House of Beauty

Karen found it fascinating that an elegant woman with a well-bred air could switch so easily between being formal and informal.

‘Then I would just like to say that I’m very interested,’ she said politely.

‘We’ll have an answer for you in a couple of days.’

As Karen was leaving, Doña Josefina stopped her.

‘And one more thing. Who doesn’t like a Caribbean accent? Don’t try to hide it. No one, not one single soul in this country or any other, likes the way we Bogotans speak.’

A week later, Karen was part of House of Beauty. ‘If I had been put in the eyebrow, make-up and eyelashes section, I’d have had trouble competing with Susana,’ she told me. Each woman had her strengths, and soon Karen was queen of the second floor. She was assigned cubicle number 3 for facials, massages and waxing. Her beauty, care and professionalism made her a favourite, especially for waxing. She discovered that when Bogotan women came for a Brazilian, it was almost never on their own initiative but because their husband, boyfriend or lover had asked. She told me about her clients and her colleagues at House of Beauty. That was how the name Sabrina Guzmán came up.

Karen knows who has a birthmark on her hip, who suffers from varicose veins, whose breast implants give her trouble, who is about to split up, who has a lover, who is cheating, who is travelling to Miami for the long weekend, who was diagnosed with cancer last week, and who has daily waist-slimming massages without telling her husband.

What’s confessed in the cubicle stays in the cubicle, same as happens on the couch. Like the therapist or confessor, the beautician takes a vow of silence. Of course, she would later come to tell me things she’d been told in the cubicle. But that was different.

On the treatment table, as on the couch in my line of work, a woman can stretch out in surrender. She obeys the SWITCH OFF YOUR PHONE sign and enters the cubicle ready to disconnect. For fifteen minutes, half an hour, maybe more, she is isolated from the world. She tunes out everything but her body, the silence or the intimate conversation. Often the confidences shared in the cubicle have never been told to anyone before.

Sabrina Guzmán arrived one Thursday in the middle of a downpour, barely half an hour before closing. She reeked of brandy, her hair was soaking wet, and she was in her school uniform. She said her boyfriend was taking her to a romantic dinner and the night would conclude in a five-star hotel. As far as Karen understood, it was the same boyfriend who had wanted to sleep with her on two previous occasions, but hadn’t done the honours because, in Sabrina’s words, she wasn’t as smooth as an apple.

He was coming to Bogotá for two days, so he had to make the most of it. Sabrina didn’t explain what he’d be making the most of, but Karen assumed she meant deflowering her. The waxing was torture for them both. Sabrina complained too much, and when Karen saw a few drops of blood, she felt suddenly cold.

When the girl left, Karen stared at that sprinkle of blood on the treatment table cover and wondered how to get rid of it. She tried water, soap and ammonia, but only managed to smudge the stain to a pale rose. That stain would have to accompany her for the rest of her days working at House of Beauty.

3.

A few days later, when Sabrina Guzmán’s lifeless body was discovered, the name of Sabrina’s lover came back to Karen. The brief write-up said only that the seventeen-year-old, a student at the girls’ grammar Gimnasio Feminino, died from an aneurism, and the funeral service would take place at midday the same day, 24 July, at the Church of the Immaculate Conception.

Despite knowing that leaving House of Beauty during work hours was forbidden, Karen felt an urgent need to go. She went into the lavatory, stripped off her uniform, pulled on her skinny jeans and white top, and asked Susana if she could borrow the black blazer she had worn to work that morning.

She went out into the rain with her cheap 5,000-peso umbrella. She forged ahead to the sound of car horns, jumping puddles until she reached Carrera 11, where she boarded a rundown bus. Inside, she folded the umbrella, opened her purse, paid the fare and made her way towards the back, squished between men’s warm backsides and the smell of patchouli emanating from women with long hair and dye jobs gone wrong. When she grasped the rail, she thought the same thing she did every time she hopped on a bus: there was nothing more repulsive than the feel of that greasy, sticky metal.

People were still getting on. A fat man’s chest pressed against her own. He was so tall she saw his dark double chin above her head when she lifted her gaze.

