From Alabama to Colombia: Peso Lane

Penny Lane is in my ears and in my eyes.
There beneath the blue suburban skies…

-Lennon-McCartney

A description of one city block in a neighborhood of Bogotá might be of interest to those curious about everyday life in Latin America. Adela, my fiancée, runs her ophthalmology office in Santa Bárbara Occidental, a prosperous suburb in the north of this vast city of 10 million.

The densely populated community bustles, ant-like, beneath massive mountain peaks that show up most mornings shrouded in mist. An occasional glance in their direction refreshes the mind, bringing relief from mad-mouse traffic or frustratingly slow customer service in shops and stores. (It recently took me 20 minutes to buy movie tickets … in a line of five people.)

People in Santa Bárbara typically live in four- or five-story buildings, optimal for walking the stairs or standing up to the occasional earthquake. A number of green parks happily fill with dogs and joggers and picnic people by day. Along commercial streets, the first one or two floors of buildings house retail or professional offices, and that’s the case along Calle 125, where Adela sees her eye patients.

Along with two dentists and a psychiatrist, she practices on the second floor of a block-long brick complex. Visitors file up and down the stairways each day holding their jaws or shielding their eyes. Sometimes, at the shrink’s office, they avoid eye contact altogether.

Things get interesting down at street level. A pedestrian strolling along the broad, if uneven, Santa Bárbara sidewalks will pass:

•A peluquería, or salon, staffed by white-uniformed females busily changing the hair and nail colors of their customers.
•A little restaurant, only three or four tables, that specializes in cups of fresh papaya and meat pies. A never-ending soccer game plays on a TV in the corner.
•A second peluquería, this one run by a Colombian version of Keith Richards. This badly weathered owner lived in the United States in the hippy times … and almost certainly did what hippies do.
•A florist shop with big plastic buckets of natural sunflowers outside … and, for some reason, other flowers spray-painted in bright unnatural colors that make them look like plastic cemetery decorations. The stems arrive daily from the greenhouses of a booming floral industry outside Bogotá. (Any bouquet or arrangement you buy in the United States probably grew in the Andes just a few days ago.)
•A glassed-in security shack manned by young guards (called vigilantes here). Jaime and Felipe address me formally, using “Don Char-les,” a term of respect. (Most Colombians find it impossible to pronounce Charles as a single syllable. I find it impossible to pronounce peluquería.)
•A Colombian eatery that serves comidas típicas, or everyday food. This local version of a meat-and-three would be familiar to diners in the states. Patrons enjoy a hot bowl of rib-and-potato soup, a plate of rice, a trout or a thin cutlet, a lettuce-tomato salad, and fried plantains … for $5 US.
•A third peluquería, this one run by John, a workaholic award-winning hair artist with 50,000 songs on his sound system and an eye for the ladies.
•A boot shop selling tacky footwear made only in Colombia. (Next to it, another boot shop that sold tacky footwear just closed.)
•A laundry and dry-cleaning service that looks perpetually lonely.
•A mysterious shop that advertises skin products. I’ve never seen a person come or go from it. Do they possibly sell actual skin inside? No one seems to know for sure, and I’m not brave enough to find out.

Most Popular

The most fascinating element of this slice of Colombian commercial life? The three hair-and-nail shops within 100 meters of one another. A friendly competition among these three small businesses offers a case study in branding, differentiation and customer appeal.

All three businesses enjoy steady traffic, their patrons coming or going to a big gleaming Carulla supermarket in the next block, or biding time before they visit one of the three important medical facilities two blocks over. (Why not stop by and get your nails done before that prostate exam? Wouldn’t a mammogram go better with a new hairdo?)

To my surprise, I often see men getting their nails done. They appear to be professionals from the suit-and-tie world, and they stare into space over the heads of the pretty girls who get their cuticles into shape. (Prior to Bogotá, I can’t think of a single time in my life when I ever witnessed a man having his nails done. In Alabama, a man doing his nails meant a fellow with a hammer on a roof somewhere.)

In Peluquería 1, the white-uniformed women seem to specialize in creating a kind of faux-spa illusion. I never see steam from Turkish baths or masseuses at work, but customers do spend a long time inside, languishing in gossip and flipping the pages of celebrity magazines to learn the fitness regimen of Miss Universe (Paulina Vega is a Colombian) or to share the inconsolable sadness of Princess Carlotta. (Her husband is a traveling comedian, or something, yet she must stay home alone for long periods in a drafty palace.)

The clientele of the ex-hippy’s Peluquería 2 appear chummy, a little cluster of old friends, creatures of habit addicted to a familiar place. When customers thin out, the wild-haired proprietor sits in a comfy chair in his shop and stares pensively out the window. (I wonder if he sees marmalade skies and a girl with kaleidoscope eyes?)

John, down at Peluquería 3, is a sort of tonsorial fireman. He gets the call when a supermom finance executive leaves work late and needs a ravishing, spun-sugar-with-caramel coif for a wedding rehearsal in just two hours. John appears to have mastered the instant “do”—he recently trained for a competition among hairdressers (like a bartenders’ competition, or a sheep-shearing contest), vying for a prize of prestige in the hair craft industry. Unfortunately, I traveled the days of the competition, and I don’t know if John made the cut.

One thing can’t be denied about the peluquerías along this street in Bogotá: If you’re getting primped, the whole world knows.

Every one of these enterprises puts customers on full display in the showroom window.

Vanity? Not a problem.

A woman with aluminum foil antennae and rollers the size of suckling pigs in her hair pretends to be invisible to those passing the window just feet away. A cute manicurist files a man’s nails as if desperately trying to force a ring onto his finger; he nonchalantly cloaks himself in imagined privacy, blending like a chameleon into a green Naugahyde chair.

It could be worse.

Upstairs, perfectly lit and on full display in a second floor window, a patient in a chair opens his mouth, ahh. A dentist in a white lab coat gazes in like a spelunker preparing to enter a cavern.

On the streets outside, the good people of Bogotá go about their own business.

The suburban life gives them most of what they need … and maybe a little too much of what they want.

Is it so very different from the place you live?

Photo: NickDun, CC-BY

Charles McNair is Paste’s Books Editor emeritus. He served the magazine as writer, critic and editor from 2005-2015.