Salvatore Scibona - The End

When the barber tucked the collar of tissue paper around Rocco’s neck and asked what he could do for Rocco this morning, Rocco said he wanted a trim and a shave.

“Speak up.”

“Just a trim all around the sides, the ears especially, and a shave, thank you,” he expounded.

“Just a trim and an alla-something and a something else,” said the barber.

He didn’t mind repeating himself. There was an autographed photo taped to the wall of Rogers Hornsby with the barber as a younger man.

At this moment, from Leningrad to Buenos Aires, the barber was tucking the tissue paper around the client’s neck, throwing the oilcloth shroud over the clothes, and fastening it at the shoulder. All over the world — Ohio, the Pennsylvania, irregardless — this unique mode of conversation was taking place in which the barber and the client addressed not the face of the other, but the face of the other in the mirror opposite. If the client was a stranger, the barber, by rights, adopted a superior tone. But Rocco’s sense today of being right with his God, of having embarked on an enterprise that aimed to make straight what spite and cowardice had conspired to make crooked, a mystic hopefulness this morning, inspired a charity in him that exposed petty complaints — his meager breakfast, a spleeny barber — as petty complaints.

With the handle of a comb the barber artfully elevated the tip of Rocco’s nose and snipped the hair growing from his nostrils into his mustache.

“I don’t go in for the hunting of waterfowl with dogs, do you?” the barber said. “I don’t think it’s right to train a predator to put food in its mouth and not eat it. I wonder what you think.”

“I don’t follow,” Rocco tried to say without moving his lips, on which the barber pressed with a finger.

“I’ll give you a for-instance. You take a woman to a store that sells fine linen sheets and tablecloths and what have you.” He turned to rummage a drawer. “You roll up a hundred dollars in her fist and tell her to walk through the aisles for an afternoon and then to give you the money back. Why, that’s cruelty! Tell me what you think while I’m stirring this here.”

“I thought they had that type of training in the breed.”

“That’s a good point. I never thought of that. It’s an important insight.”

“Thank you.”

“And let me ask you something else. I think about this here in my store when it rains and nobody thinks of coming to be groomed. Say you could go to any city in the world for a week’s vacation. Which city would it be? My answer is Perth, Australia.”

“The boat trip would be longest,” Rocco surmised.

“Just so. I would take the eastern route, following the coast of Africa as the Portuguese traders did. Which country do you come from that you talk like that?”

“Ohio,” Rocco said.

“Where’s that, in Russia somewhere?”

“Ohio,” he said. “Next door. The mother of presidents. The land of Thomas Edison and the buckeye tree.”

“Frankly, I don’t have the first idea what you’re saying,” the barber said lightly.

Rocco’s eyes were closed; the chair reclined; the barber piled a hot towel on his face. Rocco drew the letters in the air.

“I see,” said the barber. “Condolences.”

“Warren Harding, Orville Wright, the vice president’s father, all from Ohio,” Rocco said into the towel.

The barber laughed with a snort.

“You think the invention of the airplane is trivia. It’s a circus act to you.”

“Okay. I’ll tell you what. I knew what you were saying. I’m just a frolicsome kind of a person. I like to give the foreigners a hard time. I was a foreigner once myself,” he said, removing the towel. “Gua dalcanal. I wasn’t received so kindly by the natives as you were here, I’m sure. Everywhere you stepped on the sand, a dead marine.”

“I have a boy in the marines,” Rocco said. “There are those who believe he is no longer among us. They were taken in by a mountebank writing in the newspaper.” He inhaled profoundly, and the mentholated vapor of the shaving foam beneath his nose submerged his nasal passages and soaked his brain. “But I know that my redeemer lives,” he said.

“Is that so? They bring your body back to this country, they do. Give them that. The other services have more important work, I suppose. And you’re married, then.”

“As it happens. I am married these thirty-three years. However, she has been living at a distance from me, which I regret. And tomorrow I will see her again for the first time in so long. So make me up nice. She doesn’t know it yet, but I have had my full of her desertment. And I’m putting a stop to it. When I come back through here in a few days’ time, I will have her with me, and the boys, first, middle, and last, if I have to cut them in pieces.”

In Libya and in Sweden there was the hot towel and the rasp of the stropping of the razor, a sound that sent aged men into dim boyhood afternoons sitting on the bench, swinging the feet that did not yet reach the floor, while Papa, the master of the universe, reclined and another man scraped a blade over his gullet. There was a figure of speech in dialect, a phrase his own boys wouldn’t know since they hardly spoke dialect (their mother had forbidden Rocco to teach them): to search for the dead father, which meant “to desire the impossible.”

Rocco said slowly, “I have never been to the Pennsylvania before, don’t you know.”

“This ain’t Pennsylvania, pally. This is New York.”

The barber’s breathing smelled of mustard.

“You’re joking.”

“You are one half hour’s motoring time south-southwest of Buffalo, New York.”

He had swerved north of his planned trajectory on account of having decided that to buy a road atlas was to betray Providence. He knew he was headed east, essentially. In the fullness of time, the Lord would lead him to his destination.

The barber had progressed to the back of Rocco’s neck. “Listen, there isn’t any natural place for me to stop here.” He swiveled the chair and positioned a hand mirror so as Rocco could see in the mirror on the wall where he was pointing his razor. “What do you say?” he asked.

Rocco pouted indifferently.

The mug in which the barber agitated the shaving brush was embossed with a swirling blue design, and a barrel, and the words I went over Niagara Falls.

“Put your head down.”

A speck of dandruff landed on the oilcloth. The barber folded Rocco’s ear over itself and slid the warm steel over a mole on his neck.

Niagara Falls.

But wait. But he was a half hour from Buffalo. But Buffalo was, was it not, only a half hour from Niagara Falls.

He inclined his head, too quickly, feeling a gleeful stress, an elation of childhood — of climbing the lava columns in the bay at Aci Trezza, naked at night, and leaping into the sea. The razor sliced into his neck.

“Aw, hell,” the barber said, reaching for a towel. “Look what you made me do.”

It was 11:42 in the morning on the sixteenth of August, 1953. The republic, so vast and beautiful, the heir of tremendous technological and political genius and of thousands of millions of hours of the working man’s work across the centuries, had yet, as of this moment, to be destroyed. It was a tyrant killer, a vendor of grain and typewriter ribbons. Nothing could be more self-evident than that it meant well by the world, and still the world was threatening at any moment to transform us, its people, into ash and bone shards. Our belief in the justness of our cause was being tested.

In the meantime, said the Lord to Rocco, consider the gorge I have scooped out, and the steaming cliffs of falling water that I have made to fall so that you might come here and feel your heart being drawn out of your throat.