Distortion of Features

The iron wheels of the circus wagons ground the bones of the dark road with a monotonous wail, as if apologizing to the earth for a false joy they had left behind. In his narrow wooden caravan, which reeked of damp cloth, cheap oil paint, and the dust of oblivion, Leon sat huddled in the darkest corner. The train moved on laden with debts, decrepit animals, and exhausted bodies that sold laughter to buy bread. Leon had cast off the patched coat, but he had not been able to part with the hard white plastic mask; he held it between his pale hands, turning it slowly under the dim light of the swaying kerosene lamp. The two narrow slits for the eyes looked like two abandoned wells, and the small slit at the mouth seemed to mock his silence. He had left a paper in the trunk of a rose, and left an entire heart in an alley of the Old City, and now the estrangement that afflicts circus folk the moment they leave the threshold of any city gnawed at him; that moment when they turn from "makers of joy" into "mere passing ghosts" in the night of strangers. Leon tried to conjure her features. He closed his eyes tightly, begging his memory to grant him her bare face as he had seen it in that quiet wooden restaurant. He wanted to remember those features that had shaken his being behind the dark room, but he collided with a terrifying truth that ran like a cold shiver down his spine: he did not know her name! They had never exchanged identity cards, and no lips had uttered a single word of introduction. To him she was "the pavement girl," "the passerby whom his umbrella had sheltered." This catastrophic absence of a name made grasping her features in his mind like trying to hold water with open palms. And as the days followed one upon another, and the circus moved from one grey town to another still greyer, the psychological affliction began to assert its dominance. Leon would stand at new iron gates, beneath strange skies, watching thousands of faces pour forth like panting human rivers. And with each new face that passed before him, a part of Clara's features eroded. When he closed his eyes at night to gather the fragments of her face, his subconscious, driven by exhaustion and despair, played a hideous game of distortion. The delicate lines of her face began to merge with the faces of passing women who had tossed their tickets at him with indifference. Her solemn forehead took on the shape of another woman's forehead whom he had seen weeping at a train station. And her passionate eyes — those wide black eyes that had been his safe haven — their gleam began to fade, replaced by a solid, hazy blackness without depth. He tried to resist; he held his head between his palms and pressed on his temples until he nearly screamed from muscular and psychological pain. He asked himself bitterly: "Was her nose delicate to the point of fragility, or am I imagining it? Was her trembling lip marked with a small mole, or is that the face of another girl I glimpsed at the circus market two years ago?" It is the killing pang that befalls wanderers; when you realize that the place where you left your heart has begun to fade from your imagination, and that the features whose sky you kept dry with the colorful umbrella have begun to distort in your mind to become a shapeless, featureless monstrosity. Leon felt he was committing a vile crime of betrayal against that girl, not because he had stopped loving her, but because his bodily memory was failing him, and because his mind was erasing the identity of the only woman who had accepted his sorrow as it was. He had become certain in those cold nights that wandering does not only kill character, but turns love into a distorted ghost, living in darkness and screaming without a name.