The Barber of Erice

It started with the most miraculous haircut Giuliu had ever seen.

Signora Azzaro had brought in her 13-year-old son. Every boy in Erice wanted to look like a footballer, but this … The sides had been brought down to near stubble, then textured in tight zigzags like lightning bolts. The top had been made to stand at attention, somewhere between a mohawk and a pompadour, except the front, which fell moodily over the boy’s eyes. In the back, above a delicately faded neckline, were two more bolts, larger but done with absolute precision. There were even, Giuliu saw as he sat the boy in the second chair, notches carved out of his slender eyebrows, also, impossibly, in the shape of lightning.

“Mizzica,” Giuliu muttered. “Where did you go for this?”

Signora Azzaro threw up her hands. “Two weeks from his confirmation, and he looks like some Catania gangster. You can fix it, can’t you?”

“A salon in Trapani maybe?” But that was all the way down the mountain. Never mind that no one he knew of in Trapani was even capable of such work.

“He doesn’t tell me,” Signora Azzaro answered bitterly. “Just says a friend did it.”

Giuliu swept the pompadour one way and then the other, considering. Perhaps there was some way to fix it, but Giuliu had the long-dulled instincts of a man with a captive clientele. He’d cut this boy, and all the boys and men in Erice, so many times that their hair was just an eternal weed to be pruned and pruned. As the clippers whirred, the boy scowled back at him in the mirror. Faint traces of lightning could still be seen, and, short of shaving them off, he couldn’t do much about the eyebrows. “There we are,” Giuliu said. “Now he only looks like a Napoli gangster.”

Signora Azzaro cuffed her son on the ear. “This is the impression we give Padre Barale?”

Giuliu couldn’t hide his irritation at the mention of the handsome new priest. “Don’t worry, Barale’s too busy with his good works to worry how the flock gets shorn.”

“Yes, yes”—Signora Azzaro counted out exactly six euros—“for your efforts.”

Giuliu swept up, dipped his combs, counted the register back out, as if there’d been any other customers that day. He felt the usual low hum of panic—his shop, his father’s shop, going down the toilet. But, as he closed up, there was something else: remorse. All of that beautiful work, disappearing under his clippers.

Just once in your life, the guidebook said, you must see the sun set over Erice.

Giuliu sat in the piazza watching a clutch of tourists snap the same photo—the blood-orange sun trembling into the Tyrrhenian Sea, the Isole Egadi slanting mile-long shadows up the mountain, the whole burning sky going ruddy-dark red as the day bled out in the bath—that every other grinning idiot off the cruise liners had taken for the past 40 years. Or, anyway, ever since Giuliu was a boy. Even the sublime grows a rind.

He poured himself another grappa as the rest of the village straggled by. The old couples hobbling through their passeggiata. The mothers herding their little ones toward Wednesday Mass. Father Barale, smiling beatifically as he crossed the square, stopping to juggle a football with some boys. In the café next to Giuliu’s shop, the usual clutch of codgers sat playing scopa and grousing over their amari, while the proprietor gazed hopefully at the tourists, who, satisfied with their photos, trailed off toward their waiting coach. You must see the sun set over Erice, the guidebook said, but save your appetite till you get back to your cruise.