by Jordi Puntí
Soon, when it was impossible for him to hide the alopecia, Martí started to give his son black looks. First, he criticized his bizarre hairstyles, but it didn’t take him long to start mocking—mercilessly and in front of the clients—his shameful adolescent baldness.
The scene is more or less as follows: Martí is giving the final touches to a client’s hairdo, scissors busy in pursuit of a couple of elusive hairs that are still sticking out. He gets them with a dry snap, slicing the air. The mirror, occupying a whole strip of the wall, reflects a humdrum scene with the smug-looking face of the client in the foreground, apparently levitating under its own steam as if there were no body sitting beneath the white cape; the never-still figure of Martí holds a small mirror so the client can contemplate his own nape, saying, “Yes, thank you, that’s exactly what I wanted”; and, finally, Conrad’s bald head, a saintly crown, emerges behind the other two as he sweeps up the spread of sacrificed hair.
MARTÍ: That’s right. Go ahead and sweep up now . . . Let’s see if all this shifting of other people’s hair will make a few stick to you, for God’s sake!
CONRAD: . . .
CLIENT: So young and such a naked skull. You don’t take after your dad in that, my boy.
CONRAD: . . .
MARTÍ: Not in that or in anything else.
CONRAD: . . .
The mutual detestation between father and son kept fermenting in Conrad’s resentment-laden silences. The scene was frequently repeated with scant variation. Perhaps prompted by the chill of the razor on their necks, the clients tended to agree with the father but, occasionally, somebody would show compassion for the boy and send him an encouraging glance in the mirror, a compassionate lifting of the eyebrows. Conrad limited himself to responding with a shriveled smile and a shrug. One gentleman, a regular who came to get his tobacco-yellowed moustache dyed, cheerfully proposed the solution of a wig.
“Never! Not in my lifetime! Don’t even mention it!” Martí cried, shaking his head so violently that his forelock, compact and glossy as Bakelite, looked as if it might crack. “Wigs are the work of the devil. They’re false. They’re disgusting. They’re dead hair! Never trust a man who wears a wig!”
Over time, the youth’s craven resignation turned into a sort of pride. As Martí’s scorn bounced higher and higher off his crown, Conrad’s character grew stronger, nourished by ever-deepening loathing for his father. At night, when Martí was asleep, Conrad conspired with his mother. They mimicked him, portraying him as even more grotesque than he really was, a Nogués-like caricature, and their nocturnal whispers often exploded into muffled laughter. I imagine it was their only resource when forced to live with such a raving lunatic. Worse, for some time now, Martí had been throwing tantrums over the slightest thing and always dragged his bald-headed son into the thick of it. Everything was his fault, and, more than once, in the middle of all the screaming and shouting, it escaped his lips that Conrad didn’t even look like his son. His wife, emboldened by the accusation, then asked whose he was if not his own and he, completely beside himself, purple with rage, ordered her to investigate every branch of the family tree to see if she could find a bald head. Just one would be sufficient.
My theory is that the barber Martí was right and grandfather Conrad wasn’t his son, but there’s no way of proving it. This is just conjecture, or maybe a desire, based on nothing more than a family history replete with miscalculations and frustrated expectations. On the maternal side (only children of only children of only children, throughout) freethinking and somewhat eccentric characters prevail. So, a simple adulterous liaison in the Barcelona of the 1920s—or, more specifically, at the end of June 1929 during the World Fair, according to my calculations—could almost be seen as a duty for my great-grandmother Dolors.
The Christophers agree to my telling the part of the story that isn’t about their bloodline. But they do so too mechanically and without much interest, only to keep the story rolling. They want me to take a leap forward, getting them back to the airport again, but I’m ignoring them because there are some crucial moments that can’t be left out. For example, the day my grandfather Conrad turned seventeen, when his mother gave him a wig without his father’s knowledge.
