House of Beauty: The Colombian crime sensation and bestseller
A thought-provoking Colombian crime novel set in and around a beauty salon in BogotaHouse of Beauty is a high-end salon in Bogotá’s exclusive Zona Rosa area, and Karen is one of its best beauticians. But there is more to her role than the best way to apply wax, or how to give the perfect massage. Her clients confide in her, and she knows all about them. Their breast implants, their weekends in Miami, their divorces and affairs.Karen has problems of her own. She’s in trouble, and she needs money. More money than she can make at House of Beauty.Most serious of all: a teenage girl has been found dead, and Karen was one of the last people to see her alive. So the girl’s mother is desperate to talk to her …
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4th Estate
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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 © Getty Images
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
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Source ISBN: 9780008264239
Ebook Edition © March 2018 ISBN: 9780008264253
Version: 2018-01-12
Contents
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.
