This past winter, my wife and I found ourselves in a fortunate situation: we were rambling around Spain and Portugal with no particular plan and under no strict obligations. In my opinion, there is no better way to travel, and so when we finally grew weary of the rainclouds that had stalled over Lisbon, we caught a train for Lagos, in the region called the Algarve on the country’s southern coast.
There, in January, the sun and the wind seem on good terms, and their daily aerial tug of war nearly always ends in a friendly stalemate, so that the tourist who wanders there at that time of year, lulled by breezy warmth, must ask himself, “All that time I spent freezing my sphincter off for five months out of every year… Why?” In my own case, having slipped and slogged through the previous seventeen Januaries in Maine, I found the weather in the Algarve to be an open window on a part of the world I had never even known existed. It is the perfect stage-lighting for the spectacular drama enacted perpetually between the sea and the land, and I know of no word in any language that might adequately describe the colors of those cliffs and caves in the crisp morning light, but they shift from a kind of rust to a deep amber to brick-red - and not just ordinary brick, but the rich, ancient bricks once used to build great castles.
Funny thing about traveling for an extended time in such splendid places, though: once in a while you emerge from your wild dream, your inexhaustible sense of amazement, and realize that you must tend to some mundane thing. “Hm,” you might say. “It seems I’m all out of clean boxer shorts” (or tightie-whities, if that’s your preference), or perhaps: “I say. Looks like somebody needs to trim his toenails. I hope I remembered to pack some clippers.” Unsavory, I know, but true. In this instance, I woke up one fine morning in Lagos, looked in the bathroom mirror, and discovered that I was in urgent need of a haircut.
Oh, I might easily have let another languid day unfold of its own accord, sans appointments, sans deadlines, sans responsibilities, sans haircut. After all, it was a warm winter day on the Algarve, and the sun was smiling and winking like an old beer-drinking buddy from college days, but I managed to gather my resolve, and shaggy-headed and hang-dogged, I turned away from the sea and the sand and took the path into the village in search of a barber.
Now, it is a trivial fact about me that I am not particular about my hair. I have it trimmed every now and then so as not to frighten small children, and in the last two decades, my moniker of “the Silver Fox” has been exchanged for “the Old Guy with the White Hair.” There are simply some things that no barber, however artistic and accomplished, can repair. So, with my accustomed determination merely to get things over with, I tramped along those winding, tiled streets.
From the neighboring hillsides, Lagos hangs like a glimmering pendant over the breast of the sea, but when you are actually in the place, you must face the fact that you will become lost - that is, if you are honestly trying to learn your way around and not relying on your cell phone. The narrow streets and alleys, constructed and extended and enjoined over many centuries mostly at the whim of the resident engineers (such as they are), follow no grid. There is none of this “Let’s have all the avenues going this way and the boulevards running perpendicular.” Oh, no. “If the Oliveira family wishes to build their butcher’s shop here, on this spot, then by God, we will build them a road to get to it!” So you end up with a labyrinth, an unplanned network, a web, if you will, and you are bound to get lost when you come here for the first time. Still, it is a delightful lostness. You might turn down one particularly quaint alley with lovely blue or green tiled homes and then find yourself exchanging pleasantries with a nice old lady who has come out to water her flowers; or you might find a shady cafe with good local wine and end up spending the better part of your day there.
Not I, however. I had business to attend to. I passed two or three salons with well-appointed ladies under hair driers and the stylists bustling back and forth, but my old-school mentality concerning personal grooming led me onward, and after a few random twists and turns, I saw a red and white barber’s pole (which always reminds me of this symbol’s medieval origins as a rack for drying bloody surgeon’s bandages - just the kind of dark history I love), Within, no one was waiting, and the barber was sitting in his own chair thumbing through a magazine. I kept walking. Next amid the buzz of a row of gaudy shops, I came across a “Man’s Shoppe,” as the sign in English read, with two rows of chairs, half of which were occupied by youngish guys in t-shirts and tropical prints, with trendily-attired coiffeurs snipping away at them, and I shook my head. Too…new and clean, I thought. And probably too expensive.
Then, a few coiling streets away, I found it, wedged in between a shuttered bar and a used bookstore: a small shop with one antique chair and a vast mirror along one entire wall and a sink and set of shelves with all manner of combs, scissors, razors, gels, and powders, and with the morning’s clippings scattered about the floor. The barber was busily slathering shaving cream behind the ears of the tall man in the chair, and on a bench just outside the shop, two more men sat talking in quiet, easy tones; they were clearly locals, older, in their checkered, collared shirts, a bit beefy - perhaps they were fishermen enjoying the offseason and getting their haircuts whenever they felt like it. The red and white pole hung by the door, but there was no sign.
I opened the door, and the old smells I had known all of my life, since my father had first taken me into a real barber shop long ago - the powder and the soap and the aftershave - came over me like a vivid, instantaneous plunge into the past, and the barber paused, his razor in midair.
