Call Me Zebra Read online

  In a matter of days, I read all the books in Quim Monzó’s library that I remembered to have been a part of my father’s Catalan oeuvre. I selected the writers that my father had translated during our first months in Catalonia under the shadow of my mother’s, Bibi Khanoum’s, untimely death that, I now concluded, had pushed my father further into the abyss of literature. In his grief—well disguised as it was due to the fact that we, the ill-fated, have to swallow our bitterness to survive—my father had nevertheless absorbed my mother in the same way that I had absorbed him. This thought ushered in a welcome companion insight: Since I had absorbed my father, I had also absorbed the traces of Bibi Khanoum that had already been absorbed by him. I welcomed the residue of my mother into my consciousness. I saluted her. “Ah, the transmigration of minds!” I repeated into the darkness of the night. It was strange and exhilarating to be in the presence of her residue; an odd euphoria swept over me, a feeling of mild mania. I felt as though time had not elapsed and yet, somehow, everything was different.

  Time was a riddle not meant to be solved, I concluded, as I walked into the bedroom and sat bolt upright on the bed. I was flooded with emotions: I thought to myself that the act of swallowing our bitterness and absorbing one another upon death had increased our wretchedness. I pitied myself. I had inherited the stinking pile of rubbish, the unspoken emotions, everything that had ever been discarded by generations of Hosseinis; their unmetabolized pain was rotting in the ever-widening pits of my void. No wonder I didn’t often feel hunger. At that realization, a single question looped through the ghostly chambers of my many minds: When I die, who will absorb me? There was no one left. I was the last of the lineage. I sobbed uncontrollably. I wept until I gagged on my tears. I wiped my face with the sheets.

  By dawn, at the edge of despair, I had moved from the bed to the red recamier. I thought, what remedy do I have but to resort to literature? The sun, round and orange, rose into the sky. It looked like a ball of fire. I stared at it through the window. I sat in quiet contemplation. Hours later, in a somewhat more pragmatic state of mind, I remembered that some of my father’s translations—not the ones we had lived off of, but the ones belonging to his private collection—consisted of transcriptions, of copying a text word by word just as a medieval scribe would have done in the days of yore. My father had never explained the theory behind his transcriptions to me, but with my mind sufficiently primed to receive spontaneous signals from the Matrix of Literature, I instantly deduced his logic. Obvious was the fact that the practice of transcription had served as an additional tool for his memorization, ensuring his position as a scribe of the future. The more striking revelation, however, was the following: Had my father not gone nearly blind and thus continued his practice, the Art of Transcription would have led him to a very desirable state, a kind of nirvana, which men of a lesser constitution could only reach through the use of opium. It was midday. The sun’s rays pierced through the window and stained everything with a copper tinge. My thoughts, nurtured by the rusty fall light, spread into a complex web. Due to the inevitability of human error inherent in the manual reproduction of texts, which guarantees that each version produced is minutely different from its predecessor, the practitioner is able to recognize life’s infinite multiplicity, its capacity for perpetuating and recycling itself. In turn, I concluded, this recognition allows the practitioner to take comfort in two basic facts: (1) the interconnected fabric of humanity (we have all been erroneously reproduced by others; we are degenerate copies of one another), and (2) the nothingness of being (despite being connected to a million other strands of life individuals can expire suddenly without warning, not to mention that, more often than not, the people one is connected to fail to help us move along our path because they are too busy avoiding their own wretchedness, pulling rank, grasping for power at the cost of others and to their own detriment). I had expanded upon the Hosseini Commandments by culling wisdom from the abyss. My manifesto had grown wings!

  Over the course of the following nights, I managed to reread most of the authors my father had transcribed during our Catalan years. I filled pages and pages of my notebook with transcriptions from each of the following writers, all of whom, in one way or another, had been touched by exile: Josep Pla (a man of immense candor), Salvador Espriu (a man in possession of a labyrinthine mind with a great propensity toward codes), Mercè Rodoreda (a genius of the double-edged sentence, apparently blunt but actually emotionally cutting), Miguel de Unamuno (a man with an encyclopedic sensibility), Federico García Lorca (a lyric erotic) and his friend Salvador Dalí (eccentric, hyperrealist, provocateur, whose work I can never get enough of), Joan Maragall (a Hellenistic bore who became an antianarchist halfway through his life, but one I am inclined to forgive for his splendid translations of Nietzsche from the French; the man didn’t speak a lick of German), and Montserrat Roig (eloquent, graceful, master of embedded dialogue, highly attuned to the ways in which architecture absorbs historical grief).

