Self Portrait

There was a faint, almost imperceptible rustle; Daniel had already dashed, razor in hand, to the door and flung it open. Too late, the child was too quick for him: she had fled, she must have huddled herself into an angle of the landing, where she stood with beating heart, holding her breath. Daniel noticed a little bunch of carnations on the mat at his feet. “Nasty little creature,” he said loudly. It was the concierge’s daughter, he was sure. He had only to look at her fried-fishy eyes when she said good-morning to him. This had been going on for a fortnight; every morning on her return from school she laid flowers outside his door. He kicked the flowers downstairs. He would have to stand and listen for a whole morning in the outer room, that was the only way he would catch her. He would emerge, naked to his belt, and fix her with a glassy eye. “It’s my head that attracts her, my head and my shoulders, as she’s a bit of an idealist. She’ll get a shock when she sees the hair on my chest.” He went back into his room and went on shaving. He observed in the mirror his dark, handsome, blue-jowled visage. “That’s what excites them.” An archangel’s face; Marcelle called him her dear archangel, and now he must submit to the admiring gaze of this deplorable child, who was just at the puffy stage of puberty. “Horrid little creatures,” thought Daniel angrily. He bent forward a little and with a neat stroke of the razor snipped the tip off his pimple. It wouldn’t be a bad joke to deface the head they all admired. “Pah, a scarred face is still a face, it always means something: I should get tired of it all the sooner.” He walked up close to the mirror and eyed himself distastefully. “Besides,” he said to himself, “I like to be good-looking.” He looked tired. He gripped himself at the level of the hips. He must get his weight down by a couple of pounds. Seven whiskies last evening all by himself at Johnny’s. Until three o’clock he hadn’t been able to make up his mind to go home because it gave him the shivers to put his head on the pillow and feel himself slide away into the darkness, reflecting that there must be a tomorrow.

-The Age of Reason, by Jean-Paul Sartre