Call Me Zebra Read online

  I took a step back. Considered from the Paranoiac-Critical perspective of Dalí, whose presence had manifested serendipitously, Taüt’s seemingly insignificant gesture began to yield meaning. After retreating from the bowl, the bird turned his plumed head and looked at me with impish resolve. I noticed a soft depression on the surface of the white crystals. In my mind’s eye, this cavity in the sugar bowl immediately positioned itself alongside the other indentations that had surfaced in Quim Monzó’s apartment. I reviewed each instance—craters in the recamier, the black hole that had insinuated itself in the morning, the bedroom ceiling that had the appearance of a sinkhole—and concluded that, reflected upon together, this procession of hollows intimated the following: that Taüt was no ordinary bird; no, he was a real-life manifestation of Unamuno’s pájaro sabio, the famous origami bird through which Unamuno, a life-long paper folder (producer of reverse folds, pleats, and sinks), had ironically expressed Plato’s views on love and politics. Unamuno, who had suffered two blows of exile for refusing to allow ideology to interfere with intellectual life. In other words, a Hosseini hero.

  “Poor Unamuno!” my father deployed from the cave of our double mind. “Tortured by the simpleminded Franco for possessing a tragic sense of life!” His voice echoed as if it were emerging from an ancient grotto.

  “Poor Unamuno,” I answered my father in agreement, “whose famous lines express the importance of contemplating nothingness, an activity relegated to the world’s misunderstood and disenfranchised, and the very wheel that animates the Grand Tour of Exile!” Then I told my father, “Listen to this one: The deepest problem: the immortality of the crab.”

  My father pounded his cane against the walls of my void as he laughed. My paper heart crinkled in response. The sound of his laughter was a balm to my wounds.

  I felt as though I had been admitted into a world of sublime parallels and auspicious coincidences. I stood there, leaning against the kitchen counter, daydreaming, thinking about the immortality of the crab until the church bells struck eleven. Two ones, I thought. It was the hour of the double, of duality. Under the retreating peal of the bells, Unamuno multiplied, acquiring a second self in addition to his first.

  “Take that, General Franco,” I said, with great pride. “You who will always remain locked in your grave for lack of imagination, for not allowing your mind to fold over itself and fan open like flowers toward the sun, for being a degenerate nonreader, for neglecting to cultivate your consciousness and, consequently, for being incapable of surviving death. You,” I barreled on, “will suffocate in your grave while Unamuno, like all the other honest writers of our senseless world, will double and triple and quadruple at the hand of future writers who echo his tragic sense of life and who will plagiarize his words, therefore inserting his legacy again and again into the world.”

  After a moment’s pause, I yelled out: “Una-muno, una-mano!”

  With a definitive air, I raised my sick hand and gave the pájaro sabio a pat on the head. The bird winked at me. He was still walking across the counters.

  “Aha,” I wrote in my notebook. “At last, the bird and I are on the same page.”

  I sealed my notebook and stood in the kitchen with my eyes closed. I raised my grief receptors, which allow me to receive infinite amounts of data from the most recondite reservoirs of the matrix. I received the following message from the benevolent Rousseau: It’s time to go for a solitary walk.

  “Yes,” I intoned. “A Pilgrimage of Exile!” It was time. The walk took form in my mind. I considered its shape. I decided that my first walk through Barcelona should consist of an Architectural Pilgrimage of Fragmentation. Away with the sourpuss seriousness of L’Eixample! Exile had shattered my identity and caused me to suffer a grief of dizzying proportions. I needed to lay my eyes on mercurial buildings, vertiginous structures. It was the only way to trigger memories and feelings I had long repressed, severed from my consciousness. I wanted those shards of forgetfulness to pierce through the manure of my mind and rise to the surface.

  “Where should I begin?” I asked myself, opening my eyes and walking over to the recamier.

  “At Antoni Gaudí’s famous Park Güell,” I answered.

  I visualized the park: an upward slope speckled with coastal brush and petrified stone, with paths as knotted as sheep’s intestines.