  When I was done with my list, I closed my notebook. It was the middle of night. I ran my sick hand over the engraved title. I paced the corridor. Immediately, I heard: Forgetfulness is the only revenge and the only forgiveness. Ah, Borges. I laughed at his maxim. Because, contrary to his missive, I was experiencing a loss of forgetfulness. I was regressing through the chain of selves produced by exile and, in doing so, was recovering patches of memories, of feeling, none of them exact, all of them falsified due to the patina of time. I was in the mood for conclusions. There must have been a full moon causing the tides of my mind to rise to unprecedented heights. I looked through the window at the end of the corridor. There it was, hovering over L’Eixample, a wide silver disc. I raised my grief antennas. I concluded the following: I had retraced the words my father had transcribed during our time in Catalonia; soon I would have to retrace the paths we had walked together. I would have to leave the apartment.

  I stood in the corridor a while longer and thought of our long walk of exodus through that putrid no-man’s-land, and for a moment, my feet hurt, the bony knobs of my knees ached. I remembered the bitter cold, the frozen terrain, the spectral snow of those final days. My father had been dragging our suitcase along while carrying me, his ragged coat drawn over our backs. Fatigued, breathless, he put me down on a glistening icy rock, and I remembered looking up at him and seeing my own reflection in his eyes. We were undernourished, skeletal, a pair of living dead. Our lips were blue. Our eyes bulged out of their sockets.

  I sat on the red recamier and watched the moon’s glow fade behind a traveling herd of clouds. I closed my eyes. For better or worse, I thought to myself, I am approaching my own buried past. And that’s when I realized: I had returned to Barcelona to set off on a series of walks—no, not walks, Pilgrimages of Exile—during which I would conduct myself as a man digging, unafraid to return again and again to the same matter. I realized the enormity of the task and nearly succumbed to panic. I drew in little breaths. I calmed myself by thinking of how literature’s interconnected network of sentences would chaperone me into a great silence, into the void at the center of my life, into the dark folds of the universe. “Ah, Benjamin, martyr of thought,” I murmured as I retreated to the bedroom and put my notebook on the nightstand. For the first time in a week, I went to sleep at night. My job was done.

  The next morning, however, my plans were delayed due, in some measure, to the fact that the bird had finally made his debut. I looked at him. What a mongrel. He was pecking at the piece of bread I had left in the bed my first day in the apartment. The bedroom was engulfed in darkness. There were no windows. I had barely eaten. The last person I had interacted with was the grocer. I hadn’t gone outside since Ludo Bembo had dropped me off. I felt trapped, unreal, far away from the world. I examined the walls. I could have died, or disappeared, or been absorbed by the objects in the room. No one would notice my absence. No one, I reconsidered, but Quim Monzó’s bird.

  Without light, it appeared as though the sur
faces surrounding the bird, which was white, marked the edges of a black hole. I reached out and turned on the table lamp. The ceiling came into view. It sagged in the middle. It reminded me of the droopy sacks of yogurt I had seen hanging from village trees and swinging in the rancid wind of that decimated no-man’s-land. I ran my hand across the bird’s back. It occurred to me that if the room was a black hole then my hand and the bird were on the edge of an event horizon, a precipice of sorts. “Oh, the ecstasy of darkness,” I said out loud to no one.

  The bird turned his head and peered at me through his right eye. He looked haggard. What did I look like? For all I knew, my face was a void—a symbol of the very abyss of exile that had summoned me. I hadn’t looked in the mirror since I had arrived in Barcelona. There was a high probability that I had been reduced to nothing more than a sick hand. A hand that knows nothing other than my notebook. I laughed helplessly at the idea.

  I stroked the bird. Some of his feathers were bent upward and grainy to the touch. I remembered his tyrannical look in the photograph, his claws grasping the air, his rigid stance.

