‘You own a healthcare provider?’
‘Yes, can you believe it?’
‘You do so much,’ she said, intent on pleasing him and being his Sunday girlfriend. ‘Are you taking me for a stroll?’ And she took his hand.
‘If by stroll you mean a stroll among the clouds. But first: I’ve got a surprise for you.’ He took a package out of the back of the car. Carolina Herrera, she read on the bag. She needed no more words or gestures to feel this was true and pure love.
24.
Karen told us a good part of what happened in those months, but she always omitted Wílmer – I’m not sure whether deliberately or because her subconscious silenced her memory of him, the only man she sought out who wasn’t a client.
Lucía, however, thinks Karen kept a lot of things quiet. And looking back, I suppose she was used to omitting details when she talked about herself. To preserve only the good memories, perhaps her mind suppressed what was painful. The day she spoke about her fifteenth birthday party, for example, she failed to mention having her hair chemically straightened for the first time, or the pain it caused her.
It was weeks later when she broached the subject. She was giving me a massage. Lying on the treatment table, I scratched my head several times. I said that those Pantene products irritated my scalp, that my hair was greasy and I had to wash it daily. Karen seemed absent for a moment, didn’t make any comment about it and then, suddenly, as she worked a knot out of my back, she started to speak:
‘The first time I had my hair relaxed was for my fifteenth birthday party. My mamá explained that if I scratched, I would hurt myself. When I get nervous, I always scratch my head. I’ve never felt any pain like it. My scalp broke out in sores.’
‘I like curls,’ I said. ‘You’ve never let them grow out?’
‘When I was little. At school, they said I looked like a monkey. They made orang-utan sounds at me and other girls who had Afros. Some girls were sent to school with their hair straightened, even really little ones.’
‘What about your mamá?’
‘She’s had hers relaxed since I can remember. She does it religiously, every two months; it’s a ritual for her. Like the women who come here: every two weeks they have a wax, every eight days a manicure, every month a facial, every three weeks fake eyelashes … Not to mention the cosmetic treatments, the laser hair removal, the Botox, there are so many things nowadays. Out of everything, I never miss a wax or straightening my hair. It’s a pain, not only because it hurts, but because it smells like rotten eggs. Your eyes sting. In Cartagena, women know all about it. They use hair irons, rollers, hair wraps; they tame the wildest curls. Nixon used to say it was an insult to our ancestors. I don’t know about that. I only know I don’t like to see a dishevelled black woman in the mirror. I believed Nixon for a while. What he said made sense to me. If God made me, curly hair and all, why contradict Him? I went to church then, almost as often as I got my hair relaxed. Then I stopped getting it done, but because I’d been doing it for four years, my hair didn’t spring back curly right away; it went all weird, like a wire-bristle broom. I felt ugly, then I got pregnant and I was sad. I couldn’t stand seeing myself in the mirror. Nixon made a point of calling me black, but I’d never thought about it before, hadn’t thought of myself as black. I’d maybe thought of my mamá as black – I always laughed inwardly when she said she was “cinnamon coloured” because she’s black as shoe polish. But me? I have a different skin colour; I’m the one who’s almost cinnamon-coloured; perhaps the blackest thing about me is this unruly, kinky hair. On TV, they always talk about shiny, silky, smooth hair, and none of that describes a black person’s hair. Afros are for people in El Pozón shanties, that’s what my mamá taught me from when I was little; for people who live in dumps or puddles, with no work, no papers, no house. That’s what I was taught to believe, so when Nixon called me black and read me Jorge Artel poems, I felt a warmth inside, a pride I never knew, about something that usually embarrassed me. I know I’m beautiful, or at least really hot. I know how men look at me, how they want me, but I also know that if I had an Afro the same men who would show me off like a prize they won in the lottery would find themselves suddenly embarrassed. When I get called an Indian, it doesn’t bother me so much. After all, there’s Pocahontas, who is beautiful, and she’s the star of a Disney film. Do I look black to you, Doña Claire? I think I’m pretty much the same colour as President Obama, with a white person’s features and a black person’s hair. My hair has been my cross to bear. I hate the smell of those chemicals. Sometimes they make me retch, and as the years go by I hate them even more. But despite that, I’d never have it in me to stop using them. When I got pregnant, I told myself that I at least needed to feel like I was beautiful. At the end of the day, feeling beautiful and having straight hair are one and the same for me.’
