On the first Monday in January, an unusually cold day, I returned to television, after a whole month of vacation, dedicated to writing a novel about dictators who are no longer breathing. In a way, I missed that tortured and perhaps self-destructive routine, the habit of driving an hour, along congested highways, to the studio in the outskirts of the city, to keep the man who spoke alive, albeit in an autumnal life. of politics in his television program, imagining that many people watch it, without suspecting that very few people waste their time watching it. I have been on television for more than forty years, speaking on television, and when I suddenly stop doing so, an area of my existence goes out, becomes extinct, dies. You could say then that I am more alive than ever when I go live on television, or that it is the most enduring way of life I know. The first time I went on television was a Sunday, election day, and I was so nervous and scared I couldn’t sleep the night before. My grandfather lent me a jacket and a tie, he wished me luck and I left his house at five in the morning, still at night, driving his car, trusting in my driving skills, since he had taught me how to do it, giving me the helm of his car to embark together on a long four-hour trip to the farm that years ago had been confiscated by the military and was now reduced to ruins, rubble and vacant fields. I arrived at the channel before the live broadcast started at six in the morning. The producers, even though I was eighteen years old and had never said a word on television, recklessly trusted me because they read a column I wrote in a conservative newspaper. Before going on air, they took me to the makeup room. That was the first time they did my makeup. I didn’t dislike it. I felt that those creams and powders were layers of lies, fictions attached to my face, convenient impostures that covered up my imperfections and hid my true identity. I felt hidden behind makeup, protected by so many shaves and lipsticks. I was still not well informed about my sexuality. I was under the illusion that I was heterosexual. The softness of the sponges and brushes, of concealers and blushes, of lipstick and brushes, welcomed me to the world of television, without me even suspecting that like this, in a suit and tie, and with my face decorated and dusty, I would have to earn a living, my entire life. My return to television, after a month of forced vacation, has been anything but triumphant. Since I am happy at home, in my work studio, I don’t like going out as much anymore. The journey to the studio on the outskirts of the city, moving at a man’s pace along highways overflowing with cars driven by impatient drivers, seemed unbearable to me, a horrible way to waste time. The cats that had previously waited for me at the canal door were no longer there: I felt that I had betrayed them, abandoned them to their fate. Upon entering the television station, silent and uninhabited like a confused church in a town of atheists, I missed my coworkers, fired at the beginning of December. Now in the studio the cameras are still standing, but there are no longer cameramen, there are no technicians, there is no audience that laughs and applauds, there is no one, absolutely no one. I then do the program alone, although I feel the presence of ghosts whispering things in my ear, ghosts that, I suspect, are the voices of those who have been fired. For now, only the editor, the head of master control and me are left. It is inevitable to wonder what the hell I am doing here, who the hell is watching me, if almost no one watches television anymore. I feel like I’m riding a horse down a highway of cars driven by robots. I feel like I’m going to fall off my horse. I feel that soon I will not be able to get on the horse, like that old Roman emperor, who was already old at sixty years old, like me. I have not yet dared to take off my tie. I have spent my entire life buying ties to wear on television. They have given me dozens, hundreds of ties. I have many ties in this house and many more in the house that take care of me far away, in the city where I was born. When I tie my tie, I think that I do it out of respect for the public, although perhaps I am unaware that there is no longer an audience that respects me, and that the public is a fiction, one of the many fictions that run through my life. However, these first days of January I have dared to question whether I should continue putting on makeup every night, before going on air. For decades, many makeup artists, on numerous channels, in different American cities, have turned my face into a palette and painted it however they wanted, without objections or complaints on my part, because I have always felt that, when they do my makeup, , they caress me, and when they caress me with sponges and brushes, they lead me to think that my face is important and that, therefore, it must be that I am important, or at least I am at that moment. But now there are no makeup artists left on the channel and I am the one who grooms myself at home, in the guest bathroom. I learned to do it when the pandemic hit and since then I have indulged in the routine of applying a concealer, spreading a foundation and sealing the shave with powder. So I’ve been putting on makeup for several years, and doing it terribly because my daughter tells me I look like a raccoon, and suddenly I’ve felt these winter days that I’m tired of hiding behind those layers of rosy lies and that I’m too old to be on television with my true and imperfect face and not with that other face made of simulations and impostures. I finally went out one night on the television program without putting on makeup. My face was burning, my cheeks were itchy, I was scratching my chin, everything looked irritated and itchy because, apparently, my damaged skin as an older adult can no longer resist those chemicals and asks me to free it from them. Gathering courage, I sat in front of the camera, ten minutes before going on air, and I asked the head of master control how I looked, and she told me that not so bad, that my face looked good. reddish, caused by allergies, and the shadows of the mustache and the beard, and the greasy sheen of perspiration, and I have told him that I will not wear makeup that night, that I will never wear makeup again, and that if anyone stops seeing me because No I appear all dolled up, it’s because I was watching the wrong program, and then I won’t regret the sudden absence of that unlikely viewer. For the first time in my life, forty-odd years after launching a career on television, I appeared on the program without putting on makeup and I felt good, I felt that that chubby, disheveled face was really mine, I felt that I I don’t need to paint my face to hide, to conceal my identity, to hide from people the disastrous guy that I am. I have felt then, by showing my true face, which came out of the closet again, a formidable sensation of freedom. However, looking at things closely, I have been a makeup artist, perhaps without realizing it, since I took the suicidal leap of becoming a writer. In fact, upon returning home around midnight, driving on highways that are now less clogged, I have understood that, more than a writer, I am mainly a makeup artist, because the fictions I write are layers of makeup that one spreads and colors on the surface. pale, haggard face of reality, and therefore a novel is a delicate work of makeup that aspires to beautify the greasy, imperfect truths of life itself. And then the words, and the inventiveness, and all the colors of the rainbow that the imagination displays, and the persuasive lies, and the flashes of humor, are thin layers of makeup that the writer applies to the naked face of a story, a story that , well made up, well adorned, well decorated, will seduce the reader. I will then stop putting make-up on my face, if I dare to be brave, but not putting make-up on the stories I write, because a poorly made-up novel is, I fear, a poorly written novel.
#makeup #artist #writer
