The Faces

by Tove Ditlevsen

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

From Tove Ditlevsen, the acclaimed author of the Copenhagen Trilogy, comes The Faces, a searing, haunting novel of a woman on the edge, portrayed with all the vividness of lived experience.

Copenhagen, 1968. Lise, a children’s book writer and married mother of three, is increasingly haunted by disembodied faces and voices. She is convinced that her husband, already extravagantly unfaithful, will leave her. Most of all, she is scared that she will never write again.

Yet as she descends into a world of pills and hospitals, she begins to wonder—is insanity really something to be feared, or does it bring a kind of freedom?

Release date: April 19, 2022

Publisher: Picador

Print pages: 144

Sample

1


In the evening it was a little better. She could smooth it out and look at it, cautiously, hoping that someday she would have a full view of it, as if it were an unfinished, multi-colored Gobelin tapestry whose pattern would perhaps be revealed one day. The voices came back to her; with a little patience, they could be unraveled from each other like the strands of a tangled ball of yarn. She could think about the words in peace, without fearing that new ones would appear before the night was over. During this time the night held the days apart only with difficulty, and if she happened to breathe a hole into the darkness, like on a frost-covered windowpane, the morning might shine into her eyes hours ahead of time.

They were all asleep except Gert, who hadn’t come home yet, even though it was almost midnight. They slept, and their faces were blank and peaceful and didn’t have to be used again until morning. Maybe they had even taken off their faces and placed them prudently on top of their clothes, to give them a rest; they weren’t absolutely necessary while they were sleeping. In the daytime the faces were constantly changing, as if she saw them reflected in flowing water. Eyes, nose, mouth – that simple triangle – and yet how could it contain such an infinite number of variations? For a long time she had avoided going out on the street because the crowd of faces frightened her. She didn’t dare take on any new ones, and she was afraid of meeting the old ones again. They didn’t match her memory of them at all – in her memory they had lain down next to the dead, whom she was protected from in a different way. When she met people she hadn’t seen in years, their faces had changed, aged, turned strange, and no one had tried to prevent it. She hadn’t taken care of them, they had slipped out of her protective hands, which should have held them up above the surface of the water like people drowning.

Preoccupied with other things, she hadn’t taken care of the face, and at the very last moment it was replaced by a new one, stolen from a dead or sleeping person, who then had to make do as best he could. It was either too big or too small, and it bore traces of a life that didn’t belong to the new owner. And yet, when you got used to it, glimpses of the original face would appear, just the way old wallpaper will crack and reveal patches of the hidden layer underneath, still fresh and well-preserved and filled with memories of the former tenants of the house.

But some people, out of impatience or a need to keep up with fashion, would take on a new face long before the old one was worn out, just as people buy new clothes even though the ones they have on have hardly been worn. Many young girls were like that, and sometimes they would even trade individual features with a girlfriend, if they were going out in the evening and wanted to dress up with eyes that were bigger and brighter than their own, or with a nose that was more slender. This made their skin tighten up, of course, but it felt no worse than wearing shoes that pinched because they were a size too small.

But it was most apparent in children who were still growing. You couldn’t fix them with your gaze; it would reflect off them, as empty as a mirror that you’ve stared at for a long time. Children wore their faces like something they had to grow into, which wouldn’t fit them for many years. The face was almost always put on too high, and they had to stand on tiptoe and make a tremendous effort just to see the images on the inside of their eyelids.

Some of them, especially girls, had had to live out their mother’s childhood while their own lay hidden in a secret drawer. Those kinds of girls had the most trouble. Their voices would break out of them like pus from a sore, and the sound would frighten them, just like when they discovered that someone had been reading their diary, even though it was locked up among the junk and old toys from the time they had worn the discarded face of a four-year-old. That face would stare up at them from among the tops and crippled dolls with innocent, astonished glass eyes. They slept lightly; their sleep smelled of terror. Every evening when they cleaned up their rooms they had to gather their thoughts for the night like birds that have to be coaxed into their cages. Sometimes one of them didn’t belong to the girls, and then they wouldn’t know what to do with it. Hurriedly, since they were always tired, they would stuff it in the back of a cupboard or in between two books on the shelf. But when these girls woke up, their thoughts didn’t suit their faces anymore; the faces had dissolved during sleep – Halloween masks whose stiff cardboard had become torn and soggy from their warm breath. With difficulty they would put on the new faces like destiny, and they would get dizzy looking down at their feet, the distance had grown so great overnight.

