
The Barber of Sannat

The Barber of Sannat
Gary sat nursing a Cisk beer in Ta Rosina’s bar, wondering if he’d made the right decision. It was now almost a year since he’d sold his one-man barber’s shop in Blyth, on the north-east coast of England, and moved to the Maltese island of Gozo. The move had seemed a good idea: he wanted to live somewhere warm, not too many hours flight from the UK and, with the money from the sale of the shop and his flat in Blyth, he thought he could live fairly comfortably in Malta. He’d stayed in the small town of Sannat the previous summer and enjoyed its quiet back streets, its proximity to the sea, and drinking beer at Ta Rosina’s. Here, he’d decided, was as good a place as any in which to retire.
But now, six months on, he was asking himself if it had worked out as planned. The swimming was good, the village festas were fun, he liked the little house he’d bought in a narrow shaded alley, and he looked forward to going to the bar each evening. Often he’d have a beer with Tony, an ex-pat retired teacher from Birmingham, and he got on well with the local workmen who came into the bar. Rosina, the patron for over forty years, always made him welcome and he liked to watch and joke with the plumply attractive French widow, Josie, who helped Rosina out on busy evenings. He hoped that her smiles and occasional hugs showed an interest in him on her part, although he had to concede that she gave these to lots of the regulars.
On the downside was the fact that Gozo was much more expensive than he’d bargained for. He was already having to cut down on things – eating out less, abandoning a trip to Sicily, using less calor gas on cold days. Then there was the fact that he was often bored, especially during the winter when the swimming stopped. And even in the summer, he needed something to occupy him other than going to the seaside. He certainly didn’t want to end up like those ex-pats who went from bar to bar from mid-morning to closing time.
As he sat looking into his beer glass, Gary realised that both issues – shortage of money and boredom – had a simple solution. He should return to barbering – not full time, as in Blyth for over twenty years, but for just a couple of hours or so each day: enough to bring in some money and give him something to do.
Perhaps, when he’d left Blyth, he’d unconsciously anticipated a return to his profession, for he had brought with him scissors, razors and other essential equipment. After a day trip, by ferry and bus, to a hairdressing business in Mosta, Gary once again had all the necessities of his craft. The front room of his house was small, but once cleared of furniture, was large enough to serve as his shop. He’d have to use his bedroom as a sitting room as well, but he could put up with that.
Within days of announcing, at Ta Rosina’s, that he would be opening a barber’s shop, he had several customers. His would be the only barber’s in Sannat and several locals decided to try him, instead of going to the main town on the island every time they wanted a haircut. He acquired, too, two elderly men who wanted him to shave them each day. Otto, a former boxer from Austria, suffered from ‘benign tremor’, which made it unwise for him to wield a razor close to his face. Luigi, a retired Gozitan solicitor, was perfectly able to shave, but visits to the barber’s provided him with a legitimate excuse to escape the lashing tongue of his ever-complaining wife. Josie had loudly expressed the wish, when he made his announcement, that he’d shave everyone, to get rid, as she put it, of all those ‘horrible beards’ she saw in Sannat.
A few weeks after opening, Gary sat in Ta Rosina’s, admiring Josie as, with her sun-bleached hair bouncing upon her deeply tanned shoulders, she wove her way among the tables, glasses of wine or beer in hand. He was soon joined by Tony, returning from his weekly class at the Gozo campus of Malta University, where he was taking a part-time course in Psychology and Philosophy.
‘Hello, Gary. You should have come to the lecture. It was on logical paradoxes,’ Tony said, wine glass in hand.
‘Like Zeno’s?’ asked Gary.
‘Well done,’, replied Tony, surprised at Gary’s knowledge. ‘Yes, the lecturer explained one or two of them – like how Achilles, however fast he runs, can never overtake the tortoise’.
‘Right,’ said Gary, ‘Can’t say I get too excited about things like that. Bit silly, I think.’
‘Well,’ replied Tony, ‘you would have got excited about another paradox he discussed. It was all to do with a barber!’
‘A barber?’
‘Yes, it’s a paradox Bertrand Russell formulated,’ explained Tony.
‘That’s the old bloke who kept getting arrested for … demonstrating against nuclear bombs, or something. Right?’ asked Gary.
‘Yes, but he was also a brilliant logician and philosopher,’ said Tony somewhat irritably. ‘Anyway, he formulated this paradox – it’s called ‘The Impossible Barber’ paradox.’
‘Go on,’ said Gary, his interest now aroused.
‘Well, here’s how the lecturer explained it,’ continued Tony. ‘There’s this barber – call him Figaro - who sets up in this town – call it Seville. He has two ambitions. One is to shave all the men in the town who don’t shave themselves – the ‘unselfies’, Figaro calls them. The other is to shave only the unselfies – to not shave, that is, any man who shaves himself. Sounds reasonable, right?’
