A problem in the head

In an act of desperation I spend another 50€ on new products that promise to put an end to lice once and for all. We are already in the third round in less than a month. “Kill lice and nits by asphyxiation”, seems perfect to me, “I take three”.

The lady at the pharmacy looks at my daughter and says “yes, there really is a nit there, poor thing”. I discreetly take a step back. I don’t want her to dare to rest her lynx eyes on my hair.

I leave the pharmacy ready for the Herculean task of getting rid of lice in a house of six people. The scene repeats itself: five stuck in a single bathroom and my youngest son running around the house rubbing his hair full of product on everything that is fabric and wall, leaving a trail of green and viscous liquid that is little or nothing different from the sputum.

Whenever I see one of my children scratching his head with some intensity (and not as an aid to a more elaborate thought), I shove them all in the bathtub and in the end I go. My husband says it is not possible for lice to be interested in his head since a louse is the equivalent of a desert where sporadically and inexplicably you can see a palm tree. At first I agreed with him, but after three unsuccessful treatments I tend to think that maybe he is the cause of the failure. I imagine lice saying to each other, “Guys, I heard it’s treatment night. Everything for the palm trees. Each one carries the nits he can. Don’t take anything out of your backpacks, we’ll be back soon.”

It’s strange that in the twenty-first century there are still urban lice, I say urban because it’s normal for rustic lice to exist, it’s typical of the countryside, but how do lice get to the heads of city children? We also don’t see the kids out there with fleas.
I remember an image of my mother running that terrible comb through my hair, always tangled, while I do the same to my daughters and think “What the hell is this tradition”. In the midst of all that confusion I find myself extremely happy when I see a little black dot as I pass the comb through the white towel. Maybe it’s a pill, but my thirst for extermination of these thousand-legged parasites speaks louder.
When I was a child, “Quitoso” was the only shampoo there was for this purpose. Now there is a panoply of options, “Extra strong”, “100% effective”, “5 minutes only”, and all of them promise what so far none has been able to deliver, in addition to leaving the hair greasy for a week.

I changed the sheets and pajamas and asphyxiated the animals as the packaging taught me. Now we have to wait for tomorrow. All it takes is a brush of the nail on the scalp to put my husband in the bath or to asphyxiate him along with the nits and lice that break off in his palm trees.