The narrator smears ink across her face

The narrator’s act of smearing ink across her face is a bodily response to Yan Kerrand’s impending departure and to the difference between being useful to his art and being seen by him. Returning to his room while he is away, she covers her face and neck with the ink from his pot; it runs into her mouth and eyes, temporarily sealing her eyelids. What begins as an attempt to enter the world of his drawings ends with her painfully restoring her sight in front of a mirror.

Circumstances

Kerrand first knocks because he needs help translating a word for another supermarket visit, then tells the narrator in French that she was right: he had been too absorbed in his hero for too long. He has decided to return to France and says he will leave in four days. After he goes back to his room, the narrator curls up under the covers and resists the prospect of his departure. To her, he is leaving not only the town but also with his story of Sokcho, while her own story seems to be withering where it began.

The narrator understands that her distress is not, in her account, a matter of love or desire: Kerrand is a Frenchman and a foreigner, and such a relationship is out of the question. What has changed is his gaze. At first he barely noticed her; later, his physical attention made her encounter an unfamiliar part of herself. She wants to live through his ink and to be the only person he sees. Yet his praise is for her eye and her ability to help him see the world around him. She wants something different: to be seen by him, and to be drawn by him.

The Unfinished Drawing

That evening, while Kerrand is in the bathroom, the narrator goes back into his room. The drawing boards have been put away, but a ball of paper, wet with spit, lies in the waste bin. She opens it and finds a torn drawing whose remaining outline lets her imagine the missing parts. The woman in it is asleep, with her chin resting in her open palms.

The discarded image sharpens the narrator’s frustration. She imagines the artist giving the haunting woman life so that she could then tear the figure to pieces. Instead, the drawing remains incomplete, and the narrator is left to fill in what Kerrand did not sketch. The scene places her beside an image of a woman whose face and body are available to artistic attention but whose representation has been abandoned before it is finished.

The Ink on Her Face

The narrator moves to the desk, dips a finger into the gleaming ink, and traces it over her forehead, nose, and cheeks. As it drips into her mouth, she registers its cold, clammy feel. She dips her finger again and draws the ink down her chin and along her veins to her collarbone before returning to her room. The action carries her wish to be drawn into contact with the material of Kerrand’s work, but it does not make her the subject of a completed drawing; she applies the ink herself.

Ink has seeped into one of her eyes. Its burning makes her squeeze her eyes shut, and when she tries to open them, the ink has stuck her eyelids together. Standing before a mirror, she pulls out her eyelashes one by one until she can see herself again. The final gesture reverses the desired act of being seen: rather than receiving an image of herself from Kerrand, she confronts her own reflection through pain and has to physically free her sight.

Significance

The episode gives physical form to the narrator’s distinction between serving as Kerrand’s eyes and becoming the person he looks at. His attention has made her feel newly visible to herself, but his decision to leave makes that attention seem temporary and leaves her longing without the drawing she wants. The ink is at once his working material and the substance she uses to mark herself; it connects her to his art while also exposing the limits of that connection.

The act ends neither in a portrait nor in mutual understanding. It ends with ink in her mouth and eyes, stuck eyelids, and the loss of her eyelashes as the price of seeing again. That painful return to the mirror makes the scene a self-directed attempt to become visible that cannot substitute for being seen by another person.