Copyright

4th Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.4thestate.co.uk

This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate 2018

Copyright © Melba Escobar de Nogales 2015

By agreement with Pontas Literary & Film Agency

English translation © Elizabeth Bryer 2018

Cover photograph © Shutterstock.com

Melba Escobar asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008264277

Ebook Edition © March 2018 ISBN: 9780008264253

Version: 2019-02-23

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

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2.

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41.

About the Author

About the Translator

About the Publisher

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.

2.

‘From a young age, black women straighten their hair with creams, with straighteners, with hairdryers; we chew pills, wrap it up, pin it down, apply hair masks, sleep with stocking caps in place, use a silicone sealer. Having straight hair is as important as wearing a bra, it’s an essential part of femininity. A woman’s got to do what a woman’s got to do, she has to pluck up her courage, use as many clips as it takes. She has to be prepared to endure painful tugging, sometimes for hours on end. It’s wasteful and uncomfortable, but there’s no getting away from it if you want to achieve the silky straight look,’ said Karen in her low, rhythmic cadence.

‘And little girls, do they have to do it too?’

‘If they’re really little, no, but young ladies – eight, nine – then sure, they all straighten their hair, of course,’ she said as she removed the wraps.

Karen told me that when she arrived here, she liked the city. And yes. Many find it beautiful. Many are drawn to the mild sadness that distinguishes it, a sadness that is occasionally interrupted by a bright Sunday morning as radiant as it is unexpected.

She left her four-year-old with her mother in Cartagena and came to Bogotá. A former colleague had started up a beauty treatment centre in the Quirigua district, and she offered her a job. She promised her mamá she would send money for Emiliano each month, which she does. Her mamá lives in a house in the San Isidro neighbourhood with Uncle Juan, a confirmed bachelor who is in poor health. They live mainly on her uncle’s pension, his due for the thirty years he worked in the post office, and on the money Karen sends.

Karen grew up listening to vallenato, bachata and, when she was old enough, champeta. Her mother, barely sixteen years older than Karen, was crowned Miss San Isidro once, which she thought was a sign she would escape poverty. Instead, she ended up pregnant by a blond guy – a sailor, she assumed – who spoke little Spanish. After love paid Karen’s mother that furtive visit, the honey-coloured girl was born, and she shared not only her mother’s surname, but her beauty and her poverty too.

Doña Yolanda Valdés sold lottery tickets, sold fried fare, was a domestic worker, bartended in the city. Finally, she devoted herself to her grandson, resigned to her arthritis and to the fact that she gave birth to a girl instead of a boy. At forty years of age she was practically an old woman.

Doña Yolanda’s love affairs resulted in two more pregnancies, boys both times, but her luck was such that one was born dead and the other died after just a few days. Yolanda Valdés said the women in her family were cursed. An evil spell fell over them when they least expected it, and condemned them to inescapable solitude.

Karen remembers the seven o’clock Mass on Sundays and waking to the sound of canaries singing. She remembers fish stew at Los Morros beach and taut skin and the dizzying white lights that speckled her field of vision when she floated for a long stretch.

In time, our ritual of shutting ourselves away in that cubicle, sheltered by her youth, the cadence of the sea and the force of her soft, firm hands, became for me a need as ferocious as hunger.

From the moment I first set eyes on her, I wanted to know her. Gently, tenderly, I asked her questions while she moved her fingertips over my back. That’s how I found out that she arrived in Bogotá in January 2013, the sunny time of year. First she stayed in Suba, in the Corinto neighbourhood, where a family rented her a small apartment with a bathroom and kitchenette for 300,000 pesos, including utilities. She earned the minimum wage. At the end of the month she didn’t have two pesos to rub together, so couldn’t send anything home. On top of that, the neighbourhood was unsafe and she lived in constant fear. On the same morning that a drunk man shot two people for blocking a public road during a family get-together, Karen made up her mind to find another place to live.

She moved to Santa Lucía, to the south, near Avenida Caracas, but now had to cross the entire city to reach the salon where she worked.

When a colleague mentioned that an exclusive beauty salon in the north was looking for someone, Karen secured an interview. It was the beginning of April. The city was waterlogged from downpours. Karen had been in the new house barely a couple of weeks and took the deluge as a sign of abundance.

House of Beauty is in Zona Rosa, Bogotá’s premier shopping, dining and entertainment district. From the outside, the white edifice suggests an air of cleanliness and sobriety: part dental clinic, part fashionable boutique. Once through the glass doors, you are transported to a land of women. The receptionist behind the counter greets you with her best smile. Several uniformed employees, polished and smiling, are in the display room offering creams, perfumes, eyeshadow and masks in the best brands. On the coffee table in the waiting room are piles of magazines.