She looked out into the room, out of the corner of her eye, without moving her head. There was a dressing table, a nightstand, and two chairs. The room seemed bare as a grave with no headstone or cross. It resembled the rented rooms of her youth where she had written her first books, and this was the only place where she found that fragile sense of security which is nothing more than the absence of change. She was lying on her back on her made-up bed with her hands behind her head. It was essential to remain completely still and avoid sudden movements so that whatever was inside the built-in cupboards, those disturbing cavities, would not come tumbling out with all the compressed terror of her entire childhood.

Slowly she reached out her hand for the sleeping pills. She shook out two of them and washed them down with water. She had gotten them from Gitte, who gave all of them whatever she thought they needed. Gitte required more alertness than the others. You had to stifle certain words before they crossed her lips, at any cost and by any means. It was a disadvantage, thought Lise, that they were on a first-name basis. She and Gert had had a few drinks with Gitte on one of the first evenings after she had started working for them, and since she was not without a certain junior-college ‘sophistication’, they had felt they couldn’t treat her like an ordinary housekeeper, whose personal life was none of the family’s business.

Gitte was a result of Lise’s sudden fame two years ago, when she had been awarded the Academy’s prize for children’s literature for a book that she herself had considered no better or worse than her other books. Aside from a virtually ignored collection of poetry, she had never written anything except children’s books. They had been nicely reviewed in the women’s pages, had sold well, and had been reassuringly overlooked by the world that was preoccupied with literature for adults. Fame had brutally ripped away the veil that had always separated her from reality. She had given a thank-you speech that Gert had written for her, and during the speech she had been seized by her childhood fear of being unmasked, fear that someone would discover that she was putting on an act and pretending to be someone she was not.

That fear had never really left her since. Whenever she was interviewed, it was always Gert’s or Asger’s opinions she repeated, as if she had never possessed an independent thought. When Asger left her ten years ago, he had left behind a storehouse of words and ideas inside her, like a forgotten suitcase in the left-luggage room at the train station. When she had used them up, she drew on Gert’s opinions, which changed with his mood. Only when she wrote did she express her own self, and she had no other talent.

Gert had taken her fame as a personal affront. He maintained that he couldn’t go to bed with a piece of literature, and he cheated on her with great diligence, keeping her meticulously informed of his conquests. She had felt as if her soul were sinking down into a hole in the ice because, at the time, she still loved him and was gripped by the fear of losing him too.

Nadia, her best friend, who was a child psychologist, had sent her to a psychiatrist, who had explained to her that she attracted men with complex emotional lives and assertive personalities, filled with doubt about their own abilities. She had been a clever patient and had discovered certain similarities between Asger and Gert. Except that Asger, rather late in life, had been seized by that career ambition which requires the absolute, tireless cooperation of the family; and a wife who wrote something as ridiculous as children’s books was suddenly a liability, a weakness in himself that his enemies might pounce on at any moment. On the other hand, Dr Jørgensen explained to her, Gert’s infidelities would never lead to divorce, since they were committed primarily on her behalf. It was merely an act of spite, just as two-year-old children spatter their porridge. Gert was bound to her by virtue of his own neurotic entanglements, and it was hardly likely that he would relinquish his identity again to something that only resembled love.

The sleeping pills were starting to work, and because she wasn’t on her guard, a face tore itself loose from all the others and began to stare at her with that old, undisguised malice. It was the face of a dwarf she had turned around to look at as a child; at the same instant he had turned his head and looked at her. To the end of her days she would carry that face with her like an ancient guilt that no remorse could expiate.

The key was turned in the front door and the sound reached her as if through many layers of wool blankets. It was Gert coming home. She heard him walk through the dining room and thought he was going out to the kitchen for a beer or into the maid’s room to see Gitte. Then the door opened and he was standing in the doorway of her room.

‘Are you asleep?’

‘No.’

She raised herself on her elbows and looked at his shoes. They came closer, getting bigger and bigger, like in an absurd drama where mushrooms grow up between the floorboards and getting rid of them every day is the only meaningful act in the world. He came closer and, panic-stricken, she thought that it was just too much to be married to a whole person all at once.

She awakened some of the few words they still had between them; stiff and uncomfortable, they stretched themselves on her lips, like children being yanked out of sleep.

‘Sit down,’ she said. ‘Is something wrong?’

