Unmasked in Venice
Jeremy Clarke
IT've got these vertical lines running down face, on either side of my mouth, and they are bothering me, You know the lines I mean. The ones that make serious men with serious jobs look like Thunderbird comics. Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger has fine examples of them. Ex-culture minister Chris Smith's are so deep it looks like his mouth is detachable.
I once had my face read by a professional face-reader from San Francisco. Before she started, I gave her a little test of my own devising to see if there was anything in it. I'd been to the National Portrait Gallery beforehand and bought postcard portraits of people who are well-known over here but less so in the States. I showed her each one in turn and asked her what they did for a living. She had no idea what line of work Lord Salisbury was in. Edith Cavell she thought might have been involved in the world of light entertainment. Then I showed her a postcard of a painting of Sir Richard Burton, the celebrated Victorian scholar, pornographer and explorer. The artist had made Burton look like the Satan himself. Without hesitation she said, 'Explorer.' She didn't know who it was, she said, but this man's massive ear lobes told her that here was a man of tremendous physical energy, unbounded curiosity and an insatiable desire to travel. It was all right there in the ear lobes, she said.
She then drew chalk lines all over my face and measured the distances between them, but her character analysis on the strength of a comparison between these was way off. Ultimately, she was making the kind of correlation between face and character that novelists used to make before the war. A jutting chin denotes strong will. A snub nose. innocence. Full lips, sensuousness. And so forth.
Now these deepening vertical lines on my face that Arsene Wenger and Chris Smith have to such a terrible degree must presumably be a physical manifestation of some overriding inner drive or some compulsion as well. And as face-reading is an increasingly popular pseudo-science, they also presumably have a name. I worry that these disfiguring lines are known to facereaders the world over as the Lines of Orian or some such term. And when they are as pronounced as mine, Arsene's and Chris's are, whatever else we might do for a living, they will immediately recognise it isn't our main calling.
Yesterday I bought a new suit, shirt and a return flight to Venice. Guess how much? The suit. navy-blue, double-breasted, two vents, bell-bottom trousers, I bought at a charity shop, £9.99. The shirt, flood-water brown, rounded Seventies collar, also from the charity shop, was .E1.50. The flights, on Ryanair, booked on the Internet, were lp each way. Twelve quid the lot. So on Guy Fawkes Night, be sitting outside a café in St Mark's Square, and my outfit, plus the flights there and back, will be costing me less than the small latte I've just ordered from the condescending waiter.
The only down side to it all is that it's Venice. I've nothing against the place. I'm sure it'll be lovely and the smell bearable if I can pick up some duty-free cigars. What troubles me about going to Venice, though, is that these vertical lines of debauchery on my face will make me look like Aschenbach, the central character in Thomas Mann's famous novella, Death in Venice. I'm worried that people are going to come up to me and ask me if I'm him. And the terrible thing is that in a way I am him, especially in the way I go to ridiculous lengths to appear youthful. Thomas Mann has got my shame at being old, and my vanity, off to a tee. Seeing your secret vanity named, described and clinically dissected in a book by a German novelist is very unsettling. The first time I read Death in Venice, I read it from beginning to end with a rictus grin of horrified recognition, Yesterday I shaved my eyebrows. I'd read somewhere that bushy eyebrows make a chap look old. I tried to thin them out and shape them into graceful arches. So if you happen to be in St Mark's Square next week and you see a bloke in a charityshop suit with debauched creases around his mouth and permanently quizzical eyebrows leering at the tottie, you'll know who it is.
Previous page
