Call Me Zebra Read online

  Nevertheless, I didn’t want to remain mentorless forever. So I made an exception to my boycott of American institutes of so-called higher learning: José Emilio Morales, reluctant Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at New York University; Chilean exile (kicked in the rear by that madman Pinochet); fervent Communist (though he has learned to keep his politics to himself—he has mouths to feed in Chile); and ex-confidant of the deceased poet Pablo Neruda.

  I will never forget the first time I saw Morales. He was walking around this congested and surreal island—the self-proclaimed center of the world—with a copy of Neruda’s Tercera Residencia tucked into a pouch he had sewn into his suit jacket. Every fifteen minutes, he pulled the book out of his jacket, flipped it open to a random page, and breathed in one or two lines. I followed him all the way to Washington Square Park, where he walked the perimeter. At first he kept his arms clasped behind his back and his head hanging, pensive; then he lifted his arms up in front of his face, holding Neruda’s book in his hands. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Search the world over and you won’t find another man like him.

  He is a physically unique specimen. He has white hair; an unruly salt-and-pepper beard that grows in uneven patches; a round, oily nose; and small gray eyes that appear distorted due to the thickness of his reading glasses, which are held in place by the greasy end of his stubby nose. Like me, he is not attractive. Like me, he has an inward-looking gaze that suggests that at any moment he might sink into himself and disappear, vanishing from the earth entirely. But unlike me, the man is fixated on the color red. He wears red slacks, a red button-down, a red tweed suit jacket, red socks. The only contrast comes from his shoes, which are brown.

  I kept my eye on Morales for months. I didn’t want to approach him right away. I was afraid he would startle if I came on too suddenly. Every afternoon, during my father’s long naps, I set out to watch him walk the perimeter of the park with his head in Neruda’s book. He read with one eye, and with the other, he navigated the dogs, the hippies with their guitars, the skateboarders, the wealthy Lower West Siders with their fingerless gloves and frothing lattes. He never bumped into another person. He never tripped over a cable or the stumpy roots of a tree. One day, when the moment was ripe, I followed him all the way to his office at NYU. When he got to the door, he finally turned around, and as though he had eyes in the back of his head, he asked, in a surprisingly unguarded voice: “What do you want?”

  I told him I was in need of a mentor, and then I provided him with a few basic coordinates of my life. I exposed the nature of my relationship to books. I told him that my ill-fated ancestors and I had survived death through our intimate engagement with literature. Then, I thought to myself, engagement is too mild a word, so I replaced it with refuge. I said: “We, the ill-fated, have taken refuge in literature.” But this description also failed to communicate a sufficient level of intensity. With a hint of violence, I added: “Hear me! We have pitched our tattered tents in the dark forests of literature!”

  At this, Morales invited me into his office, which was long and rectangular and had a small boxy window overlooking an interior quad where a few sad trees that barely got enough sun were clawing the air. Without bothering to look at the floor, Morales stepped over a few rows of the books he had laid out on the floor in alphabetical order and sat down in the leather chair behind his desk. He leaned forward and rested his weight on his elbows. He said, “If you can cite the following lines of verse, I will take you on informally.” He leaned back and a wide grin spread across his face. He looked like an old dried flower, that white face with all the red cloth blooming around it. He said, “They can’t fire me if I do. They’ve tried many times to eradicate my presence from this campus. Communism is still treated as a crime in this country. Every year they ask me to sign a paper that says, I, José Emilio Morales, am not a Communist. I have never signed it, but still I wear red every day to get back at them for that piece of paper.”

  He reached up and turned on a dusty lamp. In a melodious tone full of drama and melancholy, he recited: “Oh pit of debris, ferocious cave of the shipwrecked.” He closed his eyes. Behind those thick glasses, his lids looked like raw dough. “In you the wars and the flights accumulated.”