That night, when Martí went off to sleep, Dolors took Conrad into the bathroom. She told him to stand still in front of the mirror and keep his eyes shut. Then she placed the wig on his head, covering the bald patch and even some of the hair on the sides of his head. With his eyes closed, Conrad felt as if it was his mother putting a small hat on his head, a beret maybe, but then he could feel her fingers, like a comb running through hair, and he smiled. When he opened his eyes, however, the first impression was one of horror. The person reflected in the mirror wasn’t him. He felt ridiculous mainly because the wig was too big—it wasn’t made to measure, of course—and it suddenly brought back childhood feelings of anxiety, like the time when Dolors had dressed him up as a hunter-trapper, a sort of Daniel Boone. The photo of that pale, stressed-looking child with a synthetic fox tail wrapped around his head was still lurking in one of the drawers at home like an overlooked prophecy.
Conrad touched the wig and tried to rearrange it. The faint rustle of fake leather made the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end.
“Don’t worry, we’ll fix it,” Dolors said from the mirror. “It just needs a few snips here and there and a bit of something to stick it on. But the color’s just like yours.”
The picture that my mother has created of her father over the years is that of an idiot, sometimes loveable and sometimes incredibly annoying. She says he didn’t know until much later that the wig had belonged to a dead man. Three or four doors down from their apartment in Carrer del Tigre lived a family of espadrille sellers whom my great-grandmother frequently visited. They were older than Dolors and had been a great help to her and her son when Martí Manley was at the front. Once the hard times were over they’d reopened the shop, now well stocked, and they even had a disabled old uncle to keep them company. He’d lost the power of speech after a stroke but, from his corner where he was parked in a well-upholstered armchair, he didn’t miss a single detail in the shop. He seemed to follow the conversations with his small bright eyes rather than his ears. He was a bachelor with the ill-concealed mannerisms of a coy young lady, as his relatives admitted, but little was known of his life because he’d always been something of a rebel. He’d been a bohemian, and vain about his appearance before his stroke, and enjoyed reminiscing about his nights of absinthe and cabaret with his friend, the artist Santiago Rusiñol. His relatives looked after him in the hope (illusory) that some hidden inheritance would be revealed when he died—a painting of hanging gardens, a drawing of a languid woman, or some unpublished play by his friend—and every morning, to make him happy before taking him down to the shop, they dressed him up in a suit and tie and put on the wig he’d always worn. Even toward the end of his life, when he was increasingly senile, the mute old man in the armchair still had a proud and dignified bearing, a presence that fascinated everyone who entered the shop.
The day the wig finally came to perch on Conrad Manley’s head was the culmination of my great-grandmother’s three-month campaign: three whole months, first of worries, calculations, insinuations, and then direct propositions until she came to an agreement with the espadrille sellers. The old uncle had another stroke, this time more serious, and the doctor warned his family that there wasn’t much hope. He was sleeping all the time and could barely move, so they stopped taking him down to the shop. He’s only got a few days, his family whispered, but the few days dragged on and multiplied. Dolors offered to look after the sick man on Fridays and Saturdays when there was more work in the shop. They no longer bothered to put on his wig and, left alone with him, she studied him on the sly, measuring his cranium with all the fervor of a phrenologist.
As agreed, once the uncle was dead and buried, the wig was the relatives’ reward to Dolors for all her help. She’d confided h
er plan to them, and they were pleased to give it to her. If Conrad wore it, they said, a bit of their poor uncle would still be alive.
Although he didn’t wear it for very long, Conrad never forgot that first wig. He talked about it in the same way you remember your first dog: its way of fawning over you, letting itself be stroked, its utter devotion, and the strange pain you experienced when it died—an untimely death of course. But Conrad’s first wig was more than good company. It gave him security. On Saturday nights and Sunday afternoons he’d go out on the town with his friends. They’d walk down Carrer Viladomat to Paral·lel, go into some bar with table soccer or hang around outside the Arnau Theatre an hour before the variety show began, checking out all the dancers and leading ladies who went in through the back entrance. Conrad and his friends knew who they were from their photos hanging next to the entrance, listed them according to their charms and hypothetically shared them out. It didn’t take much to imagine them stripped of their loose-fitting everyday clothes, squeezed into sheer body stockings, their nakedness covered with sequins and strategically draped boas, and a feathery cap on their heads. Of the whole group, Conrad was the only one who dared to venture an indiscreet remark or a whistle of admiration, which the girls tended to respond to with a disdainful smile. That adolescent boldness was the opposite of the faintheartedness that, only half an hour before, had been such a source of anguish to him at home when he told his parents he was going out with his friends. Without looking at him, Martí emitted an indifferent good-bye from his armchair. Dolors gave him a kiss and a wink and furtively patted his shirt. This was their secret. Closeted in his room, Conrad had tucked the wig under his shirt, making sure it didn’t bulge. Once in the street, having walked far enough away from his neighborhood to feel safe—the hair tickling his stomach with every step—he went into a café and asked if he could use the men’s room. After locking the door, he put on the wig and tidied it up with a few strokes of the comb. He knew the movements by heart since he’d repeated them so often and, out in the street again, with his newly acquired self-esteem, he was close to being a different person.
