Sepharad Read Online Free Page B

when he bent close with the comb and scissors, and he shaved my neck with a little electrical machine. I could hear his strong, fast breathing and feel the touch of capable adult fingers on the nape of my neck and on my cheeks, the rare pressure of hands that weren’t those of my mother or father, familiar yet strange hands, suddenly brusque when he doubled my ears forward or made me bend way over by pushing the back of my head. Every time he trimmed my hair, almost at the end, Pepe Morillo would say, “Close your eyes tight,” and I knew he
was going to trim the bangs to just above my eyebrows, cutting toward the middle of my forehead. Damp hair would fall on my eyelids, tickle my plump cheeks and tip of my nose, and the cold blades of the scissors would brush my eyebrows. When Pepe Morillo told me I could open my eyes now, I would be surprised by the round, unfamiliar face in the mirror, with protruding ears and straight bangs above the eyes, and also by my father’s smile as he looked approvingly at my reflection.
    I remembered all this as if I were reliving it when I unexpectedly ran into Mateo Zapatón in Chueca Plaza . . . and something else that until that moment I hadn’t known was in my memory. Once, as I was waiting my turn and reading a comic book my father had just bought for me, I felt thirsty and asked Pepe Morillo’s permission to get a drink. He pointed to a small, dark interior patio at the rear of the barbershop, through a glass door and down a dark corridor. When you’re a boy, the farthest places can be reached in only a few steps. As I pushed open the door, I think I was a little dizzy; maybe I was getting a fever and that was why I was so thirsty. The paving tiles were white and gray, with reddish flowers in the center, and they echoed as I walked across them. In a corner of the tiny patio, where a number of plants with large leaves added to the humidity, there was a pitcher on a shelf covered with a crocheted cloth, one of those clay water pitchers they had back then, a brightly colored, glazed jug in the shape of a rooster, made, I remember precisely, by potters on Calle Valencia. I took a drink, and the water had the consistency of broth and the taste of fever. I went back down the hallway, and suddenly I was lost. I wasn’t at the barbershop but in a place it took some time to identify as the cobbler’s shop, and the person I saw was the flesh-and-blood apostle Saint Matthew, although he was wearing a leather apron and not the tunic of a saint or a member of the brotherhood, and he was beardless, with the stub
of an unlit cigarette in one corner of his mouth and a tack in the other. “Mercy, Sacristan, what in the world are you doing here? You gave me quite a turn.”
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    JUST AS I HAD THEN, I looked at Mateo and didn’t know what to say. Up close he seemed much older, he no longer resembled the eternal Saint Matthew of the Last Supper. Neither his gaze nor his smile was directed at me: they stayed absolutely the same when I spoke his name and held out my hand to greet him, and when I clumsily and hastily told him who I was and tried to remind him of my parents’ names and the nickname my family had back then. Limply holding my hand, he nodded and looked at me, although he didn’t give the impression that he was focusing his eyes, which until a moment before had seemed observant and lively. His hat, more than tilted to one side, was skewed on his head, as if he had jammed it on at the last moment as he left the house or put it on with the carelessness of someone who can’t see himself well in the mirror. I reminded him that my mother had always been a customer in his shop—then shops had patrons, not customers—and that my father, who like him was also a great fan of the bulls, had often been present at his gatherings, and at those in Pepe Morillo’s barbershop next door, which communicated with his via an