  Every evening after watching Morales walk the perimeter of the park, I had returned home to read Neruda, the poet who moves through the subterranean channels of the human heart with expert precision. And so I said, “Easy breezy. ‘A Song of Despair,’ the honorable and deceased Pablo Neruda circa 1924.”

  “Ah,” he said, “you have pitched your tent in the same dark forests as I have.”

  That’s life. You travel the world over, aimless, friendless, adrift. Then suddenly you find another rodent who shares the sorrows of your juiced organs. I felt as though he had ironed out the wrinkled sheet of my heart.

  We agreed to hold weekly meetings in his office. I reveled in our encounters. I looked forward to them, and for their duration, I could feel an electric charge coursing through my void. At our first official meeting, I informed Morales that in order to honor my father, Abbas Abbas Hosseini, a man whose mind was as vast as the library of Babel, I intended to compose a manifesto titled “A Philosophy of Totality: The Matrix of Literature.”

  “Methodology?” he asked, removing his glasses and rubbing his eyes.

  “Memorization,” I offered.

  He nodded respectfully.

  I informed Morales that I wanted my mind to become so elastic it would be capable of containing all of literature; once internalized, the maxims, diatribes, and verses written by the Great Writers of the Past, my ingenious forebears, would begin to mingle spontaneously with one another in the decimated fields of my consciousness and produce unexpected but truthful associations that I planned to record in the manifesto for the good of my fellow vermin. Memorization, I declared, is the Hosseini way. I told him that we have combated the potential loss of will to power, a natural consequence of war and our lifelong ill-fatedness, by reciting lines from the vast web of literature. Memorization, I insisted, is how we have kept our minds engaged, decolonized; it is how we have kept ourselves from giving in. We, I told him, employing a conclusive tone, are the scribes of the future. We are the guardians of the archive of literature.

  Though he agreed to test my memorization skills during our weekly meetings, he was quick to follow up with a countercondition. If we were going to work together, he said, employing an edifying tone, he needed to know that I understood and would abide by one thing.

  “What thing?” I asked.

  He answered with the following: There is no such thing as reading; there is only rereading. As cool as a cucumber, he relayed his expectation that I should read every book several times at different hours and in different settings, and that I should recite quotes in the original language as well as the English translation. I agreed. It was a brilliant idea. I would be dispatching different parts of my mind—each language I had learned was housed in a subsector of the same quadrant—to metabolize texts. In other words, I would approach each text from multiple angles, employing the sum of all my disparate parts.

  All winter, I studied under his guidance; I read more than I had ever read before. I matured my Spanish, Italian, Catalan—languages over which Morales had an impeccable command. I worked my way through the canon, then through the avant-garde. I read this and then that. I underlined, scrutinized, read again. I skipped over certain things to make way for others. I read various translations of the classics. I combed through every line multiple times. Each time, as Morales had implied, the line appeared differently. It made a different sound, produced a different meaning, stirred awake this or that buried self.

  I reported all of this to Morales during our weekly meetings, which he spent awkwardly pacing through his overflowing office in his Communist uniform, hands clasped behind his back, head hanging as he stepped over stacked columns of books, empty boxes, unopened mail. Every once in a while, he paused to push his glas
ses up the bridge of his nose.

  If I really impressed him with my pronunciation and memorization skills, he would say, “Brava, brava!” and gently tap my head with his spent copy of Tercera Residencia. Under the shadow of that book, I recited the works of Jorge Luis Borges, Octavio Paz, Clarice Lispector, Cristina Peri Rossi, Alejo Carpentier, María Luisa Bombal, Miguel de Cervantes, Dante Alighieri, Francesco Petrarca, Josep Pla, Mercè Rodoreda, J. V. Foix, Quim Monzó, Salvador Espriu. The list went on and on until the names blurred together.

  On a particularly blustery day in January, while I was headed toward Morales’s office for my weekly recitation, a girl with a nose piercing and a purple Mohawk and pale green eyes that looked out from their sockets with a mixture of pride and disgust stopped me near Washington Square Park.

