The Bigger Light by Austin Clarke Page B

an ordinary barbershop. “Mister Boysie! Long time I don’t see you! Why you no come to visit Alfredo, no?” Boysie was in the barbershop less than two weeks ago; but Alfredo had this exuberance about him. Boysie took off his coat very carefully and hung it on the rack, and then, just as carefully, he selected his seat. There were four others waiting before him. They were all Italian. And they were talking in their family dialect about the recent soccer match between Italia of Toronto and Santos of Brazil. Boysie had seen that game too. The game had been played about six weeks ago. But everybody was talking about it, because Santos, with the star Pele, had won the match; oneto nil, through a free kick which resulted from a foul. The Italians in the crowd went mad, shouting and with tempers; and Boysie, who was sitting in a row of Italians, narrowly escaped being smashed in the head when two Italians started arguing about the refereeing. There were many West Indians in the crowd (West Indians and Italians were the two minority groups which supported soccer in Toronto), but Boysie had deliberately chosen to sit apart from them. When the blows started, it was in their direction that he crawled along the seats, and sat at the edge of a seat at the end of a long row of shouting West Indians. He felt he was safer among them, although he felt uncomfortable in their midst.
    In the barbershop, the Italians were saying
scaremo-paremo, madre-tutti-soccero-Pelito-issimo-que-passa
, and things like this; and Boysie listened very carefully, and loved their language and nodded his head when they looked in his direction, and regretted that for all the years in Toronto, visiting Henry in the Spadina area where the Italians lived, he had neglected to get close to an Italian, close enough to learn how to speak their language, “ ‘cause Godblummuh! not too long from now, is going be these same spaghetti-eating fucking Eyetalians who going be running this fucking town, you mark my word! You ain’ see that one o’ them is the biggest councillor on City Council already, Joe Pickinninni!” and Boysie listened very carefully to Henry’s warning, then and later, as he saw droves of Italians walking the streets, owning the streets, spitting in the streets, digging up the streets, and congesting the streets with new apartment buildings, “And I ain’t ever taste an Eyetalian meats yet, sheee-it! ain’t that a bitch!” Henry knew all these things; and Boysie sat here, this morning, listening to men who might have been his brothers-in-law, had he been successful with conversational Italian phrases, most often used,and then successful with an Italian woman: “Whatssa matter for you, Santos win, I ask you Mister Boysie did Santos win? compadres,” and arms and hands were flying about for emphasis and in the excitement and the love of argument, just like back home around the Bath Corner, when Henry and Boysie, Dots and Bernice, and children the age of Estelle’s son would crowd around and talk and shout and laugh and curse one another’s mothers in jest, just to make a point about cricket. “I wonder if the Eyetalians really own Toronto already?” Boysie surmised, as he was bombarded by the voices. Somebody’s hands were blocking his vision of a black woman who was passing the street; and even though he got up to see better, to see the hips and the legs better, — “You like, eh? Nice-ah stuff, eh, Mister Boysie?” — she was gone. Everybody was disappearing from him; everybody was gone before he could get a good look, and everybody was giving him orders.
    When his turn for the chair came, Alfredo said to him, very confidentially, and very much like a father, “Mister Boysie, why you don’t change your car? A man like you. A man prosperous like you, look, the way you dress, you come in here and you look
grando, mucho grando
” (Boysie thought this was what he said). “I tell you. I put you on to a man, a fine gentleman who sell