  “No one,” I concluded, “can deny that the roads in Gaudí’s park mimic the dead-end roads on which the homeless exile walks, triggering the multiple parts of herself to resurface like shrapnel absorbed during a long remorseless war. In other words,” I said, watching Taüt, who was busy walking in figure eights on the living-room floor, shaking the sugar crystals off his wings, “it would be more honest if Antoni Gaudí’s Park Güell were renamed the Metaphysical Garden of Exile!”

  It occurred to me that everything that goes up must come down. If I were to hike up to the Metaphysical Garden of Exile, I would then be obliged by the laws of physics to descend to the city’s opposite point—the port—and, once there, officially salute the Mediterranean, that Sea of Sunken Hopes. I realized, almost instantly, that the main road connecting the Metaphysical Garden of Exile to the Sea of Sunken Hopes is the legendary Passeig de Gràcia, a section of which is, incidentally, also known as the Block of Discordance. What could be more complete? I smiled vaguely. I felt as though I had stepped from shadow into light.

  I thought of Walser, committed walker and authorial sage, and declared: “It is time to leave Quim Monzó’s room of ghosts.” I washed my face, got dressed, grabbed my notebook, tucked a pen behind my ear, and opened the door. Immediately, I heard a voice, in a jubilant tone: “So you never said. Where are you headed with that suitcase?”

  It was Ludo Bembo. I could hardly believe it. He had finally found his way. I felt as if the tension, built up over the course of those long nights, was being released at once, causing me to stagger and feel giddy in his presence. He was standing on the other side of the threshold wearing a linen vest over a white shirt with his sleeves rolled up. He had the same mildly apprehensive expression on his face he’d had when he picked me up at the airport, but he had switched his tune. Now his timidity—if it was timidity—stood in sharp contrast to the seductive robustness of his question.

  “Well?” he went on.

  “Morocco,” I joked. I told him that if he hadn’t picked me up I would have arranged for a donkey to meet me at the airport. “I would have ridden that animal across the deserts of Spain and, upon arriving at the port city of Tarifa—famished, as thin as a rake—I would have pushed the donkey, which would be dead by then, into the water and used it as a raft to get across the channel to North Africa.” I told him that, like a true explorer of the literary abyss and not unlike the nauseated Roquentin, I would have sat on the dead ass’s belly and dangled my feet in the clear water, allowing the currents to transport me hither and thither.

  “Who’s Roquentin?” Ludo retorted, looking down at his feet. His shoes were made of braided leather.

  “Who’s Roquentin!” I repeated disdainfully. “And you call yourself a literary scholar.”

  Mildly exasperated, he protested, “I’m a philologist!”

  “And why wouldn’t a philologist know about Roquentin, beloved bearer of Sartre’s cross?”

  “Because I spend my days working on dictionaries,” he whined.

  “Ah,” I said. “So you are in the business of embalming words!”

  This seemed to relax him.

  “You’re very funny,” he said, undeterred, leaning casually against the frame of the door.

  I leaned against the door, too. We were so close we could easily have kissed each other on the lips. Two .1 percenters. With a little training, I thought to myself, I can turn Ludo Bembo into a literary terrorist. The very thought of his company filled my lungs with purified air.

  “Ludo Bembo,” I said, remote, philosophical, and in a silky tone. “You should know: Nothing is funnier than unhappiness.”


  To my surprise, he let out a gleeful laugh. He seemed to have grown more resilient, more open, since I’d last seen him. Where, I wondered, was this Ludo Bembo before? This Ludo who was—in contradistinction to the anxious, reserved edition who had met me at the airport—calm, supple, curious.

  We stood there in the hallway staring at each other. An old woman carrying a basket of freshly cut asparagus, whose gaze betrayed an artless candor, staggered up the stairs. Once she was out of view, Ludo volunteered: “I was in town yesterday and spent the night. I . . . I thought I would check in on you before heading back to Girona.”

