The Combover Read Online Free PDF

serious."
    "Was he Argentinian?"
    "Who?"
    "The one who did the drawing."
    "No, I don't think so. Why, should he have been?"
    "I was just asking—that's often the sort of thing Argentinians do."
    "Who?"
    "They're rude people, you see."
    He looked at himself in the mirror. Then, after a while, he asked: "Have you been going round with that for long?"
    "With what?"
    "With that," he said, pointing to my head.
    "With this? Well, yes, since I began losing my hair."
    "And if instead of pushing it forward like that . . . if you pulled it all back like I do, wouldn't it be easier? I reckon you'd also look better."
    "And I happen to think it's smarter like this, the way I do it."
    "My brother used to have it like you, but he did it from one side to the other . . . and once I went to see him at a match, he was a great attacker, my brother . . . they kicked a corner and he jumped up behind a defender and with a perfect header he took the goalie completely by surprise, and as he was celebrating the goal, he forgot about his hair and ran to the supporters' stand with his side-lock all to one side, hanging down as long as a peacock feather, and the fans started laughing and also cheering the goal; and then he heard someone from the stands shouting: ‘Cover up that fucking bald patch!' and my brother remembered his hair and redid it as best as he could as he was returning the ball to the center line."
    "Your brother must have been good," I said.
    "Listen to me, you need to be honest and admit your imperfections."
    "I am completely honest. Covering baldness—if you really think baldness is an imperfection—is a way of displaying it, even of flaunting it. You ought to try a nice combover, you'd look much smarter."
    "No, what for?"
    "It's something you get used to."
    "I know, but it's for old men."
    "Who said?"
    "No one does it like that anymore."
    "But who says? No one gets upset if they see a woman with fake blond hair and black reappearing at the roots, or with silicon lips, but they get upset about a combover . . . I don't want my head shorn, I don't want to be a slave to fashion, I brush it carefully down like this . . . all I ask is for a little compassion from nature without having to hide anything."
    And as I was explaining, I thought: "But why do I have to give reasons? Each can do as they like."
    I took my toilet bag and left the men's room, leaving that egregious idiot, who also stank of sweat—not heavily, but he stank all the same. Then I returned to my office and finished collecting my things.
    "So you're really off then?" asked the Leopardi scholar once again.
    "Yes, I have to go."
    "Is something wrong?"
    "That's my business."
    That same morning I took the first train north, for Ancona. Every passerby had become a potential hair ruffler. You are marked by certain experiences and don't know how to break free of them. But I was sure of one thing. After that joke I could no longer go back, I couldn't carry on as if nothing had happened. Impossible. I had to do something, to give some meaning to what had happened. I couldn't imagine the idea of taking the train back down to Bari the following Monday, shutting myself up in my office for tutorials, and then carrying on with lectures and so forth. That gesture had exposed me, had made a fool of me, it had also been an insult to my past, to my father, to my grandfather. It was a gesture that reminded me of my brother, of the Toldinis and so many bald and shorn heads who snigger without understanding, in the same way as that impertinent South American.
    I returned to Recanati, deep in thought. Exhausted, without any desire to carry on. Five hours on the train, a half-hour delay, an hour on the bus, and then a ten-minute walk—there just had to be wind that day—lugging a suitcase and a bag full of books behind me. It was raining, a heavy persistent rain. I had neither hat nor umbrella. Around my lips I could feel the