Diabolic Digest
Khaled Diab
Losing Face
Phantom
friends
Sven pushed the stop button midway through his
twenty-two minutes of shame. He could not bear to watch a moment longer. The
memory, caught forever in all its ugliness and pain on DVD, had earlier been
broadcast for the whole world to see – particularly the world that mattered to
Sven.
Shrugging his narrow shoulders, ons Svenneke,
our Svenneke, got up to fetch a beer from the fridge. Although Belgians are
reputed to be beer gastronomes, Sven was never much of a drinker – particularly
during the week. But ever since the operation, he’d found that a Duvel after
work sated the demons in his mind and soothed his frayed nerves.
Peggy, who was wallowing like a pretty tub of
lard in the kitchen, looked up at him, her pink face showing signs of concern
as if she, too, was missing Tanja. As he turned back to the living room, she
slouched off, her coiled tail sagging, lacking its usual spring.
After the first satisfying sip, a vague
expression of concern crossed his brow. Beer had been the undoing of his Uncle
Tom – led astray by the Duvel, Sven had thought on certain occasions. Now that
Tanja had walked out on him, he was terrified of sliding down that same
slippery slope.
Sven was a borderline man from a borderline
place. He was born and had lived most of his life in Voeren. Fouron, as it is
known in French, has an incidental claim to fame: the community of 4,000 sits
astride the country’s Dutch-French language fault line and once, in the 1980s,
a shaky coalition government fell through the Voeren crack. The village is also
home to the cheapest real estate in Flanders.
Although privacy is next to sacred in this part
of the world, being a private man in a place as small as Voeren was not easy –
no matter how hard you try to blend into the woodwork, you are still
noticeable.
Sven was not exactly unsociable but his
slightly awkward architecture and clumsy physique had conditioned him to shun the
spotlight at parties and social gatherings – he did not even like to attract
too much attention at his local, his stamcafé, as they call it in Dutch.
Sadly, after his televised polish, his mass
metamorphosis, he was even more visible against the grain in Sint
Pieters/Voeren. But he had been prepared to risk it for his Tanja. In fact, it
seemed that his few flirtations with recklessness had mostly been on her
account.
He hit the play button again and the DVD
screensaver gave way to an operating theatre. A plain-looking young man was
lying on the bed dressed in hospital overalls. His face was still fresh and
familiar in Sven’s mind but it was fading slowly into the dusk of the
half-remembered but never forgotten.
As Sven stared into the television screen, he
was painfully aware that this was his own visage. And, though he was extremely
self-conscious of his new appearance, it had taken on a strange normalness and
his old look was slowly becoming that of a relative stranger, an estranged
brother.
That sibling from which he had become alienated
was about to have his features cut up and butchered and mutilated and
disfigured – all thanks to the miracle of reality TV. “No,” Sven found himself
whimpering.
“You’re a bit handsome to be here, aren’t you?”
the obnoxious plastic surgeon joked. The nurses giggled. Despite the
anaesthetic, Sven grew even more nervous, mumbling a vague apology for not
being ugly enough. He wished the hospital would be hit by a blackout or that he
could knock out the operating lights.
It was true: Sven was far from ugly. He also
wasn’t handsome. He had quite a few attractive features – warm eyes, good jaw
line – but they all fitted together poorly, as if he was a sloppy composite.
Using descriptive geometry, he’d been able to convince himself years ago that
he lacked natural grace and symmetry.
Although he possessed the mathematician’s
contempt for numerology, he couldn’t resist seeing how close his face was to
the golden ratio, the divine proportion. He argued that, if it was good enough
for Da Vinci and other greats of western art, it was good enough for his
purposes. For a face to be divinely proportioned f (phi) should equal something
approaching 1.6180339887 – Sven’s puny 1.1122 was more Picasso than Da Vinci,
he concluded.
So, as with so much else, Sven was a borderline
case. He never drew admiring looks in the street. Women rarely flirted with
him. But no one looked at him with pity or revulsion.
It had taken quite some work convincing the
producers of his case. It shouldn’t have been, he pondered philosophically.
