The Gift of Women (6 page)

The Libyan gives Billy a bow, “But Afran
djinn
…poor Afran
djinn
.”

“What about it?” Billy asks.

“Other side of head – tail. You not like him, hair not grow;
he
not like
you
, hair stop grow.”

“What's that got to do with him and Saddam?'

“Afran, like Saddam money. Not like Saddam. Soon as Afran see Saddam thin spot, he flee north to the Kirkuk.”

“And?”

“Saddam send army find his barber.”

“Did Afran have a wife and kids there?” I ask.

“Whole fam'ly. North of the Kirkuk. Safer than Baghdad City.”

“Did the army find him?”

“Saddam army break down door. Rifle break Afran hip, here,” the Libyan points to the breakage point. “Knee, there.” He taps his right knee, on what we know to be the leg in question, the one that swings before it lands on the other side of the barber's chair and customer's head.

A voice from beyond the curtain, “I tell them when my hurt heal. I go back Baghdad,” and still talking, Afran adds, “Okay. At market, for the Honeywells.”

The Libyan holds his scissor-free hand on Billy's head, “That when Afran flee and that when Saddam gas his Kurdish people. Halabja.”

“Jesus,” says Billy. “All over a barber who wouldn't do his hair!”

“Billy, for God's sake, didn't you read about it?”

“I run and my family die without me,” voice from behind the curtain again.

Billy sticks out his leg and taps it. “Run?”

A sound follows, like a dull spit hitting a carpet – correction, Afran's prayer mat, clearly visible when he snaps back the curtain and steps out. “I escape on truck. Truck driver, uncle of my wife. He take me through Kurdish country, into Turkey.”

After that, limping emphatically, he waves us out. Billy, with his hair half cut.

“End of trading for today!” he tells us.

Afran makes me ashamed of my pettiness, the way I ran away from my country. Belittling the wool of an old cardigan, knitted with love, blaming it for smothering me in that love. I never truly recognized my mother's loneliness that went into the wool for that cardigan after my father died. Now, I feel the full length of Afran's loneliness, passing into my impoverished locks, causing them to fill the emptiness on my head the way he wishes the emptiness in his to be covered with the kisses of his wife and children.

On the short way back to our block, Billy Barlow wants to know if I believe all that BS.

“Every bit,” I reply.

“The sob story – to have me pick the Kurd, out of pity for the poor turd?”

“Don't diss the guy, Billy. Kurds got history. Pulled across borders by Iraqis, Syrians, Iranians, pulled apart like Christmas crackers. But Kurds got these talents. Believe me, unbelievable talents.”

Billy tells me the only thing he believes unbelievable are my wife's delphiniums in the front garden.

I can't deny it. They tower over everything else, her blue Babylons of delphinium.

Still, visit after visit, I continue my watch, to see if squirmers lose more than they pay for. Some do go to Afran, those in a hurry, who can't wait for the Libyan. I talk to them, and true, but paradoxical – the finer the fringe, the more balding, the sooner the visit. So, I soon see them back to ask if they like Afran, but they never answer, and I can't tell normally receding hair from hexed.

No matter. Where my own fairy ring of flesh, that hallowed circle, used to shine, I've got a bristly thatch, a bit of Brad Pitt, which my wife says is a damn implant and promptly pores over the VISA bills and medical statements from our extended coverage. She has some reservations about my mother and the upcoming trip to Ireland.

Again, when the barber shop is empty and Afran in consultation with his broker or watching the business channel on his monitor, placing his mug of coffee on top of it, like a crown, I ask the partner, “Can't you tell more people?”

“Tell? They think he crazy. And piss off customer coming. Guy in chair that day, not Mr. Barlow guy, that other guy, never come back. And Mr. Barlow think I am bit nuts for what I say already.”

