Call Me Zebra Read online

  “Should I go on?” I asked. But before I could, I was interrupted.

  The flight attendant burst into the cabin and came running up the aisle. She landed in her jump seat. I heard her clear her throat. I leaned over my neighbor and looked down the aisle. The attendant sat facing us, her captive passengers. I watched her flick three imaginary specks of dust off her pencil skirt with the back of her hand—whoosh, whoosh, whoosh. She crossed her legs, strapped herself in. Military precision, hers.

  My neighbor shifted in her seat. For the first time, I took in the details of her face. She had rosy cheeks and a flat, oily nose and wispy hair, which she had coiled up on the crown of her head. Her head was tilted to one side, and there was a peanut stuck in the crease of her double chin. I studied her hands. She was holding an open bag of trail mix. I helped myself to a peanut, to some chocolate. The copilot came on again and announced that there would be more turbulence ahead.

  He said: “Keep calm and pilot on!” He laughed vigorously at himself.

  My mind was suddenly flooded with incongruous memories of Dante the Pilgrim. Easy to be calm about life, I thought, but not so easy to shuttle between life and death, between the persistence of memory and oblivion, like a lost pilgrim, an exile, neither here nor there. At least the pilgrim was midway through the journey of our life when he found himself banished into the dark forests of exile far from everyone. I was not even halfway through mine when its infrastructure, meager to begin with, was extinguished in a two-pronged blow. I felt the toxic fumes of my parents’ deaths rise through my void. I could barely keep down my stomach.

  The engines picked up speed. Out in the distance, the clouds were beginning to break up. This was the last stretch before the wide-open sky. I could hear the motors revving furiously beneath the wings, which were trembling and folding upward. My palms began to sweat. I dried my hands on the bony knobs of my knees. If we crashed, who would die first? I didn’t have my neighbor’s padding. Suddenly, everything went still and silent, as though the plane were hovering in the sky without power and was about to drop. The flight attendant was still strapped in her jump seat. She stared ahead with glassy, unperturbed eyes. She looked like a mannequin. The plane tilted sharply to one side.

  “Brace!” the mannequin yelled. There was a burst of wind.

  A food cart that had been stowed away broke free and rolled down the aisle. A man’s hairy hands fanned out to catch it. The way his hands launched out from the peripheries in desperation reminded me of my father’s flailing his arms as he recited lines of literature, and then of the distorted bodies of the men and women that Dante, the exiled poet-pilgrim, had to witness as he worked his way down the spiral of hell into the icy core of the universe. I thought of sharing all of this with my neighbor. I wanted to tell her that my exile had evacuated all meaning from my life, left me with nothing, with no choice but to pursue that nothing, that nothingness of death that, as it turns out, is the essence and privilege of literature. I reached for my notebook and again sniffed its pages. I recited to myself: The straight way was lost.

  “Lost,” I said out loud, and clicked my tongue.

  “Listen to this,” I said, turning to my neighbor. “I came to myself in a dark wood / for the straight way was lost. Dante, circa 1320. And now listen to this: In a village of La Mancha the name of which I have no desire to recall. Cervantes, 1605.” The opening lines of those two books had begun to form a kind of slogan for my journey. Reciting them had helped to settle my stomach.

  “Do you see the connection?” I asked. Then I said, making a dramatic gesture, “You see, these books were conceived at the site of a rupture, a trauma; they are about loss of identity, about death!”

  My neighbor stirred in her seat. Her head dropped again to the opposite side, and she momentarily opened her eyes. I leaned over to pry. Her eyes were gray blue. She began to snore more loudly. I was close enough to her face that I could smell her malodorous breath. I imagined forest insects crawling out of that bird’s nest on her head.

  “Never mind,” I said, and sat back.

  I turned away from her and looked out the window. The sky was clear. We had made it to the other side. We had arrived at the golden blue sky I had seen in the distance. We had arrived at what only a moment ago had been the future, and in its soft atmosphere, the plane glided with ease. I looked back at the darkness that was now behind us. I saluted the abyss of my past and thought of the exile that had repeated throughout my life like a bad joke, like a wretched eternal return that had leveled my psyche and left in its wake a void through which I could hear the wind whistle.

