It's been almost thirty-five years.
I can scarcely believe it, nina.
Time trusts no one and so it disappears
before us like the smoke from my
cigarette.
In 1925 I was young, I was a part
of a world eating at its own edges
without being satisfied.
The Roaring Twenties didn't roar.
They swelled with passions.
They danced, and I danced with them.
I had a barber shop in a Manhattan
hotel.
It is not there anymore.
It burned down during World War II.
But in its time it was elegant, private.
My shop was small, only one chair.
Every comb, every lotion, every towel
perfect:
like the stars which burn in the sky,
everything shined.
The barber chair was gold-leafed
and made of the softest leather.
A man could fall asleep in that chair
with lather still fresh on his face.
There were four large oval mirrors,
two on one wall, two on the opposite
wall.
They faced each other like distant
lovers,
never permitted to kiss,
only permitted to greet each other
with their cool but receptive stares.
The walls had cloth wallpaper.
The wallpaper too had gold leaf
with a blue and brown background of
leaves
and trees and ocean in the distance.
And it reminded me of my town
Aguadilla,
the great stretches of beach,
The lush rain forests of Puerto Rico.
Anyway, fate had been good to me,
and I was owner of the barber shop
in the hotel, and I made good money,
and the times looked good, and I lost a lot of money
before the Twenties were gone.
But that's not why I'm telling you this.
One day in 1926, early afternoon, 1:00
P.M.,
things were slow, and I was reading
the paper,
studying the horse racing sheet.
Mangual had come by, picked up a
couple of bets
from me and got a haircut.
He had hair in those days.
It was just after he had left,
And I remember thinking what a hot
summer
we were having, and I was tipped back
in my barber chair,
almost sleeping, almost dreaming.
You know how it is when you're
between
sleep and dream and a slight push
can send you into one world or the
other.
Well, suddenly the wall phone rang.
I thought for sure it was Mangual.
Sometimes he'd call and try to get me
to change my bets. He'd tell me
I was wasting my money,
and he had a tip on a horse
so fast you'd think it had six legs
The phone rang a second time.
I did not hurry. I don't quite know why,
but I waited until the fourth ring
and snapped forward in the chair
and lifted the phone receiver off the
hook.
The front desk at the hotel was calling.
A guest wanted a haircut and shave.
I had no customers in the shop, except
maybe a fly seeking decay in summer
heat.
I said I was available, asked for the
room number.
That was that. Just another customer,
I remember thinking. Possibly a
stockbroker,
a businessman, maybe Mafia.
I'd given them haircuts and shaves too.
I took my best tools.
I had recently purchased them
And had a special black leather box
made.
Like a doctor.
In a way I was a kind of doctor.
What I did helped people ride a stream
to slow recovery, to arrive on the shore
of something new, something hidden.
A secret place. A secret person.
Well, so I went. I closed my shop,
putting a note on the door saying
I'd he back in an hour, and then I
strutted down
the wine-red carpeted hallway into the
lobby,
past the front desk and into the elevator.
I pressed the button for the eighth floor
and rode up alone to my destiny.
There was a small mirror on the
elevator wall,
just above the button panel.
It was there for the ladies and
gentlemen,
on their way to parties,
to look one last time at the present.
And so I did. I stared into the face
of a twenty-seven-year-old man
who knew little about the ways of this
world.
And for that moment I thought I saw
someone else.
Someone who was walking towards me
from another place we held in common.
The elevator door opened
to wake me from my daydream.
Room 808 was my customer,
and I found myself at the door
tapping lightly on its face.
The rooms were spacious,
and the windows faced Central Park.
I could hear the sound of an electric
fan
as the door opened, and I was greeted
by a fair-haired, frail-looking man.
He was in a dark suit,
And he was smoking a cigarette in a
holder.
Quite a dandy. He greeted me warmly,
thanked me for being so prompt.
His employer was absolutely desperate
to be ready for an evening engagement
and had little time or desire to walk
the busy streets looking for a barber
shop,
and if he did walk the streets,
he probably would be mobbed by
admirers,
and he would definitely make my time
worthwhile,
and I had come highly recommended.
Well, all these things came quickly
Out of this amiable, high-strung
American
as he led me to a room where the light
was good
and which had been prepared
with a chair, table, and large mirror.
The sink was to the left of the table.
I began setting the tools on the table
and emptying my satchel of hair and
skin products,
which I had also brought with me.
As I did, I looked up at the mirror,
more so to see if it was clean than
anything else.
When I did, I saw the reflection,
a dark-haired man in the mirror
standing in the doorway behind me.
It was the ladykiller.
It was Rudolph Valentino.
He looked drawn and tired.
He had obviously not shaved
for his face was already darkening with
whiskers.
He was wearing a very white
undershirt
and a pair of dark pants.
By his side was a very slim, exotic
looking woman.
They were arguing, but very quietly,
in whispers like lovers separated
by a thin wall from their neighbors.
The woman kept insisting on
something,
and she called him Rudy.
He finally looked at me staring at him
in the mirror and smiled slightly,
stopping the woman in her sentence by simply saying,
"Enough!"
He closed the door behind him,
walked towards me,
his hand out to shake my hand.
And to my surprise he said my name.
"I'm glad to meet you, Senor Sapia."
The look of amazement must have
been on my face.
I suddenly began to feel flushed.
In the mirror I could see how red my
cheeks were.
