Beauty Salon

By Mario Bellatin and David Shook

Mario Bellatin’s complex dreamscape, offered here in a brand-new translation, presents a timely allegorical portrait of the body and society in decay, victim to inscrutable pandemic.

In a large, unnamed city, a strange, highly infectious disease begins to spread, afflicting its victims with an excruciating descent toward death, particularly unsparing in its assault of those on society's margins. Spurned by their loved ones and denied treatment by hospitals, the sick are left to die on the streets until a beauty salon owner, whose previous caretaking experience extended only to the exotic fish tanks scattered among his workstations, opens his doors as a refuge. In the ramshackle Morgue, victim to persecution and violence, he accompanies his male guests as they suffer through the lifeless anticipation of certain death, eventually leaving the wistful narrator in complete, ill-fated isolation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Deep Vellum Publishing
• Release date: Oct 19, 2021
• ISBN: 9781646050758

Book preview

Beauty Salon

praise for Mario Bellatin

"Like much of Mr. Bellatin’s work, Beauty Salon is pithy, allegorical and profoundly disturbing, with a plot that evokes The Plague by Camus or Blindness by José Saramago."

—New York Times

What [the narrator] has given to [his patients], and Bellatin to us, is a model for dying, and for living; for treating the abject body with honesty and respect, despite its difference and decay—perhaps because of it.

—Maggie Riggs, Words Without Borders

Including a few details that may linger uncomfortably with the reader for a long time, this is contemporary naturalism as disturbing as it gets.

—Booklist

An unflinching allegory on death.

—Publishers Weekly

When this disquieting novella appeared, Mexican (and even Latin American) literature changed.

—Francisco Goldman

TitlePage

Deep Vellum Publishing

3000 Commerce St., Dallas, Texas 75226

deepvellum.org • @deepvellum

Deep Vellum is a 501c3 nonprofit literary arts organization founded in 2013 with the mission to bring the world into conversation through literature.

Copyright © 1994 Mario Bellatin C/O Puentes Agency

Translation copyright © 2021 David Shook

First edition, 2021

All rights reserved.

Support for this publication has been provided in part by the Texas Commission on the Arts.

ISBNs: 978-1-64605-073-4 (paperback) | 978-1-64605-075-8 (ebook)

library of congress control number

: 2021940885

Front cover design by Kit Schluter

Interior Layout and Typesetting by KGT

Printed in the United States of America

Space

Any kind of inhumanity,

given practice, becomes human.

—YASUNARI KAWABATA

translated from the Japanese by Edward G. Seidensticker

Contents

Beauty Salon

TitlePage

Several years ago my interest in aquariums compelled me to decorate my beauty salon with fish of every imaginable color. Now that the salon has become the Mortuary, a place for those with nowhere else to die, it weighs heavily on me to see my fish steadily disappear. Perhaps the tap water is too generously chlorinated, perhaps I don’t have the time to care for them as they deserve. I got my start with fancy guppies. At the store they assured me that they were the hardiest fish there was, and therefore among the easiest to raise. In other words, the ideal fish for a beginner. They also reproduce particularly quickly. Fancy guppies are viviparous, so they don’t require an oxygen pump in their tank to preserve their eggs. The first time I practiced my new hobby, I didn’t have much luck. I bought a medium-sized aquarium and filled it with a pregnant female, another female, a virgin, and a male with a long, colorful tail. The next morning the male was dead, slumped belly up among the multicolored rocks I’d used to cover the bottom of the tank. I immediately found the rubber glove I used for dye jobs and removed the dead fish. Over the days to follow, nothing noteworthy happened. I simply tried to do things right so that the fish wouldn’t die from overeating or hunger. Limiting the amount of food I gave them also helped keep the water consistently clear. But soon the birth unleashed relentless persecution. The other female wanted to eat the newborns. For the moment, their reflexes saved them from death. Strangely, the mother died a few days later. Since giving birth she’d lingered at the bottom of the aquarium, where her swollen belly refused