the birthmark was the test

You have no idea what that story did to me. I kept reading it, kept thinking about it, and little by little I began to see myself as I was. Other people carried their humanity inside them, but I wore mine on my face. That was the difference between me and everyone else. I wasn´t allowed to hide who I was. Every time people looked at me, they were looking right into my soul. I wasn´t a bad-looking girl -I knew that- but I also knew that I would always be defined by the purple blotch on my face. There was no use in trying to get rid of it. It was the central  fact if my life, and to wish it away would have been like asking to destroy myself. I was never going to have and ordinary kind of happiness, but after I read that story, I realized that I had something almost as good. I knew what people were thinking. All I had to do was look at them, study their reactions when they saw the left side of my face, and I could tell whether they could be trusted or not. The birthmark was the test of their humanity. It measured the worth of their souls, and if I worked hard at it, I could see straight into them and know who they were. By the time I was sixteen or seventeen, I had the perfect pitch of a tuning fork. That doesn´t mean I haven´t mistakes about people, but most of the time I´ve known better. I just haven´t been able to stop myself.


The book of illusions - Paul Auster