Cervantes Magazine Number 23: Literature

ysaiasnunez (51)in #cervantes • 6 years ago

Mexican writer Mario Bellatin takes us to the Beauty Salon where people are going to spend their last days, people who are marginalized, alleged minorities. From that lugubrious place he asks us a question: who are the bad ones, who should be marginalized?

According to the author, Beauty Salon was conceived as a novel that he later cutted, or better said, edited, resulting in a hybrid that has the extension of a story and the structure and prose of a long narrative, the combination is almost atomic.

Beauty Salon is only but a terminal where men (and only men), whipped by an unnamed disease, will spend their last days. It is run by the narrator-protagonist, it is not known if he is transsexual or transvestite, because he always refers to himself as a man, although from time to time he came to wear women's clothes to prostitute himself or to work later in the hairdressing salon when he attended the clients: "Only women did not seem to mind being looked after by stylists dressed almost always in women's clothes". Well, he doesn't "transform" so often due to the rejection and harassment to which he and his friends are subjected, first outside the Salon and then inside it.

And If he wasn’t already marginalized due to his sexual preferences, by his mother, and later by society itself, the situation gets worse when his friends, and later, strangers, turn by accident (or maybe because the protagonist wanted) the Beauty salon in what he very well calls The Terminal, because "In the hospitals where they were hospitalized they always treated them with contempt. Many times they did not want to receive them for fear they were infected. Since then I was filled with the compassion of picking up one or another injured comrade who had nowhere to turn. "

The narrator shows himself to be a savior, not of the spiritual genre, as he states when referring to a religious order: "Nobody is fulfilling any type of priesthood here. The work that is done obeys a more human, practical and real sense. "It alludes to an altruistic, totally disinterested work, in comparison of the religions, represented in the novel as" Sisters of Charity ", which perhaps are moved by other interests that assure them a place in heaven, and not the need to help, or why not ?, the fear of God, their god.

It is interesting the contradiction he shows when refusing more help than the elementary: to buy food and cleanliness of the place and the sick, rejecting medicines, arguing that this would only lengthen the stay and the agony of the guests: "[ ...] I have to re-emphasize that the beauty salon is not a hospital or a clinic, but simply a Terminal”. This fact seems a bit intentional, since it recalls the actions and statements of [Mother] Teresa of Calcutta about her philosophy , that suffering gets you closer to Christ, only that, as has been said, the protagonist does not seek any mystical experience, on the contrary, he wants to give humanity to those bodies dehumanized by illness and society. "The only thing I wanted to avoid was for these people to perish like dogs in the middle of the street ..."

Without fully understanding this, perhaps because of hermeticism or fear, the residents organize themselves to burn the beauty salon, they fear, according to them, that the place will become an infectious focus. But before reaching that point it is prudent to go back and ask why homosexuals, or in this case transsexuals, have a greater affinity with this type of exercise, are the transsexual only gifted to do hair, to fix ladies ? We know they’re not, but then what happens? Why does society tend to separate everything that is different from the majority? Seen this way, the word minority carries the tagline of discrimination, inhibiting the development of the faculties of human being in any area of knowledge.

Locked inside that bubble, you don’t get to know about any other aspiration of the protagonist other than to continue with the beauty salon, but it is there where he feels safe despite not having anyone else in life: "I can’t even keep the hope that there is someone who does not want to write to me."

Even in these circumstances, the protagonist does not abandon the idea of continuing to help people to die with dignity, with no other interest than help itself. So, as in a Chinese box, here we could see that minority within the minorities, when out there (outside the Salon) is the majority that only thinks about itself, their concern is to look better without even weighing in the idea of saving those who live their final days because, they are sick (they are different in their appearance, emaciated, horrible) and although there is no force to eliminate them by their own means, (moral and ethical?) they are abandoned, they are excluded. Something similar happens in natural selection and instinct, but that would be applicable to animals, not men.

From that perspective, the question is asked: who are the bad guys? Or to put differently, who should be despised? Where does the desire of the "majority" to label and to denigrate, come from? This type of behavior would be preventing them from seeing the real value of things and allows the minority group to demonstrate their qualities, such as the protagonist’s kindness, something the majority seems to lack, or even care to find.