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I would kiss his neck, the skinny Adam's apple, the damaged tendons, the little tracheotomy scar, but I stopped at the long scar that followed the jawline all the way around, as if his throat had been slit, disappearing into the hair on both sides.

Above it was the new face.

I got used to the burn very quickly; he was like that when we met. His face was rigid, “cardboard” he'd say, he couldn't make more than two or three generic expressions, but his voice, his gestures, all that went on inside his head—I don't know how I'd talk about that. You can describe a face, but it's hard to describe a person, all of a person, I mean.

I remember how we used to joke around, while we were waiting in line, for instance, when we got bored with the wait or someone was staring. All he had to do was go "Boo!" at just the right moment and the other person would start screaming. It was the first time I'd had so much fun with anyone.

When he was tired, he wore a scarf pulled up over his nose, and a hat. I called him the Invisible Man. His eyes he never hid. He had no eyelid left at all on the left. His eyeball formed perfect concentric circles: red, white, blue, and black. The right eye had lost its lashes, but when you saw him from that profile, with the scarf and hat, you couldn't tell a thing, just that the nose was a little short, maybe.

Occasionally, not very often, a stranger would speak to him. Sitting next to him on a bus, for example, or busy at a computer screen in an office. These strangers must either have been distracted or extremely myopic. When they looked at him full on, his face was like a fist smashing into theirs. But since they'd been the ones to speak first, they'd bravely try to go the distance. Their efforts quickly grew pathetic. They were too friendly, as if speaking to a mentally handicapped man or a little kid. They went on talking for too long, to show that nothing was bothering them, that they didn't see anything that could possibly bother them. And he'd let them dig themselves deeper and deeper, giving a big grin with his missing lips.

When he smoked, he'd clench the cigarette between his teeth and breathe noisily; it sounded like a straw sucking on an empty glass after you've finished the drink. People didn't dare ask him to put it out. They'd get hysterical when they smelled tobacco and realized someone was breaking the rules, but boy they screeched to a halt the instant they caught sight of his face.

The silence that would fall when we walked into a bar was something you had to hear. Men's faces, women's faces, all of them wondering what the hell I was doing with him. And going across borders with him, when the customs official looked at his passport, with a photo from before the burn—no one had ever dared ask him to have another one taken. Or when, with all the new security measures, he'd be asked to lower his scarf and take off his hat—the expression that would come across the official's face. The childish terror, the politically correct reflexes, disgust warring with charity, the absolute fear of the other, all of it nakedly clear.

But his sacrosanct exhaustion was gaining the upper hand. To think that this is the same man who protested when I wanted to have a tummy tuck, your stomach's fine just the way it is, always the same old song, but the moment the experimental protocol was launched he was off and running. And he went about it so well, charming the surgeons, the shrinks, the whole team, that he was chosen for the first complete face transplant.

The donor's family, his wife in particular, had also taken several tests and signed a pledge never to try to find us. All we knew was that the donor was more or less the same age, had more or less the same skin color, and had died suddenly in a distant country.

I could never bring myself to look him in the face. Above the half-circle of the scar, the skin was quite smooth, ruddy, with a heavy beard. When I looked for his profile, his strange right profile, I'd see a long nose with cheeks stuck on either side, still a little stiff, like the latex masks thieves wear in movies. The eyebrows and forehead were supple, almost too supple, like flowing water or wax, as if the face were about to come off. I didn't dare touch it. Every morning he shaved like a teenager, with great concentration and effort. He shaved off the beard that was not his. Apparently, hair follicles survive for several hours after death, and I'm telling you, it was a heavy beard. With the razor, he'd shave stripes in the shaving cream across that face. That was the only way I could look at him: in the mirror, from behind his back, watching the shaving cream disappear.

The face was neither ugly nor handsome, I don't know. It was a stranger's face, a face that could have belonged to anyone. There was still a weird rigidity, the movement wasn't quite right yet, but he never missed a physical therapy session and we were assured that in time the face would move in a natural way, quite normally.

Even his gaze had changed, because, as I've come to realize, eyelids are what make a gaze. An eyeball has no gaze, no expression. Intensity, yes, I remember the intensity, the unblinking rage, the wicked laugh. But then, with eyelids, he just looked like a nice person.