I didn’t say anything. I knew Karen straightened her hair, but had never imagined the torment behind it.
Karen massaged my calves, then spent a moment on my feet, seemingly lost in thought.
‘Nixon thought differently,’ she said suddenly. ‘If more of us were like Nixon, maybe we would be better off. In all honesty, I don’t like the look of Afros. Nothing I can do about that. Imagine, there was a beautiful young black woman in my neighbourhood: she let her hair grow out in an Afro and do you think she could find a job? She was beautiful, and educated, but no one wanted that disorder in their office, on their premises, in their shop, and much less in their beauty salon. Mamá would watch her go by and say, “One of these days I’m going to come snip off that hair of yours, and I’ll make myself a pillow out of it.” I would laugh. The girl studied some weird degree. Sociology, I think it was. She tried to bring people together, same as Nixon, to speak about pride and our ancestors and whatnot, and, in one of those meetings, a lady who washed clothes for a living stood up and said to her: “And has so much pride and pain got you a job?” Everyone burst out laughing. I felt sorry for the girl because she was onto something. You shouldn’t discriminate against people because of their hair, I understand that, but I also agree that an Afro doesn’t look good in an office. Anyway, she left the neighbourhood. We didn’t hear any more about her. She had rented a place at a neighbour’s, but stayed barely a few months. Maybe it wasn’t the place for her. Sometimes I remember her, though I forget her name. I hope someone gave her a job, so she didn’t have to get that hair of hers straightened. For her, more than the pain and annoyance of hair straightening, it would have been the fact that she had succumbed finally that would have been the real trauma. Could you turn over, Doña Claire?’
I stared at her, at her lovely features. Her lips seemed fuller than usual. I imagined what her hazel eyes would look like at night. I wanted to kiss her. I wanted to, but instead I kept still, perfectly still. I tried to control the rhythm of my breathing. I closed my eyes. I wanted Karen’s massage never to end, wanted her voice – the voice that sounded in my ears when I tossed and turned at night, unable to fall asleep – to murmur sweet nothings in my ear, softly, slowly, with her rhythmic and playful cadence, her low voice, with that flavour, that tongue.
25.
It was three in the afternoon on a Tuesday and the public servants were wearing party hats. They were cutting up a cake smothered in Chantilly cream and the cleaner, who was also wearing a party hat, was giving out Colombiana champagne cola in little plastic cups.
‘Excuse me,’ said Consuelo, raising her voice to make herself heard above the loud music. ‘I would like to know if the prosecutor is in.’
‘He’s not here, because of the long weekend. He’ll be back tomorrow.’
‘Isn’t the long weekend over today?’
‘He must have taken the day off, I’m not sure,’ said the secretary, visibly annoyed. ‘I’m not secretary to him alone.’
‘Could you give me his mobile number?’
‘No, Señora, I can’t. I’m not authorised.’
‘But he said he would put m
e in touch with the forensics officer taking on the case, so we could speak about … He said he would be in today.’
‘What about your lawyer?’ the secretary asked.
‘Come again?’
‘They usually deal with the case lawyers, not with the families. Submit a writ. It’s really hard to get looked after if you have no writ. Can’t you see he has like five hundred cases in his office?’
‘But the prosecutor told me that—’
‘He deals with a lot of people, he can’t take charge of everything,’ said the secretary, lifting the cup of Colombiana to her mouth.
‘And he didn’t leave an order requesting my daughter’s medical record from San Blas?’
‘No, Señora, he didn’t leave me anything – anything at all,’ said the secretary, hurriedly backing away because her colleagues had lit the candles and were waiting to sing ‘Happy Birthday’.
Consuelo followed her and said the prosecutor must have made a mistake when he jotted down his phone number; it always went to voicemail.
