The Combover

No one ever imagines that one day, when they least expect it, they might suddenly have to rethink their whole life. That's because no one ever imagines some wise guy might make a fool of them in front of a whole class of students who start nudging each other and laughing out loud, as once happened to me during a lesson. We spend most of our time hiding away, and we never give a thought to someone who might suddenly open the bathroom door at the most awkward moment or, worse still, the brother who catches us playing with ourselves under the bedclothes and goes off blabbing to neighbors or friends. Sometimes an unexpected smack in the face is enough to snatch away our privacy, but then we realize it was that very smack in the face that made us understand how things really are. In other words, those moments that leave a deep impression on us and which we remember in great detail, as if we were seeing a tick in a dog's coat through a magnifying glass. Such moments often make us laugh because they happen to other people, and it is always other people who end up being reduced to abject shame. "How I laughed . . . I saw him naked wearing just a pair of socks on the balcony as he was shaking the crumbs into the courtyard." And you don't know—you can't know—that someone has slotted you into a sort of deep hole in their memory. They'll picture you like that, forever, naked except for a pair of socks, flapping the tablecloth with your stomach sticking out.

I've no idea why, but when I think of those things that make us laugh or cry, I think about my father, or my grandfather, but more about my father than my grandfather, who until the end of his days—that is, until his heart attack—would continually duel with the wind along the road, hiding behind trees or moving cautiously from one courtyard to another with his hands on his head, trying to stop that blasted wind from upsetting the combover which he had spent so much time and care arranging over his scalp in front of the mirror. He alone would understand why I am here, hiding from all who wanted to shame me (including that person who hadn't meant to, but had brought shame on me all the same, in front of everyone).

I have no problem admitting that I come from a family of bald, honest men who have always tried, for better or worse, always confidently and courageously, to give their appearance dignity and elegance, seeking to remedy a simple androgenic alopecia. No big deal—every man in the world has a bald patch hidden within him. He has to face up to it. Every bald man knows exactly what I'm talking about. And so I'm proud to belong to a family of combover men, none of whom have ever fallen into the reprehensible trap, so common in our impulsive modern world, of shaving his head to mask his healthy and inevitable baldness. How much shame there is in this new century! How can we fail to see that this change from the combover to the shorn head is a sign of our declining society?

The bald men in my own very respectable family, natives of Recanati right back to the days of Menahem da Recanati the Jew, were divided into various categories: there were men like Giovanni Rospini, an apathetic, shambolic baldhead who cut his hair every three or four months and often didn't bother to wash at all (he went around with tousled hair and sweaty neck as though it were perfectly normal); there were men like Ettore Mattei, a man who never took his hat off because he was ashamed to show his baldness in public, he covered his scalp with strange substances to get it to re-grow (for a time, according to his son, he hired a Thai to massage his head, though with little result, but he, bald Mattei, never lost hope of reforesting that great bald pate); there were also men like Bislacchi, who in place of hair sported a shabby brown hairpiece with hints of olive that changed according to the light; there were men like Destriero, who also wore a hairpiece from his youth and once, it is said, while carrying out his weekly toupee maintenance, left it to dry on the radiator, and when he returned to collect it, found it gnawed to pieces by the dog (from that moment on Destriero abandoned his hairpiece for a transplant, a vineyard with thirty or so perfectly asymmetrical rows); then there were men like the Toldinis (known also as the Forapretis, common folk my parents always steered clear of), a family with a large number of baldheads who shaved to hide their baldness but in doing so revealed a ridiculous hairless dome the shape of a boiled potato; and finally us, the illustrious Gherarducci branch, people born with a combover, who never relented and always admitted their own nature, always working away with their combs (also with cotton bathed in gel or in linseed oil or even in isinglass, like my grandfather), struggling with their unruly locks. The philosophy of the Gherarducci family (or of most of them) was that the respectable approach was to hide a deficiency using one's own resources, without resorting to hairpieces, wigs, transplants, or whatever else, nor resorting to such vulgarities as shaving.

Yet the wretched circumstances of our time had reduced my father's art to an object of ridicule, a comic hairstyle. There is a failure to understand its substance, the study and choice of a model, nor is there any understanding of the effort involved in smoothing down those two or three wayward strands of curly hair behind the ears, and the disappointment experienced, for example, when the gel fails to match up to the strength of that particular curl. We Gherarduccis, in short, have never bowed to modern times and have continued, from generation to generation, to strive for a style that matches our personality. And that, my friends, is true class.

In my father's and my grandfather's time, the combover could still be listed among the hairstyling arts, regarded as a combing fashion, an art practiced by hairdressers, by patient men devoted to beauty; something which my brother, for example, a boy with thick black hair and not the slightest trace of baldness, could never understand. I always had the idea he was illegitimate, born from the adulterous relationship between my mother and an Afghan. We never got on well; if I, for example, chose one color for the room, he would choose the exact opposite: if I chose green, he'd choose yellow; if I chose sky blue he'd choose aquamarine. We were so different that we couldn't even adopt the strategy of making the opposite choice to deceive each other. My brother is an unsavory individual, and I have always nurtured a certain disdain for him. He's probably still living in Bergamo, unless something's happened with his wife, a sad neurotic infant school teacher whom I once saw—I'll never forgive her for it—with curlers in her hair, supported by some kind of scaffolding she had tied together with a headscarf. They brought a pair of children into the world who filled their lives with the most idiotic pastimes. Nature gave my brother and I nothing in common. I was a university researcher and he an organic chemist in a clinical pathology laboratory, carrying out intestinal examinations; a well-known feces analyst (insofar as you can be famous for rummaging about in people's shit). While my father grew more important in my mind, taking on the proportions of a myth, for my brother he became a simple object of ridicule, someone to be ashamed of. "You're joking, I'm not wandering around with him, with his hair done up like that," he would say. But I adored my father and was proud of a man with a combover who didn't submit to the monstrosity of shorn hair, like the Toldini family.

