Advice for Italian Boys

by Anne Giardini

  Nicolo, caught up in his brother’s giddy glee, rolled around with him on the floor giggling and repeating, “A bare-naked woman.” “Bending over.” “Showing her bare bum.”

  There were others, drawings of long fried eggs with three yolks of different sizes that were really “between a woman’s legs,” and many variations on fatly inflated sticks, raised up like hammers overtop of paired bulbous circles, or plunging into the curious fried eggs.

  “This is how they do it when they do it!” cried Enzo.

  He almost shuddered beneath the weight of all that he knew, at the splendour of his drawings, and at his generosity, he at nine imparting to Nicolo, who was entirely undeserving, such expansive knowledge of these, the greatest mysteries of the grown-up world. He himself hadn’t had access to such opportunities at Nicolo’s young age.

  And then, several weeks later that same spring, the boys were outside knocking a fraying tennis ball around with their hockey sticks when a yellow dog came loping along their street, a stray with bony hips and matted fur and no collar. They had never seen it before and didn’t see it ever again afterward. The lone dog came toward them and then, nervous of the sticks the boys held, hurried its pace, veered wide and galloped past, but not so quickly that the boys missed seeing clearly a swollen purple object, its thing, knocking against the hair and bone of its hind legs.

  A store of new words was learned over the next couple of years, schoolyard words, street words, rude words, acquired from dubious sources, known to be not allowed, not even half understood. But the discovery by Nicolo and his brothers of the magazines at the back of Massimo’s beloved and carefully kept barbershop, concealed under the sink behind a stack of towels, was vastly greater in scale than any of these. The boys were eleven, eight and five or so, and they had been left at the closed, locked store for a couple of hours during a snowy Sunday afternoon while their parents visited a neighbour who was in hospital following surgery, her head shaved, black-edged stitches showing the place where an as-yet-unanalyzed polyp had been removed from behind her ear—certainly not a sight to which the boys should be exposed. To keep them occupied and out of trouble, they had been given soft rags and paste, and told that they should dust the baseboards and polish the chrome of the barber chairs and the stainless-steel taps and sinks. The three of them made a cursory job of this chore and then began an unsatisfactory game of hide-and-seek. The shop was small and there were too few places to hide. Only younger Enzo could fit in the cupboard that concealed the pipes underneath the sink at the back of the store, and when he was pulled out by the collar of his shirt, the magazines came sliding out with him.

  Young Enzo took no interest in the magazines; he was in the thrall of the comics that were kept in plain sight on a table at the front of the shop. There were a dozen or so of them and the boys had leafed through them so often that the comic books were as soft and limp as cotton. Enzo had committed to memory the main action, and was now studying the background details: the licence plates on the cars, the clothes that the parents wore, the books on bookcases with their indecipherable titles, the signs on stores, and the shape and colour of the food dished out at the school cafeteria or at the restaurant where the characters went for milkshakes and hamburgers.

  Nicolo and older Enzo were, on the other hand, keenly interested in the magazines from under the sink. There were ten or a dozen of them, every page filled with drawings and cartoons, almost all of which had naked women in them, surrounded by jokes and stories and letters. This was another world entirely, one in which women seemed to exist solely so that they could display their ample breasts and thighs, and plunge plumply into bed with any man that happened to be near—their neighbours, bosses, co-workers, and with mechanics, dentists and—especially—door-to-door salesmen. These women wore tight sweaters and short skirts, or bikini tops and cut-off jeans, and they had eye makeup and lipstick on even when they were doing something normal, such as washing the dishes or shopping or driving a car. All of these activities led to the same thing—it, in bed or in the back seat of a car or on couches.

  For the first half-hour, Enzo and Nicolo read two or three magazines together, side by side on their stomachs on the floor. But then Enzo complained. “You’re too slow,” he said. He was the faster reader, and didn’t seem as interested as Nicolo was in puzzling out the more mysterious pictures.

  Enzo took one of the fatter magazines and climbed with it up on to one of the high swivelling barber chairs.