He sat down in the chair on the other side of the nightstand. The light from the lamp fell on his hands, which were clenching and unclenching nervously. His face was hidden by the darkness, and she pulled it out of her memory: delicate and haggard, with small, regular features.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Grete has committed suicide.’

She felt his gaze on her face and turned toward the wall. Her heart was pounding rapidly. What were you supposed to feel or say when your husband’s lover has taken her own life? There was no precedent. She had grown accustomed to using her old, worn-out feelings on him, just as the blind man orients himself with the aid of more and more distant visual impressions from the time before he was blind. Certain words and tones of voice belonged to these feelings, and it was as dangerous as walking through a minefield to move outside this familiar terrain.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said with idiotic politeness, ‘but weren’t you through with her? I thought you told me that.’

Suddenly the green curtains looked as if they were made of crêpe paper. That must be because of the sleeping pills. She noticed how they dulled her alertness.

He moved the lamp in order to reach the cigarettes. Now the light fell on his face, but she had to avoid looking at it.

‘Yes,’ he sighed. ‘But she stayed home from the office without calling in. And they knew, presumably from her, that I had a key to her apartment. Josefsen asked me to go over and see what was wrong. And there she was, lying on the bed with the empty pill bottle in her hand. It was a real shock. Not that it could damage my position, but you can see it’s damned embarrassing. They stared at me as if I had murdered her.’

His hands were shaking as he lit a cigarette.

‘I knew from the start that it was stupid to choose one of the girls at the office. And someone that age too. When single women reach their mid-thirties, it’s risky just to show them a little sympathy.’

‘I’m forty,’ she said absentmindedly. She regretted it at once. It was part of their exhausting game that she never drew attention to herself. She felt his gaze like a burning searchlight.

‘That’s different,’ he said, annoyed. ‘It’s hard to take you seriously as a human being anymore. It’s like when we see your ex-husband in a magazine as one of the ten best-dressed men in the country. Even you think it’s ridiculous.’

‘Gert,’ she said with that gentleness in her voice that she used to hide her lack of love. ‘You don’t know that she did it because of you. Nadia says that some people may have a low suicide threshold. Once she told me about a girl who took her own life because her bicycle had been stolen.’

‘I know that,’ he said. ‘I’m not one to overestimate my own importance. But I take my work seriously. And something like this throws it all off.’

For the first time in the conversation, she looked at his face. There was something wrong with it. All his features seemed to be dissociated from each other, like furniture from successive marriages. Two little round pouches had formed under his eyes, as if he were carrying in them the bitter memories from a failed life. Something resembling empathy swept over her for a second, like the beam of a lighthouse over distant waves. Then she caught sight of his ears, which were enormous and overgrown with hair like an animal’s. That couldn’t be right. She closed her eyes and sank back on the pillow.

‘It’ll all be forgotten in a few days,’ she said. ‘Go to your own room now, Gert. I need to sleep.’

‘Excuse me,’ he said, offended. ‘I forgot for a moment that your time is precious.’

He stood up with more noise than was necessary and left the room without saying goodnight.

She turned off the lamp, but the dark brought her no solace. What did he mean, her time was precious? Did he assume that she didn’t have long to live?

Someone was running water out in the kitchen, and a boy’s rough laughter penetrated into her room. She turned on the light again. It was Mogens who was laughing. He had no idea that she knew he was sleeping with Gitte. Gitte was sleeping with Gert too; she said that it was good for their marriage, which she had set her mind on saving. Over by the wall was a pair of Hanne’s shoes, and she hadn’t noticed them before. They were red, with pointed toes, and Gert had given them to her. Gitte said it was a shame for the boys that Gert spoiled Hanne like that. Lise had never thought about it until Gitte drew her attention to it. For some reason the sight of the shoes bothered her, and she got up and put them outside her door, before she lay down again and turned off the light.


2


Daylight filled the room with a guileless virginity that for a moment made the events of the night more distant than any random childhood day, preserved in her mind like a thousand-year-old insect encased in a lump of amber.

She pulled back the curtains and looked out on the enclosed courtyard. A thaw had set in, and steam rose up from the oily pavement as if from a wet rag. In the pale, cold February sun a cat was sitting on the lid of a garbage can, licking its paws. She listened to the reassuring murmur of voices from the dining room, where Gitte was eating breakfast with the children. Gitte was protective of Lise’s writing time, as if she were a Goethe or a Shakespeare. And in spite of the fact that for two years she hadn’t written a line. There was something touching, she said to herself, about that motherless orphan girl who had burned all her bridges to bring order to the existence of total strangers. It dulled her fear to think like that, it made something or other easier, just as when children appear to yield to grownups.