‘No way, hun. Sorry,’ she added in English.
That afternoon, Consuelo Paredes called her ex-husband and told him about Cojack and her two visits to the Prosecutor’s Office. Against her expectations, he reacted positively to the idea of hiring the investigator, and even offered to help with the fees. He also agreed to help search for a competent lawyer to speed up the process. Consuelo told him about the progress Cojack and his men, who appeared to be his nephews, had made. They had been in the apartment and turned Sabrina’s room upside down.
‘Did they find anything?’
‘A note written on a page ripped from her exercise book.’
‘What did it say?’
‘“Did you know there are more than thirty kinds of kisses? And we’ve barely tried one. Wait for me to come back, and I’ll show you the other twenty-nine,”’ Consuelo read out.
‘Revolting,’ said Jorge Guzmán. ‘And was it signed?’
‘No, but it’s initialled L.A.D.’
‘L.A.D.?’ asked Jorge Guzmán.
‘No idea,’ said Consuelo.
‘Do you think this is the killer?’
‘Who knows, but this note could be useful.’
‘Let’s find out who this L.A.D. is.’
Consuelo was happy to go along with that. She started to tell her ex-husband about the San Blas Hospital visit and the follow-up matrix that Cojack devised but he interrupted:
‘I think it would be best if we spoke about these things in person, you never know.’
‘You never know what?’
‘If someone’s listening. For now, we’ve said enough. Let’s meet up tomorrow. Stay calm. We’ll get somewhere; we have to.’
‘Jorge, what did they do to our little girl?’
He didn’t answer. It took a couple of seconds for Consuelo to realise he was crying.
26.
A dull blow to her ribs, like a stab wound, pulled her mind back into the room.
‘Do whatever I say,’ said Luis Armando, who had transformed into a strange thing, a monster who knew how to hit, who knew how and where to land his blows so that they left little evidence: only his victim’s pain.
‘But cut out that frightened expression, it puts me off,’ he said while searching for the roll of paper to snort another line.
‘What are you doing?’ Sabrina dared to ask when he started rubbing cocaine on her vulva.
‘Spoiling you.’
The last thing Sabrina thought was that everything was her fault. She didn’t get to know the person who was now hurling her from one place to another, who was using her body to unload his rage at the world. For her, he was a soft voice, a voice that made her feel special. An elegant, refined man who found her beautiful. And sweet. Beautiful and sweet, he said to her that time in Unicentro when he bought her a hamburger. A guy who owned a BMW SUV. And sexy, he added the second time they saw each other, one month later. That day he was gentle when he kissed her, and twice he asked if she was a virgin. Were all men monsters when it came to intimacy? Sabrina knew they couldn’t all be. Her father wasn’t a monster. He was a good man. Thinking about her father crushed her, and the urge to urinate she’d been feeling for a while now grew almost unbearable. The pain returned, leaving little room for thought. She wouldn’t get the chance to think about how she would never do all the things she had imagined, that she would never know love, would never be a mother, would never study gastronomy, would never live abroad. She would die without realising she would never see her mother or brother again, wouldn’t attend her graduation party, wouldn’t see Los Angeles, try marijuana, or feel once more that she was the sexiest woman alive, or make peace with her father, whom she had never forgiven for divorcing her mother and forming another family.
