The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup by Susan Orlean

Author:Susan Orlean
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780375506789
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2001-03-10T05:00:00+00:00

FISH WINDOW

SOME OF THE PEOPLE who admire Fernando Lara’s window displays at the Citarella Fish Company, at Broadway and Seventy-fifth, think the prehistoric-monster tableau he made one day last week was among his finest efforts. A plastic Godzilla clutching a real boiled lobster reared up on a slab of swordfish that had a face of black-olive eyes and a mushroom nose and was resting on a field of finnan haddie and jumbo shrimp. About half a dozen people stopped by to photograph the window that day. Others—purists, probably—prefer Mr. Lara’s nonrepresentational displays, which might feature a rosette of gray sole over a cascade of scallops; or concentric circles of brook trout, red snapper, sea squab, and stone-crab claws; or an elaborate mosaic of lobsters and clams and haddock. Mr. Lara’s windows—a spectacle of color and texture and fish forms—have become one of the most popular art exhibits on upper Broadway, and there is usually a school of appreciators trolling outside Citarella in the morning as soon as he finishes preparing the day’s display. Mr. Lara, who makes up a new window every day but Sunday, doesn’t publicly favor one of his styles over another, but he admits to liking to deploy a plastic prehistoric creature along with the fish whenever possible, especially if he can get dry ice for a smoke-pouring-out-of-nostrils effect.

“Sometimes, before I come to work, I sit and think of my design,” Mr. Lara said the other day. “I want the window to be nice every time. I just wish I had more time to do it.” As he was talking, he put two pails—one full of salmon steaks and one of halibut—on a shelf at the back of the window, smoothed the shaved ice in front, and calculated where to begin. He planned to edge the window with fish steaks, layer sea squabs and scallops beside them, put a pile of shrimp in the center, and poise melon boats on either side of it. He was also preparing a few mackerel for the next day, when he intended to prop three of them up like miniature porpoises leaping out of a sea of other seafood and balance a rubber ball between their noses. “Sometimes I’ll ride my train in from Astoria and I’ll have the design in my head, but they won’t have the fish I planned on,” he said. “Then I have to change my ideas really fast. I get ideas from watching television, and sometimes I see a picture in a magazine that I like, and I come to work and make it out of fish. Sometimes I can’t believe I can make all this just out of fish.”

Mr. Lara, who is thirty-two years old and came here from Mexico in 1979, had never done any artwork or arranged fish in any manner until eight months ago. He was working as an icebox man at Citarella then, and started getting ideas about the window display, so he asked Ricky Oviedo, the manager, if he could give it a try.

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