‘Sure,’ replied Gary, ‘so where’s the problem?’
‘Well, the problem comes when you ask if Figaro shaves himself or not – whether he’s a selfie or an unselfie.’ Tony paused to collect his thoughts before going on. ‘If he doesn’t shave himself – if he goes to another barber, or is shaved by his wife - then he’s failed to shave all the unselfies, all the men in Seville, that is, who don’t shave themselves. He’ll be the exception. Got it?’
‘I think so,’ responded Gary before taking another sip of beer.
‘Right,’ Tony resumed, ‘but if he does shave himself then it’s not only the unselfies he shaves – because he’s now a selfie. a self-shaver. So he’s shaving a selfie – himself – as well as all the unselfies. Again, he’ll be the exception to his rule. OK?’
Gary hesitated before hesitantly replying. ‘I suppose so.’
‘Well, there you are then,’ exclaimed Tony triumphantly. ‘Figaro can’t, after all, shave all and only the unselfies. It’s got to be one thing or another. He’s an ‘impossible barber’. What he wanted to do sounded sensible, we agreed, but it turns out that it wasn’t. There’s the paradox.’
Tony swallowed the rest of his wine and plonked the glass back on the table, pleased with his rendition of Russell’s, argument. To his surprise, Gary was scowling, angry even.
‘That’s a load of balls!’ he eventually exclaimed, in a voice loud enough to surprise the other customers and cause Josie to turn round and stare.
‘I’m pretty angry, to tell the truth, Tony,’ continued Gary. ‘Who’s this Russell, and your lecturer, to tell me – a professional barber of thirty years standing – who I can and can’t shave?’
‘But you see …’ Tony tried to interrupt.
‘No wait a minute, Tony. Let me go on. This Figaro bloke … I like him. A man after my own heart. He’s ambitious, wanting to shave every man in town, except the ones who shave themselves. And I can understand why he wouldn’t want to shave them. He’s got his pride. Why shave men who only come to him when it’s convenient, or when they’ve run out of shaving soap, or whatever. So, no, don’t tell me or Figaro anything about shaving.’
Tony waited a while before speaking, to let Gary calm down.
‘Josie!’ he called to the French woman who, like the other people in the bar, had been listening to Gary’s outburst, ‘could you please bring us another Cisk and glass of wine? Thanks.’
He then turned to Gary. ‘Look, with respect, Gary, you haven’t dealt with the problem Russell raises. Does Figaro shave himself or not. If he does, then it’s not only the unselfies he shaves, ‘cos he’s a selfie. If he doesn’t, then he’s not shaving all the unselfies, ‘cos he’s an unselfie himself.’
Gary looked into his beer glass, as if expecting it, like an oracle, to provide an answer.
‘Look, Tony,’ he began, now in a calmer voice, ‘I can’t explain where this Russell bloke is wrong. I admit he’s clever. But I’m going to prove him wrong. I’m going to become the ‘impossible barber’. I don’t know about Figaro in Seville, but I’m going to shave all the men in Sannat who don’t shave themselves, and only them. You just wait and see. I bet you a 100 euros on it!’
‘No, come on Gary,’ replied Tony, ‘I don’t want to take your money.’
‘I insist!’ said Gary, again raising his voice. ‘100 euros that I’ll become this impossible barber.’
Tony understood that, unless he wanted a real row with Gary in front of Rosina, Josie and the regulars, he had to accept the bet. He nodded his agreement, said that it was getting late and left, wishing that he’d never mentioned the lecture. Gary, in turn, finished his beer and walked home.
As soon as he woke up the following morning, Gary found himself regretting the bet he’d forced on Tony. But there was no turning back. Pride, as well as reluctance to lose 100 euros, was involved. He had to make good on his boast to become a living refutation of Russell’s argument, to become the impossible barber. But he had no time now to reflect on how to do this. Otto was due for his daily shave at 10.00am, and the front room had to be made ready.
Otto was always voluble and, on this visit, regaled Gary with tales of barbers he knew in Austria before coming to live in Gozo. Gary was barely listening until he heard Otto mention a barber in Innsbruck who, to his customers’ puzzlement, had a big, black, bushy beard. He wasn’t sure why this anecdote should have struck him until after Otto had left the shop. Then it came to him.
He recalled Tony’s words when talking about Figaro: ‘if he doesn’t shave himself – if he goes to another barber, or is shaved by his wife’. It was clear from this that an unselfie was someone who gets shaved, but by someone else, not himself. But suppose the barber was like the Innsbruck one mentioned by Otto – a man with a big, black, bushy bear. In other words, a man who was never shaved – by himself or anybody else.