Now Sabrina knew she had been unfair. Relationships end. One day the love is gone and it’s no one’s fault. Her father had a woman by his side, that was good. Now she saw this. It seemed like Luis Armando was moving at an impossible speed; she sensed him climbing the walls to the ceiling and back down to the floor. She let out a silly little laugh. She couldn’t feel anything any more, or she could, but she didn’t care. Maybe if her mamá had been more willing to talk. Maybe if Sabrina hadn’t been an idiot. She tried to follow Luis Armando’s instructions: faster, slower, more rhythmically, imagine a Bom Bom Bum lollipop, no, an ice cream, rub your hand up and down, but faster, no, not so fast, you’re so rough, it would be better if you got the hell out of this fucking room, and Sabrina thought the nightmare was almost over – once out in the hallway, everything would be over, she would just have to go downstairs and request a taxi, a telephone, call her mamá – and she would never go out with a guy like him again (no more strangers, no more psychopaths dressed as heart-throbs), but then the ‘never again’ took an unexpected twist and he grabbed her by the throat. She let out a few tears, couldn’t cry out, couldn’t do anything. He lifted her off her feet and said she’d never know how to make a man happy, that her feeble child’s body was a joke. Sabrina wanted to get away but she felt weak. Luis Armando kept up his game. He flipped her over as if she were a doll, threw her by her hair, twisted her one way then the other. She couldn’t put up a fight, couldn’t cry any more, thought she was dead, thought it was a relief to have died finally (she had expected to die the first time she wished for it), guessed she had been in the room over an hour now, knew no one was coming to save her. It no longer mattered. She closed her eyes. Her heart was about to explode. She was bleeding. She didn’t know where from, but she was bleeding. A viscous warmth somewhere, maybe between her legs. She wasn’t sure. All that blood, she thought. I’m no longer a virgin, she said to herself. Not any more. She remembered the white gloves they wore at school. ‘Symbol of purity,’ the principal often said. She didn’t see him swiftly get dressed, nimbly tie his shoelaces and knot his tie, as if this had all been a masterful performance and he wasn’t drunk, or drugged, or crazy. She didn’t see him splash water on his face. She didn’t see him sit on the bed and call his papá. She didn’t hear him say what had happened, nor hear his father say that Ramelli would take care of it, to stay calm. She didn’t see herself with mouth open, terror in her eyes, as if she had spent her whole life suspended in a scream. She wasn’t privy to any of this because, after fearing it so long, after wishing for it, Sabrina was dead.
27.
For Diazgranados, a psychoanalyst was not so different from a speech therapist or a nutritionist. Claire Dalvard had studied in Paris, so he told himself that maybe she would have techniques to help him lose fifty kilos that wouldn’t require that he stop eating. But what really made him call her was that question about his son. Aníbal had asked Luis Armando if he had a colleague called Aline and his son had said he didn’t know the name. So why had that doctor, who by all appearances had no link to him or his family, lied to get information about his son? He made an appointment. But after making it, he got his men to follow her. That’s how he found out that one
of the places she most often visited was House of Beauty, where, coincidentally, his wife was also a regular.
Then he found out that both Claire and his wife saw a beautiful young woman called Karen Valdés, the hooker who Ramelli treated like a girlfriend. Once bitten, twice shy; he knew he would have to be vigilant. What could that girl know about what went down? Didn’t the newspapers state that one of the last things Sabrina Guzmán did before she died was go to a beauty salon in Zona Rosa? What if it was the same salon? And what if Claire, Karen, his wife and the dead girl were connected in that place, off limits to men, where there was room for all kinds of conspiracies and secrets?
It was just past seven in the evening. Mondays were usually busy at House of Beauty, but today had been especially quiet. Karen wanted to talk to Susana, to tell her she was moving out. She felt like talking, like stretching out on the couch and chatting with her friend. She wasn’t seeing any clients that night. On her way back to the apartment she bought a tub of ice cream. It would be their last night under the same roof; they’d have a nice time. Yet she only needed to take one step inside to see things weren’t as she had imagined. Despite how small the space was, she couldn’t see to the other side because of the smoke. Lying on the sofa, Susana was watching the reality show Protagonistas de Novela. The room stank of weed. Karen greeted Susana, but she didn’t respond.
She put the ice cream in the freezer, then sat down beside her, but Susana didn’t take her eyes off the screen. A group of men and women were coming and going, wearing black shirts stamped with their names. Karen read ‘Júver’, ‘Yina’, ‘Everly’, ‘Omar’ and ‘Ana María’. She moved closer to her friend. Yina, poured into embroidered jeans, with hair extensions, false eyelashes and blue eyeliner, said to Júver: ‘What a traitorous bitch, voting to have her best friend thrown out of the house.’ In the next scene, Júver was sticking his tongue in Ana María’s ear.
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