  After another half-hour of reading, Nicolo began to feel an ache in his stomach, as if he had eaten too much candy. His eyes felt raw with gazing on bras and panties and breasts and legs and hair. When he closed his eyes to rest them, he saw the same images against a spangled black background: women in all positions enticing the attention of the cartoon men and of himself, Nicolo, surely at best an unintended viewer.

  He pulled himself up and returned the magazines in a jumble to the back of the cupboard from which they had fallen, hearing in the same moment the rhythm of familiar voices and the dull sound of approaching footsteps.

  The bell above the front door of Massimo’s barbershop jangled sharply, once, twice. Nicolo slammed the cupboard door shut and slid in his stocking feet toward the front of the store. What had Enzo done with the magazine he had been reading? Nicolo looked and could see its outline pressing against the striped pattern on the inside of Enzo’s T-shirt.

  His parents and nonna noticed nothing unusual, it seemed; they were preoccupied by Marcella’s illness, and by the late hour and the need to get the three boys home and fed and to bed. Younger Enzo knew enough not to say a word about what his brothers had been reading, or perhaps his blissful hour in the pastel streets and homes and school grounds of Riverdale had displaced any memories of the pictures he had glimpsed in those other magazines; it was even possible that their seedy quality had escaped his notice. The magazine that had been stashed hurriedly inside older Enzo’s shirt found a permanent home rolled up inside the heat register in his bedroom, attached to the underside of the metal slats with two wide yellow rubber bands.

  Massimo had acquired earlier that year a new fellow barber at the shop. Vito Greco, the cousin of a cousin, had been sent out from Italy when word reached Arduino of the loss of Guido Bianco at age forty-eight of a heart attack no more than twenty minutes after Friday evening dinner with his wife. (She had cooked his favourite meal: polenta baked in a slow oven with cheese, tomato sauce made from their own tomatoes, and slices of hard-boiled eggs, a salad of onions and bitter escarole from their garden, several slices of rosy melon and a few overripe black figs recently rescued from the predations of wasps and birds, a small post-prandial glass of wine sweet enough for the communion table and a handful of anise-flavoured biscotti; when he drew his last, abruptly broken breath, Guido Bianco was sated, drowsy and contented.) Guido had been Massimo’s partner from the earliest days of the shop. The two of them, thin, young, confident, too green to know any better, opened Continental Barber in the first year after they arrived from Italy. Their business thrived from the start and both were able to send for their families the following year. Language had never been an impediment. Their clientele was so close to one hundred percent Italian immigrants that it was almost exclusively Italian and Italian-accented English that could be heard above the sound of snipping scissors and buzzing razors.

  Guido was Massimo’s partner for over two decades. They spent close to seven thousand days working within two paces of each other, treading the same linoleum, swapping combs and scissors, razors, and rare bits of advice that were offered and accepted with mutual esteem. Massimo had the obdurate business sense that Guido lacked, and Guido had what Massimo did not, the gift of endless, fluid, ready conversation. Guido greeted everyone who entered the store with exuberant joy, strangers and friends. He teased and cajoled and bantered and debated, not just with his own customer in the chair before him but also with Massimo’s customer, and with whoever happened to be waiting in the L-shaped ar
rangement of seats at the front of the shop. Guido’s voice was the background music for the shop; it rolled and rumbled like that of an organ grinder, a percussive counterpoint to the cadence of the work that kept them on their feet, hands hovering above heads, from Monday mornings through Saturdays at five, filling the rare empty midafternoon half-hour, easing the passage of the many hours when the two chairs were so busy that the next man sat down on a seat that was still warm from the buttocks of the last and Massimo and Guido sometimes sprang into action without even waiting for instructions. Guido’s effusiveness gave them energy, kept them in temper, and kept them moving; it provided the pacing and the tempo for the tending of head, beard, moustache, brow and even the furtive, coiling nasal hairs that were attacked and quelled quickly with a neat, curving swipe of the smallest of the shop’s assortment of electric clippers. Other shops installed radios or television sets that were always kept tuned to news or sports, but at Continental Barber the commentary, sports, news, near news, frank gossip and personal interest stories were almost all delivered and moderated by Guido. Their customers came as much for this as for the haircuts, of which there were in truth no more than four or five elemental variations. The men enjoyed the unstintingly convivial atmosphere of the store. They felt a kind of privilege, understanding that Guido’s rumbling eloquence, which had no apparent start or end, was provided entirely for their benefit. Even the youngest child of three or four in for his first haircut could see that Guido’s loquaciousness was sustained and reinforced by Massimo’s silence, which was broken only now and again by the briefest response, a “no” or a “sì” or the barest suggestion of a vowel-less syllable, seldom more, since only rarely was anything more needed.

