Dona Nicanora's Hat Shop (30 page)

‘If it's not a problem why have you come here to disturb me? Can't I leave you to carry on with things for one morning while I sort out my business at home?'

‘It's just that I thought you would want to know,' Ramon said.

‘Know what?'

‘That it's open again,' Ramon answered, getting to his feet.

‘What is?'

‘The barber's.'

‘The barber's? Bosco is back? Bloody annoying little man. He can't even disappear properly,' the mayor said, stumbling to his feet.

‘Well, no, not exactly,' Ramon continued.

‘What do you mean “not exactly”? Is the barber's open or not?'

‘Sort of,' Ramon said.

‘How can it sort of be open? Either it is open or it isn't. Ramon, is Bosco back?'

‘No,' Ramon answered.

‘Ramon,' the mayor said, stepping towards him so that there was only a hair's width between his face and Ramon's. ‘Let's get this clear. I am not in the mood. So let us start again. Have you come here to tell me the barber's shop is open?'

‘Yes.'

‘Are you telling me that Don Bosco is back?'

‘No.'

‘So what are you telling me?'

‘That Doña Nicanora has become a barber,' Ramon said.

The mayor gazed at him, mouth open.

‘Apparently Don Bosco gave her the key to his shop, and so she has become a barber,' Ramon said.

‘She can't do that,' the mayor replied. ‘It isn't proper.'

‘Well, apparently it is,' Ramon said. ‘She is shaving Don Teofelo as we speak.' And then, taking advantage of the mayor's apoplexy, he said, ‘And the visitors are arriving tomorrow.'

Nicanora caught sight of herself in the mirror. She was covered from head to toe in Don Bosco's apron, she held his razor in one hand, his barber's brush in the other, and his best friend was sitting in the chair in front of her. In the space of a day she had quite simply taken over his life. It had certainly not been her intention to do so when she had gone to the shop the previous evening. But she refused to believe that he would not be coming back. After everything Don Bosco had given up, she could not bear to think that she had tried to take what little he had from him, and she was determined to protect it for him now. What was more, without the barber the town seemed to be losing its cohesion and its whole structure was about to fall apart.

Nicanora stood transfixed with fright as the crowd outside the shop watched her. ‘Why don't you start?' Teofelo whispered from the chair. Having sat in anticipation for the past couple of minutes he was now rapidly losing his nerve. The memory of Don Bosco's recent debacle with the razor was still painfully fresh in his mind and Don Bosco had thirty years of experience behind him.

‘I don't know what to do,' Nicanora replied.

‘What do you mean you don't know what to do? Just start shaving.'

‘I can't.'

‘You have to. We've committed ourselves. Everyone is watching. If you back out now we will both look ridiculous.'

‘I don't know how to.'

‘It's simple,' Teofelo said. ‘Just cover my face with soap and then run the razor over it. Only make sure that you don't cut my throat.' Nicanora took a deep breath, dipped the shaving brush into the bowl of warm water and began covering Teofelo's face in foam. As she lifted the razor, a hush fell over the chattering crowd. She slowly put the implement to Teofelo's neck and paused. Teofelo drew in a sharp breath, made the sign of the cross, asked the Virgin for forgiveness and then shut his eyes tight. Nicanora started to shave. Five minutes later, Teofelo emerged a renewed man. Nicanora stood back and took the towel from his shoulders as if unveiling a great work of art. Teofelo opened his eyes and ran his hand over his chin. The crowd looked on.

‘That is as smooth a shave as I have ever had at the hands of our dear friend,' Teofelo whispered in Nicanora's ear, ‘but don't ever tell him that, he would be mortified.' Nicanora felt tears of pride well up in her eyes. ‘Tell me,' he said to her. ‘Why are you doing this? Why are you putting yourself on the line like this?'

‘I think we both know that I owe it to Don Bosco,' Nicanora replied. ‘The least I can do is safeguard his business for him until he comes back. You heard what the mayor said: if I don't, Don Bosco will lose this shop for ever.'

