A fantasy particularly dear to Arturito’s heart revolved around the fancy dress parties, the grand masquerades he supposedly organized for his innumerable friends every year at carnival time. It sounded flippant at first, but he went on to talk about the parties with absolute conviction and he had a fund of stories about things that had happened in previous years. Mom and I had moved into the tenement just after carnival and there was still a while to go before it came round again, so I had no way of knowing if there was any truth to these stories or not. For Arturito life without fancy dress parties was simply inconceivable. He seemed to be perpetually dressed for one, in those little suits of his. Although it was barely the beginning of spring, he was already thinking about the costume he would wear to the next carnival party, to which I had already been invited … if I would deign to attend, if I would do him that honor, if I would condescend to partake briefly of frivolities so unworthy of me …
He didn’t seem very imaginative. He wasn’t, compared to me. Or rather he was too imaginative; again he went a bit too far (for my taste), and ended up in a kind of radiant mist of excessive imagining that enabled him to be happy — that is, rich, aristocratic, carefree — but which also sapped the imagination’s creative vigor. He had got it into his head to wear an astronomers costume to the next party. Just what this costume might consist of, he couldn’t say. For him it was just a word: “astronomer”, and its train of associations, spellbinding or, as he loved to say, “exquisite” things, like stars, constellations, galaxies …
But when he asked me what I was going to wear, although I had a thousand times more imagination than him, I couldn’t come up with an answer.
So he decided to help me. It was in the afternoon, after school but before the soap operas. We were in the tenement courtyard, and silence had settled around us, one of those dead silences that attends exclusively on children as they plumb the depths of the day. He told me he had something I could use; although it wasn’t a costume, it might be a starting point … He disappeared into his room. The silence persisted. His grandmother was perfectly quiet … It was like the silence when everyone is sleeping, but it wasn’t siesta time: it was a coincidence. I was worried, uneasy: Arturito was so impulsive, so wrapped up in his own world … What would he come back with? He might offend me without meaning to. I had a twinge of dread, but it didn’t last long. I trusted to my impassivity, which was supernatural.
There was no need to be worried. All he came back with was a cardboard nose. He had used it for one of the jokes he was always playing … His philosophy began and ended with the idea that a busy social life could only be fuelled by large quantities of humor, and humor, as he understood it, consisted of practical jokes, the sort that are funny to look back on. It was just a nose, huge though it was, with an elastic band to hold it on … A nose as big as his or bigger … with the same shape … I was overcome by an infantile enthusiasm. Was it for me? Naturally, it went without saying. Sometimes Arturito was wildly generous. And sometimes he was maniacally stingy. He was so contradictory. He fastened it to my face himself. Not that he thought I was clumsy … no, but because of my alleged superiority I was unaccustomed to carrying out mundane tasks. The nose suited me perfectly. He looked at me and said that I was already half way there. I had the rudiments or the trimmings of a costume, it was just a matter of supplementing it now … with one of my mother’s old dresses … Suddenly he became enthusiastic too, or maybe I just hadn’t noticed it before … In any case his enthusiasm began to turn on him … I could see it coming. We were six and seven years old respectively, and seized by an absolute urgency … as if the party were to be held that night … The supernatural silence reigning in the building had abolished time. Arturito had another idea and ran back into his room … He came back clacking something in his hand. His grandmother’s porcelain false teeth. I wasn’t surprised that he’d been able to steal them; she didn’t wear them all the time … The clack-clack sound he was making resonated in the silence, that silence in which anything could be stolen … It was obvious, really: the teeth had to go with the nose. He wanted me to try them … but of course I refused … there was no way I was putting
that in my mouth, nothing that had been in someone else’s mouth was going to enter mine … So he tried the false teeth himself. They distorted his face, especially when he smiled … I could tell what was coming: now he would want the nose … Instinctively, I raised my hands to protect it. In his innocence he mentioned the Astronomer; he wanted to be the Astronomer with false teeth and a fake nose … If he had asked me, I would have given the nose back to him without the slightest hesitation … But no, there was a second turn: his generosity triumphed and at the same time transcended itself … he would hang the false teeth around my neck with a thread. I would be a Cannibal … Or better stilclass="underline" the nose hanging around my neck and the teeth as a barrette in my hair … or the nose growing out of my chest and the teeth in my armpit … There was a moment of sheer permutation, nose and teeth shifting positions all over my body … It had to happen eventually … maybe I had the idea first, or he did, impossible to tell, it was like a scientific discovery … The cardboard nose had to go on my nose, that was the natural place for it … And the teeth had to bite it … It was a costume in itself: the little girl bitten by a ghost … The ghost opened a breach in time, so it didn’t matter that carnival was still six months away … With one bite he placed the false teeth at the perfect angle … Some improvisations outstrip any art … he sank his teeth into the cardboard, without taking the nose off me … I was worried about him ruining his fake nose, but Arturito was not so much generous as sacrificial; he would destroy his possessions with the indifference of a millionaire for the sake of a laugh or a bit of fun … Those little porcelain teeth felt like rat’s teeth, razor sharp … I didn’t know they were porcelain, I though they were from a dead person, I thought that’s where false teeth came from; that’s what lots of people think … The teeth went through the cardboard … Arturito laughed until he cried; he was fashioning me with that deft clumsiness of his … I wanted to see myself in a mirror … although I didn’t really need to; I could see myself in my friend’s little grey eyes … it was phenomenal … the girl who had been bitten by a ghost … But in his passion, the passion for fancy dress that ruled his life, Arturito went too far. He bit too hard. The dentures — and suddenly the full horror of those cadaver’s teeth was revealed to me — cut into my nose … because my real nose was there beneath Arturito’s cardboard fake … It wasn’t so much the pain as the surprise … I had forgotten about having a body of flesh and blood, but now, bitten, suffocating, terrified, I remembered … I let out a spine-chilling scream … I was sure he had mutilated me; now I would be a monster, a skull … Arturito recoiled in horror. My expression froze the blood in his veins … he would never forget this … but it would become an amusing anecdote, one more to add to his stock, perhaps the best, the funniest … although for the moment he was dumbfounded … He looked at me and I looked at myself in his terrified eyes, as I wriggled free of his grip and ran away … as fast as I could, in panic … Where was I going? Where was I running to? If only I had known! I was running away from jokes, from humor and future anecdotes … I was running away from friendship, and not because I disdained it or had something more important to do, as Arturito thought, in his innocence: it was pure, darkest horror that gave my feet wings.