A child of about eleven hopped on selling mints. He said he had escaped the armed conflict in Tolima. He said he had four siblings. That he was ‘head of household’. Karen rummaged in her purse and handed him a 500-peso coin before ringing the bell. The driver stopped abruptly and she leapt to the pavement.

Before going into the church, she stepped inside a department store. She wanted to get rid of the stench from the bus. She applied a test perfume, Chanel No. 5, checked her reflection in a small mirror between rows of blusher pots, fixed her hair, pulled a lipstick from her handbag, applied it carefully and went on her way.

When she got to the church, she moved through the crowd to the front, as if borne along a conveyor belt. In the fourth or fifth pew, she found a free space. Before her was the closed coffin. Very few people would be able to remember the body as she did. Her long, slim toes. Veins showing at the calves. She recalled the freckles on the narrow shoulders, her straight nose, her huge eyes and thin lips, and she suddenly realised Sabrina was beautiful. Her beauty might have been grey, like this city, but at the same time it was subtle, full of secrets.

Sadness washed over her, like a wave in the middle of a calm sea. She clenched her fist to keep from crying, imagined mascara running down her cheeks, and people wondering who the interloper crying her eyes out could be. She thought of the effort the two of them went to just a few days earlier to leave Sabrina as smooth as an apple. Remembering she was in a church, she squirmed. Only then did she glance at the man beside her. She was sure she had seen him before. He was a celebrity. For a moment, she thought she’d seen him on TV presenting celebrity news, but she realised he was too old for that. Then she recognised him. He was the author of the self-help classics Happiness Is You and I Love Myself.

Karen smiled. Four years ago, before the arrival of her son Emiliano changed her life completely, Karen was in her first semester at the University of Cartagena, studying social work.

What happened to her happened because she was a fool, she knew, though she was not all that less of a fool now; it happened because she was straight-laced, which she still was. And the thing was, the Thinking Skills professor talked so nicely. Yes, he was old, much older than she was – she’d just turned eighteen – but in her eyes, he was learned, enlightened. Professor Nixon Barros had the swagger of Caribbean men. And he talked nicely and had a belly laugh. All that seduced her; whenever she watched him speak, she was hypnotised. Nixon wasn’t afraid of tenderness. To Karen, he seemed like a real man. She liked his kinky hair. She liked the sweat that covered his forehead and didn’t bother him in the least. She liked his Guayabera shirts, always too big for him, and his cologne.

With Professor Nixon, she explored the Bazurto Market and got drunk for the first time in El Goce Pagano. For almost a year, she skipped classes and kept a secret that made her blush. Karen knew he was married, for the second time, that he lived with a younger wife and a child. But the day he leaned over to kiss her, Karen didn’t stop to think about the Prince Charming her mamá had in mind for her, or that Professor Nixon was old, and married – she just closed her eyes and parted her lips.

As the days passed, her happiness, her infatuation, her madness was so acute that she started to let her flesh do the thinking.

She let him make love to her down a dark street in Getsemaní and for the next three or four months kept letting him do so wherever and whenever they could, with growing appetite and surrender. Nixon Abelardo Barros told her so many things that amazed her. For him, she read Melissa Panarello’s 100 Strokes of the Brush Before Bed, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, Coelho’s Love Letters from a Prophet, and Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra. They kindled a chaotic revolution inside her. That was when she started to look differently at women with waxed eyebrows, and to let the hair grow under her arms as an expression of freedom. ‘I wasn’t put in this world to please men,’ she told her mamá when she asked what those tufts sprouting from her armpits were. ‘Come off it, young lady – please me, then.’ Doña Yolanda had been known to go without food if money was scarce, yet would never sacrifice her trips to the hairdresser.

Her mother had bet on Karen’s beauty as their best shot at escaping poverty. She often told her daughter that if she had been presentable the morning after her fling with the gringo, if he hadn’t caught her in a dishevelled mess, with bags under her eyes, he would never have left her waiting in vain, ‘whistling iguanas’ as she called it. As far as Karen understood, her father was a poet, an artist, a traveller, though she often intuited that her mamá had an active imagination, since from one day to the next he was a troubadour from Sincelejo, a boxer from Turbaco and an English sailor. Karen liked the last idea best.

