MILAN — MY bookshelves have a bad habit: They eat books. Especially the books I care most about. My books seem to vanish, and where they've gone nobody knows. So I find myself buying the same book, once, twice, even three times in certain cases. One night not long ago, around midnight, I set out, unsuccessfully, to find the book of David Sylvester's interviews with the painter Francis Bacon. I wanted to verify a quote I use frequently that I suspected might be his, a quote that exemplifies my view of life in general and, sadly, also the less-than-Apollonian way I run my own:
Symmetry kills.
When I wake up the next morning, I go into the bathroom and see, in the mirror, that my face has been transfigured into a portrait by Francis Bacon: the right half of my features sagging randomly, my mouth distorted, one nostril deformed but immobile, and an eye that refuses to shut. It scares me to death.
"Is this your idea of a joke, Francis?"
My face, which has fallen prey to some demented anamorphic projection, flashes me a sinister smile. Beneath the skin I sense fluttering brush strokes of nerve tissue, muscle bundles contracting in painful spasms, migrations of fleshy impasto heading north-by-northwest.
"How do you feel?" the emergency room doctor asks me.
"As if I've just swallowed a painting by Francis Bacon."
He looks at me blankly — after all, this is before Bacon's triptych of Lucian Freud sold at auction last week for a record $142.4 million.
"No need to worry, it's just Bell's palsy, an inflammation of the seventh cranial nerve. You'll recover."
I try to nod politely, as if to apologize for having such a shabby seventh cranial nerve, but can manage only another monstrous leer.
Art is an accident, the Francis of my imagination whispers.
How true. The mouth, the flesh, the butchery of the face that seems to have been ripped asunder from within — your obsessions, Francis. You used to say that you wished you could paint a mouth the way Monet painted sunsets, but you've never been capable of it. I see that now. My mouth looks like Henrietta Moraes's, and my eye looks like Michel Leiris's. They were your friends, and even they were less than flattered by the portraits you painted of them. But why me? Where do I come in? Why did you decide to colonize my face? Since when have you gone in for body art?
I've always admired your work, that astonished gaze of yours that delves deeper than surface appearance, your determination to uncover "that diamond hidden in the depths" of the ego, to borrow an expression from another genius, Milan Kundera.
You quote your genius, I'll quote mine: you kill the thing you love.
In my humble efforts as a writer, I'm trying to do more or less the same thing as you, if you'll allow me the comparison. The reason I write is to unmask my characters. I prefer the word in English: "character" is so much more intimate than "personaggi," an Italian word that derives from "persona," Latin for mask.
Though I have to say, you're being a little vindictive. All this, just because I let a friend borrow your book, and now I can't remember who? Don't you think you're overreacting? You know perfectly well that I lend out only the books I love best.
I have no hostility toward my models.
Oh, really? Then you tell me what I represent right now? Is this grimace of disgust my essence, my true self?
You can't create an image without having it produce a state of mind.
Fine, you've never wanted to indulge in facile psychologisms, you prefer the brutality of fact, but what good is the brutality of fact if you don't use it to ask yourself questions? So let me insist: Just what is it that disgusts me, what frightens me, and who is twisting my soul? Is it me? Is it the world?
Art always takes you back to the vulnerability of human existence.
Well then, why isn't the art-loving public admiring me in a triumph of empathy? After all, I am one of your creations, a minor work admittedly: absurd, anonymous and posthumous. Still, deformed as I am, I must be worth millions. With a face that's no longer worth a plugged nickel as a face, should I just auction myself off?
People gaze at my new mask as if it is something out of Greek tragedy. I inspire two conflicting sentiments, but there are no words in Italian to express them: schadenfreude, a sort of delight in the misfortune of others, and pietas, Latin for a dutiful, respectful love.
I'm gruesome, but I am your masterpiece. Can you, at least, see me?
Marina Mander is the author of the novel "The First True Lie." This essay was translated by Antony Shugaar from the Italian.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: November 16, 2013
Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this essay omitted the last six words of this sentence: "You quote your genius, I'll quote mine: you kill the thing you love."
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