  Massimo and Guido both cut hair, but only Guido gave shaves, and he administered them the old-fashioned way, with scalding hot terry-cloth towels applied first and then shaving cream made from bar soap frothed lavishly in an earthenware bowl and applied with an ancient badger-hair brush. The shaves were administered with a Pearlx-handled straight razor that Guido sharpened on a carborundum hone and polished on a leather-and-linen strop that hung ready to hand from a swivelling hook on the wall.

  Massimo had a trick he liked to play, when—and this happened rarely, so there was no risk that the joke would grow stale—Guido accidentally nicked a customer’s neck with the razor’s sharp blade, the smallest over- or under-calculation, from which a tiny, glistening bead of blood would emerge with Guido’s reflection trembling in it, carmine, upside-down. The customer would blanch and sit tremblingly still, or jump from the chair and launch into real or jocular curses, depending on his temperament. “Go, go get the poor guy a glass of water,” Massimo would cry out to the other customers—his one, his only joke. “We got to check him out to see if maybe the water leaks out through the hole.”

  Guido’s loss was more than a setback for Massimo. It called into question the future of Continental Barber itself, which had always been just the two of them. Guido had built the plywood counters and cabinets, fitted and painted the sliding cabinet doors with white enamel paint that had yellowed only slightly over the years, cut, placed and glued the pale blue melamine countertop, and bent and nailed in place the grooved metal band that edged the countertops. Massimo and Guido had chosen and laid the tiles, and had selected and paid for the two swivelling chairs with their red vinyl upholstery and nickel levers and knobs that moved them up and down and back and forward, as well as the electric red-white-and-blue striped barbershop pole that rotated out front and the lighted sign over the door. There was nothing in the store that Massimo had done alone or without Guido’s counsel.

  Three desolate weeks passed, during which the regular customers continued to come, although there were some who had to be turned away because there were too many for Massimo to handle alone and those who made it into the chair could get their usual trims and haircuts but no shaves. The shop had no jokes or music or teasing on offer, only the small, tragic percussion of a single pair of steel scissors snipping in the vast white noise of Massimo’s disconsolate sighs. In the late afternoon of the third Saturday, Massimo finished the last customer an hour late, shook his head, switched off the lights and the sign and the pole, turned the faded red OPEN sign around on its chain to display the blue CLOSED side, went home and told Paola that maybe it was time for him to close out the lease. For a hundred and fifty dollars a week he could rent a chair instead at Joe’s Custom Hairstyling four blocks down and across the street. None of his sons would become barbers; there was no good reason to preserve the business that he and Guido had built up.

  Guido’s widow Gianna was called on the phone and she came right over, pulling her black cardigan close across her chest with her left hand on which Guido’s gold wedding band spun loose at the base of her fourth finger, inside her own, closest to her heart. She was adamantly against this proposal.

  “I couldn’t stand it, to see Continental gone,” she told Massimo, her eyes dark and wet. She twisted her hands together. “It would’ve killed Guido to’ve known it would just close like that if he went. And you know what he thinks of Joe’s. A clip joint, that’s what he always called it. You’ve heard him yourself. A clip joint. He wouldn’t’ve wanted to see you there. You know he wouldn’t’ve.”