She was a tall, skinny adolescent, and though her mother fed her as well as she could, the only thing that grew were her bones. Every morning Doña Yolanda readied the grill and cooked up scrambled eggs with cultured buttermilk, rice, beans, yuca and fish, yet the girl only stretched upwards. Happiness for Karen was in that breakfast and berry juice, sitting in the patio, when the picó sound systems had been switched off and Calle del Pirata no longer boomed with competing melodies – vallenato, reggaeton, champeta, rancheras, the same war every weekend. It was in the barefooted kids kicking up the dust in the street, and in her cousins bringing over crates of chilled Costeñita to drink out the front, some lounging on Rimax chairs, and Uncle Juan in his rocker, always quiet, always serious, his eyes red from getting only a few hours’ sleep, his smile helpless as he contemplated her with alcoholic fondness.

In her rebellious period, Karen left untouched the wild curls nature had given her. But after Emiliano was born and she began training as a beautician, the drone of her mother and her beauty-school education wore at her resolve. Not only did she get sick of explaining why she preferred to keep her natural curls, but she became an expert in straight hair.

For her family, girlfriends and people she knew, using a condom when sleeping with a man was the equivalent of being treated like a prostitute. ‘If there’s love, there’s no condom,’ Doña Yolanda repeated. She rounded out that sentence with one of her many superstitions: ‘If a man tells you he cares for you, look at his pupils. If they dilate, he’s lying.’ Nixon had said he cared for her, and his pupils had stayed the same. But more than that, Karen trusted him.

Nixon was not another man who talked only about money and cars, and about women as if they were livestock. Nixon didn’t go around wearing gold chains, he wasn’t obsessed with champeta or Rey de Rocha concerts. Nixon liked poetry – like her father, thought Karen, though she didn’t really know anything about her father. He also understood that she would choose a university degree any day over competing in the end-of-year district beauty contests.

In that first semester, as well as sitting exams and writing essays, Karen tried marijuana, dancing to classic salsa, but above all she tried sex, whenever and wherever; she discovered she could revert to a primitive state, and she relished it. She learned to go into a kind of trance, almost always with Nixon, and at other times with the help of the Chinese balls her mother kept in the kitchen drawer, Uncle Juan’s foot massager or her own hand.

For Karen, reading Eduardo Ramelli’s I Love Myself meant she could keep any guilt about her behaviour at a prudent distance, or at least distract herself with the arguments of a book underpinned by hedonism. While she was reading it, a few things started happening to her: a sick feeling in the morning, swollen breasts that ached at the slightest touch, sleepiness and fatigue. She was halfway through the book when she decided to take a test one Sunday morning.

‘Fuck,’ she said. She’d just turned nineteen.

Her mother stopped talking to her for a few weeks, until one suffocating afternoon Karen heard her scooter approaching. Karen was lying on her bed with rollers in her hair, leafing through an old magazine.

‘What’s the plan? Just lie here all day, getting fat on sunlight?’

‘I fed Uncle Juan,’ Karen said.

‘Go and do something. You’re pregnant, not sick. Make yourself busy doing whatever I tell you to, or you’re out of here.’

Of all the books she read, the one that stayed with her – the one she read right up to the day she gave birth – was I Love Myself, though she no longer thought its message was aimed at her.

The man sitting beside Karen that sunny morning at Sabrina Guzmán’s funeral was none other than the author of her bedtime reading, Eduardo Ramelli. He must have been over sixty. His even cinnamon complexion shone, and he had blue eyes and greying, neat hair slicked back with gel, like a heart-throb of old.

‘Chanel No. 5,’ he whispered in her ear.

Karen kept quiet, not because she didn’t know the author of Happiness Is You was wearing Paco Rabanne 1 Million, nor because she didn’t want to play the game, but because her throat had closed up. Ramelli shot her a half-smile, his eyes fixed on the priest but clearly conscious of her delicate presence beside him.

