In Peru, they considered me a criminal and hunted me down. But when I arrived in Houston, the company had a car and a driver waiting at George Bush International. The driver put my bags in the back of a shiny black town car. He was an Ecuadorian dude named Bernardo, so we spoke in Spanish the whole way to the hotel. Funny, the first person I meet in America is another South American. Go figure. But it made me feel at home, so I told him most of the story, but sort of around the back way.
I said I had been brought to America by a worldwide cosmetics company whose name I didn't want to say. They had brought me here because I had developed a unique process that they thought could make them a lot of money and at the same time help the people of the United States. I was the only person in the world who knew the process, and I had been using it for almost thirty years. He asked about it and I said, "Trade secret."
They had brought me in to work with some scientists to see if I could modify my technique, because there was sort of a big problem with it. Bernardo asked what the problem was. I paused to think about how to say it and then I told him that some people had sometimes experienced some medical problems as a result of one part of the process. (Meaning that they died and you drained the fat by hanging the limbs and torsos above candles to warm the fat and make it fall off the flesh or whatever, but Bernardo didn't need to know that part.)
Then I felt a little dishonest for not saying the whole thing, and Bernardo was kind of my countryman in a way, at least now that we were in America, you know, so I told him that the company thought that instead of using animal products to make cosmetics, which Americans didn't like because they had to do mean things to the conejos, etc., etc., that they could find some volunteers in the city, where—to be honest, there's a lot of gordos living in Houston who need to get rid of some extra parts of themselves. The company figured it could be an all around win-win, right? I get amnesty and a huge amount of money if I sell the technique and stay on as consultant, they pay the gordos a little cash for something they don't want anyway, and the company turns it into high-quality makeup. Maybe eventually the gordos can sort of turn themselves into a wholesale market.
Okay, so hopefully shoppers can get past the idea that the product is coming from another person. That shouldn't be so hard because the donors make a profit and they become healthier at the same time, and that's good PR, and people buy wigs made of human hair already, right? So it's a "goldmine," is how they put it at the meeting. Everybody benefits, and everybody's thin and beautiful. Maybe some of the gordos will want to buy the cosmetics made from their own fat because they can go out dancing now, eh? Because they'll be flacos and they can be beautiful now. And in this wonderful new country of mine that I love, thin and beautiful equals happy no matter how you get there. And talk about sustainable, right?
Bernardo nodded and smiled, and I could tell he admired my business sense, which made my skin all tingly because nobody had admired me for a long time back in Peru. Not the police, not the community, not even my daughters. He didn't ask anything more about the deal during the trip, instead we talked about where we were from, and he told me where to find good timbuche and juane in Houston if I started to miss home. But when he dropped me off, he made a point of shaking my hand really hard and slipping me his business card.