Karen remembers arriving on the fifth of April at around 11.30 in the morning. As soon as she crossed the threshold, she breathed deep an aroma of vanilla, almonds, rosewater, polish, shampoo and lavender.

The receptionist, whom she would soon have the chance to get to know better, looked like a porcelain doll. An upturned nose, large eyes and those full, cherry-coloured lips. As she headed past her for the waiting room, Karen wondered what lipstick she used.

At the back, there was a large mirror and two salon chairs where a couple of women did eyebrow waxing, make-up and product testing. They were all wearing light-blue slacks and short-sleeved blouses in the same colour. They looked like nurses, but well-groomed and made up, with impeccably manicured hands and waspish waists. The name badge on one perfectly bronzed woman told Karen her name was Susana.

The cleaner also wore a blue uniform, but in a darker hue. She came over to offer Karen a herbal tea, which Karen accepted. She saw the tropipop singer known as Rika come in. She was dark and voluptuous with an enviable tan, possibly older than she looked. She wore sunglasses like a tiara, had a gold ring on each finger and lots of bracelets. Like Karen, she announced herself at the reception desk and then took a seat beside her with a magazine.

‘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 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.’

Recalling it now makes me chuckle. The first one tasted awful, but the next ones were a riot. That’s the kind of thing that happens when I’m with Claire. It’s like, let’s see, we’re the same age – I think I might even be a little younger – but next to her I feel so straight-laced. In contrast, she’s independent, liberated. Youth is definitely a mindset. On top of that, she’s heading towards sixty and is still stunning, absolutely stunning.

So, getting back to Eduardo, I met him when I was twenty-five. According to him this meant that, as a woman, I was in the prime of my life. He was thirty-seven. Until then I’d been a bookworm. My mother died when I was eleven. I was always quite ugly. In any case, I was never a beauty. I didn’t know much about men, and what I knew about relationships came from books. I decided to become a psychoanalyst because I grew up listening to my father talk about his cases, so it seemed the most natural thing to do. I don’t believe I even considered other options, though now I think I should have studied biology.

And so I met Eduardo at a conference. He seemed relaxed. Later I’d think frivolous. He seemed sure of himself, as though he had no need to impress anyone, though with time I’d come to interpret this as narcissism. While narcissism is a natural part of the human make-up, whereby any discovery that refutes one’s self-image is rejected, Eduardo takes this to the limit. He verges on sociopathy, a diagnosis that has taken me almost thirty years to arrive at. At least I devoted myself to writing and not to my patients. It’s possible the poor things have had a terrible time with me, since it takes me years to arrive at a diagnosis. But anyway. Speed has never been my thing. I was struck by the fact that a fine-looking man like Eduardo would notice me. I’ve always been full-bosomed, maybe that’s what attracted him. That and the manuscript, or the fact that I was always very understanding and maternal with him. I still remember the time he called me ‘mami’. He was distracted, leafing through the newspaper; I asked him something – whether he’d booked an appointment with the urologist, something like that – and, not lifting his gaze, he said, ‘No, mami,’ and then went bright red with embarrassment. I burst out laughing.

We got married a year after we met. I’d only been with one man before him, in a relationship as strange as it was uncomfortable for the both of us. I was head over heels for Eduardo. I couldn’t believe such a dish had looked twice at a woman like me. And as well as being good-looking, he was fun, witty, self-assured, worldly, classy – in other words, everything I wasn’t. As something of a dowry, you could say, I offered him a manuscript, which he published to great success. It was a book about the kind of love that kills. He thought it was extraordinary and only proposed a few changes. He published it under his own name, and mine – Lucía Estrada – wasn’t mentioned anywhere. I must have been spellbound by Eduardo because it’s not that I didn’t care; it actually made me proud. All I could think was, He liked it so much he published it under his own name. I couldn’t believe it. And then I wrote another book, which he again published under his name, but this time I’d said, ‘Look, my love, truth is I’m no good at giving interviews, at responding to emails, at explaining the theories put forward here. So, if you want, you keep signing your name.’

And to my surprise he’d said he’d be happy to. I was sort of hoping he would say, ‘No, my love, you can do it, you deserve the recognition, how could you think I’d sign for you.’ But that’s not what happened. Three decades and sixteen books later, Eduardo is the second-most-prominent self-help author in South America. And we all know who the number one is.