And then he apologized and told me
his secretary had a bad habit
of never informing people who their
customer was.
One time in California
he needed a manicure and a pedicure.
The hotel sent up an elderly lady
to give him what he requested.
But she was never told who her client
was.
When Valentino walked out to greet
her,
his pants leg rolled up, barefoot,
the woman drew in a long hard look
and fainted on the royal blue rug,
her silver hair perfectly in place.
Valentino tried to revive her
and members of his party called
for the house doctor and all was panic.
And the strange thing was
they couldn't revive her.
They declared the woman dead,
Valentino concluded, remorse in his
voice.
The hotel cooperated,
reported the woman died of a heart
attack
in the hallway, not Valentino's room.
He had enough of scandal.
This would have been too cruel,
too bizarre, he confessed.
I was struck by Valentino's story.
Why should he tell me
Facundo Sapia, a simple barber?
My girl, I was suddenly caught
between laughing and crying.
The poor man had a power
he couldn't control,
and here I was absolving him
of his sin, listening to his confession
like a priest in my white smock.
And now he was to do penance,
he was to give something up to me.
I would raise my chalice of shaving
cream
and lift my silver razor to the light.
"Sapia means wisdom, doesn't it?" he
asked.
"Yes," I told him. "My mother's name
was Inocencia."
"Ah," he said. "What a beautiful name,
Innocent Wisdom."
And he sat down in the chair,
looked into the mirror, and asked me
to help him with this man in the mirror,
meaning, of course, himself.
I covered him with the white apron.
And I began to apply the shaving cream
to his face while his eyes stared
directly into the eyes of the pitiful man
he thought he saw in the mirror.
I began to lather and disguise
that perfect face, slowly, with
compliance,
like an accomplice to the development
of the belief in one god.
Perhaps her god was what
the elderly lady thought she saw
before she fainted into death.
As I shaved Rudolph Valentino,
he remained silent, and I remained
silent.
My hands had to be steady,
for they guided the instrument
and I simply followed.
Valentino noticed my hands.
They looked like his father's hands,
the way the fingers naturally curved
when the hand relaxed.
I began to cut his hair;
he trained his eyes on my hands.
"You do not realize it," he said,
"but you are cutting away at my life too,
time leaving me like moments
falling to the floor."
Suddenly, I was afraid of a man
I could easily destroy
with one swerve of my razor,
with one jolt of my scissors.
A man who was a great lover,
not philosopher.
I didn't want to hear philosophy.
I wanted to know about the desert at
night,
the ride of the four horsemen,
the posture of the tango.
But he was speaking about death,
his own death.
And he was implicating me.
But most frightening of all,
I had this disturbing feeling he was
right.
He was dying. I was dying.
We were all dying at this moment,
in this place, where his hair fell calmly
to the floor like our simple desires.
Somehow I gathered my courage
and told him he had something
all men wished they had.
It was not his money or his appearance.
He immediately turned directly to me,
causing my scissor to glance
slightly off of his left ear.
He just stared at me.
Didn't say one word.
He lust looked and looked into flay face.
I felt like a broken fish under the eye
of God;
he was waiting for the answer.
What he had was a way with women.
I told him about the woman I was in
love with
but who did not even care if I lived or
died.
She did not even know I existed.
Oh, she was a friend of a friend,
and we talked, but I could sense
she had no fascination for me.
It was odd to tell this to Rudolph
Valentino,
a man never scorned by a woman,
a man who had probably made love
to every woman he touched.
Well, we continued in silence.
I trimming his hair,
which was in need of a haircut,
and he turned toward the mirror,
staring into his own eyes,
then once or twice stealing
a quick, deliberate glance at me.
The silence in the room made
everything else around us so
loud.
My scissors clipping steadily.
The car horns from down on the street.
Suddenly I could hear the young man
and the exotic looking woman
in the next room arguing,
at first with quick exchanges and long
pauses.
Then their voices grew more intense,
more hateful,
until finally I heard a crash or a fall,
I really wasn't sure which.
But I could hear someone crying and
gasping
and trying to talk, trying to defend.
It was the young man's voice.
I think she had hit him with something.
Valentino's eyes changed.
"Damn it, damn it," he started saying.
"Yes, I'm lucky," he said to me,
"and I'll probably be lucky in hell too."
He suddenly laughed, as if he realized
something ridiculous
far beyond his reach,
distant as his past.
By then I had begun putting talcum
powder
around his neck, ready to remove
the white apron covered with his hair.
His image in the mirror was the image
I had seen in the dark theatre.
Valentino gave the mirror his famous
profile,
the delicate ears, the high forehead,
the angular nose.
"Senor Sapia," he said, very
conclusively,
"your reputation is not exaggerated."
With that, he gave me a one hundred
dollar bill
from a money clip he had in his
pocket,
and he walked ceremoniously out the
door.
Something happened to me, mi
muchacha.
Something seized my senses.
He had said it himself:
"You are cutting away at my life too."
We all take something from each other.
It was then I got down on my knees,
began gathering with these hands his
hair,
hurrying like a mad man,
afraid someone would open the door,
catch me,
afraid someone would see my
uncontrollable frenzy.
One month later he died and I
discovered
the magical power of the hair.
It was then when I used that power.
I used it to seduce a woman I loved.
The woman who didn't love me.
by Yvonne Sapia
by Yvonne Sapia
