The main character is a barber. For some reason he is assigned to give the country’s dictator a shave, and as he shaves him he imagines cutting the guy’s throat and freeing his country. But he can’t bring himself to do it. At the end, the dictator says something suggesting he knows what the barber has been thinking, something like, “It’s not so easy, it it?”
Google found this “Just Lather, That’s All” is a story written by the author Hernando Tellez. In the story, the protagonist is described as a ordinary barber, who finds himself in a sticky situation. He is asked to work as a spy and to report back to his comrades on any new information on the enemy. Unfortunately, one day the enemy captain of the military walks into the barber shop and wants a shave. The whole time when the barber is shaving the captain, he has an argument with himself on whether he should slit the throat of the captain seeing as it was all too easy. At the end, the barber decides that it’s best for him to let the captain go with only a shaved beard.
It sounds right, but somehow I don’t think so. I think it’s something I read in high school, and I don’t think this guy would have been well enough known to make it into one of our classes. I was thinking it was – maybe – Hemingway, or Hemingway-esque.