‘What’s your name?’ he asked after the Eucharist. A long and severe ‘shhh’ from nearby ended his efforts to get her to talk. Then came the familiar ‘Go in peace’. Mass was over. The first two pews were reserved for close family. A woman was crying inconsolably, her arms wrapped tight around a young boy. The keyboard sounded and an out-of-tune choir sang ‘Ave Maria’ while the funeral goers filed out of the church. Karen reached the aisle and headed for the exit. She smelled Ramelli behind her for a couple of metres, until she lost the scent when two tall women intercepted him. She focused her attention on the ladies. They had fluffy hairdos, like egg whites whisked to stiff peaks. Tailored clothing hung from their brittle bodies. Some had drivers waiting for them outside. Often a bodyguard handed his employer a bulky umbrella at the exit, so she could take her time smoothly skirting the puddles while he ran in the pouring rain to the same car. Then they all got in, women in the back, servants at the front.

Crossing Avenida Calle 100, Karen was assaulted by the beeping horns, the exhaust fumes, the green buses as timeworn as the hunger of those begging, the one-armed men clutching squeegees on the hunt for coins, the displaced people with their dirty bits of cardboard that invariably told the legend of a lost town, the chronicle of a massacre. They’d all used the same black marker to set down the account, with grammatical errors, their handwriting suggesting they’d barely finished third grade, and they’d done so with an unsteady hand, the pavement their only support; once they’d got their story down they set up on the same ordinary corner and went in search of the elusive compassion of the commuters. Several women, almost always black or indigenous, with children hanging from their breasts or back, kept one hand on the little one, held the cardboard in the other and had their coin tins tucked under an arm. It was a sorry balancing act, and the women engaged in it had to be constantly alert to the changing traffic lights.

As soon as the lights turned red, the vehicles were set upon by beggars, criminals, addicts, street performers, down-and-outers, children and pregnant women, as well as disabled, illiterate, displaced, abused and maimed people. The performance was so repetitive and predictable that nowadays no one was the least bit surprised. Or almost no one. Recent arrivals to the cold city were often distressed when confronted with this sight.

The mountains surrounding the city ‘marked the limits of civilisation’ – at least, that’s what students at the elite San Bartolomé College were taught in the seventies. Every day, more people arrived from all over the country. Karen realised with a start that she was just another one of them. She was like the mango sellers, the scrap-metal buyers, the collectors of broken odds and ends, the jugglers and the beggars.

But what astonished her wasn’t the vast array of professions that hunger inspired. It was how it had all become routine. She watched those women in their armoured SUVs, the way they wound up the window when someone approached with a hand outstretched. The reaction seemed to come straight out of an instruction manual read in a land where guards, fences and muzzled dogs formed part of the everyday scenery.

When she arrived back at House of Beauty, her legs were tired. Her hands were cold. She ran up to the second floor, and got changed as fast as she could. She was almost ready to go into her cubicle when a sharp knock sounded on the lavatory door.

‘Yes?’ she said, tying her shoelaces.

‘Doña Fina wants to speak to you,’ a voice said from the other side.

‘Coming,’ she said, and checked her reflection in the mirror, fixing her ponytail before going out. This is what happens when you go where you’re not invited, she thought. Just when she was starting to save enough money, she was going to get herself fired on account of a client she barely knew. Doña Fina was waiting with the door half-open.

‘You wanted to speak to me?’

‘Sit down,’ Doña Josefina said curtly.

Karen scrutinised her boss. Doña Josefina was raising her left eyebrow slightly.

‘Karen, you were absent from work, during work hours, without my consent,’ she started. ‘I want you to know that nothing escapes me. Even when I’m not here I have eyes and ears everywhere. Do you hear me, honey?’

‘Yes, Señora.’

‘Now, just so you’re aware how much I always know, I’ll tell you where you went: to that girl Sabrina Guzmán’s funeral. Know how I found out? This morning her mother called, saying she thought she came here often, and that she’d been here the day before last. I wasn’t sure who took care of her, so we checked the appointment book. That’s how I found out you lost a client. My deepest condolences, honey.’

‘I only saw her two or three times.’

‘Four, to be exact. And what do you know about her?’

‘Not much, Doña Fina, she was a normal teenager.’

‘Oh honey, as if that exists. You’ve got to understand, if they launch an investigation, the police will ask you the same questions. You’d better know how to respond. What did she get done?’

‘The usual.’

‘A wax?’

‘Yes.’

