The Barber of Erice

It started with the most miraculous haircut Giuliu had ever seen.

Signora Azzaro had brought in her 13-year-old son. Every boy in Erice wanted to look like a footballer, but this … The sides had been brought down to near stubble, then textured in tight zigzags like lightning bolts. The top had been made to stand at attention, somewhere between a mohawk and a pompadour, except the front, which fell moodily over the boy’s eyes. In the back, above a delicately faded neckline, were two more bolts, larger but done with absolute precision. There were even, Giuliu saw as he sat the boy in the second chair, notches carved out of his slender eyebrows, also, impossibly, in the shape of lightning.

“Mizzica,” Giuliu muttered. “Where did you go for this?”

Signora Azzaro threw up her hands. “Two weeks from his confirmation, and he looks like some Catania gangster. You can fix it, can’t you?”

“A salon in Trapani maybe?” But that was all the way down the mountain. Never mind that no one he knew of in Trapani was even capable of such work.

“He doesn’t tell me,” Signora Azzaro answered bitterly. “Just says a friend did it.”

Giuliu swept the pompadour one way and then the other, considering. Perhaps there was some way to fix it, but Giuliu had the long-dulled instincts of a man with a captive clientele. He’d cut this boy, and all the boys and men in Erice, so many times that their hair was just an eternal weed to be pruned and pruned. As the clippers whirred, the boy scowled back at him in the mirror. Faint traces of lightning could still be seen, and, short of shaving them off, he couldn’t do much about the eyebrows. “There we are,” Giuliu said. “Now he only looks like a Napoli gangster.”

Signora Azzaro cuffed her son on the ear. “This is the impression we give Padre Barale?”

Giuliu couldn’t hide his irritation at the mention of the handsome new priest. “Don’t worry, Barale’s too busy with his good works to worry how the flock gets shorn.”

“Yes, yes”—Signora Azzaro counted out exactly six euros—“for your efforts.”

Giuliu swept up, dipped his combs, counted the register back out, as if there’d been any other customers that day. He felt the usual low hum of panic—his shop, his father’s shop, going down the toilet. But, as he closed up, there was something else: remorse. All of that beautiful work, disappearing under his clippers.

Just once in your life, the guidebook said, you must see the sun set over Erice.

Giuliu sat in the piazza watching a clutch of tourists snap the same photo—the blood-orange sun trembling into the Tyrrhenian Sea, the Isole Egadi slanting mile-long shadows up the mountain, the whole burning sky going ruddy-dark red as the day bled out in the bath—that every other grinning idiot off the cruise liners had taken for the past 40 years. Or, anyway, ever since Giuliu was a boy. Even the sublime grows a rind.

He poured himself another grappa as the rest of the village straggled by. The old couples hobbling through their passeggiata. The mothers herding their little ones toward Wednesday Mass. Father Barale, smiling beatifically as he crossed the square, stopping to juggle a football with some boys. In the café next to Giuliu’s shop, the usual clutch of codgers sat playing scopa and grousing over their amari, while the proprietor gazed hopefully at the tourists, who, satisfied with their photos, trailed off toward their waiting coach. You must see the sun set over Erice, the guidebook said, but save your appetite till you get back to your cruise.

Through the haze of dusk and grappa, Giuliu noticed that the boys playing football looked freshly cut. He couldn’t remember when he’d last seen some of them in the shop. But something else caught his gaze: a tall, rawboned African rushing over to the departing tourists—“My friends! Where you come from?”—with cheap handicrafts.

“Che palle!” a voice called out. Giuliu turned to see Marco arriving. “They’ll drive away all our visitors! Then where will we be, Giu? No one comes to Sicily to buy little drums.”

“He hauled all that crap up here,” Giuliu said. “Give him that.”

“Dai! The government gives them free bus passes. Don’t be so naïve.”

“Right,” Giuliu answered quickly, “and we pay for them!” Maybe if it were Syrians coming here, he went on, but all of these Algerians and Senegalese? They were just after work, flooding in because Brussels and Berlin had thrown the doors open. Maybe they could afford to be generous up north, but Sicily was poor, Erice even poorer. “Yet we’re expected to take in all of these Blacks and panhandlers? Cazzo!” Giuliu looked over at his friend for approval.

Since age three, Marco had been his constant companion. They’d chased all over the mountain, spinning out fantasies of adventure and escape, chubby, wheezy Giuliu always two steps behind Marco, who’d started wearing a mustache in scuola media. Now they sat scorning Erice’s decay, striking roguish poses but ever closer to the old farts in the café. Marco wore his Enel uniform—he read meters all across the province—his utility bag still slung over his shoulder as he glowered at the African. Experimentally, Giuliu also called out, “Che palle!”

Marco socked Giuliu in the arm. “Watch your language, eh? There are children here.”

Giuliu shrank in embarrassment and confusion. But a moment later, Marco pulled a second bottle of grappa from his bag and, pouring them both a glass, raised a mock toast to the passing elders. “To our noble Christian Democrats, long be their last days in the sun!”

