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This is one of my favourite stories. Some years ago, when I was hardly grey at all, a small boy, who I believe is now dead himself, came into the Mayor's office while that esteemed official was going through his daily ritual of deciding if he should allow the shaky-handed Herr Erkhart to shave him. The boy said that Captain Pfister was in a room in the Hotel Gibboni threatening to shoot himself.
They hurried over there, collecting me on the way. I'd been in my office down the hall, playing with my model of the town's buildings, past, present and future, as I did a lot in those days, and still do. All the way we listened for a shot. None came. But as we approached the Hotel Gibboni we could hear the Captain screaming at himself in a room on the 3rd floor overlooking the square.
I waited in the street. The boy and I ate hot chestnuts and I explained to him architectural features of the Hotel Gibboni. He was very alert, interested. He remembered everything I said to him. His face I forget, but his sad eyes not.
The Mayor, Herr Erkhart and a nun, found God knows where, were now in Captain Pfister's room, shouting generalised compliments and implorings at him while he screamed at his reflection (and theirs also, I suppose) in several full-length mirrors. Presently, fleeing this chorus, the brave Captain came outside onto the balcony and stood there as if he were charged with making a speech but was refusing to give one. He waved his gun, laughed.
A crowd gathered, including men on furtive visits to the barber. Furtive because apart from myself and two or three other men in the town, the male population here is egg bald. This has been so probably since ancient times. But the local tradition is that no man ever admits his baldness to any other. Not father to son. Ever has it been so, and through a long century of change, this tradition remains sacred.
Only the barber knows the bald truth about each bewigged head. In those days it was old Lintner, whose spacious American barber's shop with its red leather chairs and long mirror seemed always empty, because the wig-fixing was done in a dirty little room out back. These days 'young' Lintner, his son, with a white beard and a mess of white curly hair fixes their wigs for them. When out of his shop he makes strings of cruel jokes about baldness which only me and two or three other men in the town don't need to laugh at.
Captain Pfister, meanwhile, threw his medals off the balcony, one by one - a performance which took a quarter of an hour, at two medals a minute. He then, quite suddenly, let off two shots into the room, killing the nun and frightening the Mayor and Herr Erkhart into the street, where they joined the crowd and continued their implorings with the aid of a megaphone donated to the cause by a man later arrested as an anarchist, whose name I forget.
The megaphone annoyed everyone, including the already distraught Captain Pfister, who bounded back into the room, stood over the nun, laughing bitterly, and shot himself twice in the head.
The Mayor's disappointed "Oh!" through the megaphone is still a thing that I chuckle at. If I get any bad news (four times a year, on average) I say "Oh!" the way he said "Oh!" and the news doesn't seem so bad.
The Captain's suicide came up under 'any other business' at the next town council meeting. When I announced from the far end of the table that I knew why he'd done it, eyes widened towards me.
He was going bald, was what I said. They all touched their woolly heads in exactly the same place. Not a discreet readjustment, no! I think each in his own way was remembering a moment of acute despair when a cold gunbarrel had touched this same bare spot. Whatever, they pooh-poohed my theory.
The Mayor's deliberations over whether or not to allow Herr Erkhart to shave him proved well founded. One morning, some seven or eight years later, that being some 2,000 shaves later, Erkhart slit the Mayor's throat and appeared in my doorway giggling. I giggled too. But I wasn't the one they put away for 90 years hard labour. I think he's still at it, but I'd have to check.
One more thing about the good Captain, relevant to a current project of mine. When the Mayor and I went up to see the body, it was stretched out over the nun in a most provocative position. Their faces, cheek to cheek, looked pale with ecstasy. The boy's eyes were never sadder as he smiled at this.
We don't have mayors anymore, just Leaders of the Council - and I'm it! I have just put through a plan to have a statue of Captain Pfister, hero and suicide, erected outside the Hotel Gibboni between the trees where the scooters stand. The sculptor comes this afternoon for an interview. I picked this fellow Götsch because I saw some work he did in a chapel in Bolzano. Saint Barbara, I think it was. I shall inspire Götsch with my vision! Ecstatic nuns, I shall say, all around the good Captain's feet - the Captain with the gunbarrel against his brow, his bronze mouth screaming, the nuns silently begging him not to do it.
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