‘Bikini?’

‘Yes, Señora.’

‘The full Brazilian?’

‘Yes.’

At that moment, Annie poked her head around the door.

‘Sorry to interrupt. Karen, your next client is waiting.’

‘Can I leave, Señora?’

‘Off you go. But best not mention this to anyone. If you start saying a client died after an appointment with you, no one will set foot in your cubicle again.’

‘Thank you,’ Karen said, wondering if Doña Fina was serious. She was making sure to pull the door half-shut behind her when she stopped midway and turned around:

‘Excuse me, Señora, but the girl is already buried. What could they investigate now?’

‘How am I to know?’ Doña Josefina waved her hand. ‘Now shut that door for me, I have important things to attend to.’

4.

As the years went by, Eduardo cried more easily. He cried in romantic films, on seeing how his hair came away on the pillow, on noting his erectile dysfunction. Not long ago he cried, oh how he cried, when, finally, after a Viagra, and vast amounts of concentration, he managed to be with a woman. The worst thing is, I found out because he himself told me. My only consolation is that, as far as I know, while we were married he never brought them home, or that’s what I like to believe. He especially liked a black woman named Gloria, who couldn’t have been over twenty. Oh, to have my twenties again, I thought, when I spied them on the terrace of a seafood restaurant on Calle 77. It was a coincidence. I had been to see a dermatologist, and decided to walk home. I saw them from the pavement opposite. He squeezed and released her hand in a seductive move so old that, back in the day, it worked its magic on me. I knew her name because once, when I was using his computer, I opened a folder called ‘Gloria’, where I saw the photos. As with other times, I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t blame him for going out on the street to get what I’d stopped giving him so long ago. I was hurt more by his selfishness, his lack of interest in me and the fact that he left me on my own. The girl got to me less. Over the years, bit by bit I’d lost all feelings of desire, and this got worse with the onset of menopause. I thought, if he needs sex, he can go get it where it’s on offer. But he could at least keep me company, show interest in the things I care about. Though, truth be told, I’m not too sure what these are any more, since I’ve been focused on him for so many years.

That day, when I saw them with their hands entwined, brushing against a shrimp ceviche cocktail, I’d just been diagnosed with vitiligo. Just what I needed, I thought. I held in the urge to cry in front of that cardboard cut-out of a doctor. He was looking at me with such pity. But he was only a whippersnapper, he couldn’t have been over thirty.

I went out quiet, calm. Said to myself, I’m going to walk home, I’ll go via the supermarket. The diagnosis explained the large white streak that had appeared a few months ago, ruining my black hair. Same went for the patches on my ankle and left cheek. I was feeling low, I won’t deny it. And right then I came across my husband with that ebony sculpture, the woman I’d already seen in her birthday suit. It was too much. One humiliation after another. And the worst thing was, I didn’t even care. I’m not sure what it is. Whether it’s the menopause or just that I’ve grown used to living with shame, the fact is I remained in a listless state I thought I’d never come out of, until Claire came back into my life.

She gave me back some of the energy I’d lost. We hadn’t been especially close at school. As a psychologist, my father was respectable more than wealthy, so we lived in different worlds. Claire was beautiful, haughty, proud. She was from a good family and was outstanding at whatever she set her mind to; I was nothing special. On top of that, I had frightful mousy hair with about as much lustre as potato soup, and horrendous glasses. We had a friend in common, Teresa, who these days is wife of the Minister for Internal Affairs. But Claire was a sophisticated woman from a very different world from me.

Nevertheless, when we met up for the first time after she’d said she was back in Colombia, she was so affectionate, and I suspected she was lonely. So, we caught up a second time, four or five days ago, and drank an outrageous amount of whisky. I confess I’d never had a whisky in my life. I’d tried it, so I knew what it tasted like, but I’d never drunk a whole one. When I had the chance, I drank a glass of wine, maybe a champagne or Baileys. Never whisky. But Claire poured herself one and said, ‘Do you want a whisky?’

I wasn’t about to say ‘Do you have a Baileys in the cupboard somewhere?’ like an old lady or a fifteen-year-old. No. I summoned the courage and said, ‘Yes, pour me one, yum.’