Ancient Indian surgeons used plastic surgery to heal noseless adulterers, while
the Pharaohs used it to repair battle wounds. And Sven desperately wanted to
find a cure for Tanja’s infidelity and his battle-scarred soul.
Although the programme’s theme music seemed to
imply that everyone was beautiful, no matter how they looked on the surface,
what it really aimed for was mass voyeurism – and they couldn’t do that with Mr
or Ms Average. What they needed was telegenic ugliness.
After his ordeal, Sven reflected that Marilyn
Manson’s Beautiful people would make a more appropriate theme tune. “The
horrible people, the horrible people,” Manson would hiss as the line up of gum
disease, flab, and parchment skin flashed across the screen, “It’s as anatomic
as the size of your steeple.” And your dome, Sven added. Envy, jealousy,
rivalry, hate, the power of the system to create inadequacy and then to offer
the promise of replacing it with perfection.
Sven should’ve known better, he realised with
regret, especially given that he was a specialist in economic justice. But what
could he do in the face of his own overpowering childhood dream – and the lure
of the dream peddlers – of rising above the twins of apathy and antipathy that
he had grown up with on the wings of a blazing rebirth as a creature of
blinding light? Or, like the biblical Joseph’s dream, he wished his family
would bow before him in adoration and respect.
“Don’t bother to resist, I’ll beat you. It’s
not your fault that you’re always wrong. The weak are there to justify the
strong,” Manson roared.
Sven finally managed to sway the programme’s
makers with his human-interest angle. Suckers for a bit of marketable romance,
they were hooked on the idea that he was willing to undergo this transformation
– despite not being ugly – just to save his relationship, to re-win Tanja’s
love.
Wanting to get as close as possible to the
golden ratio, Sven spent several sleepless nights plotting and re-plotting the dimensions
of his face as he perfected the drawings he’d started at school. Finally, he
managed to reach 1.4673. He also downloaded a PhotoShop add-on from the
Internet to test out his hypothesis.
Art was never Sven’s strong suit and, as a
schoolboy, he exhibited an almost artistic talent for finding ways out of
producing drawings or paintings in class. One day, his art teacher – a
good-humoured, if terribly outmodish, chap with large rubbery lips and
artless-seeming stubby fingers that looked like they’d been sat on by an
elephant – introduced the golden rule.
The algebra immediately appealed to Sven and he
set about experimenting geometrically with the angles of his face to see how
close he could get to the magic number. But until now this had been an abstract
exercise and he had never actually considered physically remodelling his
features.
He handed in his detailed plans – with to the
millimetre adjustments to his nose, lips and cheeks – to the programme’s
bemused makers. His geometrical obsession and the drama that was to unfold
between him and Tanja led the director to go more high-brow, so to speak, and
he named the episode Sven’s divine comedy.
“Once the anaesthetic kicks in,” the commentator announced breathlessly, “Sven will embark on an eight-week transformation to regain the heart of his beloved Tanja who, though she thinks she has concealed it well, has been cheating on him with an ex-workmate. But Sven is determined to reinvent their relationship.
“Little does Tanja realise just how much Sven
is willing to change to please her. She thinks he is away at a conference in
Delhi and a lecture tour of south Asia. He is, in fact, holed up in an
exclusive beauty clinic and health spa.”
Little did she realise, indeed! And little did
she appreciate it when she learnt that Sven had confessed to hundreds of
thousands of viewers about her illicit relationship without even confronting
her first.
Shortly before she received the news, Tanja had
just supervised her first birth. The mother was a first-timer, too. The labour
was long and torturous and, in the end, it was the classic choice between
mother and child. The sweet, little baby breathed its first and last breaths
seconds after it entered the world.
“Arme koe – poor cow,” Tanja said
wearily to herself outside the barn. “Having to live with the knowledge that
her child had died in her place.” Tanja was certain that she saw the cow’s big
eyes swim in a film of tears as she lay, spent, on the hay, looking over at the
still body of her calf.
