House of Beauty: The Colombian crime sensation and bestseller

‘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. (#u30d2a1be-de2c-5126-bbb6-a19a3e71a691)

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.