by Nicole Yurcaba
When readers first enter the world depicted in Mario Balletin’s Beauty Salon (translated by the poet Shook), they enter an environment all-too reminiscent of the makeshift sanitariums and hospitals that emerged after AIDS erupted in the 1980s. In Balletin’s novella, an unnamed, highly infectious disease spreads rapidly. The disease’s victims slide towards an excruciating death, and, denied treatment by hospitals, find themselves at the mercy of an unidentified narrator who converts their beauty salon into a males-only ramshackle refuge known as the Mortuary. Unique to the Mortuary is the collection of aquariums housing exotic fish. Confined by death and violence, the narrator guides readers through their everyday existence where too often life resembles the brutality happening inside the aquarium rather than the civility of an organized society.
What captures readers initially is the narrator’s openness and honesty, as well as the astute observation they give their surroundings. The narrator is quick to acknowledge their flaws, stating that they “tired of keeping solely guppies and golden carp,” and that the tiring “has to do with a deformity of my personality.” The deformity, the narrator admits, is that they “quickly tire of the things” to which they are attracted. Readers eventually see this “deformity” control the narrator’s approach to the Mortuary’s guests, admitting that “they’re all the same to me” and “now they’re no more than bodies marching in a deathly trance toward disappearance.” Despite the confessed exhaustion the narrator feels, their openness and honesty creates a sense of selflessness, of which the narrator seems unaware.
Readers will also notice how the narrator’s observations of the Mortuary’s confinement resembles that of the aquariums adorning it. Readers see the aquariums’ resplendence diminish into decrepit states where “the water’s not as clear anymore” and a “greenish tinge…has clouded the walls of the aquarium.” It is as though the narrator’s own dissatisfaction and decline, as well as their patients’, manifest in the aquariums. Like the patients in the increasingly neglected Mortuary, the fish “cling strangely to life,” surprising the narrator at “how faithful this last brood of fish has proved itself to be.”
As readers witness not only the ever-quickening decline of society and the patients, they discover that the narrator’s life “has some semblance of order for the first time.” This may strike readers as odd, especially as the narrator faces their own mortality when the disease’s symptoms present rather suddenly. As the narrator looks toward death, the narrator again reveals a stalwart selflessness: “I don’t know where we have learned that aiding the destitute means attempting to ward off death at any cost. Because of that experience I made the decision that if there was no cure, the best outcome was a quick death, in the best possible conditions for the sufferer.” Even though the narrator’s weakness and exhaustion more and more presents itself in the novella’s final chapters, readers see a person more concerned with others than their own mortality. The narrator worries what will become of the Mortuary after they die, whether or not some religious organization, specifically the Sisters of Charity, will take over the Mortuary and transform it into an unrecognizable place with missions that are the complete opposite of the original ones.
Through the narrator’s experience, the book also tackles the age-old question surrounding devout servitude–what is it all worth? The narrator states “So I ask myself what all this sacrifice is worth. I’m still as lonely as always. Without any type of emotional recompense. Without anyone to come to mourn my illness.” As the narrator continues nursing the sick while suffering from the disease, the narrator admits “But now I must see to them all myself. I must suffer through my decline without uttering a word.” By its end, readers may not necessarily receive an answer to the question “What is it all worth?” Again, through the fish’s experiences, the narrator conveys the human condition: “In all these years the only one affected by the loss of life in the aquariums has been me.”
At its core, too, the book draws to the forefront the meaning of a merciful death. Through their selflessness, the narrator ultimately works to provide that for their guests. Yet again, the narrator utilizes the natural world, and specifically aquarium maintenance, to bring this concept to the forefront. By removing a dead fish as soon as they found it in the tank, the narrator exhibited yet another form of selflessness, stating “I sometimes couldn’t sleep well at night if I knew a fish was being torn into pieces by one of its previous companions.” This parallels the narrator’s thoughts on what will happen to the Mortuary should the Sisters of Charity take over what the narrator has created: “Medicines all over the place—usually attempting to save lives already chosen by death. Prolonging suffering under the guise of unconditional love.”
Timely and powerful, with the subtle poesy and quiet force of Augustina Bazterrica’s Tender is the Flesh, Beauty Salon transports readers into a dystopian dreamscape where nature reminds the humans occupying it that they are not in control. Like Bazterrica’s novel, Beauty Salon also uses the suffering and survival of the natural world and some of its often forgotten creatures to reinforce to readers their own futility and mortality. It’s a book sure to leave readers not only questioning their own existence, but also considering how even the smallest act of selflessness might bring ease and comfort to another—even if the larger world doesn’t recognize it.
Nicole Yurcaba (Ukrainian: Нікола Юрцаба) is a Ukrainian-American poet and essayist. Her poems and essays have appeared in The Atlanta Review, The Lindenwood Review, Whiskey Island, Raven Chronicles, Appalachian Heritage, North of Oxford, and many other online and print journals. Nicole holds an MFA in Writing from Lindenwood University, is the recipient of a July 2020 Writing Residency at Gullkistan, Creative Center for the Arts in Iceland, and is a Tupelo Press June 2020 30 for 30 featured poet. Her poetry collection Triskaidekaphobia is forthcoming Black Spring Group in 2022. She teaches poetry workshops for Southern New Hampshire University and works as a career counselor for Blue Ridge Community College.
