The Combover

by Adri

  "And where do I have to do it?" she would ask. "You know I hate blood."

  "I've told you over and again. Choose a buttock, draw an imaginary cross, and stick the point of the needle in where the lines meet. That's where you do it. Surely you can manage that! There won't be any blood if you do it as you're supposed to." But it was no use, she was hopeless, though she could prepare a syringe without leaving a single bubble in it.

  We lived in a first floor apartment close to the main square in Recanati. Below it was a take-away shop that gave out a terrible stink of grilled meat. The owner was a man who smoked a cigar that he always kept in one corner of his mouth. He roasted pork by the shovelful, and as time passed, he began to develop pig-like features, as if the spirit of the pig had left its body just as he was putting its flesh on the grill and had gone and attached itself to the first bastard it happened to come across. One day I went into the take-away to ask him if he could do something to reduce the smell, as I couldn't open the window without breathing in a stink of putrefaction. He said no—I had to get used to the smell, he said.

  There was an old couple in the apartment next door who argued and threw dishes at each other. In the evening, when I got tired of studying bibliographic data exchange formats, I sat by the window listening to their arguments. I began writing a story all about them, but then asked myself: "Why am I wasting my time on two fucked-up old people?" What was so extraordinary about them? And then, the shouting . . . the insults . . . their "stupid old sod," or "why don't you just drop dead." In short, I got bored writing about them and gave up after a couple of weeks, still stuck on page one. The man in the take-away also told my neighbor that it was just a matter of getting used to the smell of the meat, but one day, tired of his wife and of the stink, he took a fire extinguisher into the shop and sprayed it over the grill ("I'll have you . . . getting used to it! . . . I'll have you . . ." he said), and then he lifted up the extinguisher and smashed it over the take-away owner's head. When the take-away owner got back from hospital with his head bandaged up, the old man told him: "If I smell the stink of grilled meat again, I'll flay you alive and stick you on it. Understand, you pig?"

  All this pandemonium that had been tormenting me reached its culmination one day when I went to a barber in Bari, the city where I had just started work as a specialist researcher at the university, studying—as I have already mentioned—bibliographic data exchange formats. The barber was in Via Napoli, a noisy area, full of traffic. It was one of those no-frills gentleman's barber shops with two chairs, two mirrors, the usual table of magazines to flick through—the atmosphere of a hospital. I sat down in one of the chairs (both were empty) and exchanged an occasional comment with the barber: the weather, the traffic, and life in Bari. But then the barber, almost apologizing for the interruption, asked: "The usual?"

  "Yes, the usual," I said, though I can't think why I said "yes, the usual" since this was the first time I'd been there.

  I had always had difficulty, since I was a child, explaining to the barber how I wanted my hair. There was a time when I used to go round with a photo of my father in my pocket, and when the barber asked how I wanted my hair I'd pull out the photo and say: "Like this, I want it just like this," even though later on I preferred the imperial hairstyle of Julius Caesar.

  They used to look at me, holding back a smile.

  "You haven't arrived there yet, my boy."

  "But I will sooner or later!"

  Instead of blank walls, the barbers ought to have photos of hair styles, so that you can choose according to taste. "Like this one," a customer might say, or: "On top like this and the sides like that one there," and so forth.

  The barber in Bari was a portly man and his head was already showing a few signs of baldness: perhaps it had been stopped in time but he'd certainly lost a few hairs—in fact, quite a few. He moved around me like a hippopotamus. I didn't mind entrusting my head to him—the way that things were going, my hair was in need of some periodical care, and so the barber, I thought, would most likely have a potential customer in me. But on the other hand, I never trusted people with bodies that didn't fit what they did, and yet the Bari barber—while seemingly unsuited to wielding scissors (he had more the hands of tomato picker or a tire repairer than a barber)—seemed to be a man who was confident and precise. In short, while he was working away with his scissors, perhaps as a result of the anti-epileptic drugs I was taking at the time, I nodded off for a moment in the chair. Two minutes at most, no more (I used to keep a close watch when they cut my hair, and if something wasn't right I had no hesitation in taking the scissor-wielder's hand—"Leave this up here, but you can cut there," I would say). I may even have started dreaming as I sat there in the chair—I don't know what, but I think I was dreaming something. When I came to, I had the impression that the reflection in the large mirror in front of me was someone else. One of the Toldini's, for example. Costantino Toldini, to be exact—a man my age, a financial consultant who had a shorn head and ran around the town wearing earphones and a pair of leotards that showed off his package (and he wasn't in the least embarrassed at being seen like this). The haircut had been one of the fastest I'd ever had. When I roused myself he was already brushing the hair from the back of my neck and behind my ears with a soft white brush.

  "But you've shorn me!" I said.

  "See how fine you look," said the barber, and to convince me that it really did look good, he stuck a mirror behind my head so that my shorn head was reflected back into the large mirror.

  "It's not possible, how could you? I asked for a light trim."

  The barber replied as calmly as could be: "Come on, summer's here . . . You don't want to look like those old folk who wander about with their last remnants of hair, do you?"

