstances … How can you trust me? What sort of guarantees can I give?

Just think a minute.

If I had wanted to capture you, would it not have been easier to blow your cover, to get one of those men who are chasing your doll to take her away, and to be left alone to excavate your skin at my leisure?

I am ready to confess that if I had believed that this plan could have been successful, I would have executed it without the slightest hesitation. But quite frankly, my man, how do I keep you? If I put you to sleep, if I extinguish the cold semen in your eyes, your skin would stop renewing itself—you would stagnate and so would our business. There is not a jail, a hospital, an asylum, that could retain you. Of course they would begin by following my instructions down to the last detail: fasten you tight, watch you day and night, surround you with reflectors as if we were about to operate. Inevitably, however, they would soon forget how dangerous you are, their attention would be distracted, and, all of a sudden, you would have escaped. And it is unpleasant to contemplate what you would do to me that night. No, my dear man, my former patient, I do not wish our little partnership to end like an action film where the hero finally, when everything seems lost, unties his bonds and wreaks a terrible revenge. No doubt gratifying to the passive, inert audience in the darkness, but not so to the one who receives the blows. Far better, wouldn’t you say, to keep you happy?

Now you do pass me the photo. Without a word. Strange, to see oneself so clearly from eyes that are so alien, the lightning flash of my hands entering the mysterious waters behind that face. A memorable photo, indeed. I will try not to deny what my face is proclaiming—you have captured exactly what someone, what I myself think on those occasions. All right, I admit it, I start to think that I am possessing that face: that small apparatus is like a metallic clitoris, which I am inserting into the precise intersecting line of the brain. The photo’s admonition to harbor suspicions is not misplaced.

But there is no possibility that I would do something like that to you. What function do you attribute to that piece of metal? Is it for spying? Is it a way of controlling the patient? Not at all. It is an integral part of the therapy, what we might call the postoperative treatment. Tell me: of what use is it to change somebody’s twisted nose if his memory persists in remembering the old one and, therefore, continues to twist the new one until it resembles the nose that will not vanish from that memory? That is why my operations have such an incredible degree of success: because along with the old skin, they eliminate the old habits, the past. It is as if I strained my patients through a filter: like one of those that converts the dirtiest river into the most transparent drinking water. And you drink the old and purified liquid without giving a second thought to where it has been, what it has touched. My tiny device is merely guarding that new face from the ghost of the old face, making sure it cannot be recomposed. Just as we change our phone number so old lovers cannot call and make a scandal, interrupting us as we prepare to make love to our wives. But forgive that image: I forget that you would not know what I am talking about. Of course.

It is here that our interests coincide. Both of us want that sleeping beauty of a girl to stay with you, never to awaken. If that face enthuses you so, certainly, we shall make her once again into a five-year-old. And if you choose to suffocate her other faces, I will certainly not voice any opposition. But I am again appalled at your lack of ambition, my man. Why demand a dossier of her past when you can burn the memory in her? Why suffocate what you can extirpate? Irreversibly.

So she will remember only what you want her to remember.

Which does not mean that you should worry about something like that being done to you.

I would have to be insane to try to make you forget the deep pit of your previous face, that pit which has no bottom. On the contrary, what I require is that you recall it every night, that you continue to reproduce it inside over and over. My only desire is that under the faces I will settle upon you, which I have been preparing all these years, under the multiple masks, there, deep under, the cells of your original facelessness will replicate themselves like serpents during an eternity. So that each time it becomes necessary, I may descend like a miner toward the inexhaustible treasure which grows like moss on the inner wall of your most recent features.

Why should I wish to erase the incrustations that coat your skin and your memory, if your face is the only capital that you are contributing to this enterprise?

I have plans for that face.

And they are not, at this moment, the ones I dreamt of when I first saw it. Even if during all these years I have reminded myself why I should search for it. Even if up to the instant before you limped through that door I repeated that reason and no other. But now I know that we are going to postpone the distribution of those small doses of your cells among my clients, no matter how large the payments might have been. That sort of exchange will come, it will come: later.

No, my plans have changed. Your eyes have illuminated my own life as if until now I had been blind, murmuring to me that, with all my almightiness, I had been up until now a slave controlled by others, captured by their looks, relegated to exercising power through indirect, remote intermediaries. As you spoke, I managed to understand fully that thing I had glimpsed only as a weak intuition on the day I had you in these hands and dared to find in myself the courage to postpone our glory for another occasion, when you had refined the instrument of your anonymous skin and I had acquired the means to insure its use: the intuition of another future for your face.

I knew it halfway then and I know it fully at this moment and I will know it beyond any doubt within a few minutes.

I want that face for myself.

I do not know how long I will need it. A few days, a week, a year. It makes no difference. I will return it when I have tired of its exercise. I want to roam the world without anyone knowing me. I want you to open up. Open up. Open up, and let me see that which only you have seen.

Why do you look at me that way, with those forgettable eyes? With those eyes that so soon will sink into my sockets?

Let us go. If that is your desire, let us go first to undress Oriana so her memories can never more rebel. If that is your desire, if you are still doubtful, you can by yourself insert into her this apparatus, which will erase her previous faces. I shall be no more than your silent assistant, I will do no more than pass the instruments. Are you not the person who knows most about faces in the universe? Is there any other way to insure that I will not invade, with my hands, the intimate world of Oriana? Or would you prefer another sort of insurance before we operate on her? Would you prefer that before that happens we undress, you and I, underneath the lights which stream forth from the reflectors?

Here is proof of my trust.

Here is your first face.

Look at it carefully. You dimly saw it that day when the nurse brought you to the consulting room of a poor plastic surgeon. There it was, floating above your waters on the first day of your creation. Can there be more eloquent evidence of our partnership? That you should put on the only face I did not extract from nothingness, the only face that was given to me already made, that I inherited, and that now, thanks to you, I can bestow as a gift and someday recover for myself? My face.

To whom else could I offer it?

My son.