One of my steady customers at the barber shop.
By Erick Hernandez
HAVANA TIMES – I have shared several stories here that clients have told me. Most of them have taken shape and continued over the course of several visits. In some cases, the confessions have been brief, but they have been enough to spark reflections on issues that go beyond the individuals themselves. In any case, the common thread running through all these conversations is trust.
Among the assumptions that popular wisdom takes for granted is the open connection between a person and their barber. When I told my friends that I would soon be getting into the business, many of them told me, with a somewhat mischievous tone, that a barber is the only person a man tells everything to. There is a whiff of macho camaraderie in that notion, but the truth is that those same friends ended up turning the barbershop into a private space where they could discuss their most intimate concerns.
With those who weren’t already my friends, the interactions happened spontaneously and were almost always initiated by whoever was sitting in the barber’s chair. For example, one February 14th morning, a man I had never seen before walked in. After telling me how he wanted his hair cut, he took out his phone and began scrolling through Facebook. Suddenly, he turned around and showed me his phone.
“Look,” he said, pointing to a Valentine’s Day greeting featuring a woman’s photo on the screen. “She says it’s eternal love, and she’s already had about three husbands. She’s a neighbor of mine.”
I gave a faint smile and said, “That’s something else.” Although I’m not interested in anyone’s private life, in situations like that, to avoid making the client uncomfortable, all I can do is show a little complicity. I never saw that gentleman again, but there are plenty of similar examples. Not all of them involve gossip about other people.
In fact, most clients talk about themselves. There’s a young man I ask about his job, which he recently changed, and he tells me what it’s like making deliveries in different neighborhoods around the city and how much more he needs to save to buy the electric bicycle he wants. Another client tells me about his years serving in the military’s special forces, offering that as the only explanation for his hair loss and describing it as an experience that, according to him, left him with nothing but exhaustion.
A gentleman in his seventies always tells me about the ordeal of standing in line to withdraw money from the bank, but he also insists that he knows how to get his hands on money. This elderly man speaks the language of the streets and the domino tables and claims he has a son in the Soviet Union waiting for a chance to cross into Spain.
One of my best and most loyal clients is a man who lives in an apartment building a few blocks from the barbershop. His haircut is simple, but from the beginning, our conversations have had the lively quality that comes from exchanges where both people have room to speak and listen. His son, who is in third grade and is also my client, is a hyperactive boy. While waiting for his father, he collects little stones from the garden and uses them for target practice, aiming at the palm trees. When his father comes without the boy, he tells me that ever since his son was little, he’s had to enroll him in activities to keep him occupied and help him burn off energy. He’s tried painting, soccer, and now baseball.
“But right now I can’t take him because my electric bike broke down, and we can’t walk there every day. We’ll see when I can get the bike fixed, but for now the kid is bouncing off the walls at home.”
That same client has managed to raise animals, even though he lives in an apartment. And when I say animals, I mean pigs, goats, rabbits, and, on one occasion, a peacock. On the ground floor of his building, he has a space where they all live. Once, someone tried to break the padlock to get in, but they didn’t succeed. After that, he began standing guard every night.
That trust, that unspoken understanding of discretion, is real. It feels like a responsibility, in the sense that you have to be prepared to listen, but also to respond and offer measured opinions.
For me, being rather introverted, it has been a rewarding challenge. Of course, there have been more personal confessions, and that is precisely why they don’t appear in this article. But the simple fact that a stranger assumes you’re just his barber and that you’ll understand his way of thinking carries a certain tenderness that speaks to human goodness. It is an instinctive sense of equality, a recognition that we share problems and ways of looking at the world.
Read more from the diary of Erick Hernandez here on Havana Times.