“To Brussels!” Giuliu added. “Long may they tax our asses blue!”

Marco roared with laughter, then broke out in song. “Ah, che bel vivere, che bel piacere per un barbiere di qualità!”

Feeling flush and woozy, Giuliu joined in for a few bars. But his attention was dragged away again by the lanky African, who’d given up on the tourists and was now kicking the football around with the boys while the mothers looked on warily.

“Sto stronzo,” Marco muttered.

Giuliu was about to agree. But just then an errant kick came their way. The African ran over to retrieve the ball, and as he turned back around, Giuliu saw them, as sharp as a slap to the face: trimmed out of the guy’s fade, one on each side, two perfectly shaped lightning bolts.

The next afternoon, Giuliu closed early—he’d done little save sharpen his shears—and marched down the winding footpath to the old convent and rectory. He came into the grove where the two cloistered buildings sat in tranquil shambles. The dense, daydream scent of jasmine hung on the breeze, and ocher sunlight stippled the soft carpet of leaves, such that Diana herself might step out of the trees. But Giuliu marched straight ahead, in no mood to admire the day.

Following a clutter of voices, he came into the courtyard and saw a milling crowd of about 60, all Africans and Arabs. Bristling, he went quickly on to the rectory. Two years ago, Barale had arrived—replacing a miserable Capuchin who dropped dead of a stroke in the middle of Epiphany—and set about converting the disused convent into a camp for refugees and other layabouts. Till recently, they hadn’t been seen much in the village, preferring to pester the tourists down in Trapani. Well, Giuliu wouldn’t stand for them taking over Erice, too. Just as he was about to hammer on the rectory door, however, he heard a familiar sound. He followed the electric, insect whine back to the courtyard. And there, in the center of a loose circle of men, stood the source of his outrage and worry.

At a makeshift barber station—cracked picture-frame mirror propped on a chair, red plastic bucket for a sink—a slight, very dark-skinned man wielded the buzzing clippers. He wore baggy trousers and a faded red polo, while the others were in shorts, jeans, and Manchester United and Barcelona jerseys, cheap knockoffs that made them look even more foreign. But their hairstyles! High fades, drop fades, braids set off with zigzags, hard parts, platinum-dyed tips, textured falling quiffs … Even the most flamboyant striker would have trouble maintaining such looks. The short man was cutting a Middle Eastern guy, holding the clippers at a strange angle but working with total focus. Giuliu squinted and leaned forward, so entranced that he jumped at a voice behind him.

“Welcome, Signore Rizzuto.”

“Father Barale,” Giuliu said coolly.

“And how are you enjoying this fine afternoon? I confess I’m still unaccustomed to the beauty of this place. To have known it your whole life!”

Giuliu, bridling at the priest’s smile, said only, “Your man over there is killing me.”

“Sorry?” The priest ran a hand through his hair, giving himself away. “Oh, you mean Baba? In the red shirt?”

“Our boys, Erice’s boys,” Giuliu said gravely, “are coming here to get cut.”

“Our doors are open,” the priest said. “This isn’t a prison. And I suppose it could even be, well, something of an intercultural experience.”

“Yes, yes, very lovely. Except your Babbo, or whoever, is filching my customers. How do you think I make my living? As meager as it is.”

The priest nodded slowly, radiating sage contemplation as if he were Solomon himself.

“It isn’t safe,” Giuliu put in. He wasn’t sure quite what he meant, so he added, “You need a license to be a barber in this country.” He gestured toward the courtyard. “This is … unhygienic.”

The priest sighed. “I’d pay our guests to fix up the facilities, give them a bit of pocket money. But we’re at a deficit already.”

“Look, your Babbo can cut his friends here. But I’ll have to draw the line at our boys. After all, we wouldn’t want the Ministry of Health involved.”

Barale suddenly brightened, as if he’d scarcely heard the threat. “There’s an idea! Why don’t you hire Baba?”

Giuliu nearly spit in the dirt. “But he, I … you couldn’t possibly—”

“Take him on as your apprentice. We’re eager for any of these men to have work, proper work. You’d be doing the community a great service.”

“The community?! Look here, Father, we’re not all aiming for sainthood. Keep our boys from coming down here, or I’ll inform the authorities.”

Barale opened his hands, about to ascend that very moment. “I understand your caution, Signore Rizzuto. But—” He seemed to reconsider, tugging again on his shaggy hair. “Well, perhaps I’ll have to come see you, and we can discuss it further.”

Scoffing, Giuliu waved again at the courtyard—“Why don’t you have him do it? He’ll give you a cut worthy of Balotelli himself”—then, in a huff, set off back up the path.

