Page 29 - WTP Vol. IX #10

her to the vivero to select new plants, which was always fun, especially when we picked up roasted chickens with fat greasy fries from a Pollo Loco on the way back to eat with our fingers for dinner.
All this is to say that my aunt has spent much of her time outdoors. Not only in the garden, watering and supervising and repotting, but also at the beach or the pool. She has much lighter skin than my mother, which was part of the familial narrative of her supe- rior beauty when she and my mother were growing up. She is slightly older than my mother, and char- ismatic. When she was young, she was fair skinned and dark haired like a South American Vivien Leigh or Elizabeth Taylor. Maybe she took this beauty
for granted, having been assigned it since toddler- hood, but in any case, she never cared about the sun, about getting brown or freckled. Most of the summers in the period of time I’m recalling, in her middle age when she lived in a gated community with a large, lush garden and plenty of irrigation, she got darker, lightening again during the mild winters, marking the seasons with her skin tone.
In the warm months she often wore bright pareos from morning to night, tied around the top of her chest and over her bathing suit. My mother, on the other hand, never liked to tan, always conscious of the stigma of being too brown to begin with. And now, looking at the photograph, I can see the conse- quences of my aunt’s blithe attitude toward the sun. Although the bones of her beauty are still evident, her nose delicate, her cheekbones sharp, her skin is thin and spotted and lined.
My aunt lives in an epicenter of plastic surgery. Many cities in South America—Bogotá, Caracas, Rio— promote, through a combination of pressure and propaganda, the relentless beautification of women. In Lima my aunt is surrounded by women who get fillers and Botox, lasers and peels, facelifts. Yet she has done nothing. She remains a cosmetic procedure virgin. It seems odd in someone who appears so superficial, who values designer handbags and per- fumes, Italian shoes and penthouse apartments. She constantly comments on other people’s wealth, the companies and property they own, their houses and cars, as well as their looks. About a friend’s daughter, for example, who is particularly pretty, she’ll make sure to report several times, Está linda—¡preciosa! Does her apparent indifference to cosmetic work for herself have to do with having been considered beau- tiful her whole life? With having found her husband and having had her children early, at the peak of her beauty? Or perhaps it has to do with her distrust of doctors in general. She once told a daughter who
was six months pregnant not to worry about giving birth—no tengas miedo—that prenatal care wasn’t necessary because having a baby was like having a tooth pulled—cómo sacarse una muela.
Her mother, my grandmother, was not a beauty, but she was attractive enough to catch the eye of the Ital- ian gentleman who had emigrated from Genoa, and all her life she looked elegant in silk, heels, and her signature pearls. My grandmother escaped the era of plastic surgery, of chemical and surgical alteration of the body and the face. She aged, I like to think, with dignity. She never dyed her hair, but instead wore it swept up in a large bun that over the years turned from black to grey to white. Growing up, I never re- ally noticed her aging face, it was just a normal part of her, an essential aspect of her character. I never thought to criticize it, or to think about how she could fix it to look better. What I noticed instead was the way her black eyes crinkled when she laughed, how her silver hair framed her wide cheekbones, how her broad smile exposed slightly protruding teeth.
My mother, though, gave in to the siren call of cos- metic surgery, with its promises of prolonged youth, a thinner body, a firmer face. Why she and not my aunt? Why she, who was used to decades of being
in the shadow of a brilliant sister? Who was used to being the darker, plainer one? Maybe it was because of this. Maybe she saw surgery as her opportunity
to shine, to transform from an ugly duckling into a shimmering swan. To be clear, my mother, my beauti- ful aunt’s little sister, is not ugly, or even plain. She is also beautiful, but in a quiet, unassuming way. And everything is relative. Growing up in Peru with a sister whose beauty was striking, that called out and demanded attention, taught my mother that she was wanting, that she lacked charm and attraction, that she was the drab, homely side of the coin. She likes to tell a story about her First Communion: My grand-
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