Gary almost danced with relief. Paradox resolved. All he had to was never to shave and grow a beard – a big, black, bushy one in fact, since Gary was, like Esau and the Innsbruck barber, ‘a hairy man’, with plenty of black hair on his body and, by early evening, a dark shadow on his chin. He would continue to shave Otto and Luigi, who were, he was sure, the only unselfies in Sannat. So he’d be shaving all the unselfies in town. He, Gary, would be no exception, since he wouldn’t be, in the relevant sense, an unselfie. Russell’s mistake was clear: he had assumed that everyone either self-shaved or was shaved by someone else. But Gary, like the Innsbruck barber, would be neither.
Doubts about his solution only began to arise later that afternoon, while Gary was swimming in the picturesque bay of Mgarr Ix-Xini, a couple of miles from Sannat. His first thought was how inconvenient a long, big, bushy beard would be when swimming. Wet and heavy, might it get into his mouth and eyes when floating, as he liked to do, on his back? And, apart from swimming, what about eating and drinking? He’d more than once felt queasy, when trimming customers’ beards, at the sight of porridge, scrambled egg or gravy sticking to them.
Then there was the worry about his clients’ reactions. Otto had spoken of the surprise of the Innsbruck barber’s clients at the size of his beard. Wouldn’t Gary’s potentially enormous beard put customers off coming to him for a haircut? But what weighed most with Gary were the words he recalled Josie proclaiming when he told people at Ta Rosina’s that he was starting a barber’s shop. She’d said that he should get rid of all the ‘horrible beards’ in Sannat. He was sure that the beard he would be growing would, for her, be very horrible. While his hopes of a romance with Josie were not high, Gary certainly didn’t want to ruin his chances by hiding his face behind a bush that she would find repellent. Other women he might one day meet, he feared, could well share Josie’s distaste.
By the evening, Gary was back to square one. For good practical and romantic reasons, never shaving or getting shaved was not an option. For the first time in weeks, he didn’t go to Ta Rosina’s. Not even the prospect of Josie’s smile could persuade him to have to admit to Tony his lack of progress in refuting Russell.
The following day, after Otto had left, it was Luigi’s turn for his daily shave. And, just like the day before, it was something said in the barber’s chair that inspired in Gary a resolution of the paradox. Though not in the same league as his wife, Luigi was also a moaner. Whenever he began a sentence with ‘In this town’, Gary knew that what followed would be some complaint of Luigi’s against people in Sannat – the arch-priest, perhaps, or the butcher, or even Rosina. He listened patiently until Luigi, who was never in a hurry to get back home, eventually left the shop.
It was the simple phrase ‘in this town’ that stayed with Gary. Then it came to him. According to Tony, what Figaro aimed to do was shave all and only the unselfies in a particular town – Seville, in his case. That would only be a problem, Gary realised, if Figaro lived in Seville. If he moved out, he could then shave all and only the Sevillian unselfies without any problem. Whether or not he shaved himself would be irrelevant. If he did, this wouldn’t break his rule never to shave a Sevillian selfie – since he was not shaving himself in Seville.
Similarly, all Gary had to do, in order to shave all and only the two Sannat unselfies – Otto and Luigi – was simply to move somewhere else, to nearby Munxar village, say. But could he do that? He would have to keep his shop in Sannat, and he couldn’t afford also to rent somewhere in Munxar. And it would mean a half an hour walk to and from Ta Rosina’s.
But then, with relief, Gary realised that he wouldn’t have actually to live outside Sannat: it would be enough if he shaved himself outside the town’s limits. His relief at this thought, however, was short-lived. Where could he go each morning – and on many evenings as well, to remove the dark shadow – with his shaving tackle? The Munxar public toilet was too far away, and anyway hardly a savoury place. And of course the residents of the village would soon be wondering why the barber of Sannat kept using their public toilet, often twice a day.
But where else? Crouching behind a dry-stone wall at the edge of a field just outside Sannat perhaps. But that would be no good when the weather was terrible, and anyway a passing farmer or dog walker might see him. The story of a man hiding behind a wall, his face covered in lather and brandishing a razor, would soon be all over Sannat, indeed the whole of Gozo.
For the second day in a row, Gary’s hope that he’d soon become the impossible barber evaporated. And for a second evening in a row, he couldn’t face going to the bar and confessing his failure. Instead, he’d have an early night and sleep on the problem.
When, in the morning, he awoke from what had been a very disturbed sleep, he was no further forward. One thing he did decide, though, was that, today, he must go to Ta Rosina’s. If he didn’t, he feared they’d send out a search party for him. But instead of going in the evening, when Tony would be there, Gary would go at lunchtime. Tony, occupied with private tutoring of maths and physics to pupils from the local high school, rarely went to the bar during the day.