He read Il Giornale front to back, dipped and redipped his combs, went through his bills, most of them second or third notices, reorganized his supply closet, then meticulously oiled the levers on both his chair and the first chair, the one his father had used. Giuliu had grown up in the shop, a heady male world of cigar smoke, rude jokes, and the old ballads his father and the customers often broke into. Some mornings, Giuliu came down to the shop, and it all seemed to be still hanging in the air. As for his mother, she’d fled Erice when he was four, all the way to Milano, where, village gossip had it, she’d married some big wheel at the stock exchange. He’d always thought he’d go off to find her, one of his many stifled fantasies. When he was 18, his father died of lung cancer—and suddenly, with scarcely the chance to plan any other avenue through life, Giuliu himself became the barber of Erice.

He was reclining in the second chair, puzzling over a classified in Il Giornale—“Stairs for sale, Christ just take them, they’re not going anywhere”—when the bells on the door rang out. He heaved himself up, glad at least for some business. Then he saw who it was.

“So,” he said, “Barale sent you instead.”

Up close, Giuliu could see that the man was around 40, at least as old as himself. He was balding, a little hunched, and stood with his hands clasped behind his back, a quizzical look furrowing his brow. “Hello, yes, you are the one named Giulio?” His Italian was jumpily enunciated but surprisingly competent.

“Giuliu,” he answered drily. “Like my papa before me.”

“My sincere apologies, Mr. Giuliu. Now I would just like to introduce myself. I am Boubacar Condeh. Baba, for short. I am very sorry to disturb you today, sir.”

“Yes, well, you’ve caught me at a free moment.” Giuliu cleared his throat. “Look, sorry to disappoint you and Saint Barale, but I’m not looking for apprentices.”

“That is not the reason for my visit, sir. I understand that we may have a disagreement. But today I am here to ask you a favor.”

He took from behind his back something wrapped in cloth. For a moment, Giuliu thought he was going to be robbed. Then he saw that it was a pair of shears.

“I am asking if you are able to sharpen these.”

Find someone in Trapani, Giuliu was about to say. Or better yet, mail them away, far away. Then he saw the condition of the blades, the chips in their edges, the dulled luster of the steel. “Bedda Matri! What have you been using on these?”

“Padre Barale provided a knife sharpener from the kitchen, but I do believe that—”

“From the kitchen?! Cazzo. Here, let me see them.” They were decent Hitachi blades, procured from who knows where and abused considerably. He ran a fingertip along an edge, felt its ragged burr, and practically shivered with dismay and excitement.

Going to his supply closet, he removed his stone from its oil bath and carried it to the unused counter before his father’s chair. He reexamined the edge—a couple bad nicks to work out first. That the other man was watching annoyed him, but after a few strokes, Giuliu was lost in his work. He heard again his father’s voice, felt his father’s talc-dry hand around his own, gently correcting, entrusting him even with the delicate texturing shears. A subtle, maddening art, but the old man had never felt a moment, or a blade, wasted in giving his son such a skill. The Hitachis sang as he ran them against the stone, and Giuliu felt himself sliding into the sun-dappled past, back when everything was still good and clear and—

“It is a patient process,” Baba said. “Perhaps I should come back tomorrow.”

“No, no.” Giuliu lurched back to this world. “Here, see it now.” He took up a tissue. It wilted away from the blades.

“Incredible! What, please, do I offer you for such a service?”

Giuliu stiffened his jaw. “Niente,” he said gruffly.

The other man bowed slightly. “You have my gratitude.”

“Repay it by not cutting my boys’ hair.”

The other man smiled mysteriously, either arrogant or dignified, and Giuliu saw that he wouldn’t yield so easily. Baba wrapped his shears in the cloth and, with another slight bow, turned to go. Giuliu looked at the two empty chairs, at his oil-spotted hands. Baba reached for the door, the bells rang out, and Giuliu knew that whichever decision he made, he would regret it.

“Aspetta, un momento,” he said. “I have to know. How do you do it?”

One day a week, Giuliu proposed, no more.

On a Tuesday, Baba stood with a towel draped over an arm as Giuliu took his time with Signore Cappadoro, a retired lawyer, who, thank God, insisted on a cleanup every three weeks. That afternoon, the only other visitor was the postman, who brought more bills and stared at Baba like he was a living exhibit. For his part, Baba kept quiet and busy, sweeping up, inspecting the tools and supplies, and learning the levers and positions of the chair. Hesitantly, Giuliu had moved over to the first station, his father’s, and given Baba his own. Still, he trembled with exasperation when the man experimentally lathered the ivory-handled, badger-hair brush with which Giuliu had been taught to shave, himself and others. He barely knew what to say to this foreigner and was irritated he couldn’t read Il Giornale in peace. There’d been more drownings in the Mediterranean, news so common he usually recalled only the numbers—13, 24, 63—and cursed the fools for taking such a journey in the first place. Now, with Baba nearby, Giuliu felt odd and put out, and he skipped those stories altogether.

