Benjamin Hale - The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore

A string of bells clinked against the glass as the door shut behind us. A long, narrow room: in front, a desk, a register, and a waiting area, with metal folding chairs and a coffee table covered with women’s magazines in Portuguese; in back, a doorless doorway covered with a turquoise curtain; below, linoleum floors; above, a row of three ceiling fans with pull chains clinking against wobbling light fixtures; there was a long counter with rows of metal sinks embedded in it, and scissors, razors, bottles, sprayers, combs and brushes scattered down the length of it; two parallel mirrors stretched along opposite sides of the room; next to the counter, reclining chairs were rooted to the floor on metal poles, with pedals to pump the chairs up on the poles or release them to sink hissing downward, and at the head of each chair a hemispherical plastic helmet fixed on a hinge that would descend over the head of the person sitting in the chair. The room smelled lush with shampoos, soaps, perfumes, wet hair. The feminine energy in this room was sweet and thick as cream. Several women lay in the chairs, and other women stood over them, fixing up the heads of the women lying in the chairs — snipping, clipping, brushing, lathering, rinsing, blow-drying, etc. — and all the women were talking together in the universally recognizable tones of gossip, but were speaking Portuguese — that pretty language, musically mysterious to me, that sounds like Spanish softly brushed with French.

When we came in, the women smiled and blew kisses and flicked feminine waves hello to Sasha, and one of the women — she was heavyset and middle-aged, with heavy purplish pouches under her green eyes, pink lipstick, and dyed bronze-blond hair — said something to the woman in the chair whose head she was working on, and came smiling and clacking on her heels toward us across the linoleum. She and Sasha embraced, exchanged kisses on cheeks. Then Sasha and this woman had a lightning-quick conversation in Portuguese, and Sasha pointed at me. The woman held out her hand to me, palm down.

“Hello, Mr. Bruno,” she said, in an accent with feather-dusted consonants. I put a small kiss on the top of her plump brown hand, because that seemed like the thing to do, and she was introduced to me as Cecília. With a long fingernail, painted pink to match her lips, she beckoned us to follow her through the mirrored corridor of the beauty parlor, where in passing she bid one of the other women with a signal and a flutter of Portuguese to finish her work for her. She scraped aside the turquoise curtain covering the doorway at the back of the room and directed us through a dingy storeroom filled with damp cardboard boxes, down a short, dim hallway, through another door and into another waiting room, which looked much like the waiting area in the front of the front room, with the same metal folding chairs and coffee table with the same magazines on it. There was a plastic potted plant in one corner and a framed mirror on the wall.

This room essentially looked like the waiting room of a normal doctor’s or dentist’s office, in that it was clean and well-lighted and so on, and even professional-looking — but what was missing from it was a feeling of legitimacy, of — well, legality , a basic lack of fear. Yes, that’s it — this room had a little fear in it, a fear that slightly soured its mood; but only slightly soured, like a whiff of milk that’s just beginning to turn but would probably still be safe to drink. The carpet was a little too thin or too questionably stained, the décor a little too shabby, the walls a little too naked of ornament. We sat down in the cheap metal folding chairs, and Cecília went out and brought us coffee in Styrofoam cups, and sat down to ask me a few polite questions, nothing too serious yet, which questions I answered as politely and as well as I could between sips of coffee. Then Cecília turned to Audrey, asked her a few similar questions, and apologized to us before turning to Sasha and launching into a rapid exchange in Portuguese. I liked Cecília — she was businesslike, but beneath that there was something almost grandmotherly about her, something worldly and kind that I trusted.

The other door in the room softly clicked open and two women came out. They looked surprised to see us sitting there. The older of them held the younger one by a linked arm. I realized from their synchronized gait, bodies, and eyes that they were mother and daughter. The daughter’s face, from her upper lip to her eyes, was covered in a bandage: plaster-wetted gauze was wrapped across her nose, a big adhesive bandage secured it to her face, and a cotton pad strapped over that with white tape wrapped around the back of her head beneath her hair. Both her eyes were swollen-lidded, bloodshot, and bruised purple, as if she’d been in a fistfight. She was breathing through her mouth. The mother dipped a careful nod at Cecília, who nodded back with pursed pink lips and knowing eyes, and they went out. The other door was still slightly ajar. The door swung outward and a little man came out: he was middle-aged, thin, and delicate-looking, with pronounced cheekbones, pewtery hair that glistened like fish skin slicked flat to the sides of his mostly bald head, and a neat black mustache that pointed down from his nose to the corners of his lips; the overall effect of his face evoked an aging matinee star from the era of silent film. A pair of wireframe glasses pincered the bridge of his nose. He was snapping off a pair of bloody surgical gloves and whistling. He wore a string-tied white apron, covered in blood. Then he saw us sitting there, and, still whistling, he jabbed an index finger in the air, probably pretending to have forgotten something, turned back inside and shut the door behind him. For a while we heard the clank and scuttle of things being cleaned up or thrown away, the eek-eek of faucet knobs and the hush of water, accompanied all the while by his tuneful and insouciant whistling. Cecília excused herself, rose, went into the room and added the sound of their muffled conversation to these noises. She came back and sat with us again, reassured us with a smile and a wink, and patted me twice on the knee. Soon the man came out again. The wireframe glasses were now pushed higher up on his nose and the gloves and bloody apron gone. He wore elegant shoes and a purple shirt tucked into pinstriped gray slacks; his sleeves were rolled up past his hairy forearms, and a silver watch with a segmented band flashed at his wrist. This was Dr. DaSilva.

There was some initial business to discuss. After that was over with and the DaSilvas (Dr. DaSilva was the husband of Cecília, who ran the legitimate half of their business) were sufficiently convinced I was trustworthy, Cecília returned to the front of the store and I left Audrey and Sasha in the waiting room to follow Dr. DaSilva back to his office, a cramped but clean, windowless room with a desk, a sink, and an operating table. An assortment of surgical equipment lay gleaming on the counter. The operating table had a white bedsheet draped over it, with fluorescent lamps C-clamped to its edges. Dr. DaSilva decompressed into the office chair behind his desk, and I sat across from him in a small wooden chair facing it. There was a distinct sense of Old World gentility to Dr. DaSilva. Seen close up, he looked even more like a silent film star: he even seemed to move like a man in an old movie, too slowly when standing still and too quickly when walking, and sometimes, while in transit, popping instantaneously from one place to another; you could almost hear the crackle of decaying film as he moved around the room.

“I need your help, Dr. DaSilva. I want a nose.”

“I believe I can provide that,” he nodded. He sat in his cheap wheeling office chair with his elbows anchored on the thighs of his crossed legs and his fingers making a cage, each fingertip leaning on its corresponding fingertip. Dr. DaSilva looked like a man of science. Something about his mannerisms reminded me at that moment of Dr. Norman Plumlee.