I was a foreigner in their midst, but no one realized it. I lived among them as a spy and no one, not even I, suspected it. They all took me for a relative; no one knew I’d been swapped at birth. And so I was one of their equals without anything in common, a brother to all without belonging to the family.

I had come from wondrous lands, from landscapes more enchanting than life, but only to myself did I ever mention these lands, and I said nothing about the landscapes which I saw in dreams. My feet stepped like theirs over the floorboards and the flagstones, but my heart was far away, even if it beat close by, false master of an estranged and exiled body.

No one knew me under the mask of similarity, nor ever knew that I had a mask, because no one knew that there are masked people in the world. No one imagined that at my side there was always another, who was in fact I. They always supposed I was identical to myself.

Their houses sheltered me, their hands shook mine, and they saw me walk down the street as if I were there; but the I that I am was never in their living rooms, the I whose life I live has no hands for others to shake, and the I that I know walks down no streets, unless the streets are all streets, nor is seen in them by others, unless he himself is all the others. We all live far away and anonymous; disguised, we suffer as unknowns. For some, however, this distance between oneself and one’s self is never revealed; for others it is occasionally enlightened, to their horror or grief, by a flash without limits; but for still others this is the painful daily reality of life.

To realize that who we are is not ours to know, that what we think or feel is always a translation, that what we want is not what we wanted, nor perhaps what anyone wanted – to realize all this at every moment, to feel all this in every feeling – isn’t this to be foreign in one’s own soul, exiled in one’s own sensations?

But the mask I’d been staring at as it talked on a street corner with an unmasked man on this last night of Carnival finally held out its hand and laughingly said goodbye. The natural-faced man turned left down the street at whose corner he’d been standing. The mask – an uninteresting one – walked straight ahead, disappearing among shadows and occasional lights in a definitive farewell, extraneous to what I was thinking. Only then did I notice that there was more in the street than the glowing street lamps, and where the lamplight didn’t reach there roiled a hazy moonlight, veiled and speechless and full of nothing, like life…