  The pilot said, “We have a few hours left until we land in Barcelona.”

  Barcelona. I pictured General Franco’s face: the puffy, childlike cheeks; the distant, austere look in his eyes; his squared mustache; his chin always held high as if he were proudly surveying the spoils of his labor—the look of an adult harboring an angry, tormented inner child. I remembered my father saying that we, like the Catalans, had survived—no, thrived—under the sign of death, under the threat of erasure. That’s why we had fled to Barcelona: because the Catalans, according to my father, were our brethren, and Barcelona—the City of Bombs, the Rose of Fire, the Manchester of the Mediterranean—was the home port of the AAA. I got a whiff of my father. He smelled like bergamot, cardamom, and eucalyptus. Just then, a large cascading cloud rolled over the wings of the plane to a great and striking effect. It reminded me of Nietzsche’s mustache and my father. I watched as it glided over the plane. I remembered reading Dalí’s words. That mustache is a Wagnerian mustache, the mustache of a depressive! He hated Nietzsche’s mustache.

  The cloud quickly disappeared. I pictured Dalí’s paintings, his hyperreal renditions of the Catalan landscape, and immediately remembered walking along the white shores of Catalonia with my father, climbing to the top of a huge granite cliff out of which cork trees and marine pines emerged like horns. The Mediterranean Sea lay slack and purple below, and black birds darted through the sky at dusk like missiles. I remembered being pushed along the coast by the tramontana, that great wind that left in its wake a polished, limpid, unornamented sky. I wanted to have that emptiness—that flat periwinkle expanse rinsed clean by the hand of the tramontana—hanging over my head every day. That void was the same void I had experienced when my father had placed the black band of blindness over my eyes as we were crossing into Turkey. I wanted to inhabit literature beneath that sky that represented the nothingness of my ill-fated life, the void of exile.

  The flight attendant got up and reached for the intercom. She fixed her glassy eyes on us, and announced, icy, cold, metallic, “You are now free to move about the cabin.”

  Free. I parsed that word—free—on my tongue. I remembered the mathematical principle I had devised in the weeks following my father’s burial: liberty = death = nothingness = literature. I wanted to stamp my neighbor’s body with that formula. I wanted to impart an education to her. Others should stand to benefit from the knowledge arriving to me in spontaneous droves from the Matrix of Literature. What good are the ill-fated if we do not open our fellow men’s eyes to their willful blindness? I retrieved a red pen from my belongings and traced the formula in a circle on her hand. It looked like ringworm.

  On that first evening in Barcelona, I met Ludovico Bembo. He came to pick me up at the airport, thanks to Morales—Chilean exile, Communist who had redistributed university money to fund the Grand Tour of Exile, beloved literary guru with a knobby forehead who had called in favors on my behalf.

  According to Morales, Ludovico Bembo, who went by Ludo, was a runaway philologist from Italy and the literary protégé of an old friend of his who had warned Ludo Bembo to get out from underneath the shadow of Berlusconi as quickly as possible because—according to her logic, which was not unlike my father’s—a country run by a buffoon is no longer a place to think. Before departing, I’d also conducted my own investigation into Ludo Bembo and discovered that he was a man of ex
ceptional literary pedigree. He was a descendent of none other than Pietro Bembo, the famous sixteenth-century literary scholar, poet, Petrarch connoisseur, and member of the Knights Hospitaller. Pietro Bembo’s father, Bernardo Bembo, had erected a tomb to Dante Alighieri in Ravenna, a city that I discovered was referred to by the mighty Russian symbolist Alexander Blok as the realm of death, and by the wild Oscar Wilde as the city where Dante sleeps, where Byron loved to dwell. From all of this, I’d deduced that, like me, Ludo Bembo was part of the .1 percent.

  As I walked through the airport, I imagined Ludo Bembo standing in the dusk air beneath a row of palms at the curb, sniffing the brackish Barcelona air. I thought to myself that even though Ludo Bembo, an expatriated Italian living in Catalonia, is among the world’s unfortunate he isn’t as unlucky as I am. I was thinking of the Pyramid of Exile, which I had conceived of upon exiting the New World. I located myself somewhere in the middle of the pyramid, sandwiched between an infinite number of sorrowful rodents who are pressed together in the craggy plateaus beneath me and the more fortunate ones like Ludo Bembo, who occupy the upper echelons.

