The sun threatened to abandon the Once neighborhood, as in those biblical scenes in which its presence or absence determines the fate of the battle. Ezequiel, eleven years old, quickened his steps in the last hours of light: the hairdresser closed at seven. The first star is still hiding; After the obligatory haircut, Shabbat began.
While he was on leave from school for pediculosis – in the early 1970s – he was prescribed a clean cut before returning to class.
He didn’t like crossing the threshold of Jacinto’s hair salon again. He was supposed to leave in March, by order of his father; and in June also against lice. This November was the third visit to the gallows. Jacinto Benavídez was the best in that purgatory. The hairdresser read constantly Nippur of Lagash, Pepe Sanchez, Savarese. The same comics, from the Columba publishing house, written largely by the unlikely Robin Wood – Paraguayan screenwriter, resident in Argentina -, in which Ezequiel immersed himself, as if drinking an antidote to the boredom of things.
While they performed the close-cut sentence, at least they could converse like two expert readers. Both had also frequented, but each in his own way and for his own reasons, the stories of the Old Testament.
In the unique exchange between hairdresser and client – the mirror in which faces are reflected, voices that cross in strange directions -, Jacinto felt a sadness he had never experienced before.
“But what’s wrong, my friend?” said the hairdresser, tying the protective robe around his neck, over which justice was done to the mane of the person involved.
Ezequiel remained silent.
Jacinto started cutting by machine. But the gesture of contrition was such that even in spite of himself the hairdresser stopped. The condemned man was left in limbo between a close shave and a Clan Club fringe.
“Tell me,” Jacinto insisted.
-Eugenia, the one I like the most. “She said if they shave my head again, she won’t talk to me again,” Ezequiel explained.
Jacinto took the scissors, even though the rest of the cutting only needed a machine.
-Do you know the story of Samson?
The question was rhetorical, but Ezequiel pointed out the offense anyway. Was it Jacinto’s ploy to turn melancholy into anger?
“She fell in love and married an enemy,” Ezequiel quoted. He was the strongest man in the world, with hair that reached past his waist. Dalila, his wife, wanted to know the secret of his superhuman strength.
With scissors in hand, like an orchestra conductor, Jacinto invited him to continue.
-Samson claimed that he had never been tied with seven ropes of fresh bark. If they tied him up like that, he would be as weak as any other man.
Dalila offered herself to him, gave him narcotized wine to drink; And when she slept soundly, hiding the Philistines on the outer threshold of her dwelling, she exclaimed:
-Samson… Philistines on you!
But the Jewish hero woke up as if nothing had happened and with his extraordinary power freed himself from the bonds.
Delilah, far from being intimidated, reproached him for being a bad husband. Her cry was so bitter that Samson resigned himself to another alibi:
-I have never been tied with seven virgin ropes. With seven strings never used before, I will be like the weakest of men.
Delilah repeated the trick at every moment, and Samson the mistake: exposing his strength.
The third time, already tired of loving and denying, he revealed the truth:
-They never shaved me down to the roots. The secret of my prodigious strength lies in the length of my hair, which has never been cut.
That same night Dalila lay with him, gave him something to drink and drugged him. She made him bald with a hoe.
Samson woke up bound by the Philistines. They took him to the pagan temple. They gouged out his eyes, they denigrated him.
During decades of captivity, he inadvertently regained the length of his hair. Blind and humiliated, he caused the columns of the pagan temple to collapse on his enemies, perishing together with his tormentors.
Ezekiel concludes the story. The dying evening light pointed to the other empty chair; hair scattered across the faded tile floor, razor at the end of the counter. A mirror reflected the absences.
-Why did you tell him the truth? -Jacinto broke the silence and added:
-Samson wasn’t stupid. Due to stupid prejudices we underestimate the intellectual capacity of physically powerful people. But in the episodes preceding his marital defeat, Samson demonstrates superlative intelligence. A fifth grader and a modest hairdresser we discover in the first lines that Delilah intended to betray him. Why then did you tell her the truth?
“Because I was in love,” Ezequiel saw his reflection reply, without thinking.
Jacinto nodded and finally placed the scissors on the Formica shelf.
-Love was his weakness, not the fact that they cut his hair. He had fallen in love with a woman who hated him. If you give up everything for love, even your identity, you will lose love too.
At that moment they discovered the appearance of the first star in the mirror. The sky went from a pale blue to a dark, mysterious blue. Ezequiel’s father entered and, like Jacinto, was already finishing that day’s work.
“Jacinto,” Ezequiel said confidently. I cut my hair.
Source: Clarin