Since Conrad couldn’t bear the idea of his father seeing him in disguise, he and his mother resigned themselves to enduring this life of fearful deceit, furtive wigs, and café men’s rooms for years, until Martí died or, if they were unlucky, until some client remarked on it in the barber’s shop, unwittingly setting off a bomb. Nevertheless, the happy ending came long before anyone imagined: my great-grandfather kicked the bucket alone and unnoticed one Saturday evening when his son had been wearing the dead neighbor’s wig for two years, and, except for him, the whole neighborhood was party to the secret.
It would have been eight o’clock at night. He’d closed up the barbershop and spent some time replenishing the bottles of Floïd aftershave, just as he did every week. When he applied the lotion he put on a great show, patting it briskly on his clients’ faces, flapping a towel to fan them if they complained it was stinging, and they all believed this was a proper massage. In fact, my great-grandfather used a concoction he bought wholesale. A chemist in Poble-Sec distilled it in his own garage, and every few weeks Martí climbed up to the foot of Montjuïc with two empty five-liter glass flagons. It seems that the blend achieved by the Poble-Sec chemist was very similar to the real Floïd, the main difference being that the counterfeit aftershave contained more pure alcohol.
When Dolors found him that Saturday at midnight, Martí was lying dead on the floor with his mouth twisted and eyes wide open. At his side lay one of the flagons, smashed to smithereens. The fake Floïd had spread across the floor, infusing the premises with its virile sickly-sweet fragrance.
“It stinks like the boxers’ changing rooms at El Price,” remarked one of the Civil Guards supervising the death scene. “At least the gentleman’s had a perfumed death. Every cloud has a silver lining . . .”
The forensic surgeon determined the cause of death as alcohol poisoning and cardiac arrest but no one ever found out what really killed Martí, the heart attack or excessive inhalation of his dodgy aftershave. Whatever the cause, it’s a pity it was all so prosaic because, in hindsight, a frenzied death in a fit of rage after discovering the secret kept from him by his wife and son would have suited him better. I imagine a completely over-the-top scene, something hammed up by a bunch of amateur dramatics enthusiasts. I see my great-grandfather coming home from the café one Saturday evening—no need to change the day—walking past the La Paloma dance hall in Carrer del Tigre. I see Conrad, who’s about to go inside with his friends, and I see the famous wig on his head, gleaming and drunk with hair spray. I see Martí looking at that head of hair from a distance with certain professional admiration and how, closer up, he sees that it’s fake. His look, now one of revulsion, goes from the mane of hair to the face of the wig’s owner, and then he realizes that it’s Conrad, his son. I see the veins in his neck swelling and his eyes popping out of his head. I see how his legs and his whole body start trembling when he goes up to him from behind, reaching out his hand to tear the wig off. Now I see Conrad’s look of surprise when he turns around, I see how the wig flies after being grabbed by Martí, and I see Conrad’s hands at his father’s throat. And when the man falls to the ground, suffocated by his son, I hear the famous last words from a mouth twisted in a grimace as he loses consciousness: “Never trust a man who wears a wig!”
“Facts! Facts! Get to the airport!”
