A trick I learned. When you live in a country whose language you don’t speak, even the simplest tasks become exponentially more difficult. But at one point, after a haircut I was particularly pleased with, I had the foresight to take a selfie and store it in my phone. I didn’t have to rely on my nonexistent Italian to tell the barber what I wanted. I only needed to show him a picture.
It was morning, and the sun outside was already burning the shadows of trees and walls onto the baking roadway. But it was dark inside the barbershop, the metal shutter still pulled down on the east-facing window so that the place seemed closed.
And yet as I stepped inside, blinking as my eyes adjusted to the changing light, I saw that I wasn’t alone. A middle-aged man sat with his son on the cheap plastic chairs along one wall. The barber raised his head to greet me before turning back to the old man in the chair in front of him, his wrinkled face frosted with a beard of white foam. I sat on a padded bench under the blind window to wait my turn.
The old man was a talker. But in southern Italy, that’s not uncommon. Even as the barber expertly shaved him, his jaw never stop moving, the musical notes of dialect flowing on without pause. His head was bald but for a faint fuzz of white behind his ears. The slow flow of long years had taken from him the dexterity needed to shave himself, but it did nothing to dull his ability to talk. Unable to understand a single word of his chatter, I sat in silence and waited my turn.