  “Not so fast,” she said, raising her gloved hand as if I had been trying to avoid her.

  I stopped. She was tall and thin, all angles, no curves, as sharp as a whip. She looked like a futurist statue. Even as she stood still, she gave the appearance of being in motion, as if she were headed someplace more important, where things stood a chance of being resolved. She was wearing a studded dog collar, and the metal bits kept catching the bright winter light, nearly blinding me. She had deliberately cut holes in each layer of her outfit. She wore black surfaces all the way down, leading me to conclude that it was her sole purpose in life to expose the depth of the darkness that surrounds us, to signal the infinite and stratified nature of the abyss. I immediately liked her.

  She pulled a book out of her bag and knocked me over the head with it in the same way Morales would knock me over the head with his copy of Neruda’s saddest poems. I never knew which good-bye between my father and me would be our last, and these whacks, delivered from the realm of literature, drew me out of the fog that settled over me each time I left our apartment. I examined her face. I understood immediately: She, too, had been an informal pupil of his. There were many of us. Morales was using official means to nurture the dissident tendencies of his unofficial advisees, who had flocked to him like moths to a light. No wonder the university was trying to fire him.

  “I studied with Morales for a while,” she spat out. “And it’s true, there is no one like him.” She paused thoughtfully and turned her nose to the sky. Then she added, “But he never gave me this.” She handed me the book she had pulled out of her bag. “This is a book one anarchist woman gives to another. Read it. It will make you feel a lot better about all of this shit.”

  I looked at the book. It was Don Quixote by Kathy Acker. I had never heard of her before, and I felt my heart quicken with excitement at the thought of discovering this radical woman’s sentences. The cover was a glossy gray blue, and it featured a photograph of the author. In the picture, she has her back to the camera. Her shoulders are bare, exposing a flower tattoo that extends across her upper back. The photograph appears to have been ripped to pieces and then fit together along the edges of the seams. I took these fissures to be indicative of what lay between the covers. I was stunned by the beauty of the composition. By the time I looked back up, the girl had begun walking away. I stood there and watched her; her Mohawk made an incision in the sky, tearing the godless heavens asunder.

  I sat in the park at the foot of the commemorative statue of Giuseppe Garibaldi. I saluted the short, bearded “father of fathers” drawing his sword and, under his aura of resolve, prepared to inhabit Acker’s sentences. I took pleasure in lifting the book to my nose. I picked up mild tones of sage, black olives, nicotine. I noticed wine stains on the spine. The pages were brittle, yellow. I opened the book three times at random. In the Hosseini tradition, I consulted it as if it were an oracle.

  I read: Isolation is a political tool.

  Then: I have left behind all that I know, so I go into the room of my death.

  And finally: I travelled all over the world, looking for trouble.

  As I closed the book, I thought to myself, these three prophecies will come to mean something very soon.

  Morales didn’t have a dearth of official students. I often bumped into a particularly banal pair of them on my way to his office. Alice and Tomaso were a feckless duo with broad, plain foreheads. They wore overalls and thick old-man glasses (it was unclear to me why they dressed alike), and they called themselves the New Poets. They walked around fluffing their feathers and boasting about having been admitted to the master of fine arts in poetry program. A couple of amateurs. While they struggled to compose a single verse a month, I read and wrote until my fingers were bruised.

  I wanted nothing to do with them, but they were clingy, wide-eyed, curious types with spongy cheeks and large ears; the kind of undiscerning, overprivileged humans who ask inane questions and then listen to the answers with their mouths ajar.

  That afternoon, I was particularly loath to talk to them. My hand was burning from holding Acker’s book. I wanted to get through my meeting with Morales as quickly as possible so I could return to my apartment, where my father would likely be reclining on his mattress, and read the book cover to cover.

  The New Poets beckoned as we crossed paths in the hallway. “A minute of small talk?”