She put on her bathrobe and sat down at the dressing table, making as little noise as possible. In the mirror her face seemed to her tired and used, like an old glove. Her mouth was set in brackets by two faint, sketchy lines that stopped a little before the slope of her chin, as if the unknown artist had been called away in the middle of his work. Her eyes had the same open, sincere expression as in children who are telling a lie. Three delicate wrinkles lay like a pearl necklace around her neck, and they would dig deeper day by day. Would this face last out her time, this face that bore traces of so many things the world must know nothing about? Did it turn toward her with hostility whenever she wasn’t looking? And what would be underneath, when it fell apart one fine day? She thought about the much-too-large dresses and shoes that she had worn as a child, always bought to grow into, always designed to fit her just when they were worn out.

Whenever Hanne saw pictures of her in the newspapers, she said: ‘Oh, you’re so photogenic, Mother.’ Søren said: ‘You’re the most beautiful mother in my class.’ Mogens didn’t say anything. Gitte said that it was difficult to have a famous mother. She quoted Graham Greene: ‘Success is a mutilation of the natural human being.’ Gitte used world literature and the newspapers as if they were kitchen appliances that were supposed to make her daily work easier.

The door opened, and she turned her head with a start, as if she had been caught at some secret vice. It was Søren, with a milk mustache over his mouth and a knapsack on his back.

‘Goodbye, Mother,’ he said uncertainly. ‘Gitte said I could come in and see if you were asleep.’

‘No, I’m not. Goodbye, Søren. Won’t you give me a kiss?’

She leaned down and kissed him on the mouth. He put his arms around her neck, and a smell of interrupted sleep, of school dust and childish guilt, fell over both of them for a moment like a protective cape wrapped mercifully around a fallen foe. She held him by the shoulders and, full of dark sympathy, regarded the exhausted little face.

‘You need a haircut,’ she said with false cheerfulness and stroked his blond, silky hair.

‘No,’ he said vehemently and wriggled out of her hands. ‘Gitte says that long hair looks good on me. The other kids laugh at me when I’ve been to the barber.’

‘I see.’

She straightened up quickly, and at the same moment Gitte stepped in between them. She took the little boy by the wrist.

‘Get going,’ she said with authority. ‘It’s two minutes to eight.’

She strode through the room with the expression of someone who has a goal in life, and stopped as suddenly as a car that brakes before an unexpected roadblock. She picked up the bottle of pills and stared at Lise with an expression of moral intensity in her nearsighted eyes.

‘Gert has asked me to keep them,’ she said, ‘This thing with Grete has given him a shock. He doesn’t ever want to go through that again.’

‘Oh,’ said Lise and sat down on the bed with a feeling of transparency, as if she were clipped out of paper. ‘Did he tell you about that?’

‘It’s your own fault.’

Gitte stuck the bottle carelessly in the pocket of her jeans and sat down next to her. She was fascinatingly ugly, and she smelled of sweat. Lise smiled broadly. Fear filled the room like a liquid. The clock in the dining room struck eight.

‘He came in to my room looking for comfort last night. He wanted to make up, Lise. He was ready to come back to you, he wanted to give up all thought of being unfaithful to you. He wanted to go to bed with you. But you were too tired, you wanted to sleep, you didn’t understand a thing.’

Her voice resounded with bursting impatience. She put her elbows on her knees and rested her face in the cradle of her hands.

‘Gitte,’ said Lise, ‘don’t I get any morning coffee?’

‘Oh God, yes. Then we can talk.’

Lise took off her bathrobe and crept down under the comforter again. There was no more sleep to be found in its familiar folds. Nadia, she thought, I’ll call her today. She leaned toward the gentle, unwavering image that Nadia had of her. Nadia found her to be impressively tolerant, but she mistook tolerance for indifference. To be intolerant you had to be involved. Candor, she thought, that’s all that Gitte is asking for right now, a little corner of my soul, an expression of something human. Then one more day would pass before the hatred broke loose.

‘Now eat something, you need it, I’ve just baked some bread.’

Gitte placed herself in the chair where Gert had sat during the night, and she poured coffee into two cups.


Copyright © 1968 by Tove Ditlevsen & Hasselbalch, Copenhagen

Copyright © 1991 by Tiina Nunnally