“Bom dia,” he said, smiling.
“Hi. Any chance you can squeeze me in?”
He looked out the window at the two fellows on the bench. “Well,” he said. “As you see, I have two gentlemen waiting now…” His English was quite good.
“Shall I make an appointment for tomorrow then?”
He thought it over for a moment, looked at the state of the head of the man in the chair, and then looked up at the clock on the farthest wall. “I’ll tell you. It’s just noon now. Can you return at two o’clock? I can save you a spot.”
“Perfect,” I said, and closed the door.
The two-hour wait made for a leisurely interlude. I had retired from full-time schoolteaching the previous spring, and I was still getting used to the idea of having nowhere to be, much of the time. I meandered around, took in a free art installation at the town offices (mostly ceramics pieces), bought a copy of a local newspaper to practice my Portuguese, stopped in a cafe for a cup of dark roast, and somehow, I had found my way back to the unnamed barber’s shop by the appointed time.
He was just sweeping the morning’s detritus into a dustbin. Apparently he had not taken a lunch break.
“Ah,” he said. “Please sit. I will be right with you.”
As he washed his hands, I looked about the little shop. The pale paint was old and flaking a bit here and there, but otherwise, things were orderly - a dozen or so combs sat submerged in a jar of some sort of solution, several pairs of scissors hung from finishing nails along the side of a shelf… Everything had a proper place, as in a good mechanic’s garage. There were only two indications that the proprietor had any sort of personal life of his own: tacked to the far wall was a photo of a dark-haired woman and a teenaged boy (whom I took to be his family), and above that hung a well-scratched Portuguese guitar.
Having sustained a significant interest in stringed instruments for many years, I had taken a tour of a guitar museum in Coimbra and had also attended a dinner show in Porto, and I had learned a bit about Fado, this country’s famous native musical form. The Portuguese guitar looks like an octave mandolin to me, but it is throatier, distinctive in tone, and it is probably a derivative of Arab moorish instruments of the Middle Ages.
Gesturing toward the lovely, slender wooden thing, I asked, “Do you play?”
The barber looked over and shook his head. “No. It is just a wall ornament.”
He was distinguished-looking, with short hair graying about his temples; he was trim, and as he prepared to reckon with my bushy head, I noticed a pronounced grace in his physicality, especially in his arms and hands. He snapped the pin-striped sheet out into the air theatrically, let it float down over my chest and shoulders, and got down to business.
After a few silent moments wetting and combing my hair flat against my forehead (always a humbling experience), he suddenly asked,
“So, you are a traveller here? From America?”
“Yes, I am an American traveller.” I liked the sound of that.
“And where have you been traveling?”
“Well, we were in southern Spain for a month or so, and we’ve been in Portugal for several weeks now.”
“Oh? Yes, of course. And what places have you seen in Portugal?”
“Porto, Coimbra, Sintra, Lisbon…”
“Ah. I know Lisbon well. Did you enjoy it?”
I supposed this was just routine Portuguese barber/tourist chat, but he was very good at it. He was soft-spoken, but there was a compelling warmth in his voice, and each time he asked me a question, he looked up at my face’s reflection in the mirror and listened thoughtfully.
“I did enjoy Lisbon, but it rained for two weeks straight. It was still raining when we left to come here. We did the touristy stuff - you know, visited some wineries, went out to hear some Fado music…”
He had selected a pair of scissors and had begun snipping, but now he stopped abruptly, scissors poised a few inches above the crown of my head.
“Fado. You say you heard the Fado music in Lisbon?”
“Yes. Some friends had recommended that we do so. They said it’s a great Portuguese national art form. I’d only read a little about it but had never actually heard any of it.”
His mouth opened slightly as he gazed at my reflection. He stood up straight and held the scissors against his chest. “And…what did you think of it?”
“It wasn’t what I expected, to be honest. I’d been told that it’s a kind of folk music. But the show we saw wasn’t like that. It was very…slick.”
“Slick?”
“Yes, you know, over-produced, I guess. Too well rehearsed. Not much spontaneity.”
It was true. We had gone to a “Fado dinner.” The vocalist was an attractive woman of about forty. She wore a glittering black dress and her two accompanists, who were very good, had worn suits and ties. The woman sang beautifully and vigorously and dramatically, even histrionically, but when the evening had ended, I found that I felt nothing.
The barber looked sadly down at the floor. He sighed. “Yes. That’s how it is now in some places where the Fado has lost its original meaning.” He put the pair of scissors back on its own nail and folded his hands behind his back. Again his gaze met mine in the mirror, and he smiled.
“BUT,” he said, “in many other places, it retains its energy, its life’s blood, its sense of truth. Originally, you see, this music was about our daily lives, the slow daily drama of life in a Portuguese village, with its petty jealousies and its grandest aspirations - all of it. Angry husbands, conniving women, betrayals, magnificent love affairs, and even the occasional murder.”