  Small talk! Their diction was as terrible as their breath. I had had it with them. I told them that I would never use the term small talk, let alone engage in it as an activity. I considered speaking to be a grand waste of time unless its purpose was to get the big unsaid truths out in the open. I declared: “I have no time for small talk! While you two expose yourselves to the detrimental effects of a formal education—reduced self-knowledge, submission to authority, covert institutional indoctrination in linear time—I am employing unorthodox methods of learning in order to facilitate grand associative leaps, heightened cognition, and transcendental intellectualism, because with my father’s death fast approaching”—I bore into them with my eyes—“it is my duty, as the last remaining member of the Autodidacts, Anarchists, and Atheists, to make a major philosophical intervention aimed at correcting the skewed and pitifully narrow perception of the world’s pseudo intellectuals and heretics, your erroneous brethren!” The words came out with such ease, with such deliberate organization, that I realized they had been sitting on the tip of my tongue awaiting their turn to manifest.

  The New Poets stood with their backs against the wall, looking mystified and confused. They gawked at me as if I were an exotic animal they were seeing for the first time, a wildly frustrated creature pacing inside a cage. I could see saliva pooling in their open mouths. Throughout my monologue—let’s call it what it was, an intervention—they were nodding at me with so much fervor I thought their heads had come loose. When they finally got it together, they asked me if I wanted to go eat a taco with them.

  “A taco?” I asked. There was smoke coming out of my ears.

  “A taco!” they implored in unison, as if they were twins.

  There was no use in repeating myself. That pair wouldn’t be able to see themselves clearly if I held a mirror up to their tongues.

  “I don’t eat tacos,” I said, and they dropped the subject.

  ̷̷̷̷̷̷̷̷̷̷̷̷̷

  The events of that drafty day marked a turning point in my thinking. The intervention I had spontaneously offered to the New Poets, the way those words had glided out of my mouth, grand associative leaps, heightened cognition, transcendental intellectualism, helped me to realize that I was on the cusp of a revelation. By funneling extreme amounts of literature into my mind, I had engineered it to make a Grand Leap in Consciousness. All that was left to do was to push things over the edge, the way our exodus, in combination with my mother’s untimely death, had shoved my father and me over the threshold of sense.

  I did this by reading even more intensely than before, with a passion bordering on madness—madness contained, the irrational in the palm of my hand—and with what I had identified through my studies as the Paranoiac-Critical approach of Dalí; a spontaneous method of irrational knowledge that allowed
me to carve ever more delirious associative pathways within and among texts and therefore to expedite the plan I had been hatching all along: a vast constellation of literary networks I could inhabit during the period of grief that awaited me due to the rapid decline of my father’s health. In other words, due to his imminent death.

  The night of my encounter with the New Poets, while my father was fast asleep, snoring through his mustache, I walked in concentric circles honing my plan. I said out loud to no one, “In contradistinction to the New Poets—literary attachés to the master of fine arts in poetry, a pair of disengaged numbskulls who lazily read with their eyes—I, outsider and literary terrorist in training, read not with my eyes but with my consciousness, scanning the stratified layers embedded in each text like an archaeologist in an excavation site!”

  The next morning, I found my father in a fit. He was in a horrifyingly bad mood. It was obvious why. We both could see that my plan to compose a manifesto and his approaching death—his disintegration and eventual reabsorption into the mind of the universe—were inversely related. He pushed his glass of tea over the edge of the dining table with the end of his cane. It shattered, and I had to clean up after him. I looked around. The apartment was in a terrible state: dirty, disorderly, its corners patched with cobwebs that matched my father’s white-haired armpits. “This,” I said somberly, “is a Room of Broken Heirlooms.” At that, he fixed his eyes on me. His gaze was loaded with helplessness and rage. I watched him try to take in the circumstances of our lives, but he couldn’t. A barrier had gone up, and he was stuck on the other side of it looking as lost and bewildered as I had felt as a child. I nearly wept as I looked back at him. I turned away to conceal my pain.