  “Here, here,” I said to the bird, as I stroked it. “I come in peace.”

  My words echoed back: I come in pieces. With the suddenness of a revolving door, Taüt cocked his head to the side and snapped his beak open and bit my finger. I let out a shrill scream. There was a drop of blood on his beak. I could see the drop glistening in the dull light of the lamp. I remembered the stain of blood spreading across the flattened sheet of my heart in my dream. I backed away from the bird. Taüt retreated. He knocked his feathered head back and gargled as he retreated across the bed. Then he stopped and pressed his talons into the sheets. He spread his wings and shimmied from side to side.

  “Taüt!” the bird screeched in an impatient voice, before gathering himself and exiting the room.

  I wondered if the apartment was diseased. I wondered if Quim Monzó, the retired literature professor, had gone to Greece to disabuse himself of the idea of order; perhaps he was engaging in some kind of entropy tourism, a tour of the authentic disorder of life.

  The darkness quietly tugged at the objects in the room, reeling them discreetly into its hollow sphere while the weak light of the table lamp pushed meekly against it. I felt myself begin to unreel. It occurred to me that the apartment, cluttered and potentially diseased, was, in fact, a hospital. I slipped out from between the humid sheets and ambled down the corridor. I wanted to confront the rest of the apartment. No, not confront, I corrected as I walked out of the bedroom; I wanted to extract information from it. I walked past my chest-shaped suitcase full of books and heirlooms. I got a whiff of my father’s death. I walked down the corridor, the corridor of exile—the long dark corridor of my mind. As I paced, it occurred to me that before walking through Barcelona I had to commit to the nonsense of the apartment, the nonsense of the bird, which was no different from the nonsense of the world, nonsense that people deny because their consciousness has been reduced through the falsification of history to a singular dimension. The falsification of history! The words gave me a distinct pleasure.

  I entered the kitchen in a mild state of hilarity, made coffee, poured it into a dusty cup, carried it to the window. The Catalan flags hanging from the buildings on the other side of the street looked limp, defeated. The four vertical red stripes looked rusty, like dried blood. The street was largely deserted. It was still early in the morning. There was a radio perched near the window. I turned it on. I heard, “The whole world is a potential front. We are all foot soldiers.” I turned it off. A plump woman in an apron appeared in a window on the opposite side of the street. She leaned out and began to beat her flag with a broomstick. Patches of dust lifted off into the dense air. The bells sounded out; their peal receded into the enormous distance.

  I got up and moved to the red recamier. In the living room, I noticed a Swiss cuckoo clock I hadn’t seen before; the pendulum was swinging, making a rhythmic clicking sound. The rooms of the apartment had begun to reveal their true colors over the course of the past week, coming forward with all they had initially withheld. It was like being inside Velázquez’s Las Meninas. There was a mirror on the wall opposite the window. In it, I saw the attenuated reflection of the pendulum, the curved end of the recamier, the bronze studs lining the velvet seams, the wooden shutters beyond the window, and blue strips of sky through the louvers. The clouds had moved on. The sun was shining.

  I ran my hand across the red velvet cushions on the recamier. There were cigarette burns in the fabric. The crusted edges reminded me of the mouth of a volcano. I thought of Mount Sahand. “That comatose beast!” I said out loud, and laughed. I felt time slow down, come to a halt. Everywhere I looked, I saw holes, depressions, ditches. In the shadowy yolk-colored light, the objects of the apartment seemed to be acquiring density, pulling me toward them. Again, I had the sensation that the apartment was a black hole. Quim Monzó, whoever he was, had taken his leap. I had to take mine: the leap into the void, into the nothingness of exile. I was preparing myself to walk the streets of Barcelona, a stranger once again. Or worse than a stranger, I thought, a restranger, a double alien ready to approach her buried past.

