How I Got Botox ... In The Dark ... At The Mall In Portugal

What happens when you combine botulism, a power outage, and a mall in Lisbon.

Dear Reader,

The air on the sidewalk was warm and still, the kind of afternoon where even the birds go quiet for a moment, and you stand in the shade to avoid the sun burning your forehead.

A low battery warning flashed on my phone again, and I sighed in relief when a white car with an Uber sign on it pulled up next to me on the sidewalk.

Thank God.

Without this Uber, I’d be walking home across Lisbon.

I had just checked the metro and it was blocked by a metal gate.

No one was loitering next to it waiting for it to open. This was not a good omen.

I slid into the backseat of the car, and the faint, stale scent of cigarettes clung to the air, mixing with a warm breeze drifting in from the driver’s half-open windows.

It reminded me of old men and coffee.

Asphalt and leather.

“Bom dia,” I said to the driver in relief and searched for his name on my phone. “Ricardo. Muito obrigada Ricardo.”

After I thanked him for picking me up I held up my phone and pointed at it and said in English. “Do you have a charger?”

Ricardo was a thin middle-aged Portuguese man with salt and pepper hair very closely cut to his head.

He smiled back at me and flipped open the dash cubby to pull out a white cord that would connect my phone to his car.

“I guess the electricity is out,” I said, glancing at the darkened storefronts as we passed them on the street.

”Across Europe!” he said, his voice tilting upward in disbelief. He pointed at his phone. “They say it’s at least France, Spain and Portugal.”

“Across Europe?” I repeated, a strange flutter of unease in my chest.

“Yes,” he laughed. “It’s crazy! I’ve never seen anything like this. Never!”

“What happened?” I asked.

“Don’t know yet,” he said, navigating the car into a stream of traffic that was headed in the direction of my apartment.

“None of the traffic lights are working,” he gestured, and I could see that they indeed, were all dark.

It was a sunny day. A normal day. Except for all of the traffic lights weren’t working.

“What is this?” I thought. “Am I in an unaired episode of the Twilight Zone?”

Ricardo’s phone rang.

He picked it up and spoke in rapid Portuguese trying to calm the person on the other end of the line and then shut it off abruptly as we approached the bridge in front of us, which was blocked by a traffic jam.

“That was my mother,” he explained. “She’s checking on me. I told her I’d be home after I dropped you off.”

“Of course,” I thought. “Who calls us first in an emergency? Our mothers.”

We inched forward, the cars ahead of us glinting in the sun, a river of hot, stalled metal.

Someone laid on their horn, a long, frustrated bleat.

Ricardo rolled his window down a little further, muttering sharp words I didn’t fully understand, but I got the gist.

“Thank you for picking me up,” I told him again. “The metro was closed.”

“Yeah, all over the city," he said. “Grocery stores are closed too. And gas stations.”

He veered away from the bridge, explaining that he was going to take me a back way because the bridge was too blocked and would take forever.

The drivers around us seemed a bit unsure about how to navigate without stop lights but everyone was doing the best we could.

“It reminds me of a normal day in traffic in Africa,” I told him, and it did — that same slow merging, like cars pressing through a river bottleneck, inching forward bit-by-bit, drivers craning their necks to see what’s behind and what’s ahead.

“How long have you been in Portugal?” he asked me.

“Oh God,” I thought. “Have mercy.”

This is my least favorite question because I feel like I should know more Portuguese than I do at this point. Should be more capable than I am. Have seen more than I’ve seen. Just in general be better than I am.

But I’m not. No excuses.

Photo by Paul Torres on Unsplash

I shared with him a bit about my journey as we drove by his football team’s field, and the park that was his “gym,” and discussed how Lisbon has changed over the years.

“I’m 48,” he told me, and I said, “You are? Me too.”

He studied me in the rearview mirror.

“Really?” he said it as if I were lying.
“You don’t look it. You look like you’re in your twenties.”

“I just have good genes,” I said, feeling the slight sting of fresh puncture marks beneath my skin, and laughing at myself and laughing this moment.

Some things are better left unsaid and unseen, even in broad daylight.

I didn’t tell him.

I didn’t tell him that he picked me up for this ride near a darkened mall in Lisbon, where I had been at an aesthetics clinic that morning called … wait for it … “Soul Beauty.”

Soul Beauty is apparently found in the kind of mall with one upstairs and a downstairs, and a maze of boutique stores you could get lost in even if the lights were on.

But they weren’t.

I thought they were off to save on money.

