![]() Embarrassment was dramatized by twirling the hat nervously in both hands at stomach level. Holding the brim between the thumb and the ring and middle fingers, one tipped one’s hat to acquaintances, male and female, encountered on the street. As a kid growing up in the 1940s, I can remember my father instructing me to remove my hat when entering someone’s house-but not a public building, except in the elevator, where one unbonneted out of deference to the women present (the hat stayed on in an all-male car). For today’s watchers of late-night films, such hats signal detectives and gang bosses, lonely romantic heroes and rich guys out on the town. ![]() ![]() Hombre con Sombrero (Man with Hat), by Joaquín Torres-García © Christie’s Images/Bridgeman ImagesĪll the men in Juan Carlos Onetti’s fiction wear hats: not caps, but proper Borsalinos, wide-brimmed and pinched and cocked at the top into Jean Arp sculptures, gray or black with a subtle silk band-no feathers-initials stamped in gold along the unseen interior sweatband. ![]()
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