At the start of our marriage, having a child was up for discussion. He hadn’t closed the door and I thought that he’d keep it open for me. But no. He didn’t want children. Nor did he want to live abroad, because here he had his fans and his business associates. I kept writing the books. That, at least, took me to all different places. He gave talks, I wrote. He signed books, I wrote. He went shopping, I wrote. He spent the weekend with a lover, I wrote. And that’s how it went for thirty-three years. It’s not like I’ve really suffered or anything. I’ve lived comfortably. I like books; I feel secure, calm around them. I’ve had a good life. Plus, I loved Eduardo so much that his happiness was also mine. And we had things in common, though in all honesty he didn’t much like talking about books. Actually, I’m not certain what bonded us, exactly – cooking, maybe, as he knew how to make three or four dishes, and when he cooked he talked to me about what he was doing. I’m not sure what we did together all those years, but I didn’t feel bitter, or unhappy. None of that. It was only when we separated that I came to a diagnosis: the neurotic patient, in this case Eduardo, fashions his world into a mirror, and expects a response that reflects his own expectations about himself. In other words, the patient sees his wife, his friends and his work as projections, his idealisations of what they should be. In this way, he doesn’t recognise the other as an independent being, because the other only exists as a reflection of his own unsatisfied needs. When the inevitable failure of an idealised expectation occurs, an irreversible frustration overcomes him, giving rise to the process that Freud, following Jung, calls ‘the regression of libido’. This is how I lived for three decades with a man who never knew me nor wanted to get to know me.

He was a man for whom the important thing was feeling loved, admired and respected by an anonymous but irrefutable mass. My existence was important to him only in that it continued to validate his sense of self.

The fact is, in my own way, I was happy. I suppose that my happiness consisted in the ‘negation of my own desires’, in ‘renouncing myself’ and even in ‘self-punishment’: Claire’s words. I served him well, in all senses of the word. The ironic thing is, I still serve him. Before finalising a divorce settlement, I moved to a small apartment in La Soledad, where I still write books for Eduardo, in exchange for a monthly allowance and the occasional furtive encounter, almost always infelicitous. He still seems to me drop-dead gorgeous, and funny, and so refined; he’s as adorable as they come. Though, as I said, I haven’t felt desire for a long time. The point is that Eduardo suffered a lot as a child. His father mistreated him, and he had to learn to put up defences, to protect himself. We shouldn’t be so quick to judge others. And that’s what I told Claire. No one is as good or bad as he or she seems. Eduardo was never a bad man. Although, there’s some truth to the idea that I became more and more a mother figure. Yes, a mother figure. I brought him his slippers. Made him coffee. Ran his bath. And he turned to me for comfort, for reassurance. My poor Edu.

The last time we saw each other, he tried to kiss me. We’d been to dinner at a new restaurant. He brought me home and asked if he might have a drink before he left.

‘I’m tired,’ I said, trying to get out of it.

‘Just one glass, my Lu-chia.’

One glass turned into the five or six that were in the bottle and a never-ending monologue. I nodded off at the other end of the sofa. Eduardo wanted to talk about his impotence, then leaned over to kiss me, and I pushed him away.

‘I can’t, my love, I’m sorry,’ I mustered the energy to tell him.

‘You can’t or you can’t be bothered?’ he asked, lighting a cigarette, not looking at me.

In the cold early hours of 23 July, he woke on the couch. I had settled a blanket over him before going to bed. I fell asleep at almost three in the morning and two hours later heard him. But what was he doing? I wondered this in a half-awake state, because I could hear him tripping and moving about in the little living room while murmuring into his phone. A loud thud got me out of bed. I went out to see what was happening. Eduardo was searching for his shoes in a rush. The living room was still in semi-darkness. He had knocked over the bottle of whisky and the little that remained had spilled onto the parquetry floor.

‘What’s wrong?’ I asked, alarmed.

‘I’m sorry, Lucía, I have to go.’

‘So early?’

‘A friend’s in trouble, he needs my help, I’ll tell you about it later.’

Eduardo left. Right away I emptied the ashtray of my ex-husband’s butts. I wondered how it was that someone over sixty could have a friend in trouble at this time of the morning. It could happen in adolescence, but at this age? It reminded me why I left him. Eduardo was selfish and, forgive me, thought more with his willy than his head. How I hated the smell of cigarettes. One of the good things about my new place was that no one smoked here. That, and the silence, the peace. I bought a yoga book for beginners, a special mat and a few candles. Eduardo made fun of me. He thought it ridiculous that at this stage of my life I wanted to learn something new. Every afternoon I dedicated an hour to it, and bit by bit improved. The simple fact that I didn’t have to accompany Eduardo on his trips any more gave me lots of freedom. One or two afternoons a week, I went to the cinema, sometimes for long walks down Park Way. I even thought about getting a dog.

I got out a slice of bread and slotted it into the toaster. Mopped the parquetry floor. The smell of whisky nauseated me. I opened the windows. Prepared a coffee, watered the plants and brought the laptop to the dining table to go over what I’d written the day before. I served up the toast and coffee, put my glasses on and started to read: ‘This is how infidelity becomes the most common reason behind divorce and marital maltreatment. It can cause depression, anxiety, loss of self-love and many other psychological disturbances, representing the dark side of love.’ I read it twice. It made me laugh. I couldn’t read it again. The Dark Side of Love could be describing the two of us. I felt listless. What would happen if I didn’t write the book? The royalties from the others would be enough for us to live off. True, there was an existing contract for The Dark Side of Love and it was scheduled for release next year. But Eduardo could always find another ghost writer: nowadays there were a lot of decent young writers around, and some of them had studied psychology.

