Octavio Armand Portrait*
“I want to see you.” I pale. Don’t know what to say. What she wants confounds me. But I’m thrilled by the way she’s expressed it; the words that seem to exclude her, as if they belonged to a language not hers, to her, one dead and buried; and the smile opens her body to mine, including me in that body, as if inviting me to her shadow, more welcoming than mine. Than my light. “May I?” she asks, raising her hands toward my face, toward my lips, which until now have merely framed a voice. “Of course.” She touches my face. Feels it. I imagine her sensing the warmth of my skin as I sense the warmth of her fingers. I even think I feel her blood pulsing close in the wake of their live, very present tips, not prints, absence. Or perhaps I’m feeling my own pulse beneath her skin and mine?
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This is and is not a caress. She draws, gauges. With both hands simultaneously. Her palms on my cheeks; extended upward, her fingers, oriented quickly by my breath, touch my lips, separate them, cross from one lip to another as if over a bridge, squeeze my nostrils, seeming to measure them, then join over the septum; after confirming the sockets, her fingertips press my eyes closed, lightly, as if the pressure were only the weight of that rosy dawn, the ribbing of an almost imperceptible breeze as it refreshes first my eyelids, then my eyeballs, concave like marble pupils, denting slightly after yielding to the momentary pressure, as if this were light embracing the empty gaze of a shadow; now the play of her fingertips brushes the base of my supraorbital ridges, each fingertip pressing gently in order to reach the eyebrows and traverse them at snail’s pace, from their point of separation to their silky edges, fanning out until they again touch skin; from there they ascend, advancing over my forehead until they reach my scalp, which they furrow, as if to comb it, or dishevel it; then they move toward the sides, the cheekbones, temples, sideburns, the lobules and helix of the ears, finally to slide, as if in retreat, along my cheeks, jawbone, chin, always downward, all the way to my neck. “You’re handsome,” she tells me, always smiling, as she withdraws her hands. “Because I’m your work and you’ve signed my skin.” Caracas, 24 August 2009 * Profiled by this mirror—the only one that’s ever caressed me—, I saw myself in the touch of a blind woman. Decades ago. Yesterday. Recalling it—yesterday, decades ago—I had the sensation that my face was Braille and that she erased it as she drew. As if to ensure that I would not drown in my image but that she would absorb it. Or drain it away from me. Eyes closed, facing a blind woman, for an instant I felt light. No ideas, no identity. A pleasant beheading for which I thank Marie, not Nemesis.
translated by Carol Maier