  “What did you do all night? Did you take a solitary walk?” I teased, thinking of Rousseau’s orders.

  “No,” he intoned, looking away. “I spent the night at a friend’s house.”

  I detected a hint of sexual melancholy in his voice, and his hair looked tousled. He obviously had slept with someone. I leaned in and sniffed him. He smelled like ferns. He stepped away from the frame and nervously reached for his pipe, which he had tucked into the breast pocket of his vest.

  He asked me if I would be interested in getting a bite to eat at the Boqueria. He told me it was the Fiesta de la Mercè. I remembered the celebrations. There would be fireworks, a procession, neighborhood teenagers dressed up as devils running around with pitchforks and playing with fire. I agreed to meet but told him I had to run a few errands first.

  “What errands?” he challenged.

  “I am going on an Architectural Pilgrimage of Fragmentation,” I offered matter-of-factly. “But I can meet you in the afternoon when I’m done.”

  He looked at me with a seriousness and a sensuality that implied soon we will be wrapped around each other in bed. He held my gaze for what felt like a long time, then teased: “Do you even eat?” He crossed his arms and tilted his head. His curls fell across his face.

  I felt my corporeality evaporate. My mind clouded over. I saw myself double: I was standing outside that ruined house that had come down on my mother, and at the same time an older version of myself was leaning against the frame of a stranger’s door in Barcelona speaking to Ludo Bembo while wondering if my mother had found anything she could have eaten—fried liver abandoned on the stove, a bowl of walnuts, dried mulberries—before that house came down on her head. I felt my void clench.

  Without realizing it, I mumbled: “I prefer not to eat.”

  “We’ll have to fix that,” he said. “We’ll have to show you how to eat like a true Mediterranean.”

  A sweet, cool draft blew through the door. I remembered that with each stone we had lifted off my mother’s body my father had recited Marx’s famous words, Change the world, followed by Rilke’s, which echoed not only Marx’s but also Nietzsche’s, illuminating a triangular pattern in the matrix: You must change your life. Change! I chewed on the word. I looked Ludo Bembo up and down. The word secreted a mild anxiety. Was there room for him in the Grand Tour of Exile? I was afraid he would derail me from my objectives. More than anything else in the world, I felt the need to record the uselessness of my family’s suffering in my notebook. That obligation to share our story, to sound it out as an alarm, had been assigned to me by my dead father and was so exhaustive that it competed with every rudimentary need: food, sleep, the company of others. And yet I was in a divided frame of mind. I knew I was also afraid that without another person anchoring me to this trifling universe I would fade into the ether entirely, vanish into nothingness.

  Ludo reached out and squeezed my hand.

  “That’s my sick hand!” I told him, trying to squash my desire. But, like a phoenix, it rose its dusty head once more.

  We walked out into the yolky light of midday. Before we each went our own way, we agreed to meet in the afternoon at the side entrance of the Boqueria between the vegetable stalls. I watched Ludo retreat through the brutal grid of L’Eixample. Then I walked to a corner newsstand, which was run by a middle-aged woman with a fleshy face and kind eyes. I bought the paper. I checked to see if there was news of the Grand Tour of Exile. Perhaps Morales had dispatched a press release. I stood there and leafed through every page. Nothing. Not a word. There was news of a homicide-suicide, of stranded boats loaded with refugees adrift in that great green sea, of kings and queens, of politicians and their wives.

  “Tourist?” the owner exclaimed, nosily craning her head out of the newsstand’s opening, gesturing at the carefully arranged rows of trinkets, guidebooks, and maps of the city.

  “No,” I exclaimed impatiently in Catalan. “A returning exile!”

  She reeled her head back into the enclosure of the newsstand.

  I picked up a map of Barcelona and slid it between my fingers. It was a pocket-size laminated map that folded conveniently over itself. Where would the Spaniards be, I thought, without Unamuno, the man who had introduced them to the art of paper folding? I purchased it. Then, thinking of Borges’s words, I asked the fleshy-faced woman if, in her opinion, the map I had bought was conscionable or unconscionable. She pretended not to hear me, so I repeated the question. “Conscionable or unconscionable?” I posed. But her phone rang before she could respond, and she walked to the back of the newsstand to pick it up.