‘Nicanora,' Teofelo said, gently placing a hand on her shoulder. ‘You, I and the rest of the townsfolk will have to face up to our loss eventually.'

‘Don Teofelo,' Nicanora replied, ‘I don't know where Don Bosco
is, and I don't know whether he will ever be coming back. But I can tell you one thing for certain. He is not dead.'

‘And how can you know that?' Teofelo said, his gaze involuntarily turning to the hat on the pole.

‘The same way I knew all those years ago, without a shadow of a doubt, that you would lose the Champions of the Swamp trophy to those wandering pot sellers.'

‘You really knew that?' Teofelo said, now laughing at the memory of his foolishness. ‘In that case you owe me fifty pesos. And you know that our good friend Bosco has not been eaten by the swamp?'

‘I do,' Nicanora said.

‘I am so pleased,' Teofelo said mildly. ‘We all have our time. I accept that. But he would not have liked to go that way, swallowed by mud. He always hated to get his clothes dirty.'

‘You talk as if he is never coming back,' Nicanora said.

‘And is he?'

‘That I don't know. But I will do what I can to make sure he has something to come back to.' Nicanora desperately wanted to ask Teofelo about the photograph she had found in the drawer and whether that might be a clue to Don Bosco's whereabouts. She felt certain he had placed it where she would find it. He obviously knew her well enough to suppose that given the key to the shop she would not be able to resist snooping into the dark corners of his life. Could she confess to Teofelo that, having been in the shop for less than a day, she had started going through Don Bosco's secrets? Teofelo must know something about it, and she suspected that he was hiding something from her. What she really wanted to tell Teofelo was that she had not realised until Don Bosco was no longer there how much he meant to her and how much she missed him. She felt as if she had been playing a game with herself, never prepared
to admit that she had looked love in the face and scorned it. She had committed the greatest betrayal of all: she had denied herself the chance of happiness. But the discovery that Don Bosco had been, and possibly still was, in love with another woman had now made her reassess her whole life. It all made sense to her: Don Bosco had gone off in search of his lost love, and if he found her, he might never come back. She had turned him away, cruelly, when she had the chance of happiness with him and had never allowed herself to admit that it was the kindness and warmth of Don Bosco that had drawn her back home and enabled her to live there in peace for all these years. She felt now that she had been extraordinarily arrogant in assuming that she had been the only woman for whom Don Bosco had ever felt affection.

‘Don Teofelo,' she said, ‘where do you think he is heading?'

‘I don't,' Teofelo replied, ‘I didn't believe he would actually go. He just told me that he had some unfinished business that he had to attend to.'

But before Nicanora could continue, a voice rose above the murmuring of the crowd, breaking through her thoughts: ‘Three cheers for Nicanora, three cheers for Nicanora.' Nicanora turned to see Doña Gloria making her way towards the door of the barber's.

‘I have come to offer you my help. I am an expert in these matters,' Gloria declared, stepping inside, and with one magnificent flourish of her hand, she pushed Teofelo out of the shop.

The mayor was not sure which way to turn. He simply could not comprehend how life could change direction so dramatically in the course of one day. He had returned home the previous evening an
utterly contented man. Everything, for once, was working in his favour, and well, he thought, he deserved it. He had exerted his authority before the townsfolk, he was master of his house again, and this time Lucia would be gone for good. He had regained his place in his bed, next to his wife, who, for all her faults, he knew to be a very forgiving woman. He found it hard to admit quite how much he had missed Gloria on his recent visit to Rosas Pampas. He had missed the comforting familiarity of her body next to him at night, he had missed the playful glint in her eye when she was trying to humour him, and he had missed the inevitability of their bitter arguments and sweet reconciliations. But most of all he had missed the smell of her, the indescribable smell of the person who had lain beside him night after night, year after year, and knew him for exactly who he was.