As soon as he’d finished shaving Otto and Luigi, Gary walked from his house to the bar, where he found Josie regaling three customers with an account of a wedding she’d encountered the previous afternoon. The wedding had taken place in the Palazzo Palina, a grand, vaulted building in the grounds of a hotel on the outskirts of Sannat where Josie had gone to meet a friend for a coffee.
‘Zut alors!’, exclaimed Josie, ‘half the men going into the building, they were dressed as women. Well, maybe more: man or woman, homme ou femme - I couldn’t tell’.
She then explained that, according to a hotel receptionist, the couple getting married had earlier been two gay men, but that one of them had now transitioned. So it was a marriage between a man and a trans woman.
‘Blimey!’, said one of the trio of customers, ‘what do you Gozitans think of that, being Catholics and all that?’
Neither Rosina nor Josie replied, but their gestures conveyed what they thought. Rosina, who was indeed a staunch Roman Catholic, slowly and solemnly wagged her head from side to side. Josie, of no particular denomination, made the inimitable gesture the French use to express a combination of incomprehension and resigned acceptance - shrugging her shoulders, raising the palms of her hands, pursing her lips and letting out a gentle ‘Bouf!’.
Gary was about to give his opinion when, like a thunder clap inside his head, he realised how to resolve the paradox. Once again, he recalled Tony’s words when describing Figaro’s ambitions. Figaro, Tony had said, wanted to shave all and only the men in Seville who didn’t shave themselves. If Figaro had been a woman, passing herself off as a man in order to work as a barber, she could then have shaved all and only the unselfies without any problem. What she did with her own chin – shave it or not – wouldn’t matter, because all the relevant people, selfies and unselfies alike, were, according to Tony, men. Bertrand Russell’s mistake had been to assume that the impossible barber was a man.
Gary’s solution was clear: to transition, like the trans woman getting married at the Palazzo Palina. There would be no difficulty doing this in Malta, a country where people could transition with ease – no medical examinations, no requirement to live or dress in a particular way, no obstacles at all, in fact.
‘Got it!’ shouted Gary, to the surprise of Rosina, Josie and the trio of drinkers. He insisted on buying them all a drink in celebration of his Eureka moment, then apologised for having to rush off without having anything himself. He wanted to get back home and, with a clear head, plan for his transition.
As the afternoon wore on, however, Gary realised, now for the third time, that his euphoria was misplaced. He knew, of course, that he could never actually live as a woman. The thick black hair that covered much of his body was sufficient reason by itself never to wear feminine attire. But, as he understood it, Maltese law didn’t demand that a gender-reassigned person had to live or dress in a certain way.
Then there were the various issues, legal ones perhaps, that he would face, if not in Malta then in other countries, including the UK. Which public toilets to use – male or female? Which hospital wards to stay in if he needed treatment? And would he be allowed into some of the countries he hoped one day to visit – like Egypt and the UAE? He could easily imagine that, at best, he would be subject to embarrassing interrogations at foreign airports and hotel check-ins.
The biggest problem, however, was how his transition could be kept secret. His passport, Maltese ID, English driving license, and many other documents would have to be changed. Surely it would come out. Someone checking passports at the airport, for example, would be tempted to tell her friends about this hairy, unmistakeably masculine figure who, according to the passport, was nevertheless a woman. Malta is a small place and the story would soon find its way to Ta Rosina’s. It might eventually reach Gary’s sister and nephew back in Blyth. It would be difficult, he reckoned, to convince them that he had transitioned, not for the reasons people usually give, but simply to refute Bertrand Russell.
And then there was Josie. He hadn’t forgotten the raised palms and the ‘Bouf!’ that made her attitude to the wedding in the Palazzo clear. Even if the gender-reassigned Gary was still welcome to drink at Ta Rosina’s, would Josie ever smile at and hug him – or rather her - again? There were also Otto and Luigi to consider. Would they still come to the shop? He was pretty sure that Luigi’s famously jealous wife would prohibit her husband from being shaved by a woman barber.
Strangely, the recognition that he couldn’t do what was necessary in order to become the impossible barber didn’t, this time, depress Gary. He’d tried his best and, after all, he had worked out three ways in which he could have done this. It’s just that, for very sound practical reasons, he couldn’t actually bring himself to adopt any of these ways. But what he’d worked out was enough to show Tony, the lecturer, and Bertrand Russell that they’d got it wrong. It was enough to show them that they shouldn’t try to tell a professional barber, like Gary or Figaro, who he could and couldn’t shave.
So, that evening, as he set off for the bar, he almost looked forward to meeting Tony and explaining all this. He didn’t, naturally, look forward to handing over the 100 euro. But perhaps Tony would be so impressed by Gary’s solutions that he’d waive the bet and buy him a drink. He hoped that Josie, too, would be impressed – enough to give him an extra smile, an extra hug, and even a kiss.
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