MEN’S GILLETTE, STORY

My mother told my father she could no longer manage me — unpredictable, impossible. That afternoon Rocco Pizzimenti, owner of the local bar, had spent the day mocking my father, calling him a cuckold, until I showed up carrying my mother’s fabric scissors, intending to settle the matter myself. The whole bar laughed. I did not. Rocco stopped calling my father a cuckold after that — he understood I wasn’t exactly what he expected. My mother reached the same conclusion much earlier. The next morning she enrolled me at the Sisters of Saint Vincent, paying the full year in advance — insurance against my return within forty-eight hours.

My father, a Gillette salesman, kept the convent supplied with the promotional plastic bags the sisters loved and could never obtain elsewhere — five hundred cartons at a time. Whenever supplies ran low, the Mother Superior called for “a greeting.” Head office eventually noticed thirty percent of Italy’s promotional material disappearing into one convent and called my father to ask why. He told them he was quietly helping the Vatican’s charitable work, the Gillette way — no publicity. They sent more material. For eight years the sisters never bought a single bag.

The convent produced its incidents. I turned hide-and-seek into an expedition through the sisters’ private rooms, and became the subject of every search party’s opening warning: check everywhere, that devil could be hiding anywhere. During the morning ritual where children kissed the rosary and named Jesus Christ the most powerful being on Earth, I kissed the sister’s habit instead and announced that my father said women were more powerful than God. A sufficiently generous cheque, six zeros in old lire, turned sin back into concern — and concern vanished just as fast.

By the final exam, a member of the commission let it slip in public: at last, we’re getting rid of him. Thirty years later I placed an order for Gillette razor blades, payment in advance, and nobody ever asked how that had become possible. Sixty-one years have passed and questions remain. Recently my daughter looked at me and said: sorry, Nando, I don’t call you Dad — but who the hell are you? Ahahahah.