  Just then, it occurred to me that I could think of the Matrix of Literature as a black hole: an abyss with no boundaries, an elastic void that consumes everything and from which nothing but a faint residue radiates back out into the world—a nonplace where time collapses, becomes imaginary, and therefore, finally, truthful. It occurred to me that if the matrix is an elastic void capable of digesting the whole then its structure is analog to the future, which, much like a black hole, is a vast, open nothingness capable of containing everything that approaches it. I said to myself: “Literature is the residue of the past radiating back out into the world.” Then I examined the thought from a different angle: The past, I concluded, contains within it a trace of the future. That trace acts as a conveyor belt through which certain images can be experienced as visions in advance of their time.

  I looked at the three black encrustations on the red fabric of the recamier and imagined steam rising from the mouth of a volcano. The apartment, I realized, was nourishing me. It had been doing so all along. With all its accumulated clutter, it was signaling to me that until now I had been floating around the matrix. Until now, I had been metabolizing literature. But, as I watched the steam rise into the air, it occurred to me: What if literature metabolized me? I imagined being regurgitated by the matrix, my body radiating back out into the world as the residue of literature and spreading across the surfaces of the Old World, which was itself an afterimage, a residue. I felt incredibly pleased with myself. I felt delighted with the irrational symmetry of my plan. I realized that I must be receiving private communiqués from the Matrix of Literature: signals of genius, signals of Dalínian proportions. I, Zebra, was exactly where I wanted to be: in the land of oblivion and the land of persistence, on the precipice of the future and about to enter the past. I was on the verge of becoming more Zebra than I ever had been before.

  I walked up to the window at the end of the corridor and opened it. Fresh air streamed into the apartment. It smelled like sardines and salted cod; it flowed sweetly through the wooden gaps in the shutters. The streets were coming to life. There were people walking on the sidewalk. I could see their limbs moving through the louvers. They seemed tiny and far away. An electric current traveled down my spine. As I inhaled the warm, brackish air, I said to myself, “Something horrible is going to happen.” I had the distinct feeling, a premonition, that the cruel events that were working their way into the fabric of the world—political suicides, spontaneous bombings—would soon accumulate into an undeniable critical mass; there would be no turning away from the stain of horror. “Not even love will save us,” I whispered into the sealed shutters. Love! What is love when it can’t save us from the wrenching severance of death?

  For a moment, I saw myself as a child in my father’s arms. I felt a tickle in my mind. My fa
ther was pressing his mustached mouth against my void. I heard him whisper: Read to me from your notebook! He must have known my notebook was in a great state, pregnant with citations, in stato interessante, as they say in Italy. As I thought this, I realized that I had not heard a peep from Ludo Bembo. This lack of contact confirmed to me that he was, in fact, a part of the .1 percent; it proved his literary nature was underscored by an innate suspicion of others. Were it otherwise, I concluded, he already would have showed up at Quim Monzó’s door. And yet there was a part of me that wished he had. A part of me I could only acknowledge in brief segments, that had been yearning for Ludo to interrupt the brutal progression of my mourning, the miserable state of linking together a wretched sequence of thoughts and memories.

  My father slumped down into a chair inside the vaulted maze of our double mind and tapped his cane on the floor. He was growing impatient. “Read to me!” he echoed. I retrieved my notebook and consulted it at random in accordance with the Hosseini practice of bibliomancy. I read from a list of transcribed quotes and maxims extemporaneous to my father’s Catalan oeuvre. I announced: Those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire. Borges. I walked in concentric circles reciting the sentence. This seemed to soothe my father. Soon, he was replaced within my void by words. It was as if the words Unconscionable Maps were sitting on the chair he had vacated, cross-legged, regal, polite.

  With my father folded again into the obscure sheets of memory, I walked into the kitchen to get a glass of water. There was that ghoulish bird. He was walking across the counters. I stared at him in dumb astonishment. He kept sticking his beak into this and that, spilling coffee grounds, peeling cloves of garlic. The next time I looked down at my notebook, my eyes fell on the following transcription: Someday that mustache of yours will poke a hole in the world! From my father’s oeuvre! A joke Josep Pla had often repeated to Dalí. I crossed out the word mustache and replaced it with the word beak. Certain sentences are extraordinarily accommodating. “Someday that beak of yours will poke a hole in the world!” I warned Taüt. The bird cringed forward in response and plunged his head into a bowl of sugar Quim Monzó had left near the stove.