Using a gesture he had learned from the pope — the extending of the hand for a kiss on its ringed fingers — he dismissed his traveling companion. He went over to the mirror and, with careful, precise movements, began to comb his hair.
Francesca
Teresa brought in the chocolate and announced that Giuseppe, the pretty, rosy-cheeked, blond, blue-eyed boy, had arrived and was even now waiting for his instructions. Giacomo gave the girl money, had some white stockings brought over from the nearby fashionable haberdasher, then — on credit — ordered two pairs of lace gloves and a pair of clasped shoes as an extra. While the barber lathered him, the various servants proceeded round him on tiptoe, changing the bed, pouring hot water into basins, and ironing his clothes, for he had taken considerable pains to impress upon Teresa the importance of carefully starching the ruffles on the front of his shirt. The barber’s soft hand moved over his face, rubbing the lather in, then, like a conductor, wove and teased each curl of his locks into place.
“Talk to me,” said the guest, his eyes closed, stretching his limbs out in the armchair. “What news in town?”
“Town news?” the pretty barber began in a singing, slightly effeminate voice, lisping a little. “You, sir, are the news. No other news in Bolzano since sunset last night. You alone. May I?” he asked, and with the ends of his scissors he began to snip at the hair sprouting from the guest’s wide nostrils.
“What are they saying?” came the question, along with a sigh of satisfaction. “You are allowed to tell me the worst as well as the best.”
“There is only the best, sir,” the barber answered, snapping his scissors in the air, then taking the heated curling tongs, breathing on them, and turning them about. “This morning, as usual, I was up at the crack of dawn with His Excellency. I’m there every morning. You should know, sir, that His Excellency does us the honor of affording our company his patronage. It is my privilege to shave him and to prepare his peruke for him, since His Excellency — and I tell you this in confidence — is perfectly bald now. My boss, the renowned Barbaruccia — they say there is no one, not even in Florence, who possesses his skill in cutting veins or restoring potency with a special herbal preparation — is both doctor and barber to His Excellency. My job, as I have explained, is to shave him. And Signor Barbaruccia’s wife massages him twice a week, but at other times, too, whenever he feels in need of it.”
“Surely not!” he replied coldly. “His Excellency requires both massage and restoratives?…”
“Only since he got married, sir,” answered the barber, and began to curl his thick hair with the hot tongs.
He only half heard the news, stretched out as he was in the exquisite minutes of self-indulgence afforded by the submission of one’s head to the soft fingers of a barber. Giuseppe’s fingers were nimble but he was even nimbler in his talk. His voice was light and gentle, like the sound of a spring, full of lisping, eyeball-rolling scandal; he spoke in the manner peculiar to barbers, who are at once friends, experts, counselors and confidants for whom the town holds no secrets, for they know about aging bodies, about the cooling of the blood, about scalps that are losing their former glories, about the slackening of the muscles, about the delicate creaking of frail bones, about toothless gums and bad breath, about the crow’s-feet gathering on smooth temples, and who listened with attention to everything that the bloodless lips of their customers had to say. “Chatter away!” thought Giacomo and stretched his body again, yielding himself to the effeminate voice, to the fine scent of the burned alcoholic tincture being rubbed into his brow and the rice powder being sprinkled on his wig. He enjoyed this half hour in this distant town, as he did in every distant town, these moments when, after rising, he would welcome the appearance of the barber, the official traitor to the municipality, who snapped his scissors and whispered the secrets of the living and the dead. He encouraged the nimble youth with the odd blink or brief aside—“Really? Completely bald?”—in mock astonishment, as though it were the most important thing in the world, as though he had his own suspicions as to the condition of the gracious gentleman who required feeding and massage now that he was married. “But surely there remain a few stray locks on his nape at least?” he asked confidentially, narrowing his eyes.
“Yes,” Giuseppe brightly replied with the unselfish volubility of one prepared to divulge still darker and more melancholy information. “But how thin those locks are, exceedingly thin. His Excellency is a great patron of ours. My master, Signor Barbaruccia, is among his favorites, as am I. It does us no harm, that sort of thing. We order him roe from Grado for the increasing of his desire, and Signor Barbaruccia’s wife prepares a brew of beetroot, horseradish, and spring onions for him to ward off apoplexy should he then be assailed by particularly carnal thoughts. His Excellency has mentioned you, sir.”
“What did he say?” he asked, his eyes wide with amazement.
“Only that he would like to meet you,” answered the barber in his best obedient-schoolboy manner. “His Excellency, the duke of Parma, would like to meet you. That’s all.”
“I am very much obliged,” he responded carelessly. “I will pay my respects to His excellency, if time allows.”
So they chattered on. The barber completed his task and left.
“The duke of Parma!” he muttered, then washed himself, drew on the white stockings that Teresa had left at the side of the bed for him, drank his chocolate, licked his fingers and smoothed his bushy eyebrows before the mirror, trimmed his nails with a sharp blade, pulled on his shirt, and adjusted the hard-ironed pleats with the tips of his fingers while occasionally touching his neck with the index and ring fingers of his right hand, as if testing his collar size or wishing to ascertain that his head was still there. “The duke of Parma!” he grumbled. “So he wishes to see me.” The possibility hadn’t occurred to him when he escaped and hired the trap to drive him to Bolzano. He whistled quietly, lit the candles in front of the mirror because the early afternoon had already filtered into the room with its brownish blue shadows, sat down at the spindle-legged table, arranged paper, ink, and sand for blotting, and with goosequill held high above his head, his upper body slightly reclined, his eyebrows suspiciously raised, he peered attentively and curiously into the mirror. It was a long time since he had seen himself like this, in circumstances so fitting for a writer. It was a long time since he had sat like this, in a room with fine furniture, before a fire, in a freshly starched shirt, in long white pearlescent stockings, with a real quill in his hand, ready for literary production in the hour most apt for solitude and meditation, for complete immersion in the task before him, which, at this precise moment, was neither more nor less than the composition of a begging letter to Signor Bragadin. “What a letter this will be!” he thought with satisfaction, the way a poet might contemplate a sonnet the first few rhymes of which are already jangling in his ears. “The duke of Parma!” he reflected once more, compelled by an association of ideas he could not dismiss. “Can he still be alive?…” Pursing his lips, he began to count aloud.