Isle of Nines

By Mario Benedetti

Translation from Spanish (La Noche de los Feos)

We are both ugly. Not even vulgarly ugly. She has a sunken cheek. Since she was eight, when they did the operation. My disgusting scar next to the mouth comes from a fierce burn, which happened in the early years of my adolescence. We don’t have tender eyes either, the sort of anchors of validation through which the hideous sometimes manage to approach beauty. No, by no means. Both hers and mine are eyes of resentment, reflecting only the little or no resignation with which we face our misfortune. Perhaps that’s what has brought us together. Maybe “together” isn’t the most appropriate word. I mean the relentless hatred that each of us feels for their own face.

We met at the entrance of the cinema, standing in line to watch two beautiful nobodies on the screen. That’s where, for the first time, we examined each other without sympathy but with a dark solidarity; that’s where we noticed, even from the first glance, our respective solitudes. In the line, everyone was in pairs, and they were genuine couples: spouses, couples, lovers, grandparents, who knows. Everyone – hand in hand or arm in arm – had someone. Only she and I had free and clenched hands.

We examined each other’s respective ugliness with scrutiny, with insolence, without curiosity. I traced the crevice of her sunken cheek  with the audacious assurance my own shriveled cheek gave me. She didn’t blush. I liked that she was tough, that she returned my scrutiny with a meticulous look at the smooth, shiny, beard-free area of my old burn.

Finally, we entered. We sat in different but adjacent rows. She couldn’t look at me, but I, even in the dimness, could distinguish her blond-haired nape, her well-formed fresh ear. It was the ear on her normal side.

For an hour and forty minutes, we admired the respective beauty of the rugged hero and the gentle heroine. At least, I have always been capable of admiring the beautiful. My animosity is reserved for my own face and sometimes for God. Also for the faces of other ugly people, other grotesque figures. Perhaps I should feel pity, but I can’t. The truth is they are like mirrors in a way. Sometimes I wonder what fate the myth of Narcissus would have had if he had a sunken cheek, or if acid had burned his cheek, or if he had half a nose missing, or had a seam on his forehead.

I waited for her at the exit. I walked a few steps beside her, and then I spoke to her. When she stopped and looked at me, I had the feeling that she hesitated. I invited her to chat for a while at a café or a pastry shop. She accepted.

The pastry shop was crowded, but at that moment, a table became free. As we moved through the crowd, we left behind us astonished faces. 

My antennae are particularly sensitive to pick up on that morbid curiosity, that unconscious sadism of those with ordinary, miraculously symmetrical faces. But this time, not even my trained intuition was necessary because my ears were enough to pick up whispers, small coughs, fake throat clearings. A single, hideous face in isolation is evidently interesting, but two uglinesses together constitute a spectacle in and of itself, almost coordinated; something that should be observed in company, with one of those good-looking people with whom you deserve to share the world.

We sat down, ordered two ice creams, and she had the courage, which I liked, to take her small mirror out of her purse and fix her hair. Her beautiful hair.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

She put the mirror away and smiled. The hollow in her cheek changed shape.

“A cliché,” she said. “Like attracts like.”

We talked at length. After an hour and a half, we had to order two coffees to justify our extended stay. Suddenly, I realized that both she and I were speaking with such hurtful frankness that it threatened to surpass sincerity and become almost equivalent to hypocrisy. I decided to go all in.

“You feel excluded from the world, don’t you?”

“Yes,” she said, still looking at me.

“You admire the beautiful, the normal. You wish you had a balanced face like that girl to your right, even though you are intelligent, and she, judging by her laughter, irredeemably stupid.”

“Yes.”

For the first time, she couldn’t hold my gaze.

“I wish that too. But there’s a possibility, you know, that you and I could make something of it.”

“Something like what?”

“Like caring for each other, darn it. Or simply getting along. Call it what you want, but there’s a chance.”

She frowned. She didn’t want to entertain hope.

“Promise me you won’t think I’m crazy.”

“I promise.”

“We have the possibility to dissolve ourselves into the night. In the complete darkness. In total obscurity. Do you understand me?”

“No.”

“You have to understand me! The total darkness. Where you don’t see me, and I don’t see you. Your body is beautiful, did you know that?”

She blushed, and the crevice of her cheek suddenly turned scarlet.

“I live alone, in an apartment, and it’s nearby.”

She raised her head, and now she looked at me, asking, trying desperately to diagnose me.

“Let’s go,” she said.

I not only turned off the light but also pulled the double curtains closed. She was breathing beside me. It wasn’t labored breathing. She didn’t want me to help her undress. I couldn’t see anything, nothing. But I could still tell that she was motionless, waiting. I carefully reached out my hand and I found her chest. My touch aroused her, discovered her powerful, excited. I felt her belly, her sex. Her hands explored me.

At that moment, I knew I had to tear myself, and her, away from the lie I had created. Or tried to create. It was like a lightning bolt. We weren’t that. We weren’t that.

I had to muster all my courage, but I did it. My hand slowly rose to her face, found the groove of horror, her sunken cheek, and began a slow, and committed caress. In reality, my fingers, at first a bit shaky, then calmer, passed many times over her tears.

Then, when I least expected it, her hand also reached my face, and it passed and traced the seam and the smooth patch, that beardless island of my sinister mark. We cried until dawn. Miserable, happy. Then I got up and pulled back the double curtain.