I had been in the chair for five minutes when I realized that the hairdresser was blind. His hands went from one side of my head to the other, cutting here and there with astonishing precision, as if his fingers had eyes. I complimented him on his talent and dismissed him. Then he invited me to close my eyes and immediately put in my hand an object that I knew was scissors. The truth is, rather than getting to know them, I “see” them in ways I’ve never seen them before. I distinguished the stems and the leaves they elongated and the articulation points of the two parts, I distinguished the edges and ends… They were scissors that I would call “long legs” because of the length of their blades. My brain immediately told me how much force I had to use to keep them in the air and how much finger pressure to operate them.
“Our tools,” I heard the barber say, “seem to be designed for touching rather than seeing.”
I agreed with him: I have never had such a rich experience examining an everyday object. I was ashamed to return them to him, because I never got tired of going through those two pieces of steel joined by an axis. Then, eyes still closed, he handed me a comb, and I enjoyed his oddity for a few moments. You had to have a lot of brains (and that’s no joke) to invent something devilishly simple and effective at the same time. The comb was flexible, plastic, of course, and very long.
When I opened my eyes, the reality looked a little dim, even though the soot was abundantly lit. The blind man asked me if I wanted him to straighten my eyebrows, which I gladly agreed, and in a few clippings he reduced them to normal size without changing their symmetrical proportions. After the service, the man placed an oval mirror on the back of my neck so that I could consent. But again, I chose to close my eyes and run my hands over my skull, and I was fascinated by the functionality of the object called the head, under whose walls is the brain, the nucleus, where my identity is mysteriously revealed.
“Perfect” I said. And the blind barber smiled with his eyes.