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T.O. BOBE
126
Eyeglasses
The hardest thing is the eyeglasses. Not his. Mr. Gică still sees
well. But some clients don’t put them in their pockets, they
leave them on the edge of the table. The glasses look like a
dead man’s remains.
1
Forgotten glasses frighten Mr. Gică. All
day long, he avoids themand thehypnotic power of their empty
gaze, hoping the tenor (soccer players never wear glasses) will
come back for them. But no one ever comes back to Mr. Gică
for their glasses. At first he would put them in a drawer, and
then when that filled up, he bought a special cabinet, actually a
metal locker with three sections: he kept his white workcoats in
one and tossed the glasses in the other two, one after another,
dozens of pairs, hundreds perhaps. Every time he opened the
door to throw in another pair, Mr. Gică was frightened. It was
a kind of Auschwitz, that pile of glasses, it seemed like all his
clients were dead, and the dead watched him through their
forgotten glasses. But the dead returned to the shop after a
few weeks, with new glasses on their noses, and no one talked
about the forgotten pair, as though it was something shameful,
as though it was something you could only toss into a locker, in
a little room at the back of the barbershop.
1 Of course, no one is buried with his glasses on. You can’t even give a dead
person’s glasses away. No one knows what happens to the eyeglasses of the de-
ceased. They’re left in a drawer somewhere, or, if the person was someone well-
known, a senator or a historian, their family devotes a corner of the house to
him, displaying his glasses among stacks of nicely arranged papers, pens, favorite
books, and the dead man’s pipe.