My brothers are complaining again because I’m having a ball inventing amazing death scenes. They’re all worked up, shouting (as if they’d never blathered on) and demanding that I get to the point. Cool it, Christophers, I’m wrapping it up now. My great-grandmother Dolors didn’t cry much over Martí’s demise, just shed a few tears when receiving condolences and that’s it. When the death notices were distributed around the neighborhood, the news spread fast and the apartment filled up with barbers from the guild and clients who came to pay their last respects. Conrad had also hung up a notice saying “Closed Owing to Bereavement” on the door of the barber’s shop. No one knows whether he was devastated or happy.
Some memorable moments from the wake have been passed down to us thanks to Dolors’s reminiscences. The barbers’ guild printed an obituary notice to be distributed around the neighborhood and other barber’s shops. Under my great-grandfather’s name, like a family shield, they’d placed an emblem consisting of crossed scissors and comb. The former barber’s shop owner, for whom Martí was a disciple, asked to view the body. He wept when they opened up the coffin but, seeing Martí lying there before him, couldn’t resist whisking a tortoiseshell comb from his pocket and tidying up the corpse’s venerable forelock, which was starting to wilt. It seems that there were mutterings about the funeral too. Conrad had at first decided to attend wigless in deference to his father’s memory, but my great-grandmother was a very stubborn woman and didn’t let up until she convinced him to wear it. After all, Martí was dead, and Conrad’s wishes came first now. Martí’s barber friends considered it a provocation, and, coming out of the Our Lady of Carmen Church to express their condolences to the family, some of them looked askance at the wig, unable to disguise their contempt and anger.
This happened in 1949 when my grandfather was twenty years old. Now he only needed the reason for my mother’s birth. Martí’s sudden death was a big relief to Conrad and, as they say, he never had to take his wig off again. Three months after the uncomfortable funeral, and with the black mourning armband still in place on his left arm, Conrad sold his father’s shampooing equipment, the mirrors, and the chairs to a barber who was setting up in Carrer Tallers, and opened a wig shop in the former barbershop.
He called it “New Samson Wigs,” and it sent shockwaves through the neighborhood. In the early days, Conrad received several anonymous letters threatening to scalp him of his leather pelt just like Indians did to palefaces in John Wayne films. The former owner of the barbershop, who now felt like an abandoned orphan with no cha
nce of getting free haircuts in any other establishment, kicked up a huge fuss about this “betrayal of history” and demanded that Conrad return his signed photograph. The parish priest of the Our Lady of Carmen Church, in Carrer Sant Antoni, a faithful servant of the National Movement, stalked into the shop one afternoon and, with a crow-like expression of disdain and in a sinuous voice that would do justice to a Richelieu, informed him that the name of the shop was heresy, maybe even anathema or cause for excommunication. Conrad explained that, quite the contrary, the reference to Samson was his homage to the Holy Scriptures, and he won the day by promising the priest free wigs for Jesus and the apostles when the Easter Week procession came around.
In their zeal to erase any trace of Martí, Conrad and his mother transformed the old barbershop from top to bottom. It was as if the cut hair that was once been strewn around the floor had colonized every corner of the place: There were wigs in the front window, majestically crowning the heads of mannequins that looked like royal busts, wigs on the shelves, wigs on the work table ready to be combed, wigs of every size, with golden curls, long jet-black tresses, or white powdered hair. The only thing mother and son had failed to eliminate was the cloying smell of fake Floïd, which, since the Saturday of Martí’s demise, had seeped into the walls. Despite all the changes, the odd absentminded client occasionally wandered in and asked for Martí. In his wig palace, Conrad had toughened up, and he couldn’t stand being reminded of the old days so, brandishing whatever wig he happened to be working on right then, like a guillotined head, or Samson’s locks in the hands of Delilah, he went berserk and kicked him out, yelling from the door, “Here we don’t keep anybody’s hair. Here we sell hair!”
In that 1950s city of soot and rags, in that diminished and fearful city called Barcelona, most people saw the New Samson wig shop as an extravagance that would soon be pulling down its shutters for once and for all, but, just when it had lost the gleam of novelty and people forgot all about it—when it blurred into the life of the street—business started to pick up. Conrad was affable to the point of being unctuous and, once he’d sussed out what kind of client he was dealing with, whether the person was timid or vain, he’d come out with one of his lines.
