Your face, tomorrow

Scenes from the sales floor

There’s a guy at work, older guy. White hair. He’s deaf. Works as a bagboy, or bagman, I suppose, him being older and all. You see this in grocery stores: people with disabilities of one sort or another finding employment and performing a role in the community. All that good civic bonhomie deal.

I rarely see the guy. He works at the front end, and I’m at the back, in the dairy section. Grocery stores always place the milk as far away as possible from the front door. That way, you got to stroll through the sales floor and get tempted by frivolities on your way to pick up the staples. Sometimes I see the guy, though. He’ll come to the back room looking for supplies, can liners or T-shirt bags for the registers. Because I’m polite, I’ll wave. Sometimes I’ll help him look for the can liners. Sometimes I’ll even succeed.

Only word I know in ASL is ‘thank you.’ The finger to the chin, lowered appreciatively. So when the guy tries to communicate with me, searching for whatever, we are operating with a limited vocabulary. He has a pen and pad if need be. Often, though, he’ll simply gesture, pointing, gesticulating.

And expressing. His face is extremely expressive—smiling, frowning, squinting. The broad facial gestures of a silent movie star, using the only means of expression at hand. Even when he signs with one of the employees who also signs, his face remains highly expressive. Chin jutting, brow furrowing. Signing with one’s whole face, whole body. Fly him to Italy and he’d have no trouble communicating.

It does make you think: what if your face was enough? What if your face said everything you needed to say? More, even?

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Your Face Tomorrow is a trilogy of novels by the playful Spanish writer Javier Marías. The story follows a Spanish writer named Jaime who returns to Oxford, where he studied as an undergraduate. Soon he falls in with a don who’s also an intelligence operative for the MI6, as one does when one is in Oxford. MI6 discovers, then exploits, a strange gift that Jaime possesses. He can read the future in people’s faces.

This gets Jaime into some jams, obviously. There is a shootout in a discotheque that lasts for 100 pages. Yet the central conceit is weirdly optimistic, even joyous. Your face says everything about you, literally. It’s only a matter of knowing how to read it.

Marias often gets discussed as a writer of autofiction, meaning his books are inspired by his own life by greater or lesser degrees of fidelity. It makes you think: is this face-reading talent real? Are British spies making use of it as we speak?

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There are cameras throughout the grocery store. The front doors, of course. The liquor aisles too. The pricey items. Currently we stock an oversize bottle of whiskey that retails for $7500. No one’s bought it yet.

Our faces, then, are shown on screens. Rendered in pixel. Captured, perhaps, at some juncture of data transference, then stored at a water-guzzling data center. Our bodies, our faces, shedding data like dust.

But what if our faces could be read by another? Another with a face of their own? Understood more fully than otherwise possible?

What if the deaf guy with the white hair had to take just one look at me, one look at my face, to know everything about me? Would I want to know what he knew?

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Marias lived in Madrid. He had two apartments in two different apartment buildings, directly across the street from each other. Same apartment number, same floor. One, he decorated all in white, with splashes of black. The other, he decorated all in black, with splashes of white. Guy was Jack White, basically.

A man needs a mirror, such a living arrangement implies. One place to live, another to see how one lives. A face for seeing, and another face for being seen.