  I regarded that "come on," said with a pat on the back, as a real impertinence. Then he carried on with his justification: "You're still young. Married?"

  "What's that got to do with it? All I wanted was a light trim, I didn't want to end up as yet another Toldini."

  The barber smiled, though he had no idea what I was talking about.

  "Take my advice, you look much younger like this . . ."

  "I haven't the slightest interest in looking younger, and anyway, that's your opinion, and quite frankly, I couldn't care less about your opinions."

  "Next time I'll give you a light trim and no more, if that's what you prefer."

  "Next time! You were supposed to get it right this time . . . this is too much." I tried to make him understand, without going into detail, that he'd left me nothing to comb over.

  "I'm sorry."

  "It's easy to say sorry . . . I knew I should have stuck with my usual barber."

  "Where?"

  "Who?"

  "Your barber."

  "In Recanati."

  "Nice place, Recanati. I went there a few years ago."

  Over the large mirror was a calendar with a naked woman rolling in the sand and a picture of two bald men heaving boulders; below it was a passage from the Inferno:

  Those whose pates boast no hairy canopies

  Are clerks—yea, popes and cardinals, in whom

  Covetousness hath made its masterpiece.

  "You see?" said the barber as I was reading these lines. "Those with the shaved heads are priests, whose only toil in life had been to accumulate wealth."

  "I'm not interested," I said. I couldn't have cared less about Dante at that moment—I was looking at my combover, which was now a pile of clippings on the floor.

  Leaving that place with my head shaved was an unforgettable experience: the air around my ears, my head exposed, the sun on my naked scalp—in short, I was no longer myself or, if I was, I was not what I had been before. I could have died of shame. My grandfather, an extremely respectable man, considered to be a man of reason, would have wasted no time in reporting that Bari barber. I stood there at first, in the doorway. The barber meanwhile was shaking the cape and holding it out for the next custo
mer who had just arrived.

  "Take my advice, you look much younger like that," he repeated, holding out his scissors, ready to commit more carnage. He was certainly a man of clear ideas, I had to admit.

  "You've done a proper fine job of him, Kociss!" said the next customer, pointing to me and already settled in the chair.

  I summoned all my strength, took a deep breath, and went off along the road with my head bowed. I didn't go to the university that day. I telephoned the secretary's office to say I was postponing my lesson.

  "I'm not feeling well this morning," I told one of the secretaries, "I'm going straight home and then to see my doctor."

  The mechanical gesture of pushing my hair forward, which I continued doing despite there being nothing left to push forward, was now pointless. "And now," I wondered, "how long do I have to wait before it grows back?" All I could do was to get a hat from a stall by the station. Over the stall were the words: Give your head a new profile. I chose a brown cloth cap with red stripes. It didn't look too bad on me, though I was never much for hats, unlike Ettore Mattei and his son.

  When I arrived home Teresa looked at me in amazement, and then she hugged me.

  "What a surprise! You look wonderful like that, you know," she said, rubbing her hand over the bare surface of my scalp. "You look like a lollipop . . . it's much better than that tuft you had on top, all pushed forward."

  I stayed at home the following week, pretending I had a bad headache, or perhaps I really did. When at last I went out, I had to deal with people's accusing looks. The whole thing caused me great upset and embarrassment, but in the end I came to terms with it.

  3

  The great ruffle

  But there was another day even more woeful than the Bari barber's head-shave debacle. My combover had grown back vigorously. And what I remember of that day is the pulsating sound of the alarm clock, the cappuccino and jam croissant at the corner bar, the one euro twenty cents I left in the clammy hand of the newsvendor, the morning greetings. But most of all I remember, before leaving the apartment where I was staying in Bari, that I went to the bathroom to wash my hair with a blueberry shampoo, I dried it, then held out the hairdryer and flattened it down as far as possible, so that it spread evenly over the surface of my scalp. Lastly, for safety, I sprayed it with hair lacquer, since you never know. I left the bathroom only when the fringe had dried firmly on my forehead.

  The lecture began at nine o'clock on that Tuesday morning, as it did every Tuesday for as long as I'd been working in Bari. It was a city I liked because everyone rushed about, as if they had so much to get done. And as I climbed the steps to the second floor, I was stopped by a tall, skinny boy whose face was covered in acne. He asked me what books he had to bring in to do my exam as an external candidate.

  "Bring along the two recommended books as well," I told him, "The Library by Solimine and read also the History of Italian Publishing."

  "How many pages are there in all?"

  "I don't know, just read what I tell you and don't worry about counting the pages."

  The department always had that stuffy smell that made me think of railway waiting rooms. One long corridor, teachers, assistants, researchers, doctoral graduates, students waiting at doorways for exams or to talk to their tutors. I shared my office with two researchers, one who had spent the past four years working on a critical edition of the sonnets of Ugo Foscolo and had just split up from her husband; the other an expert on Giacomo Leopardi and with a slight hump on her back. She had a wild passion for Schubert Lieder. They called her Mezzosoprano. I didn't have much to do with either of them but, all in all, both women were fairly pleasant. They were always talking about projects and funding, and that morning they were speculating about whether a post would become vacant, but as soon as I put my bag down on the desk, they quickly changed the subject. I asked them whether they weren't hot with all the windows shut. They said they weren't, that they preferred it that way with everything closed. I left, set off down the corridor, and was stopped straight away by another student, a boy with sideburns and long hair. He was from Argentina, the son of an Argentinian consul. He always wore a jacket, even in summer, and when he spoke he rolled his S's, so as to double them.

