A form of pride

Abstract

But again and again he wakes up and that straw-colored thing that was there the day before is still there, impassive, unaware of the anxiety, at this point the urgency, with which he hopes it will disappear. Days go by and with days time goes by, and what is he going to do? Start crying? He gets used to it. And so he could go on, and in fact he does, adapting to his new personality, until shortly after he meets his father, looks at him incredulously and with a hostile tone, as if he had been cheated, his father, who has been bald since he was 25, that is, in other words, since he can remember, asks him point-blank: “Can you say what you did to your head?” As always, he has not finished condemning his father and already pardons him. He sees the lights of the bar reflected on his tanned bald head, the neon sign stamping a coffee mark on the top of his forehead, which advertises it for a few seconds, like a screen, until the sign goes out and the spots, moles, remains of skinning, flakes, all the traces that sun sessions held at the most dangerous hours and times of the year have left on his skin, in this case wrongly called scalp, and which his father proudly displays, as if they were decorations, come back to the foreground.