After thirty years of marriage, he had to confess that he had become accustomed to Gloria in the way that he was accustomed to his legs being attached to his body, or to his eyes allowing him to see which path to take every morning. He felt deeply hurt by her accusation that he had been engaged in anything other than utterly official business during his absence. It was true, in the past he had been guilty of such excesses on more than one occasion. He now deeply regretted that it had caused Gloria pain and regretted even more that she always found out about his misdemeanours thanks to Lucia's highly proficient network of salacious gossips.

He had never really understood why Gloria was so perturbed by his careless meanderings. He had told her on many occasions that they meant nothing more to him than a simple release of his passions. He felt that she should have been proud of him for having so much masculine drive, but he had never quite been able to put this argument across lucidly enough. Gloria could never see his
point of view on this. He consoled himself that she was not an entirely innocent party, and that she was certainly not averse to a public flirtation or two, as her drunken display with Ernesto had made quite apparent to all, only a few months previously. He had never chastised her for these bouts of self-expression, as they were always followed by the deep and painful depressions that it took him months to coax her out of. It was the depressions that in the past had been the reason for his many absences, allowing himself a short respite to glimpse a carefree side of life. He had never understood what prompted Gloria's melancholy, but he was convinced that her darkest moods often followed an extended stay from Doña Lucia, who, for his own reasons, the mayor strongly tried to discourage from visiting the house.

What had mortified him most about Gloria's accusations was that on his recent visit to Rosas Pampas he had no longer felt any desire for younger womanly companionship. He had simply longed, every night, for the familiarity of his bed and his wife. It was not just that with the passing of time he had lost confidence that he could perform his part effectively, a shortcoming that happened with alarming frequency these days, and which his wife accepted with stoicism and good grace. It was simply that he derived no pleasure from even the thought of being next to anyone other than Gloria. I have been a good husband, he told himself on reflection. I still am a good husband, no matter what Lucia may say. I have always had my Gloria's best interests at heart.

With Gloria foremost in his mind he had stopped at the little shop in the plaza to buy some of the
sublime
chocolate bars that she so enjoyed and a bottle of
aguardiente
with which to toast his good fortune. As he left the square, he raised the bottle in salute to the liberation of the barber's shop and was immediately overwhelmed
by an acute pang of guilt. He was, he had to admit, the only person in the town with a reason to celebrate the shop's closure. But he certainly did not wish any harm to Don Bosco, quite the opposite. He wished him well on his travels and truly hoped that he would find happiness now that he had finally taken his life into his hands. He poured a splash of
aguardiente
on the ground and asked the Mother Earth to take care of their absent friend. He had become as accustomed over the years to his unspoken battle of wits with Don Bosco as he had to his marriage to Gloria, and he had a grudging admiration for the little man.

Very soon after his arrival in town, the mayor had identified Don Bosco as the only real rival to his ambitions. He had initially encountered him during a meeting of the townsfolk when the first elections for the newly created town council were being discussed. Don Bosco had argued lucidly for the rights of the peasants to a greater allocation of the estate land under the statutes of the recently passed Land Act, which he had clearly understood, having read it from cover to cover, which was more than the mayor had been able to do, despite his legal training. The mayor had sniffed the intelligence of the man and despised him for it.

Over all these years, Don Bosco had remained an enigma to him. He had never understood why the barber had remained in the shop for so long, especially as he had made the terms so unreasonable. He had done so simply to exert his authority over a man who he knew could thwart his own plans with a wink of his eye. He had sensed the barber's regret at signing the agreement as soon as he had done it. The change in Don Bosco had happened almost immediately, as if the man were mourning a part of himself that had died overnight. The thought that he had been the cause of the diminishment of another man's soul had played slowly on his mind
over the years. He felt an odd kinship with the barber. In him he saw a man just like himself, a man who had thrown his life away on a whim. In Don Bosco's frailties he saw his own failings starkly reflected.