The Mask

Until this day  I never realized what it was or could be. I had never thought about it. Whenever thinking of it, my mind roams to a museum of primitive art in a city. Today, I am in a big city. I stay on the seventh floor of a hotel. It is Singapore, not downtown but close to the heart of the city. The hotel has 12 floors and is brand new. Skyscrapers and buildings under construction surround the hotel.Night and day, traffic is passing by. Who are the people staying in this hotel?

I see them downstairs in the air conditioned hall, running in and out, calling taxi drivers and dragging luggage into the elevators which automatically speak: doors are open, doors are closing. Most of the guests are Asian, younger couples, families and children. Every day I go swimming at about four o’clock in the late afternoon. I walk straight from my room on the same floor to the swimming pool. After the swimming, I stay at the pool, hang over the wall around the terrace, watch the hotels, the skyscrapers and the sky. It’s a surrealistic place that mirrors a world I do not know. Most of the time it is rather hot on the terrace, but I sit down in the shade and don’t move, still refreshed by the swimming. Today, there is an elder couple, when I enter the terrace by the glass door alongside the gym. Nobody else, not a sportsman, a waiter or a guard. The couple doesn’t look up and I go for a swim. I breach the mirror, the mask of the pool. Then, I take a chair and look around. The pool restores the mirror and reflects also the chairs along its rim. Rain is nearing and it’s cooling off rapidly. The couple moves to this side of the swimming pool where I sit at a table. Without looking at them, I see everything they do, their movements, their smiling and their reflection in the water. The old man moves two stretchers close to each other, almost without any room in between. Slowly, the lady is going to sit and lie down carefully on her back, closing her eyes and waiting, drinking in the heat and the sounds. Firstly, the husband seems to remain sitting in the middle of the stretcher, but then he reclines on his left elbow, his back towards me. Though, I can see he wears reading glasses and is holding a book upright in his right hand. After a while, I hear him reading aloud but in a low voice. New people enter the place; nobody reacts or notices what the couple is doing. The old man continues his reading without looking up from the book. I hear people diving into the pool, splashing and talking loudly. The old woman lies motionless down, listening attentively, her face without any expression. She is breathing calmly at the rhythm of to the words the old man is reading from the book. They weave a web of words and sounds around their two old bodies on the stretchers, their own cocoon. The reading sounds like an undertone, a deep voice from the bottom of the swimming pool, a rhythmical beat from the heart of the hotel. The man turns the pages slowly, the reading progresses at pace and the cocoon grows thicker, enveloping the couple and making it almost invisible. Suddenly, the voice stops its activity; the couple rises up and unwinds the cocoon. The lady walks to the door glass door smiling, almost as if she is dreaming, while the man is following her, apparently pushing her almost protectively by his free hand. I remain alone on the terrace watching the rain coming closer. Then all of a sudden, I see the glass door moving, reflecting the late afternoon sunlight. The couple reappears in the opening and walks back to the stretchers they left. Soon, the man is restarting the reading to his wife already stretched out on her back. Both of them wear a warm jacket now. They look ever more close to each other and to the spoken words. They almost don’t move, but are reclined to each other. The outside world is banned from their life, their being together. Now, the face of the older woman looks flat, unwrinkled and smooth, childish and unmoved. Her face is a mask, a motionless persona, a dead face I have never seen before. It is of a lifeless substance. Her emotions are hidden and gone, her reactions invisible, nonexistent. Her face is a beautiful mask of an absent mind. The spoken words of her husband reading in a low voice are like raindrops already evaporating before falling in the swimming pool.