• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2329 0

a place where the alphabets of many different languages were jumbled together on the storefronts, where Latinate, Cyrillic, and Greek letters fought for space with Arabic and Chinese, this Babylonian salmagundi of scripts and tongues all nattering in unison—tongues, and musics, too!—strains of polka, samba, reggae, and klezmer intermingled with Persian ululations, the accordion-and-brass oompa-oompa of mariachi music and the fuzzy thumps of rap blasting from car stereos—and the smells!—whiffs of meat crackling over fires and fried dough and who knows what else twisting together with the smells of tobacco and sewage, and there were all kinds of people jostling each other on the streets, women in bonnets and wooden clogs wheeling baby carriages with pudgy children pattering after them past skinny men in glossy tracksuits and jewelry and with glued-in-place hair, and so on and on: this place was like a sprawling fractal of infinitely divisible human complexity, a distracting circus of the senses where everyone was so busy that no one bothered to look anywhere but where they were going. Audrey piloted us in that grumbling behemothic vehicle down the street, past barbershops, shoe stores, bars, gas stations, and donut shops, until we came to where we were going. She gradually seesawed the large automobile into a parallel parking place. We were in a Brazilian neighborhood, said Sasha. Everywhere I saw what I presumed were Brazilian flags draped over things, hanging from awnings or painted on windows, green and yellow with a star-speckled blue orb in the middle, and everywhere I saw people with the same olive skin and green eyes that Sasha had. Here was a storefront embedded in the middle of the block of a medium-traffic street, inconspicuously snuggled between a deli and a store that specialized in doors: a picture of a palm tree and the words IPANEMA BEAUTY dancing in loopy green cursive across the front of a white awning that shaded the front door. We went in.

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,