I am still obsessed with unaccountable growth, and I wonder, besides Afran's trims that trigger it, what else around and about me grows that fast after it's cut, well, apart from the grass, or wool on that nutty green cardigan. Those poppies! A bunch, the landlords of a rented house across our lane cut from the front lawn and threw onto the rubbish heap at the back. They reseeded real quick. I don't know if they're the heroin bearing kind that fill the fields in Kurdish Turkey, Kurdish Iraq or Afghanistan, but they get looked at on the heap, as if they belong to an obnoxious grow-op. Same look as Afran gets through the shop window.

Just to show I have no objections to them in the lane, that I actually like their rabid, exotic growth, I put down my nose to test for scent, but those poppies have none, or my nose is no good. Very likely, judging by what happens when Afran's scissors come up for my nose hairs. If they're aimed up there for me to sniff some growth-crazy chlorophyll, I smell only antiseptic wash from the vase, where Afran plants the scissors. Then, the lobes for the finger holes just gape out of it, like empty metal petals.

But I'm not disappointed. Forty of us regulars are now in the know, a select believer-group under the balding scrutiny of the dumb majority. On his behalf we swear he'd not harm a hair on anybody's head. The very opposite, his scissors sow what they snip, and we boys in the know bow our heads to bear witness to our peers in the barber shop.

Don Mateo sings this song, or mournfully hums under the lyrics passing through his mind for “Unchained Melody.” Even though he doesn't understand the English floating underneath the singer's voice and across the landscape in the movie he loved and saw ten times with the subtitles to guide him, he sings until everybody around him in the Cine Cuautla yells at him to shut the singing or they'll shoot him.

He sings it as he crosses the aqueduct, fed by the
apantle
a few miles away. He loves the sound of this instant river that erupts from the earth, out of a mound heaped with
epazote
, cilantro, watercress and everything green that clings to a well-watered place, especially the banks and ditches that follow the
apantle
along the side of the cane fields until it reaches the stone aqueduct. The aqueduct sprouts thick walls on either side for the
apantle
, providing a narrow conduit for the water to pass through. It crosses twenty metres in the air, over a great dip in the earth to rush like applause into a hamlet on the other side.

As a boy, Don Mateo sat in the aqueduct, holding onto the stone walls on either side with his forearms, letting the water build up behind until it reached his ears and the force shot him across the length of the aqueduct. Strong as a breaker from the ocean, smashing out of its confinement, banging him from side to side, skinning his elbows, while he closed his eyes and imagined he
was
in the ocean far away where the water from the
apantle
went.

Walking home with his machete from his day's work in the cane fields, he imagines he keeps the
apantle
company on part of its long course toward the ocean. He can hear its distant crash in the rush of the aqueduct as he crosses on one of the stone walls used for going into town. Cuautlenses pass on the other side and greet him, going out.

He doesn't live in Cuautla, he lives on a shrunken
milpa
over the other side of the Pan American Highway, where it climbs the slope out of Cuautla toward Azúcar de Matamoros and the new
Panteón
. There, he will be buried because the old one, which is much closer to his home, lies filled to the brim. If he turned into a cicada or a firefly, he could take up residence in the trees above the old
Panteón
and hurtle past his sons and grandsons, daughters and granddaughters like a green grenade, lobbed out of their family's long history of dying in this town, which he has never left for the ocean. No, not once, although he is certain the
apantle
reaches it on his behalf, joining up with other comrade waters for companionship on the journey.

He sings about the lonely rivers until he reaches the
pulquería
, where he stops every night after quitting the cane fields. In the
pulquería
, he releases his hooked machete and sets it along the side of the table. The
pulquero
behind the serving hatch dips his head to look and check who he is. The
pulquero
nods his head at the machete, turns his head to the side like a bird while pursing his lips into a beak, as if trying to work out if the machete is set there for convenience or for business.

How many years has he looked through that hatch at Don Mateo the same way?

If Don Mateo sat with the machete dangling at his side, it might trip someone passing, or bother him by bumping on the floor every time he moved, or knock against him on his way to the lavatory – even swing in front of his fine flow of yellow piss. No one will steal it. Not with square eyes behind the hatch keeping an eye on all the machetes laid as carefully as cutlery on the sides of the tables. Too many machetes, too confusing for a thief to take a pick.