  “Is that your final assessment?” I posed to myself.

  “Yes, Ludo Bembo belongs in the upper echelons of the Pyramid of Exile,” I replied, “because unlike me, who has been betrayed repeatedly by the treacherous hands of history, Ludo Bembo has only been pushed in a westward direction once, leaving him a hop, skip, and a jump away from his hometown of Florence. I have had to travel in punctuated movements from East to West with such dizzying frequency that I remember nothing. No, not nothing,” I corrected. “Nothing except the shards of memory that shoot up at random from the swampy lagoons of my mind to pierce the surface of my consciousness with fresh wounds.”

  Moments later, while hovering over the carousel at the baggage claim, I felt my father’s mind spinning inside my own. He was cobbling together sentences. He was funneling information to me from beyond the grave. I heard his voice, thin, wispy: The ruins of the world are hiding in plain sight, he whispered. Future exiles are perpetually manufactured in the factory of war. Just then, the chest-shaped suitcase that I had used to transport my dead father to his grave tumbled down the chute and landed on the shiny black conveyor belt. It looked like an abandoned body bag. I leaned over it, eager to reclaim the sorry remains of my past, but then something came over me, a kind of melancholy bemusement, and I stepped back to regard it affectionately as it whizzed around on the moving belt. I watched it spin. A bitter scent rose from my suitcase in wafts; it was the putrid odor of my father’s death. Each time I inhaled it, it burned my nose and caused my void to swell.

  The carousel finally stopped spinning. The motors died down. I heard the stupid laugh of a child. I looked down. The laugh was being directed at me by a little girl in a pink dress. “This is a coffin!” I exclaimed to her, winking. She retreated behind her mother, who was standing next to her, and looked at me with a fixed and fearful eye.

  I removed my suitcase from the carousel and dragged it across the floor. The automated doors pumped open. I heard them say: “Zebra, your father may be dead, your mother may be buried under a lone date palm in no-man’s-land, your ass may be rotting in the desert, but don’t forget that you have inherited a passport through the inky sweat of your father. Know your privilege. Welcome to the Grand Tour of Exile!”

  Outside, Ludo Bembo, a multilingual man who spoke English with native fluency, was standing at the curb just as I had imagined he would be. He looked alert, at the ready, like a man who is always at his post. He was holding a sign that read: Here to reclaim José Emilio Morales’s friend. I searched his face. He was surprisingly good-looking. He had curly hair, round glasses, a Roman nose that reminded me of the flank of a mountain, a charming gap between his front teeth (he was smiling), and like the true and pedigreed gentleman he was, he had a pipe and a silk handkerchief tucked into the breast pocket of his suit jacket. I examined his aura. It had an antique veneer. It was the aura of a man whose energy field has been fattened with the residue of his literary ancestors, the Bembos.

  He waved at me. I observed his hands. They were delicate, feminine, nimble. I imagined him running those hands over my legs. I imagined telling him the truth about my existence: that I, Zebra, alias Dame of the Void, am in worse condition than Dante the Pilgrim, because I have never encountered the straight way; my life has been crooked from the start, and that overexposure to grief has flattened my heart into a sheet of paper. It would have been an honest introduction. But something utterly strange came out of my mouth instead. My words were misshapen by a kind of nervous affliction. “Have you ever possessed me?” I asked, pointing at his sign.

  He craned his neck over it. “Possessed you?” he echoed. Then he looked at me, and his pupils instinctively narrowed. He stepped back toward his car, a banged-up two-door 1980s Fiat. I heard him clear his throat. He adjusted his glasses on the bridge of his nose. Then he gathered himself and reached out to shake my hand.

  “I’m Ludovico Bembo. You can call me Ludo. It’s a pleasure to meet you,” he said, employing a formal professorial tone. He leaned in and gave me two kisses.

  In the space between our faces, I saw an infinite number of miniature Bembos. Those tiny men opened their mouths, and said, To wish is little; we must long with the utmost eagerness to gain our end. I recognized the quote. Ovid through Petrarch. I stepped forward. I was channeling Ludo’s points of reference.

