House of Beauty Read online

  ‘Doña Fina is expecting you, you can go in,’ said the receptionist.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Karen, making sure to pronounce all her consonants to hide her Caribbean accent.

  She went up a spiral staircase, passing by the second floor to reach the third. To her right, three manicure stations, four for eyelashes. In the middle, four cubicles and, at the back, to the left, Doña Josefina de Brigard’s office. Karen approached the half-open door and heard a voice beyond it telling her to come in. In the middle of an inviting room, with skylights that revealed a bright morning, stood a woman of uncertain age. She was dressed in low-heeled shoes, khaki pants, a beige blouse and a pearl necklace, with an impeccable blow-dry and subtle make-up.

  ‘Take a seat,’ she said in a low voice.

  Doña Josefina watched Karen walk to the chair on the other side of the only desk in the room. She looked her up and down with her deep green eyes, raising her eyebrows slightly.

  Then she looked straight into Karen’s eyes. Karen bowed her head.

  ‘Let me see your hands,’ she said.

  Karen held them out, a child at primary school all over again. But Doña Josefina didn’t get out a ruler to punish her. She let the young woman’s hand rest on her own for a moment, then put on her glasses, examined the hand with curiosity, repeated the operation with the left one and asked her once more to take a seat.

  She, in contrast, paced around the room. If I had that figure at that age, I wouldn’t sit down either, Karen thought.

  ‘Do you know how many years House of Beauty has been running?’

  ‘Twenty?’

  ‘Forty-five. Back then I had three children. I’m a great-grandmother now.’

  Karen looked at her waist, delicately cinched by a snakeskin belt. Her pale pink nails. Her almond-shaped eyes. Her prominent cheekbones had something of the opal about them, pale and gleaming. The woman standing before her could have been a film star.

  ‘House of Beauty and my family are all I have. I’m exacting, and I don’t make concessions.’

  ‘I understand,’ said Karen.

  ‘Yes, honey, you have an I-understand face. You went from an exclusive salon in Cartagena to a run-of-the-mill one in Bogotá. Why?’

  ‘Because I earn more here than there, or at least that’s what I thought when I left the coast.’

  ‘It’s always about the money.’

  ‘I have a four-year-old.’

  ‘So does every other young woman.’

  ‘A four-year-old?’ Karen said.

  ‘I see you’ve got a sense of humour,’ said Doña Josefina, abruptly going back to the formal ‘usted’. ‘This is a place for serious, discreet women who are willing to work twelve-hour days, who take pride in their work and understand that beauty requires the highest level of professionalism. With your gracefulness, I’m positive you could go far here. You’ll see: our clients may have money, some of them a lot of money, but much of the time they are tremendously insecure about their femininity. We all have our fears, and as we start ageing, those fears grow. So, here at House of Beauty we must be excellent at our jobs, but we must also be warm, understanding, and know how to listen.’

  ‘I understand,’ said Karen automatically.

  ‘Of course you don’t, child. You’re not old enough to understand.’

  Karen kept quiet.

  ‘So, as I was saying, don’t be too quick to answer; if they want to chat, then you chat; if they want to keep quiet, you should never initiate a conversation. Requesting a tip or favours of any nature warrants dismissal. Answering your phone during work hours warrants dismissal. Leaving House of Beauty without seeking prior permission warrants dismissal. Taking home any of the implements without permission warrants dismissal. Holidays are granted after the first year; pension contributions and healthcare are at your own expense. Same with holidays, which are in fact unpaid leave, and can never exceed two weeks, bank holidays included. The files, creams, oils, spatulas and other implements are at your own expense, too.’

  ‘Can I ask what the salary is?’

  ‘That depends. For each service, you receive forty per cent. If you’re popular and our clients book a lot of appointments with you, after a few months you could earn one million pesos, including tips.’

  ‘I accept.’

  Doña Josefina smiled.

  ‘Not so fast, honey. This afternoon I’ve got two more interviews.’

  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 leavi
ng 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 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.