Lost Luggage (38 page)

The military experience wasn't very useful except when it came to showing who was boss in the barber's shop. He was secretive and tight-lipped at home, as if his time at the front had left him emotionless, but with scissors and a comb in his hands he was quite a different man, one who'd mastered every register of futile conversation. He spoke to his clients, looking them in the eye in
the mirror, knowing how to crack a joke and how to concede they were right about everything without coming across as an ass-licker. Sometimes the particular shape of a skull, an ear, a shaven nape, or the trusting client who tipped his head back offering a clear shot at his carotid reminded him of the fraternal bond he'd known at the front. It was such a natural, innocent feeling that he'd spend the next few minutes missing the war.

Three years after he started work the real boss retired, and Martí Manley bought the business at a very low price, although he did sign a document promising he'd hang a photo of the former owner on the wall so his oldest clients wouldn't forget him, and did offer him all the services of the establishment free of charge, including the final tidy-up before he was buried. Instead of paying an apprentice, Martí made Conrad leave school and start at the barber's shop one Monday morning. To make it less traumatic, my great-grandmother Dolors, who secretly abhorred her husband's decision, bought Conrad a white coat and had his name embroidered on the pocket. It was 1944. My grandfather Conrad was fifteen with a downy moustache and beard that grew in patches, making shaving difficult. Quite a portent.

The business was slowly making a name for itself in the neighborhood. Not a day went by without some stranger coming in for the first time, and often returning after a few weeks. Since it was near the theaters in Avinguda Paral·lel, Martí soon acquired some very elegant clients, gentlemen who dropped in before a show for a trim, a shave, or to get their sideburns touched up. They often appeared in magazines, and their signed photos were starting to keep the old owner company on the wall. When they went out into the street, coiffed in a cloud of hair spray and wafting a trail of scented lotion behind them, Martí Manley puffed out his chest and shot a quick self-conscious look at himself in the mirror. He was a happy man.

Then, only a year and a half after he started to work as an apprentice, due to heaven knows what variety of genetic plot, Conrad Manley's hair started to fall out. At first, like all maladies, this one manifested itself with a few random symptoms. Four jet-black
hairs on a pillow when he woke up; a tuft tangled in a comb; a clump blocking the drain in the bath. Soon, however, its virulence spread all over the crown of his head, denuding the whole region in a matter of weeks. When he realized what was happening, Conrad tried to cover it up by combing his hair backward because he knew his father would feel betrayed by the wasteland. Martí was convinced that a great part of the business's success was attributable to the image offered by the barber—an aesthetic model to emulate—and every day, before opening, he attended to his mane of hair with morbid devotion. Nature had been generous with him, and a great lock rose above his forehead, a lordly presence evoking the glass canopy of Hotel Colon. It inspired respect.

For all Conrad's efforts to hide the calamity, the ravaged zone kept growing. Surprisingly, a potion bought from a pharmacist in Carrer Unió, stinking like a sewer and fecal yellow in color, which he had to slather over his head and cover with a hairnet before going to sleep, gave him not only an assortment of ill-smelling nightmares but also three weeks' hope. Once the respite ended, though, his hair seemed even more panicked and opted for mass suicide.

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 her 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.