That was when I stood beneath the half-lit mall directory, squinting at the list of shops, panicked because I was late.

“Soul Beauty” was somewhere inside, but the owner wasn’t responding to me.

I texted two words: “Upstairs?” or “Downstairs?” cursing myself for not remembering how to ask that in Portuguese.

No response.

I took the stairs to explore the first floor, the sound of my Vija sneakers slapping on each step.

The echo rang out through the hollow, empty corridors.

I moved quickly, past darkened storefronts that smelled faintly of chewing gum and damp, and people gathered around their phones in twos and threes.

No Soul Beauty here.

Downstairs, it was even darker. That close, dense kind of darkness that makes you wonder if you’re in a scary movie.

I was almost ready to turn around and leave when I saw the words written in cursive on glass.

Soul Beauty.

Behind them I could see a small light inside and so I knocked on the glass door.

“Olá?” I called out, trying to sound friendly.

The door cracked open, and a woman appeared — Brazilian, mid-thirties, hair down to her waist. Her lips were plump and shiny, like fresh plums.

Honestly, she looked like she had just walked out of a commercial advertising, “Get the Brazilian look” and I probably would have bought everything she was selling on it.

She greeted me and then held up her phone to my face, the flashlight catching my skin in a stark, white beam.

“Olá” she said, studying me as if she could remove my wrinkles with her gaze. She gestured for me to take a picture of my face with my phone and then show it to her.

So I did.

I felt the absurdity of the moment. Showing a stranger my face through a screen, in the dark, so that she could see my flaws even better.

After a few moments, she touched my forehead with cool, dry fingers.

“Frown,” she said in English. Then, “Relax.”

She repeated this several times, her fingers pressing and releasing, as if my face were a map and she was finding the places that needed erasing.

We studied the menu of her services on my phone and agreed on what I needed, or rather, what I wanted.

She led me to a hospital bed in the back of the room draped with a thin sheet and propped two phones so their beams of light pointed at my face.

At this point, I should have said, “Maybe I’ll come back tomorrow when the lights are on,” but here’s the thing, beauty waits for no man and it was my time and I didn’t care if the lights were out.

I was there and I was getting a treatment.

She filled syringes with botulism and said, “I’m a pharmacist,” before placing an elastic plastic cap around my head, “Who referred you?”

I wanted to say, “All the women my age,” but I didn’t.

Instead I focused on the sensation of her poking needles into my flesh in the dark, telling me to relax, let it go.

Let the worry go.

I closed my eyes as another needle pierced my skin, a small, sharp sting followed by a cool wipe from cotton.

And in the dark, as she pressed the solution beneath my skin, I thought about how darkness strips away our illusion of control.

How I just had to trust that whatever she was doing to me with a poison I tried like hell to avoid creating in my kitchen back when I was into canning in Montana wasn’t going to paralyze something I might need later — like critical thinking or empathy.

Instead, here I was, lying in a darkened mall, a stranger’s hands on my face, letting her erase my worry lines while three countries struggled to figure out what was going on with their power.

“How do you feel?” she asked when she was done.

“Good,” I said, and then she instructed me not to put my head down for four hours, and I wondered if that would ruin the nap I had planned for later.

And then of course, Ricardo came and dropped me off at home.

Here’s something you need to know about that day.

Just a normal park on a normal day during the blackout

It wasn’t chaotic in my neighborhood. There were no riots. No panic in the streets. No reasons for new worry lines to appear on my forehead.

Just life without lights and internet.

I practiced music. Read. Filled my water bottles. Ate the last can of tuna in my refrigerator. Walked in the park and watched my neighbors do the same thing.

And when the lights came back on, about ten hours after they went out, my neighbors cheered in celebration.

We yelled out our windows. We felt the joy of something returning that had been lost.

And as I watched my own reflection flicker back to life in my mirror, I couldn’t help but wonder if days like this would be better at erasing frown lines than any Botox treatment ever would be.

It was a step back in time.

Before we needed the Internet to connect us. Electricity to power us. Social media to entertain us.

All we needed was presence. And patience. And peace.
Just like now.

Love,

Janelle

Thanks for reading … you make me smile

P.S. One more quick story. I met some Canadians the next day who were tourists in Lisbon. They were from Newfoundland and New Brunswick. I asked them about their trip. They talked about castles and beaches. I asked them about the blackout. It was like asking a cat if a bird had flown by. “Oh, the blackout? No big deal. We just hung out in the hotel. We’ve been through hundreds a lot worse than that.” And I thought, “See? It’s all a matter of perspective.” And it was.