It was the barber who lived nearby, came from Cuba, or perhaps it was his parents who came from Cuba. He was as tall as 170 CD sets of Cachao Master Sessions Volume 1 stacked one on top of another, and as heavy as 650 CD sets of Cachao Master Sessions Volume 1. He could have grown taller if he had not curled his back up, they said when he was in his twenties, and in his thirties, they said, he could have grown taller if he had not picked up the work in auto repair at that young age. Then, in his fifties, people said, it was the cigar; he put the cigar in his mouth as the speechless Nicholas Vedder did to the pipe in those philosophy sessions in front of the inn, but that was long before the auto was a thing, and apart from the fact that they were both smoking something, there was no more similarity. But for people in their sixties, curling their backs becomes such a norm, like Miniature Pinschers dying in their fourteenth year, thus people stopped talking about their curled backs, just like it is not appropriate to act astonished repeatedly for the death of a 14-year-old Miniature Pinscher.
I was honored to have discussed Havana and those Jam sessions with him last year. He played as many instruments as there were vaccinated wounded soldiers who developed tetanus at Dunkirk or as there were failed cases in Harken’s 130 heart operations. What a coincidence that he told me he was also vaccinated for tetanus when he was only a child, and that he had a heart operation a few years ago. If he did indeed play in any of those Jam sessions, or descargas, as people from his roots would call it, anyone with a sober mind would be convinced by this coincidence and say that his destiny was intertwined with music. But he did not attend any of them, not a single one, did not even shake dried seeds in bottles. Instead, he opened his barber shop after his waist, as if being soaked in expired lubricating oil for too long, could no longer sustain his corpus among those metals with moonlight radiance, they shine like those metal wires that are exposed after you open the piano lid, but those are from a piano after being magnified by a thousand times or more.
I said to him,“Then you are like Mike Score from the band A Flock of Seagulls. He once was a barber.”
He asked,“A flock of what?”
I wondered if he had ever been to a seashore, had ever seen a seagull. It was certain for me to assure that he had definitely not been to El Malecón in Havana. Every time I went past his barbershop, I gazed upon the walls decorated with ceramic tiles. Perhaps the handymen were deliberately making fun of him; they brought tiles that were supposed to be weeded out, for their colours were not standardized, and did not follow the colouring instruction that the barber wrote for them. But I thought it was more like a masterpiece of Gaudí; if Gaudí had been to El Malecón, he’d remember it with a piece like this.
Last Thursday, the barber fell down in the exact same place. All the way down the Malecón street, where his roots once were, or was this only my guess? So, I can only say that he fell down in his barber shop. And this is all I have for the barber’s obituary.