My rift with my brother had begun early, at the time when he used to enjoy waiting to ambush our father on his way out of the bathroom, where he had spent much time arranging his combover—my brother would hide behind a door or a curtain and would thrust out his hands, the ones that would eventually examine intestinal samples, onto my father's neatly combed head, ruffle up all his hair, and then give out a great laugh, holding his belly.

"No, Manuele, what are you doing?" my father would say, which was the greatest ticking-off he was capable of giving—he, a great expert in the interpretation of law but completely unable to apply it to his own sons.

And Manuele, still laughing out loud, would say: "It looks better like that, with that bit of hair sticking up."

"I don't like your little jokes, my boy."

"You look much better like that," Manuele would repeat.

Our father would then retreat to the bathroom in shame and only come out, taking the necessary precautions, when my mother had punished Manuele by sending him to his room. It was his favorite entertainment, and he only stopped doing it when our father died, struck down by a heart attack, in his office, alone, unnoticed by anyone. Manuele had perfected his ambush technique over time. He could throw himself on my father like a monkey and ruffle his hair with unprecedented speed. He wasn't content with just a quick ruffle or a tease—his intention was to demean him, to unmask him, to annihilate him, he wanted our father to feel ashamed of his hair every time he looked at the mirror.

"
Avvocato
Gherarducci, baldy nut . . .
Avvocato
Gherarducci, baldy nut," Manuele repeated as he tripped him up along the corridor, "
Avvocato
Gherarducci, baldy nut . . ." and I'd feel upset, and all I could do was look on in shock. Such an unfathomable gesture left me without even the strength to enter the bathroom and hug the man who had been so cruelly mocked by his son, to show him my solidarity. And so I'd shut myself in my room, take out my card album and count the cards once again, or I'd comb one of my teddy bears, even though I'd already stopped playing with such stuff.

Manuele was four or five years older than me and had a reputation at school for being a thug, one who cleaned his fingernails with a knife at the dinner table, and woe betide anyone who dared to tell him off. A bully ready to snatch sweets from anyone. He scared everyone, even those who were older than him. He liked using his hands, it gave him a thrill. He was always there when there was a punch up. He never protected me, in fact he'd have a go at me if he had the chance—sometimes he'd twist my ears, other times he'd kick me in the shin. At home we had to put up with his arrogance right up to the death of my father,
Avvocato
Abele Gherarducci. From then on, Manuele began to treat our mother with more respect: he thought of himself as the man of the house. He lifted the toilet seat, he didn't shout, and sometimes he even went to get the bread from the bakers.

I remember the day our father died and we found our mother crying at the hospital. She was standing at the foot of his bed, muttering to herself. I'd never heard her talking like that. I quite liked it, though I had the suspicion some garrulous little spirit, a companion of the deceased, might have taken hold of her. She had cleaned the
Avvocato
's face with a piece of damp cotton and arranged his hair, smoothing it down to one side with an affectionate delicacy with which she was well practiced; except that Manuele, when he approached the
Avvocato
, instead of stroking his cheek or following the line of his combover, from right to left, as it had been arranged, ruffled his scalp with a flick of the hand, shifting our father's locks to the other side, from left to right, and messing his hair up once again.

At that moment our mother, racked with grief, rushed forward to rearrange our father's hair, saying: "Please, Manuele, please, don't you see he's dead?"

I looked my brother straight in the face ("Don't you see he's dead?" I repeated), and for the first time I felt a sort of clumsy, deep-down urge, the effect of pent-up feelings and anger, that turned for the first time into a hefty shove.

"Enough, leave him in peace," I said and hurriedly took the comb from my mother and rearranged my father's hair myself (I would have liked to think it was not my hand that held the comb, but my father's hand that held mine, so that he could knock on the gates of the hereafter with his hair neatly in order).

"Hey, what do you want, moron?" my brother said threateningly.

"I want you to stop messing up his hair."

"Well, look at you, asshole. You're going to be ugly and bald just the same." And he shoved me back, but in a weak, ineffectual manner, just to have the final word. The pusillanimous shove of someone who knew he was in the wrong but didn't know what to do about it.

"You can do what you like to me, but you'll never touch our father again, because he's gone and you've always treated him like a shit."

"Fuck off," he said, "you just see when we get home . . ."

My mother began crying and immediately forgot about Manuele's humiliation. But that gesture marked the final break between me and my brother. I was thirteen, and from then on I hoped to become bald as quickly as possible: it was my hope, my aim in life, my way of standing up against Manuele (whom I would never have allowed to ruffle my hair). A hatred had developed between us which time has done nothing to heal. We fell out forever, and while his mop of hair grew ever thicker—looking like the mane of a lion, a black, vicious lion—my hair began to drop like leaves. I felt myself to be a true Gherarducci, I was proud of it. (After all, I told myself, isn't hair an excrement that the body slowly pushes out, like fingernails? And in that case, the sooner you're rid of it the better.)