  “Technically speaking,” I said, pointing again at his sign, “you can only reclaim something if you’ve claimed it once before.”

  A miserable pause ensued.

  In that gloomy silence, I searched his face. His expression was equal parts intrigued and guarded. I could see the wheels of his mind spinning. I considered telling him that our ancestors—his and mine—have been mingling in the Matrix of Literature since time immemorial and that, metaphysically speaking, he and I cohabit the Pyramid of Exile where he, in his privileged position relative to mine, is afforded a great deal of oxygen as well as the good graces of those below him, like me, who shoulder his weight. At this, I pictured my mother buried under the stone house that had come down on her head, and I heard her words echo across a great distance. Who will marry her? Who will feed her once we are dead? I nearly said, We have all the necessary ingredients for an arranged marriage! But before I had a chance to speak, Ludo plowed ahead with that linear, bureaucratic mind of his.

  “Did you get any sleep on the plane?” he asked. He maneuvered around me and crossed to the back of the car, his gestures confident, calculated, precise.

  “The plane?” I huffed. I was annoyed by how quickly he had engineered a change in topic. I pictured the stifling sky we had flown through. I said: “I flew here on the back of an ass!”

  He let out a short rudimentary laugh, and in that laugh, I diagnosed the dryness of his character. A terrifying seriousness that lifted my spirits because it confirmed his relation to the Bembos, a somber bunch of poets. People shuttled past us on either side. A second later, a swallow fell through the sky. It hit a palm on the opposite side of the road and landed on the ground. It was dead.

  “Did you see that?” I said to Ludo. He was fussing with the trunk of his car.

  “Birds die all the time,” he said, with the dull indifference of an administrator.

  I looked up at the sky. It was dusk. The dead swallow’s verminous friends appeared, a hovering black mass checking out the scene of death. A moment later, the birds gave up, disappeared. They left a streak of ink across the sky. The streak read: Like Sancho Panza to Don Quixote, so too Ludo Bembo to Zebra. I laughed with childish ebullience. I was giddy, weary, and worn-down from the trials and tribulations of my Final Exit and, at the same time, astonished, amazed that I had managed to get away from that wretched New World that had claimed my father’s life. My eyes misted over. Ludo cast me a circumspect look over the trunk of his car. I crossed behind the Fiat. I was eager to pose my question again, to return to the subjec
t of his signage. “Have you e-ver po-ssessed me?” I asked.

  Ludo leaned against the trunk. His mouth looked like a sealed envelope. I wanted to open that envelope. I said, “Ludo Bembo, I, Zebra, beg of you: Speak now or forever hold your peace!”

  His mouth opened. “That’s not the name I was given,” he said tersely. His cheeks puffed out a little, like a fish’s gills.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “I recently acquired a new name.” I felt versions of my former self diffuse through my void. It was a terrible sensation. I scurried up to him to distract myself. “Now tell me: Have you ever possessed me?”

  He stuck his head in the trunk. A weary little voice spilled out from inside that cavernous void: “It was just a sign!” he mumbled tiredly. He sounded as if someone had removed his lungs.

  “If it’s just a sign, then why not play a little?”

  His head reemerged. My commitment to reinvigorating him was producing moderate results.

  “To the best of my knowledge, I, Ludo Bembo, have never claimed you before this moment.” His tone, though firm, revealed undercurrents of exhaustion; it was as if he had been called to the witness stand in a court of law.

  I laughed. A second later, a smile broke across his face. It was a jagged, uncertain smile, but it was a smile nonetheless. He was coming along.

  “So you stand corrected?” I asked.

  “Sure,” he said, and plunged that curly head of his back into the trunk. I watched him push a car jack and some books aside to make room for my suitcase.

  Security officers in neon vests were waving their hands at waist level, trying to get us to move along. I was standing directly behind Ludo. I was looking at his ass. It looked like a bowl of fruit. I heard him murmur something into the Fiat. One of the security guards approached us. A red-faced man with a goatee and a gash for a mouth. He ordered us to get going. Ludo nodded apologetically. Then he bent over my suitcase to pick it up.