The sharp blade cuts across the side of my face, glinting off the light of the overhead mirror lamp, whirring past the side of my ear. I wince as the force of the sharp knives pierce my skin, specks of blood dripping into the sink.

I know that many of you can already feel that phantom pain jabbing on the side of your chin, and like me, have felt that dumbness as you realize, “God I knew that a pimple was there yet I still decided to CUT OVER IT WITH A RAZOR”. And in the end you realize that you can’t even grow a mustache or a beard and the only reason you use a razor is for your own self pride but we can get into that for another day.

Or maybe I’m misjudging some of you, and you’ve never gone a day in your life where you’ve had to manually (or automatically if we’re getting technical here), cut your own beard. Maybe you’ve gone to a nearby salon, plopped down into a chair, tilted your head up, and waited five minutes for a professional to do it specklessly. 

Maybe those five minutes turn into five seconds and you get up, pay your barber, put on the coat you left at the door \

Type of Razor used by barbers

rack, and you walk through the exit, only to look back at the barber and say, “They told me you would kill me. I came to find out if it was true. But it’s not easy to kill. I know what I’m talking about.” 

Because it turns out that you are the killer of all rebels, and all signs point to the barber being one.

Lather and Nothing Else, shadows the instance a barber, our narrator, goes to give a shave for the most notorious Captain in the military in th

eir small town, Captain Torres. Throughout the story, we give the context of the nervousness that is aroused within our barber as soon as the Captain goes to lay down within the chair, as it turns out that the Captain had just gone on a capture spree and publicly executed numerous rebels, and that the barber was also part of the rebellion taking place in their town. But given the opportunity to have the head of the rebellion killing operation be sitting in his salon chair with a razor blade in hand to do his job, he agonizes over whether or not he should kill the Captain or not.

I know for a fact that I sit in my bed half the days tossing and turning about where I should go for lunch, back and forth between hmmm maybe Portillos, but I’d probably save money if I went to Wendy’s. Those decisions actually give me stress somehow, yet as you can probably tell, these are clearly first world problems. Hernando Tellez, author of Lather and Nothing Else, on the other hand dealt with different types of problems in his lifetime. 

Hernando Tellez is a mystery man, and through the numerous sources I searched, it all came up with the same short six or sev

Hernando Tellez

en sentence biography. Tellez lived through several civil wars and military dictatorships in Columbia, eventually seeing the giant nation of Gran Colombia, through the rise of numerous rebellions, separate into Colombia, Venezuela, and Ecuador. 

Tellez describes the problematic lifestyle of being a secret revolutionary through this short story, an idea that kept me scrolling down the short story, on the edge of my seat waiting to see whether or not he would finally kill the barber. The barber’s indecision runs rampant, as those five minutes for him turn into five hours, contemplating every single choice on the consequences and the positives if he were to slit the Captain’s throat. 

Lather and Nothing Else ultimately shines a light on the indecision and decision that constantly lives within mankind, and the struggles, how great they may be, that many deal with that. An unknown revolutionary must decide between his job, or the greater good of his side of the political spectrum, and whether or not he must become a murderer to do so. The tale follows a constant back and forth as the angel and devil on the barber’s shoulder help him think in their own way, and eventually shows the true meaning of having values and whether or not you should break them, even in the direst of situations when you might know that it’s right to break them. 

Our first world problems may have right and wrong choices (don’t worry I did end up going to Portillos), but not everything is so cut clearly for people in countries with different kinds of problems. While some may argue that he should kill the captain, what about the fate of the barber, and where he would go to support the revolution, as every military man would be after him. Or the devil’s advocate, he would be considered a hero, protected by the rebellion and commended for his ultimate duty to the cause. 

But none of that is as clear as day. That’s the precaution that our barber had to take when deciding the Captain’s fate. This gripping tale truly kept you attached to the screen, waiting for the dramatic conclusion of whether or not it really was just Lather and Nothing Else, or Lather and a Whole lot of Blood, and a read that I definitely recommend to you.