And he seemed to be doing very nicely from the business he had going with his associate. It wouldn’t matter in the least if we didn’t publish a book; it wasn’t as though we would starve. Though Eduardo was becoming increasingly ambitious. Greedy, you could say. In fact, that had been another catalyst for our separation. His plans to buy a place in New Hope, on top of the Gloria incident, were the last straw. It didn’t matter how much I criticised New Hope’s flashy Miami look, with all its showy pride at being the most expensive postcode in Bogotá. He’d insisted that we would be comfortable living among ‘people like us’.

‘People like us? And at what point did you become a prototypical, snobbish Colombian?’

‘Don’t start with me, Lucía,’ he’d said. ‘Anyone would think you were penniless.’

The conversation hadn’t lasted much longer. He argued that there was nothing wrong with wanting the best.

‘We deserve it, my Piccolina,’ he’d said.

He’d pulled out a green folder from his leather briefcase then opened it slowly and pulled out some papers.

‘Piccolina, the matter is already settled. All you need to do is sign here, and we’ll have made the best investment of our life.’

Eduardo leafed through the papers and started reading out loud and telling me about the property. ‘You have to see the vertical garden on the rocks out the back. There are 350 car spaces, a security room, 48 security cameras.’

He kept reading. ‘You’ll love the function room, my love, it has its own kitchen. And amazing furniture – all designer, very tasteful. But the best part is the clubhouse. You like swimming, you’ll love it. There’s a climatised semi-Olympic pool, with a swimming instructor, sauna, steam room, Pilates room …’

The phrase ‘you like swimming’ had echoed in my ears. The truth was, I did. I had liked swimming as an adolescent, and I had at university, too. Why had I stopped swimming? ‘You like swimming’ echoed in my head again and again until I felt like I was drowning.

I also liked Joan Baez and Simon and Garfunkel, I liked heading to the mountains on weekends, I liked preparing ajiaco soup – but Eduardo didn’t eat ajiaco, didn’t like my music, and if he left Bogotá it had to be by plane. So, I’d adapted my preferences to suit his, and I’d adapted so much I’d become blurry. He finished talking and, not noticing my red eyes or my silence, he put the papers back into his briefcase, changed his jacket and dabbed on some cologne.

‘Goodbye, my love,’ I said with a smile from the bed.

‘Don’t eat too much,’ he said.

I got into bed with a bag of potato chips and a box of chocolates. By midnight I’d watched an episode of CSI and two of Mad Men, and I was tired. The women in those series are heroines, I thought, but, in the end, it never does them any good. Eduardo still hadn’t come home. My eyes were swollen from crying.

When I turned off the TV I imagined sleeping in another bed. A smaller one, but my own. I fell asleep thinking about a window overlooking the street, hopefully alongside a park, an open-plan kitchen, a few plants, a round dining table and a little lamp hanging above it. Eduardo came back when dawn was breaking. I was up and sitting in front of the computer, looking for apartments in La Soledad.

‘Up working so early?’ he’d said.

‘What do you think?’ I’d said, determined to find the perfect place for myself, the room of my own where there would be no space for him.

And now I was in that place of my own, collecting his cigarette butts. When I finished cleaning, I decided to ask Claire if we could make a habit of catching up once a week. I decided not to let him smoke at my place again. I raised the calendar and marked the date: 23 July. From this day forward, no one smokes in here, I said to myself, circling the date with the same red pen that I used to correct drafts of his books.

5.

Sabrina was in her uniform. That’s why they didn’t let her into the hotel bar where she was meant to be going on her date with Luis Armando. She would have liked to go for a drink, or for him to take her to a restaurant, or at least to go for a walk. But he insisted on seeing her in his room.

‘I can’t wait to cover you in kisses,’ he said.

And that phrase was enough for Sabrina to feel her heartbeat quicken.

‘Do you love me?’ he asked in the voice that often murmured over the telephone how much he wanted her.

‘A lot,’ Sabrina said, turning red. It was the first time a man other than her father had asked.

When she went up to his room, she saw that Luis Armando was drunk. She was drunk, too, from the brandies she tossed back earlier so that she could bear the pain of the waxing. If she’d been sober, perhaps she would have reacted faster. But she wasn’t. She realised that coming here hadn’t been a good idea. Nevertheless, instead of leaving, she stared into his eyes, searching for the spark of love she thought she’d detected in them once. She was ready to become a woman.

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