  "I am completing the bibliography," he said, "but I do not have much material in Italy for the argument I am working on."

  "First read the books I've suggested. You'll find all the material you need there. And come and see me next Monday at five: we can talk about it then."

  "OK," he said, "that's fine."

  It wasn't my intention to give him short shrift, though I always felt a certain aversion toward students who stop you at awkward times, wherever you happen to be, to ask you things. The classic fifteen minute delay had now come to an end and I couldn't leave the rest of the class waiting. When I entered the classroom, forty or so students were already sitting in their places. At that time I was giving a series of lectures on the history of printers' marks; on that particular Tuesday I wanted to talk about the role of animals in printers' marks during the 1500s: the cat with the mouse in its mouth, for example, used by the printer Giovan Battista Sessa, Manuzio's dolphin, Costantini's two crowned serpents entwined around a staff, or Giolito di Ferrari's phoenix. I wanted to show them the various marks and, if there was enough time, to explain the symbolic meaning of the images. Here too, the classroom windows were shut and no one had any intention of opening them. Wind and sweat were two things I could not abide. As I was describing a mark used by Valerio Dorico—a Pegasus striking a rock with its hoof making a spring gush forth—I remember noticing the Argentinian student, whose thesis I was supervising and who came to all my lectures, getting up without saying a word and coming toward my desk. I followed him with my eyes, to understand what he was doing there at the front. I thought he wanted to ask me a question or to help me turn a page of the great catalogue of printers' marks I was leafing through in front of the class. But no. While I was holding this great book, he pushed back my combover with a gesture that was deliberate but not aggressive—indeed it was almost elegant—exposing my baldness to the whole class. For a few seconds the students sat there looking at me, astonished, without understanding the insult. Then, predictably, they all began to laugh. They began nudging each other nervously, some bent down beneath their desks giggling where I couldn't see them, others burst into shameless fits of laughter. The Argentinian student then went back to his place through the front rows of desks. He wasn't laughing. He peered silently at me and that was all—the mad, incomprehensible gaze of someone who had fulfilled some necessary act. At first I didn't even try to straighten my hair. I stood there with the large book in my hand, my hair ruffled, my forelock sticking up, just as he had left it. When the laughing subsided, I put the book on the desk and tried to rearrange my combover by smoothing it forward, with no mirror, as best as I could, flattening it down over my scalp, hoping that the lacquer would still hold. This also produced a few brief laughs. I was sweating heavily, but no one thought to open the window. Finally I cleared my throat, and without further comment I carried on with my lecture.

  "As I was saying," I continued, feigning indifference, "we can find this Dorico printer's mark on various frontispieces . . ."

  By now, only a few continued to snigger. I'm sure that someone had even made an attempt at drawing me, and that my caricature was being passed around under the desks. Then I talked about a dragon that spouts a jet of fire, an immense flame of breath against a dove in flight, but I forgot to say which publisher or printer the mark belonged to, or perhaps I did and don't remember. All that happened from that moment on, even though I have an excellent memory and remember every tiny detail of the whole event, remains confused and hazy, as if my memories had been replaced by clouds that dispersed and reformed according to the wind. I remember getting dates mixed up, that I finished the lesson half an hour early, that the South American spent the whole time staring at me without once losing his composure, that something was g
etting passed around from desk to desk, that others were still sniggering.

  I think there is a right moment for all things—for singing, for dancing, for saying goodbye. That Tuesday morning was the right moment for humiliating a man who was standing in front of a class which was bored by his lecture, and so one brave student took the initiative to break the monotony. He had understood better than anyone else that this was the appropriate moment; otherwise he wouldn't have stood up and ruffled the doormat on my forehead. He had taken the opportunity when it arose and had humiliated me. Out of some need for attention, perhaps?

  I was the last to leave the room. Generally I was the first to open the door. I would close my notebook and make a hasty exit. That was how the lecture ended. But that day I felt unsettled and wanted to wait, in the hope that someone would come up and say something. I didn't want apologies—these things happen, I know that—but I was looking for some word of support and appreciation. I have always, basically, been a strong advocate of live-and-let-live. If someone wants to do their hair like Costantino Toldini, that's fine by me, they're free to do so, but no one has the right to ruffle me up or tell me how to do mine (that's why I could have turned the Bari barber, that conceited cretin, into mincemeat that day I went for a haircut in Via Napoli). In short, the Argentinian went out with the rest of the class, not even saying goodbye. I certainly didn't expect him to shake hands, but I expected some word of consolation at least: "I was just joking—I hope you didn't take it the wrong way."