  “Una nena, una nena!” I heard her exclaim a second later. A girl had been born. She had popped her veiny blue head into this woman’s life.

  I folded the newspaper and tucked it into my notebook. Then I opened the map. I searched for the street I was standing on. Carrer de Girona. When I found the street, I pointed at it and simultaneously tapped my foot against the ground in order to indicate to the various intersecting surfaces of the city that I, Zebra, Dame of the Void, was as receptive as an antenna, ready to channel information; that my double mind, which contained multiple subminds, each motored by a different language, was a fertile ground for receiving signals from the palimpsest of time that is, it goes without saying, contained within the Matrix of Literature. The first private communiqué I received kindly suggested I pass the map along to someone else with the following note: “Consider yourself warned: This map, like all maps, is a lie. Literature is the only true form of cartography in the world.”

  I transcribed the message onto the map’s borders and then walked to the grocer’s. As soon as the grocer saw me, his face took on the disgruntled expression of a pug.

  “I come bearing gifts,” I said.

  No sooner had I spoken than the grocer’s face slackened and turned red as if it had been grilled and deboned. I put the map on the counter and told him that enclosed in the map is a message from the Matrix of Literature, indeed from the illustrious Borges, one of the matrix’s greatest masterminds, and that he, the grocer, a primitive, miserly, and nonliterary man, should consider himself lucky that I had chosen him as the recipient. “Open the map and read what I have transcribed in the margins,” I ordered.

  After a moment’s hesitation, he opened the map. I watched him work the laminated edges with his gnarled walnut-stained fingers. He spread the map across the glass counter and examined it under the yellow glow of a dusty overhead light. He studied the map for a moment, then, like a man lost at sea, he mumbled to himself: “‘Consider yourself warned: This map, like all maps, is a lie. Literature is the only true form of cartography in the world.’”

  “Excellent,” I said. “Message transmitted.”

  The grocer looked bewildered, as though he had been slapped. I ignored the peaks and valleys of his facial expressions. There were things he needed to reflect on in order to transcend his ignorant state. To butter him up, I pointed at his poster of Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory and complimented him on his choice of art. After that, I told him that he would be a fool to ignore Borges’s message, since Borges had a great deal to teach us about the labyrinthine nature of both voluntary and involuntary memory, not to mention historical versus private memory, themes that greatly concerned Freud as well—I was speaking with the voice of my manifesto—the man who dared to ask: Where does a thought go when it is forg
otten?

  That did it. I had pushed the grocer over the edge. In a resentful nasal tone, he told me that it was clear to him that I suffered from certain incorrigible limitations and that I should get out before he was tempted to throw produce at me. He said this last part while looking sorrowfully at his pile of black walnuts. I wondered what those walnuts symbolized for him. His cat appeared with its orange stripes and its tail in the air, and this seemed to calm him, at least momentarily.

  I took advantage of that brief caesura to stroke my notebook. I lifted it and smelled the musty sheets. Then, in the gentlest of tones, I said to the grocer: “My dear grocer, no one is spared. Someday you, too, will join the world’s unlucky, the world’s foot soldiers, the bearers of grief. And when that day arrives, you will finally understand that a book is a counselor, a multitude of counselors, and you will think back on me fondly.”

  Naturally, nothing more was said. A thick silence enveloped me as I walked out of the store. Before I left, I looked back at the grocer and his cat through the glass door. He was a changed man. He and his cat both seemed resigned, aware of their smallness, of their powerlessness in the grand scheme of life. But that awareness of the dark side would soon start working on their behalf; because once trespassed, darkness begins to yield to its survivors—to the unlucky lucky—the secret revenge of laughter. I stopped to look one last time through the glass door. I could no longer tell where the grocer ended and the cat began.