By the third Tuesday, no surprise, word had gotten around. The proprietor of the café came over and peered in the window. The postman rushed in and out with even greater alarm. Then, just after lunch, a boy Giuliu hadn’t seen in months shuffled in, sporting a sweep-over that had grown shaggy and frizzy. He looked at Giuliu guiltily. “Take a seat.” Giuliu gestured at the second chair. “I know who you’re here to see. Baba,” he said resignedly, “get him a cape.”

Giuliu felt wounded, wronged—here he was giving his job away—but he also found himself fascinated. Baba held the shears as strangely as he did his clippers and made quick, angular cuts Giuliu never would’ve considered. He was almost disappointed when, in the middle of this display, one of his regulars came in. He gave him a more meticulous cut than usual.

“What is this?” the old guy said when Baba stepped out for a cigarette.

“Charity work,” Giuliu said quickly. “Barale put me up to it.”

“Ah,” the regular said, at a loss. “Welcome the stranger, eh?”

“Shirt off my own back,” Giuliu muttered.

Baba took another boy just before close, then, per their arrangement, Giuliu paid him half of what he’d earned, the rest going to chair rental and supplies. This was, more or less, what Giuliu had hoped for, to lure back his old customers, with a little extra on top.

He was unprepared, however, for the following Tuesday. When he came down to open up, seven or eight Africans were lingering on the piazza. After Baba arrived, they came in and sat tentatively in the folding chairs along the wall. Giuliu thought about booting them out, but they looked so hangdog. “Listen,” he told Baba, “no discounts. They pay the full amount.” That afternoon, Baba saw six more customers, three of them migrants. A local boy came in, a younger teen. He’d made some clumsy attempts, obviously self-done, at side etches, apparently never having worked up the courage to visit Barale’s camp. The boy waited nervously next to the Africans, about to bolt any moment, until Giuliu said, “Come on then, Luca.” He started the same cut he’d given the boy since he was five. Then Giuliu paused, stole a glance at Baba, got out his clippers, and cleaned up the boy’s zigzags. “Better?” Luca practically beamed at him.

At the end of the day, it was the best take in months. But Giuliu thought of little Luca sitting next to those strange-smelling newcomers, and he knew that this, too, would already be village gossip. Regret, Giuliu was reminded, was a many-layered thing.

He sat on the piazza with his grappa. The old couples passed by, the mothers, their children. The café grousers sat grousing. Marco was late, and Giuliu had been attempting a little public banter. “Dusty today, isn’t it?” he called out to the Raveggi twins, the only single girls in the village. “We’ll have another blood rain before we know it!” But they wrinkled their brows at him and hurried on. “Signore Cappadoro!” he called out to the lawyer. “Comandante, your cut is growing out nicely.” Cappadoro only grunted and joined his compatriots in the café.

Giuliu was aware of his standing in Erice: a wounded duck, an orphan still chumming around with his only friend. Now and then, Marco dragged him down to Trapani, where they hung around the tourist bars and Marco got hollering drunk with sozzled women off the cruises, occasionally leading one off to a nearby pensione. Giuliu was usually left to small-talk her sunburned friend or apologize to the bartender. He wasn’t sure how exactly he’d come to be known as the diffident grump and Marco the rough-hewn, charming lad. He saw his friend crossing the square, stopping to chat with the chubby Raveggi girls—to think that one of them had once been interested in him, Giuliu—who were suddenly all a-titter. And here Giuliu was, flailing in his attempts to mollify his fellow villagers. He couldn’t wait for Marco’s arrival.

Yet he was terrified of what Marco might say: that Barale had gotten to him, too, whispered his cheap pieties in Giuliu’s ear. And all of this bullshit about trying to save his business? He was only ruining everyone else’s—these stranieri would drive off every last tourist. They’d only suck us dry and move on. Same with Barale, just another miracle worker down here angling for a cardinalship. Well, fuck Rome! Marco would raise two fingers toward the north. Fuck Berlin and Brussels, too! And Giuliu knew he’d immediately agree. Dry-mouthed, heart pounding, he’d be glad for the rough clarity. Don’t fret, Giu, Marco would reassure him. Things will pick up. It’ll get better. We just have to have to remember who we are.

He saw Marco turn to come his way, and he reached for the grappa and poured them both a drink, ready to feel Marco’s burly arm around him, ready to hear him break out into song: Ah, che bel vivere, che bel piacere per un barbiere di qualità!

But Marco veered off into the café, where one of the old farts stood him a drink. He only threw a quick wave in Giuliu’s direction, the look on his face so cold and impassive that Giuliu’s heart flapped miserably against his rib cage. He sat there, burning with embarrassment, as if the whole village could see his cheeks flush red, then quickly swallowed both grappas and rushed home to his little apartment above the shop.

He needed to do something, to explain to Baba why it couldn’t go on. The man was polite enough to take the news without offense—then go back to cutting hair at the old convent and destroying Giuliu’s trade. But no, he had to fire him. For the good of the village.

The following Tuesday, however, Giuliu came out to the piazza to find at least 15 new customers waiting. Baba stood among them, looking so eager to get started that Giuliu’s resolve fizzled. Once again, a busy day began.

