'All wives are jealous.'
'So you're unfaithful to her?'
He lifted the razor and, looking me in the face, said: 'Excuse me, Signor Baldeschi, but that is my business.'
I felt myself blushing. I had put that indiscreet question to him because I thought, rather stupidly, that I had the right to do so, as a superior to an inferior; but he had put me, as they say, in my place, as an equal to an equal, and this I had not expected. I had a feeling of irritation and was almost tempted to answer: 'It's not only your business but mine too, since you've had the impudence to annoy my wife.' But I controlled this impulse and said rather confusedly: 'You mustn't be offended, Antonio… I didn't mean anything.'
'Of course not,' he said; and then, applying the razor to my cheek and slowly shaving me, he added, as though he wanted to mitigate the sharpness of his first remark and soothe my mortification: 'Why, Signor Baldeschi, everybody likes women.. . Even the priest over there at San Lorenzo has a woman, and that woman has presented him with two children. If you could look inside people's heads you'd see that everyone's got some woman or other. . but no one wants to talk about them, because if you do, it gets known and then people start gossiping. . And women, as you know, only trust the ones who don't talk.'
Thus he read me a lesson on the importance of secrecy in love affairs; leaving me in doubt, however, as to whether he belonged to the category of men who do not talk and who are trusted by women. I said nothing more about it that morning, but changed the conversation. But the suspicion had crept into my mind that, after all, my wife's accusations might have some foundation. In the afternoon, as happened regularly once a week, the farmer's eldest son, Angelo, came to go over the accounts with me. I shut myself up with him in the study and, after examining the accounts, brought the conversation round to Antonio, asking him if he knew him and what he thought of him. Angelo, a young peasant with fair hair and an expression which combined cunning with foolishness, answered with a slightly malevolent smile: 'Yes, yes, we know him, we know him all right.'
'It seems to me,' I enquired, 'or am I mistaken? — that you don't much care for Antonio.'
After a moment's hesitation, he said: 'As a barber — there's no doubt he's a good barber. . '
'But…'
'But he's a stranger here,' continued Angelo, 'and strangers have different ways, as everybody knows. . Perhaps things are different, where he comes from. . Certainly no one in these parts can abide him.'