I'm writing this totally inappropriate letter, horrible even, so you can show it to all your friends and tell them: watch out for this deranged lady. I don't care if you do. You're maybe twenty years old, same as my oldest son. You're so beautiful that perhaps it's impossible for you to know how much, the magnitude of it. Maybe you compare yourself to others around you and don't believe it. But you know, just as I knew back then, that this long straight hair, those big dark eyes and those brown hands are a powerful weapon, a hydrogen bomb.
I mention your hands because they're important to me. For several months now I've been going to get various types of facial treatments at the aesthetics clinic where you work. I've been through all kinds of machines and substances, processes I subject myself to so that my face doesn't deteriorate thanks to the fetid air of late capitalism, the smog of various cities, the weight of motherhood and an endless marriage. That's your job and I assure you, Karina, you've been perfectly professional. Efficient, attentive, everything your boss wants to hear. I hope they pay you very well, you do it with talent.
I know there's no work in this country. That there's no point going to university because having a degree doesn't change the conditions we find ourselves in, in an economy completely tilted toward services and tourism, serving a market that sustains itself by promising miracles. My oldest son went to university and studied architecture. What a waste, Karina. There's no way he'll find a job. He's just wandering around doing nothing. My other son, the younger one, is in high school. I don't think anything much better awaits him. You must have gone through some classes at an academy for eighteen months, where you learn to put creams between other people's wrinkles. As a result you earn more than my son. I hope you tell your mom, so she can be even more proud.
The first thing you do when we see each other is tell me to take off my blouse. It's a somewhat intimate moment, behind closed doors. In this quiet space you, a stranger, can see my sagging breasts, my stomach distended by middle age and pregnancies, the traces of a life you perhaps view with ambivalence. It's a moment of exposure I didn't know I'd have to face. But how discreet you are. I lie down on a table and you put a little blanket over me so I won't get cold, leaving exposed my face, my neck and my shoulders. The really problematic areas.
Once after the treatment your shift ended and I offered to drive you to the bus stop in my car. You thought about it, and finally accepted, because it was raining. I told you I happened to be heading to Desamparados. Which was a lie, I never go to Desamparados. Anyway, I managed to drive you almost to your house, and in those minutes trapped in this idiotic city's traffic, under an apocalyptic downpour, I asked you all the questions I dared. I asked about your boyfriend, who works in a call center. I understood that you live with your mom and younger brother. I know you dream of opening your own "mini-spa," or working at a beach resort where tourists reward your efforts with good tips. That next month you're taking a microblading course. Karina, I listened to all this and recorded it in my deep memory, a place full of tenderness, even though I had my eyes fixed ahead, toward the traffic jam and the curtain of rain.
On the table you apply small pulses from a machine that injects some water into my skin while it sucks the grime from my pores and peels off the scales of dead cells. Sometimes I have to receive stabs from a laser machine. Sometimes a miserable acid burns my skin in a controlled way and I spend two days hiding in my house playing sick. My favorite part is when your brown hands take mine to give them a careful massage. The first time you told me "what tiny little hands!" My heart melts in your hands that in comparison are generous, like a hug. Your massages on the neck area, shoulders and face are perhaps more tender, more careful than any lover has ever given me. Your millimetric review of every pore on my nose is more intense than any attention I've ever paid myself in the mirror. That you see me at that level of skin has caused me all kinds of disturbances, not just sexual, but emotional. I don't cry because tears would interfere with your work.
You've never asked me anything about myself because this is a very unequal relationship. I'm your client. A word from me, an expression of annoyance, a small insolence on your part, could put your future mini-spa at stake. On that table I imagine what you imagine about me and can't ask. Another lady desperately trying to hang on to the last gasp of elasticity in her skin, to the last external signs of youth and therefore of others' desire. You know all that is valuable, Karina, but you can't imagine how much. Your only quantifiable measure is how much we ladies pay to maintain the illusion that we'll be seen. You don't understand that part because you're impossible to ignore: your mother's eyes, your boyfriend's arms. But there comes a moment when even the important people in our lives see us with a familiarity that borders on insulting.
This isn't a letter with advice from a lady approaching fifty. It would never occur to me to assume your life has anything to do with mine, the world I lived in was different. I got married at twenty-five, not much older than you are now, with my eyes closed and immune to any warning: my mother's seemed to come from a movie set in an earlier century. Having children was nothing like what anyone ever told me. Working so many years to obtain some kind of professional recognition now seems like it was an absolute waste of time. My husband, decades later, has nothing more than a certain air of kinship with the boy I married. Sometimes I do miss that one. I wouldn't know what to tell you.
Rather this letter is to let you know that I'm not coming back to the salon anymore. Enough with peeling my face, burning it, injecting it, washing it with products of the most extravagant chemical compositions. I imagine my hormonal curve has fallen off a cliff. Those hormones are what allows you to tolerate all kinds of indignities, and I've run out. Along with this letter I'm leaving you a tip, and I hope one day to find myself surprised again with a hand in yours, in a moment of future happiness. I need you to know one thing: everything you know is true. I had that power you have Karina, but they always told me it was forbidden to use it for my own benefit. At twenty years old a woman already has everything inside, what she'll need to live her whole life. It's later, with time, that we start losing it.