Fausto, a much-younger relative, shuffles in and sits down opposite Don Mateo with his back to the hatch, where he will go to order his mug of
pulque
and one for Don Mateo. Fausto doesn't like to see the
pulquero
's face and the look that says, ah ha, Fausto has to sit with Don Mateo whether he likes it or not.

As a nephew, his sister's son, with more great-nephews for Don Mateo on the way, he needs Don Mateo's permission to add to the small building space Don Mateo has allotted him on Don Mateo's
milpa
. Fausto feels crowded in his little home, crowded in the
pulquería,
and that is what galls him every night when, at some juncture, Don Mateo tells him about how listening to the
apantle
makes him feel free because it flows all the way to the sea.

Every night, sure as the fifth mug of
pulque
, Don Mateo will say, “God bless the god Quetzalcoatl for inventing this
pulque
. Down through the ages it pours to us, just like our
apantle
to the sea.”

His nephew, Fausto, knows Don Mateo has worked on this salute to
pulque
and to the
apantle
for years before he got the right words, almost as many years, months and days as Fausto has waited for permission on the extension. But Don Mateo gets drunk, forgets, falls into bed after Fausto carries him home and drops him into it. Then, when his uncle wakes up, he thinks it is the same day as the day before.

Fausto's aunt, Doña Celestina has begged Fausto to be in the
pulquería
for when he must carry Don Mateo home across the highway.

Fausto wants to know why Don Mateo doesn't use his mangy horse. Except Fausto would have to be there to shove him into the saddle. His uncle doesn't let him add-on because he knows Fausto would have no call to be here at his beck and call any more, ready to heave him over his shoulder.

“Uncle, please, let me add-on.”

The fifth mug gavels the table as Don Mateo lands it with relish. “Quetzalcoatl will be pleased. Add-on as much as you please in his praise.”

“Jesus,” says Fausto, “you don't hear, do you,
Tío
Mateo!”

“What don't I hear?”

Fausto stomps over to the hatch and buys himself the biggest mug of
pulque
he can get and doesn't bring a matching one for Don Mateo.

“To the god whoever,” says Fausto and drinks it, then goes for another, which goes down just as brazenly in front of his uncle. Then, Fausto stands and declares, “The
apantle
goes into a river that ends up in a lake. Didn't you ever hear that in school?”

“I never went to school, as you know, and I hear what the
apantle
tells me. The
apantle
tells me it goes all the way to the sea with its friends.

“No, it does not.”

Don Mateo stands, reaches across the table and slaps Fausto across the face.

Fausto jumps up and before he knows what he has done, he has picked up his machete and swept the ear from the side of Don Mateo's head.

“See what you hear now!”

He has just come out with a bitter oxymoron, but Fausto is much to blame for the long, long wait and his wrath because, a while ago, Fausto had a scheme for paying Don Mateo for his add-on.

Fausto's brother-in-law, Fidel, nearly drowned in the
apantle
when he was baptized by the pastor from the Baptist church. Fidel has land. The near-drowning to save his soul didn't stop Fidel from signing up for Bible College, so he could do unto others as the pastor had done to him.

Fidel owned one big field in particular, which Fausto could rent for a song or a hymn, which he practises with his brother-in-law, for when he fulfilled a promise to be the first soul Fidel will dunk in the
apantle
and save for Jesus. These watery conversions take place close by the Baptist church, shortly after the water gushes out of the aqueduct, hence the perilous footing for the baptizer and the about-to-be baptized.

Don Mateo liked the story of Fidel very, very much.

“I'd die to be born again as a boy in the
apantle
.”

“You'd be born again as a Baptist,
Tío
Mateo, but I have a better way for us to follow Fidel, by planting onions and tomatoes in his big field. That's where Fidel made his money.”

“Tell me more, and tell me why your brother-in-law, Fidel, doesn't want to make that money anymore.”

“He will collect it by the bucketful when he is a pastor. I have seen it with my own eyes, big plastic buckets full of pesos every Sunday.”