In between cuts, Giuliu couldn’t help studying Baba’s peculiar methods. The man spent minutes just staring at a customer’s head, then launched into a flurry of cuts, from all directions, no apparent order. He was clearly self-taught and kept adjusting the chair, spinning it this way and that. Go easy, Giuliu wanted to say, that’s an heirloom. “Keep it turned toward you,” he counseled instead. “Use the mirror to get a better look.” He made suggestions, too, about the way Baba held his shears and clippers. He’d felt the ache in the wrist that came from poor technique, which could end a career. At the same time, he found himself taking greater care with his own work, not just repeating the same cuts again and again. His fades had already improved—this from simply watching Baba. He had occasion, too, to study hair he’d never before had between his fingers: Africans and Arabs, but also Afghans, Iraqis, Eritreans with their bushy curls. And he wasn’t just taking Baba’s overflow. Some of these foreigners, the ones with more conservative styles, preferred to wait for him, Giuliu.

Without quite meaning to, he’d upped Baba to three days a week. “Where are they all coming from?” Giuliu asked him. “They can’t all be living at the convent.”

“Some come from Trapani.”

“All this way?”

Baba grinned. “Yes, they like to look good. And they hear we are two very fine barbers.”

Just as likely, Giuliu thought, they weren’t welcomed in Trapani’s barber shops. In an entrepreneurial spirit, he put out a plate of candied oranges and kept a pot of tea steeping through the day. On the radio, Baba played African music, and his customers sometimes got up and danced while their friends laughed and clapped, their boisterousness spilling out into the piazza, where the codgers in the café sat glaring. But Giuliu felt a curious excitement. Many of these new customers actually spoke serviceable Italian, and he found they answered even the stalest joke about Roma FC or the Cinque Stelle with generous laughter. Sometimes, he had the creeping feeling it might be at his expense. The swirl of languages—Pashto, Urdu, Bambara, Wolof, Tigrinya—could be bewildering. Still, the extra business had already helped him pay off a few bills. And, in certain ways, it felt more like his father’s shop than it had in decades.

He saw, however, fewer and fewer of his old regulars. He’d tried to spread word that Wednesdays and Fridays were business as usual, but on those days he had a near-empty shop. Passing the café, he could hear the eternal chorus—That Giuliu, there was always something off—idle complaint being Erice’s real stock in trade. The codgers were all unkempt. Wispy, flyaway hairs, overgrown eyebrows, thickets of nostril hair—Giuliu itched to prune it all back right there on the piazza. Apparently, they would all let themselves go completely, even the ones vaguely sympathetic to migrants, rather than patronize his shop.

Then there were the boys. At first, he noticed only two or three, boys either he or Baba had recently cut. Their heads had been buzzed to the scalp, uneven, at-home jobs done, no doubt, by their mothers. Some of the older boys—the ones pushing 20, who didn’t have the brains or guts to go off to university or to work in Palermo or Catania and just skulked around all day, looking surly and lost—had even shaved their heads completely. When Giuliu met them in the pasticceria or the market, he felt so menaced that he hastened his step.

He was aware, too, of the lingering figure of Vaccaro, the village’s sole cop. Usually, he spent his days drowsing in a stuffy office above the bakery. Now, he always seemed to be stalking the piazza, taking notes in a little book. Vaccaro had even started wearing his revolver, the barely used leather harness creaking across his belly like the traces on an ox.

Once, Giuliu ran into Signora Azzaro. “And how was young Paolo’s confirmation?” he inquired solicitously. Come on, help me out! he wanted to say. Your boy is the one who started this mess. Tell me what to do! “He’s a fine young gent,” he went on. “He’d make a fine priest actually.” But the woman just stomped off, leaving him with a look to curl his own hair.

He had to content himself, then, with the laughter and cheer of his new customers. None of them really knew him, and he wasn’t about to pry into their lives. Midafternoon, Giuliu tuned the radio to the news—more drownings at sea—and the room would fall silent. Sometimes, in the mirror, he’d catch them staring off into space, with expressions of such isolation and longing, he had to quickly look back down at his work. “A lot of these boys,” Baba said to him one day as they were sweeping up, “they know someone who died coming here.”

Giuliu murmured vague agreement. Like Marco said, the crossing was so dangerous, only a fool would try it. Well, the foolish or the desperate, Giuliu supposed. Didn’t he, himself, still sometimes dream of Milano, his mother, a new life? He could see a hollow watchfulness in the eyes of these new customers. Eager as they might be for work or money, they were constantly borrowing someone’s phone to look at photographs of family back home. It took courage to break away, to roam thousands of lonely miles from everyone you knew and loved.

“You must excuse me,” Baba went on. “I am very distracted today.”

