Czytaj książkę: «House of Beauty: The Colombian crime sensation and bestseller»

1.

I hate artificial nails in outlandish colours, fake blonde hair, cool silk blouses and diamond earrings at four in the afternoon. Never before have so many women looked like transvestites, or like prostitutes dressing up as good wives.

I hate the perfume they drench themselves in, these women as powdered as cockroaches in a bakery; what’s worse, it makes me sneeze. And don’t get me started on their accessories – those smartphones swaddled in infantile cases, in fuchsia and similar and covered with sequins, imitation gemstones and ridiculous designs. I hate everything these waxed-eyebrowed, non-biodegradable women represent. I hate their shrill, affected voices; they’re like dolls for four-year-olds, little drug-dealer hussies bottled into plastic bodies as stiff as the muscles on a man. It’s very confusing; these macho girl-women disturb me, overwhelm me, force me to dwell on all that’s broken and ruined in a country like this, where a woman’s worth is determined by how ample her buttocks and breasts are, how slender her waist. I hate the stunted men too, reduced to primitive versions of themselves, always looking for a female to mount, to exhibit like a trophy, to trade in or show off as a status symbol among fellow Neanderthals. But just as I hate this Mafioso world, which for the past twenty years or so has dominated the taste and behaviour of thugs, politicians, businessmen and almost anyone who has the slightest connection to power in this country, I also hate the ladies of Bogotá, among whom I count myself, though I do all I can to stand apart.

I hate their habit of using the term ‘Indians’ to refer to people they consider to be from a low social class. I hate the obsessive need to distinguish between the formal ‘usted’ and informal ‘tú’, expecting the servants to address them as ‘usted’, while they themselves use ‘tú’. I loathe the servility of waiters in the restaurants when they rush to attend to customers, saying ‘what would you like, sir’, ‘as you wish, sir’, ‘on your orders, sir’. I hate so many things in so many ways, things that seem to me unjust, stupid, arbitrary and cruel, and most of all I hate myself for playing my own part in the status quo.

Mine’s an ordinary story. It’s not worth the trouble of telling in detail. Maybe I should mention that my father was a French immigrant who came to Colombia thanks to a contract to construct a steel mill. My brother and I were born here. Like others of our social class, we grew up behaving as if we were foreigners. Wherever we were – our place in the north of Bogotá, or the apartment in Cartagena’s old quarter – we lived our lives surrounded by walls. There were a few summers in Paris, the Rosario Islands once or twice. My life hasn’t been all that different from that of a rich Italian, French or Spanish woman. I learned to eat fresh lobster as a little girl, to catch sea urchins; by the age of twenty-one I could tell a Bordeaux wine from a Burgundy, play the piano and speak French with no accent, and I was as familiar with the history of the Old Continent as I was unfamiliar with my own.

Security has been an issue for me as far back as I can remember. I’m blonde, blue-eyed and 5 foot 8 tall, which is getting less exotic nowadays, but when I was a child it was an ace up my sleeve to win the nuns’ affection or to get preferential treatment from my peers. It also attracted attention, and so made my father paranoid about kidnappings. As luck would have it, we were never targeted. Our money and my peaches-and-cream complexion contributed to my isolation, though lately I’ve begun to wonder if I tell myself that to sidestep the responsibility for being an exile in body and soul. No matter where I’ve travelled, I’ve always been someplace else.

At my age, melancholy is part of my inner landscape. Last month I turned fifty-nine. I turn my gaze inward and back on my life far more than I look out to the world around me. Mostly because I’m not interested, and don’t like what I find out there. Maybe they’re the same thing. I suppose my neurosis has something to do with my scathing reading of the here and now, but it’s also inevitable. As Octavio Paz would say, this is the ‘house of glances’, my house of glances, I have no other. I accept my snobbish nature. I accept, no, more than accept, I embrace my hatreds. Maybe that’s the definition of maturity.

When I left Colombia, mothers still made sure their daughters’ knees weren’t showing; now nothing is left to the imagination. That’s another thing that shocked me when I came back. I felt like women’s breasts were coming after me with aggressive insolence. At any rate, I haven’t managed to readapt to Colombia, and in France I was always a foreigner.