As he spoke, a depth of passion had ebbed into his countenance, but then he reached out somewhat sheepishly for his electric razor.
“Forgive me,” he said. “I become agitated when I talk of the music. It’s the only thing I really know anything about besides cutting hair.”
“It’s quite all right,” I said. “I’m interested, really. How did you come to know so much about it?”
He rubbed warm shaving cream into the back of my neck and then began to run the razor gently and precisely over it.
“I cannot say that I was taught by my father or that I am a musicologist or anything of the kind. The truth is that I fell in love with a woman many years ago. Her name was Sonia, and she was a singer, and she sang the Fado, and she was extremely gifted. She was blessed by God. She sang the real Fado - her voice could make you weep. Her nephew, who was only sixteen at the time, was a virtuosos on the guitar.”
I glanced as furtively as I could toward the photo on the far wall.
“Yes,” the barber said. “That is a picture of the two of them. And I resolved that I would learn to play the Portuguese guitar, and that we would form a trio, and I would help her to realize her dream.” He rinsed the razor and set it on the shelf., then picked up a different pair of scissors. He held them up, looked contemplatively at them and then at the thatching above my ears, and remarked, “It was all she wanted, to sing. She was young, as I was, and we knew nothing of the cruelties of the world.” Now he held the scissors behind his back, strode over to the mirror, and fixed his eyes upon mine.
“On many nights, we would meet here, in this very shop, and we would practice late into the night, and then - “
“But if I may, sir,” I stammered. “I thought that earlier you told me that you don’t play the Portuguese guitar.”
He turned to face me. “I do not play - not anymore. But I did once, for nearly three years.”
He worked in utter silence for several minutes, his scissors whirring about my eyes like a small bird.
“Again, please, forgive me,” he said at last. “You merely came in here for a haircut, and now I have regaled you with a mad man’s ranting. When you expressed your curiosity about the Fado, I should simply have given you some recommendations for listening and a little history. For instance, if you want to know Fado, you must first know that like all other great art, it survived wars and revolutions and times of repression. For so long, it persisted as an oral tradition, but after the revolution of 1974, it flourished again. The great singer Amalia Rodrigues was a link to this fabled past, but you should also listen to current artists such as Mariza, Anna Moura, and Carlos do Carmo. In fact, I will make a list for you.”
He found a scrap of paper in a drawer and scribbled wildly for a minute or two. Then he loosened the paper collar around my neck and then held up a hand mirror so that I could inspect the back of my head as well. Then I looked to the front, and then to the back again, and suddenly it occurred to me that I had just been given the best haircut I’d had in a long, long time. He had taken an aging man’s white, flaccid mop and turned it into a masterwork of craft. It wasn’t simply that the lines were straight along my part and my collar line; there was an element of artistry there, a sort of sculpture, and the kind of glow that one sees in a great painting.
“My God,” I said. “You…how did you… I mean, this is probably the best haircut I have ever had in my life. Somehow I look like I’m ten years younger.”
He shrugged his narrow shoulders and removed the sheet from me. I stood up, and he slipped the list of singers’ names he had made into my shirt pocket.
“How much do I owe you?” I asked.
“It’s twelve euros.”
I could only shake my head. “Here’s twenty. I’d give you more, but this is all I have on me. Please keep the change.”
He smiled and made a little bow.
“Please,” I said. “Before I go, I have to ask. What happened to her? To Sonia?”
He looked steadily at me, and I understood that he had been waiting for me to ask this question.
“She simply moved away,” he said. “Neither her nephew nor I had any notice at all. Only a note left on the seat of this chair, saying that she had gone to Lisbon. We had no idea why. That was many ears ago now. In my desperation, I followed, of course, but she had left no trail, no trace, no forwarding information. For three weeks, I searched the streets of the great city, walking up and down, day and night, visiting all of the cafes and bars, prowling the alleyways, seeking her in sunlight and shadow. I never really understood.”
“Did she ever become a professional singer?”
“I don’t think so. I went to every establishment that hosts Fado music, and I could not find her. I only wanted to know why she had left without a word. Had I said or done something to upset her? Had she met someone else? I finally gave up, surrendered myself to the fates, and I returned to Lagos to devote myself to my profession.” He nodded toward the instrument on the wall. “That was the day my guitar became a wall hanging.”
Even now, I could see that he was suffering, and yet he bore it with inscrutable dignity. “I…I have no words,” I muttered.
He mustered a wry smile. “Oh, it’s likely that she is married and has been living quietly all this time. Most of us abandon our dreams at some point. Things seldom work out as one hopes, you know.”
He was right, of course. I walked out into the slanting afternoon light.
I confess that I have not yet taken the time to listen to any of the Fado artists recommended by the barber. When I returned home, I tucked his list into a desk drawer, and every so often I see it there - another scrap of paper to remind me of a thing I have not yet gotten around to.