Giuliu knew these apologies, these prefaces. His father had never been a talkative man, yet he’d said the right things as he listened to the customers in his chair. As a boy, Giuliu had seen grown men, pillars of Erice, confess and confide and even weep, especially when the grappa came out. Men used to come to the barber for bloodletting, to have teeth pulled, for all sorts of ailments. Even now, his father had instructed, cutting hair is not the only service we provide.

Giuliu hesitated, then gestured to Baba to have a seat. He brewed another pot of tea, levered back his own chair. They sat staring at the ceiling. Finally, Baba began to speak.

“I apologize again, sir. Today was a very difficult day.”

“You don’t have to call me ‘sir.’ ”

“Yes, sorry, Mr. Giuliu. I was just thinking today about my wife and my boys.”

“You’re married?” Giuliu was surprised. “You don’t wear a ring.”

“It was among many things I sold on the way here.”

And then Baba was talking about Liberia, the days when everyone was fleeing the civil war. He and his family left their house in Monrovia and traveled to a town near the border. They were arranging travel documents when the rebels arrived. Everyone knew they wanted recruits and were pulling children into the war. Baba and his wife had told their sons to run and hide, but the boys were too proud, too protective. Tell them to come with us, the soldiers demanded. They grabbed Baba, held his hand flat on a table. Tell them! One of the soldiers smashed the butt of his rifle into Baba’s hand, breaking his fingers. Tell them now! Finally, the rebel commander came in, asked what was happening, and promptly shot Baba’s wife and sons in the head. Come on, he said to the soldiers, forget this loyalist swine. They left Baba sobbing on the floor. Eventually, he snuck across the border, through Guinea, Mali, Algeria, Tunisia, where he paid the last of his money to get on a smuggler’s boat, and finally here to Sicily.

Giuliu stayed silent. At this point, his father would have usually murmured something comforting, or poured another round of grappa. But this was not about a jilted mistress or a truculent teenager; Baba had strayed into territory his father had never known. Giuliu thought to ask if the broken fingers were the reason Baba held his shears so strangely. But that seemed a trivial question. The moment came when he should have said something, then it passed.

“Maybe I should not have resisted,” Baba went on. “Maybe my boys, my wife, they would still …” Now Baba was at a loss. “This job, it is very important to me, sir.”

“Giuliu,” he said and faltered at what else to add.

That night and the night following, Giuliu slept terribly. He lay in bed turning over Baba’s story. Was the man telling the truth? More than that, how long could this arrangement last? Was he, Giuliu, ruining the promise of all those rich tourists off the cruise liners, Erice’s chance at rebirth? He finally dropped off—and was woken by a crash. He ran downstairs and out the front door. In the distance, he heard heavy footsteps, voices, laughter—deep or boyish, it was hard to say—and turned to see his candy-striped pole smashed to pieces.

He spent the next few days cutting in a daze, hardly able to meet Baba’s eyes, even in the mirror. Baba’s day off arrived, and the shop was empty. Giuliu had been staring at Il Giornale for hours, understanding nothing, pacing up and down stairs in his head.

The bells rang out. “Well, here I am finally,” Barale said as he came through the door. “A little later than expected. Busy as always.” He tugged on a forelock of his now almost shoulder-length hair. “We always say be Christlike, but I’m not sure Rome would approve.” He laughed, loosened his collar, made for the chair. “I leave myself in your capable hands.”

Giuliu only grunted and stood with his arms crossed over his chest.

“You’ve taken down your pole. It was damaged?”

The priest damn well knew. The whole village did.

“Must have been the wind.”

“My own efforts haven’t always been popular,” Barale said. “Take heart. We’re far from the only ones eager to help. Italy is changing. All of Europe is.”

“Change doesn’t come this far up the mountain.”

“The trick, I’ve found, is to really get involved in the life of a place. Reach people on their own terms, slowly, a little at a—”

“Sorry?” Giuliu said heatedly. “Excuse me? Do you have any idea what I gave up for this town? To keep this shop open? I could’ve gone to Milano.”

“But why? Was anyone asking you to? Erice would’ve found another barber.”

“Yes, but—” How could he explain? This man looked like he’d never had to face a consequence in his life. “You don’t understand this place. You just don’t.”

“Once you’ve made a decision, don’t let it be your burden. Make something of it.”

“Some of us have to live for this world, Padre.”

Barale, at least, would come out of this mess unscathed, gleaming even. The people of Erice would never hold him to account. The priest spoke to their better selves, the ones who would always welcome the stranger, shelter the homeless, feed the starving, visit the dying, the ones who would ascend, flawless, to heaven. But a barber could only tend to their vanity, the person they had to confront in the mirror each morning. And try as he might to tame their cowlicks, to shape their beards, to hide their weak, quivering chins, disguise their bald spots, their moles and scars, they kept coming back, ever more ragged, sagging, and wrinkling, decaying under his very fingers.