  She suggested instead that he give Vito a try—this young cousin of a cousin of a cousin she had heard about back home in Arduino. Vito was up to date, she said, on all the newest styles, and he was single and restless in his late twenties. An engagement had fallen through suddenly for unexplained reasons; the girl had been lovely apparently, and pure as the snow and from a good family and willing, and Vito was, as a result of this event and the fact that the girl had several brothers, anxious to get away. And so it was arranged. Vito’s papers were expedited by younger Enzo, who was able to convince the immigration officials that Vito’s unique tonsorial skills were not otherwise available in Canada. Trained in Milan, the fashion capital of the world, he said, stretching the truth by a few hundred kilometres. Several months later, as promised, Vito arrived at the store—very tall, very thin, his stomach carried forward like a young girl’s, his Adam’s apple prominent like a half-swallowed stone in his throat, his long black hair combed back and formed into ridges and furrows with gel, shadow-jawed, all quick dark angles—on a Friday in February (the darkest, wettest, coldest month) at nine-thirty in the morning, delivered to the glass front door of the barbershop by Gianna, who had offered him a bed and his meals until he could get on his feet. She had no children and had hopes that Vito might help diminish the emptiness of her house in a way that seemed otherwise entirely beyond her.

  Vito lived up to Enzo’s sales pitch. He was a skilful, meticulous barber. He had learned the craft in one of the alleys that reach out like the ribs of a fan from the harbour in Naples, where he had gone on his own at age sixteen to apprentice. He had started sweeping thick piles of hair from the floor made of yellow-veined, cracked marble—women of the neighbourhood would come and ask for a few fistfuls of the sweepings, to sprinkle around their tomato plants to discourage the city’s feral cats—becoming next a soaper, wetting and soaping customers’ cheeks and necks for a senior barber to shave, and so on up through the strata from insignificant to second barber. Vito brought with him to Continental Barber his own long-bladed scissors, which he sharpened himself with a palm-sized whetstone, and a burnished aluminum comb for flat-top styles.

  He proved to have the knack of it. He could smooth tight curls and mould them into sleek, shiny pompadours. He could contain the thickest head of hair into a formal, tidy shape, with properly squared-off sides and back. He adopted Guido’s abandoned straight razor and delivered shaves with surgical exactitude. But Vito was brusque with the customers, showing no inclination to engage with them or get to know them. He limited his attention strictly to the hair and whiskers that sprouted above their necks. He had no small talk or thoughts or opinions that he cared to share. Massimo thought at first that Vito was getting used to a ne
w place, and then that he might be bored by the shop and its clientele and possibilities. He noticed that Vito’s eyes seemed always to be darting toward the window, to the sidewalk and road outside where people and cars passed.

  The only time Vito became animated was when the shop was visited by the sales representatives who peddled shampoos, conditioners, oils and soaps. Vito invited them in, all of them, offered them small glasses from the collection of bottles of bitter grappa and sweet anisette that he had installed in a cupboard under the sink at the back of the shop, tested creams and lotions and salves on the skin on the underside of his wrist, rolled up his sleeve and tried out multi-headed electric razors and super-sharp shears on the dark hair of his forearm or on his own thick, black moustache. Massimo and Guido had always turned the travelling sales reps politely away, declining even the samples they offered at no cost and no obligation. Both of them had been suspicious of anything that purported to be free and they had stayed loyal over the years to the original companies that had helped them start out by providing easy credit terms and lots of advice. Massimo worried too about the fact that the bylaw governing barbershops, which Paola had read closely and had summarized for him, expressly prohibited serving food or drink on the premises. However, he kept this concern to himself.

  “Be patient with him,” Nonna counselled Massimo at the dinner table at the end of Vito’s first week. “Nessuno nasce maestro.” Everyone has to learn.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Mario’s fiancée, Angela Trapasso, invited Nicolo’s mother and nonna to her wedding shower. The invitation arrived at the house in a pink and white envelope addressed to Filomena and Paola Pavone. Nicolo opened the envelope when he came in from work and he read the details aloud to his mother and Nonna. Nicolo had already mentioned Mario’s engagement to them, but this announcement and summons to a celebration made it official. Nonna studied the envelope and card carefully. She cannot read, really—she is analfabeta; she had no school after age eight or nine and almost none before then—but she has an abiding respect for formal documenti, for notices, bills, correspondence and announcements that come in substantial envelopes embellished by stamps and labels. She was able to work her way through the names Mario and Angela, her forefinger tracing the letters as a guide for her eyes. She smiled and made a sign with her thumb over the names, invoking fortune, averting any possible domestic sorrow.