I didn’t go to Paris just to study; I was fleeing. I was comfortable there for a long time, I got married, had a daughter, pursued my career. But then the years pressed in on me like thorns and my memories grew hazy, until the day I understood it was time I came back. Divorced, with fifty-seven Aprils under my belt and a twenty-two-year-old daughter studying at the Sorbonne, I packed my life into three old suitcases and made the trip without her. Aline speaks Spanish with an accent and makes mistakes. She’s stunning. Slim and very tall, with a preference for women over men that might be fleeting or here to stay. Not that it worries me too much. Though I know that if the poor thing lived here she would have to put up with moralisers, bullying. Things have changed somewhat, it’s true. At least now you see a few foreigners in the streets and there are more people who think differently. Even so, aside from my friend Lucía Estrada, with whom I’ve rekindled my friendship after almost two decades, I’m very alone. Not that I need anyone, not really.

COLOMBIA IS PASSION, according to the poster that greeted me at the airport. And the other day the press reported fifteen dead after a massacre in the south. That passion must be what makes me hate some people so fervently. Señora Urrutia, Señora Pombo and Señora MacAllister, who invite me to take tea and to pray for a sick friend or for the eleven children killed in the latest landslide in the city’s south, where they’ve never set foot. The doormen who take such pleasure in denying everyone entry, the security convoys that charge through the rest of the traffic, the desperate down-and-outs who tear off side mirrors at the traffic lights. Only at work do I connect with my compassionate side. Bitterness hasn’t caught up with that part of me yet.

At the start of 2013, I purchased a good apartment on Calle 93, near Chicó Park. I dusted off some corporate shares and bought not just the apartment but also a plot of land in Guasca, where I intend to build a little house in the mountains. In the same apartment, I set up a consulting room and, thanks to my credentials, had patients in no time. I confess I find most of them boring. Their fears are so predictable, and so are all of their complexes, inhibitions and thought processes. Nevertheless, I was short on other hobbies, and fell back on therapy once more. Fortunately, the city has a very broad cultural offering, so every now and then I’m in the mood for a concert or exhibition. I set aside two afternoons a week for such things. Psychoanalysts earn plenty and, given my age and circumstances, I needn’t work too much.

In time, I started taking walks on these free afternoons. There’s no way of getting to the city centre without spending two hours stuck in traffic, so I keep to my neighbourhood and explore it on foot. On one of these outings I discovered a couple of new bookshops, a splendid pastry place and a few boutiques. Yet I had no desire to try anything on; my body is growing less and less recognisable to me. Often, my own face in the mirror surprises me. My naked legs are an unlikely map, discoloured and forgotten.

It was on one of these strolls around the neighbourhood that, after browsing along Avenida 82, I ended up having a cappuccino and a chocolate soufflé in Michel’s Patisserie. I felt guilty, and decided to walk as far as Carrera 15 and then head home, again on foot. After a few blocks, on that clear May afternoon, I paused in front of a white building with glass doors I’d never stepped through. LA CASA DE LA BELLEZA was written in silver lettering. I peeped inside out of simple curiosity. I think it was the name that attracted me. House of Beauty. I was running my eye over the expensive products, for wrinkles, hydration, slimming, stretchmarks and cellulite, when I saw her by the reception desk. She was wearing white tennis shoes and a light-blue uniform and she had her hair pulled up in a ponytail. A long, black tress fell down her back. The rings under her eyes didn’t matter, nor did her tired expression: her beauty was forceful, almost indecently so. The young woman oozed life. There was something savage and raw in her that made her seem – how to say it? – real. I’m still not sure if it was the result of discipline and vanity, or simply an inherited gift. I’ll never know. Karen is a great mystery. Even more so in a city like this, where everyone’s appearance reflects who they are; where their attire, speech and the place they live announce how they will act. The codes of behaviour are as predictable as they are repetitive. I was captivated by her gazelle-like figure, but above all by a certain serenity in her expression. I’d bet she did absolutely nothing to look like that. If I knew anything simply by looking at her, it was that tranquillity has nested in her soul.

Perhaps because I stood there, stunned, staring at her as if she were an apparition, she came forward to ask:

‘Do you need help, Señora?’

She smiled effortlessly, as if expressing her gratitude at being alive. I was surprised no one else seemed to perceive her beauty. It was as if the finest orchid had fallen at random into a mud puddle. All around her were women in heels sporting fake smiles. The receptionist was a monstrosity of cherry lips and caked-on blusher. Not her. She seemed to rise above it all, to be the reason for the name of the edifice.

‘Yes, thank you. I’d like a wax,’ I said, as if I hadn’t done my own waxing since I’d had the ability to reason.

‘We’re not too busy at the moment. Would you like an appointment now?’

‘Now’s fine,’ I said, mesmerised.

‘Excuse me, your name?’

‘Claire. Claire Dalvard.’

‘Please follow me,’ she said. And so I followed.