“You’ve met this challenge bravely,” Barale said. “Not everyone would take such a risk.” He paused. “To be in any way … different, in a place like this, well, that already takes a lot of—”

“I’m sorry, Father,” Giuliu said abruptly, “I don’t think I can fit you in today.” But it was too late. He hadn’t been able to control his panicked expression. Barale had seen. Mother of Christ, were they all able to see him?

“Papa Francesco,” Barale rushed on, “has brought in a lot of progressive thought and …”

Giuliu was already headed upstairs. “A shame, Father,” he called back, “you had to come all the way up the mountain.”

The following Monday, Baba came in limping, with a black eye and a welt on his forehead. “Minchia! What happened?” But Giuliu had already guessed—the boys, no doubt the same ones who’d broken his sign—had known from the beginning that something like this would occur.

“Ah, it is nothing, Mr. Giuliu. Simply an injury from playing football.” Baba smiled. A crackle of pain lit his eyes. “Some of my friends, they can get quite competitive.”

Baba, he wanted to say, you can tell me the truth. But he also knew Baba wouldn’t identify anyone or risk a stir. His only choice, like all stranieri, was to lie low, hope things blew over. Another long day began. Giuliu felt his guts churn every time he saw his fellow barber grit his teeth to get through another hour on his feet, another cut, those Hitachi shears not making it any easier. The mood in the shop was subdued, everyone staring at phones, no one mentioning Baba’s black eye.

Baba wanted to stay and help sweep up. Giuliu sent him home to the convent, couldn’t even bring himself to take up the broom. He wandered out into the streets, searching in his fellow villagers’ eyes for those who knew what had happened, for an answer, and only finding himself back in the piazza, where a few harried tourists were shielding themselves from a stiff, gritty breeze. A crimson sun floated on the scratchy, copper-tinged horizon, the sirocco turning everything hazy and unreal, the breath of the Sahara curtaining the sky, catching in his nose and throat. All over Erice, doors and shutters were closing, people sealing themselves up inside.

The next day, it was blowing even harder. Giuliu sat upstairs, sipping then gulping grappa while grit skittered against the windows. Midday, the sky opened up, rain stoning down, the cobbles and gutters running red. Giuliu felt himself trembling, about to explode. Finally, he couldn’t take it. Pulling on his shoes, forgetting his coat, he reeled out into the storm.

Marco finally opened his door. He stood in his boxers, two days unshaven but his eyes bright as blades. “Minchia, it’s three in the morning. What are you doing pounding like that?”

Giuliu stumbled into the apartment. There were football magazines stacked on the coffee table and Montalbano playing on TV, the music sawing ominously under a lingering shot of police inspecting a flinty Ragusa beach.

“This fucking storm,” Marco said roughly, going over to the small, checkered sofa and dropping heavily onto it. “At least I don’t have to read another goddamn meter this week.”

Giuliu swayed in the middle of the room. “Marco, I … I need your … talk to you.” In a blur, he explained: his pole getting smashed, Baba beaten up, no way of proving which of the boys had done it. If he accused any of them, all of Erice would turn against him. But if he said nothing, it would only get worse. Baba was the first—what about all of their customers? He just wanted it all to stop. He just wanted to cut hair and—

“Oh, shut up,” Marco said. “I smashed your sign. And Vaccaro and I beat up your man.”

“What?”

“Giu, I’m trying to save you from yourself. When was this ridiculousness supposed to end anyway? Apparently, neither you or Babbu got the message.”

“But you—” Giuliu started. Then, as the truth crashed down on him, he raced on about Baba, about Liberia, the soldiers, Baba’s wife and sons. “Everything he’s been through!” Giuliu knew he was in the right now and felt the power of rectitude coursing through him. “Don’t you understand? Baba came here to be safe, so that something like that never happens again!”

Marco picked at something on the sofa, looking weary and unimpressed. “And I suppose you believe everything they print in Il Giornale as well?”

“No, Baba isn’t like that. His fingers. You don’t know him. He’s—”

“He’s after a job. Your job.”

“We’re … we’re friends.”

“And he knows your school? What grades you got? He remembers your dad?”

Giuliu felt his knees giving way. He dropped down beside Marco on the couch. Instead of socking him in the shoulder, Marco put his arm around him. Giuliu realized he was sobbing. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know what to do.”

“It’s okay, amico mio,” Marco said. “Don’t worry. We’ll take care of it.”

He felt Marco’s arm warm and tight around him. A stream seemed to be rushing inside of him, pushing him helplessly forward. He turned and kissed Marco, half missing his lips, feeling his stubble rough and oily against his own cheek.

“Minchia!” Marco shouted.

“I just thought—” Giuliu began. “I just thought you—”

Marco shoved him away. Giuliu sprawled to the floor. Marco knelt above him, eyes burning, fist cocked. “Go,” he said through gritted teeth. “Go before I do something.”