Having only recently graduated, Tanja was
junior vet at Dr Wolfgang’s practice. She felt a little distraught that her
first birth should have ended so disastrously. Her kneelocks gave out and she
felt a heavy weight drag her down towards the damp grass. She sat there, her
head hanging over her chest, her rusty autumnal hair, dishevelled and mucky,
veiling her eyes, as she broke down and wept.
Her tears were partly due to her inexperience.
But they were mainly in empathy. You see Tanja was pretty certain – after she had
missed her second period in a row and three pregnancy tests had turned out
positive – that she had a new life floating around in her womb.
She was also pretty sure – but not certain –
that Sven was the father. She hadn’t screwed Charlie around the time she
probably became pregnant and she always made him use a condom. With Sven, they
never used a sheath and she’d forgotten to take her pill a few nights before
Sven went off on his business trip to India.
She had told Charlie that she could never see
him again and she was preparing to break the good news to Sven when he returned
from abroad – which would not be long now. No sooner had she wiped away the
tears and was beginning to think excitedly about the look on Sven’s face when
he found out, when, surreally, a television crew materialised out of the grey
and came dashing towards her like a herd of overexcited bulls.
Dazed, she learnt about Sven’s supposed gift to
her, his rebirth after eight weeks in an exclusive womb. She was asked frank
and intrusive questions about how she felt and whether she would end her affair
now that her boyfriend had demonstrated, with his extreme makeover, his extreme
love for her. Shocked, she told them unequivocally that they were “perverted
vultures” and demanded they leave her alone. “If you broadcast this, I’m going
to sue you.”
“Why do you think I didn’t tell you about my
affair?” she screamed at Sven when they were reunited, privately, in their house.
“Why do you think I snuck around and met Charlie in far-flung places? It’s not
because I enjoy intrigue or playing hide-and-seek – it was because I didn’t
want anyone to know, Sven. Now everyone will think I betrayed poor, dependable
Sven.”
Sven felt it was rich that she’d turned the
tables on him when it was she who had committed the original sin. “Hang on,
let’s not forget who cheated on who here.”
“Well, you betrayed me, too. Is my reputation
not worth anything to you?” she said, fighting away the tears. “My dad will
probably be made at me for putting you through all this.”
Regaining her composure: “Sven, did you think
that a few cosmetic changes would heal our relationship? Let’s face it,
darling, your face wasn’t the problem. You push me too far away, that’s the
trouble – we’ve stopped integrating. If I’ve learnt anything from studying
anatomy it is that your skin is only the packaging you come in – I love you for
what you are, not for your box.”
All through her monologue, Tanja had not been able
to look Sven in the face. Now she looked up. His new features gave her the
sensation that she was talking to a stranger whom she somehow knew – which she
realised was the aptest description of her soon-to-be ex-boyfriend. She had
decided that she was not going to tell him about their child – he wasn’t mature
enough to be a father.
In an attempt to make amends, Sven cooked them
dinner and tried to make the place more romantic. After they’d eaten, with
Coldplay playing in the background, they found themselves in the middle of the
living room, dancing, holding each other tightly, as candlelight penetrated the
darkness surrounding their minds.
“Where do I go to fall from grace?” a question
that found resonance in Sven’s mind. “Now, when you work it out I'm worse than
you.” How true, he agreed.
“When you work out where to draw the line.” Too
obsessed with redrawing the lines of his features, he’d overstepped the mark.
He realised now that he should’ve drawn the line at physical change – what he’d
actually needed to sort out was inside him.
But the mess, the imperfection that was his
form could not just be written off, he countered. His body, his corpus
adumbro, cast its shadow on how people saw him and on his personality. Is
there anyone in the world whose physical appearance does not have some
influence on their character, he wondered? But we have to transcend the
physical, deal with our assets as best we can. No matter how good or bad you
look, it can be a burden if you view it from the wrong perspective, he told
himself.
The welled up emotion led them to the bedroom
where they made intense love. Intoxicated by grief, there was something
consummate – a strange completeness – about their love-making. Their bodies
were keenly attuned to one another’s every touch, every need, every sigh. It
was as if they did not want it to end. It was as if they wanted to climb inside
each other. They held on as though they were afraid that, if they let go, the
gravity in the room would fail and the other would levitate away, never to
return.
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