Melba Escobar - House of Beauty - The Colombian crime sensation and bestseller

4th Estate

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers

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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 © 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

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: 9780008264239

Ebook Edition © March 2018 ISBN: 9780008264253

Version: 2018-01-12

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Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Translator

About the Publisher

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.