Giuliu stumbled down the stairs and out into the sizzling rain. He lurched back to the shop, clambered up the stairs, aimed himself at the closet. There he kept a shrine, photos of his father, the one he had of his mother, half of her face turned away, so that he had never quite seen her. In the center of all these relics, the holiest of all, wrapped in lamb’s wool: his father’s shears. German steel, sharpened so many times that the manufacturer’s stamp had worn off. The shears Giuliu had learned with—he’d never known how perfectly balanced until after his father’s death, when he’d put them away and bought his own, inferior pair. He held one blade and pushed up his cuff, exposing his wrist. “This is how you test them,” his father had said, shaving off the fine downy hairs. Giuliu started to do the same, angling the blade more and more steeply, the blue veins under the pale skin starting to stand up. Just one, he thought. One cut would be enough. A fat, dark drop of blood welled up …

The air burned bright and hot. He woke on the floor, smelled the tinge of iron and the vomit all down his shirt. He’d thrown up before he’d passed out or cut too deep. From the piazza below, he heard the old men in the café, eternally babbling. He thought he heard knocking downstairs, but it went away. All he could do was drag himself down to the shop to retrieve another bottle of grappa. As he was digging among the supplies, the knocking returned. He cursed under his breath, tasting bile again.

It was Baba. He let the man in, in order to tell him to go away, go away forever.

“Mr. Giuliu!” Baba said. “Are you all right?”

Giuliu looked down at his shirt, at the dried blood on his arm, then straggled over to the wall of mirrors. A stringy-haired old man stared back at him. Without thinking, he took up his shears and started snipping.

“But what are you doing?” Baba said.

“I’ve been cutting it myself for years.”

“No, no, it won’t do.” Baba reached for a cape and flourished it over his chair. “Sit now.”

Giuliu made a brief show of protest, but if he stayed vertical another moment, he’d vomit again. He sat stiffly as Baba parted and reparted his hair, considering it from all angles, a few spritzes from the water bottle, to see the contours more clearly, just as Giuliu had taught him.

Then Baba started in. From the roots up, Giuliu felt himself bristling. He heard the shears singing in his ears, felt the slight, not unpleasant tug of the blades. Baba brought out the clippers, and their familiar whine brightened his headache, made him squint and wince. Baba took down his sideburns, faded his sides, going tighter and higher than Giuliu would have done himself, less cautious in the spots where Giuliu could see, but not quite admit, that he was thinning and graying. The middle of the cut, where the customer saw only his lopsided, unfinished self in the mirror, was the chasm. Now he felt his own self-loathing, all of the years he’d wasted, right there before him, naked and raw under the unrelenting shop lights.

But as Baba took off the frazzled split ends and made them lie down, as he worked lines that Giuliu himself wouldn’t have guessed, something else was taking shape. He thought of the evenings when the old man would put him in the chair and instruct while he cut. Baba brought out the straight razor. The hot foam on the back of his neck, the gentle bite of the blade—Giuliu shivered. With a scalding towel straight from the warmer, Baba wiped the foam away with quick, hard strokes. Then he molded another towel over Giuliu’s scalp and started rubbing with skull-thrumming vigor. Giuliu felt every capillary opening, every follicle letting in heat and oxygen and a strange pulsing energy. Then Baba dropped the chair back and gave him a hot shave—smooth, fast, assured, just as Giuliu had taught. And his father before him.

Lastly, there was the fuzz around Giuliu’s ears, his wayward eyebrows, the stiff, coarse sprouts from his nostrils, at which Baba was no less meticulous. Giuliu couldn’t help drifting away, back to those years of tutelage, when he dreamed of taking everything his father had shown him and going off to Milano to ply his trade. Like his mother, he’d always longed to see more than could be glimpsed from this mountain. But then, too soon, the old man died. And Giuliu couldn’t stand to let go—all of the salty jokes and unguarded grappa tears, all of the years of smoke and talc—couldn’t stand to see the shop close and leave Erice hollow at its core. He couldn’t break that promise. So, he had to fire Baba, tell him to leave, go far away. And if Baba refused, Giuliu would call the Ministry of Health. Such were the conditions at the convent, maybe they’d shut the whole place down. When his fellow villagers saw what he’d done, they’d accept him again. They’d take him back in. They had to.

His father had told him there would always be work, for a barber of quality, always. But what use was a middle-aged Sicilian—no matter how many cuts he knew—in a city like Milano? Even if, up there, they’d barely notice one who was different.

“Okay,” Baba said, “so I think now we are finished.”

But Giuliu didn’t even see the face in the mirror, the face that looked so clean, so unburdened. He was too deep in the past, remembering what his father always used to say at the end, as his son gazed at his reflection with a gathering sense of possibility and the chance, always, for change: Ah, now who is this strange boy?

“Aspetta,” Giuliu said. “Un momento.”

He went upstairs and found his father’s shears where he’d dropped them in the sink, washed off the blood, carefully wiped them down. Then, testing the blades, hearing them schnik against each other, he took them back down to the shop.

“Please,” he said, placing them in Baba’s mangled hand. “Please.”

The post The Barber of Erice appeared first on The American Scholar.