Call Me Zebra Read online

  “Ready?” he asked.

  “Yes, but be careful,” I replied, pointing at my suitcase. “This here is the corpse of my past.”

  I saw his face fall a little.

  A moment later, we found ourselves in the car, enveloped in a dismal silence. I considered explaining myself. I considered telling Ludo Bembo that the corpse of my past is a metonym for my library of books, but it occurred to me that if I did the mood, after briefly trending upward, would most certainly wilt even further than the dire straits it was currently in. So I sat there quietly instead. I watched Ludo Bembo stuff his pipe, and roll the window down. He leaned his head back and sucked, then blew the smoke out of his mouth and nose. His eyes looked soft, sensual; his lips moist. Then he sat up, pushed the gearshift into first, and we drove off.

  I watched the airport retreat into the darkness through the car’s side mirror. When I looked up, I saw the flank of Montjuïc. My father and I had hiked that flank. I remembered his telling me that Catalonia’s thinkers had been shot and tossed over the side by Franco’s men; they had been kicked into an abandoned stone quarry and left to rot in the wind and the rain. I should have known then and there that the flank was a sign of the twists and turns ahead of me and Ludo Bembo.

  We maneuvered around a series of roundabouts and merged onto the highway. We drove past factories, metal-processing plants, strips of freeway. The sky was darkening by degrees. Again, I could feel my father’s mind spinning within my own. He whispered: The exile is the cannibal of history. I let out a dark and labored laugh.

  “What’s so funny?” Ludo asked, drawing on the end of his pipe with his sublime wet lips.

  I considered telling him about the lines of literature that had become slogans for my Grand Tour of Exile. I considered telling him that I was laughing at the fate of the exile because, in order to survive, the exile must carve out a future that is neither discontinuous from the past nor a false replica of it, which is, of course, an impossible task because in this dissociative world of radical ruptures there are only two options made available: the amnesia of Don Quixote or the passionate yearning and nostalgia of Dante the Pilgrim. I considered telling him that the exile’s options are total forgetfulness or a complete collapse into the claw of history, both of which lead to discontent and to a self-perpetuating cycle of violence. But after all that thinking, I didn’t say anything; I wasn’t sure Ludo Bembo would understand. I sat there watching him look at the road through his glasses, those round silver-rimmed spectacles of his until, prompted by a glance he cast in my direction, I finally lied. Or rather I provided him with a red herring. I said: “With mirth and laughter let old wrinkles come. Shakespeare’s golden words.”

  “So you are laughing in order to age well?”

  “Yes,” I retorted. “Like a good pickle!”

  He let out a generic grunt.

  We looked at each other, and even though his lips were wet, he managed to let out a dry, stiff smile, a Bembo smile, which I recognized from the various portraits I’d seen of his bearded ancestors. I decided to reward him for his effort.

  “If you must know, I’m laughing because I’ve devised a terrific theory.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The Theory of the Pyramid of Exile.”

  Ludo pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. His expression was one of quiet contemplation. “Go on.”

  “Think of Ravenna,” I said. “Think of Dante buried there in exile. Forgotten. Abandoned. Banished. He lives at the bottom of the pyramid. Not in its catacombs, which are reserved for those even less fortunate than Dante, but at the bottom nevertheless. But you,” I said, “live somewhere at the top of the pyramid. As a man in voluntary exile, you have access to the most oxygen. You are at the peak of a mountain, filling your lungs with pure oxygenated air, unaware that each time you take a step you are stomping on the heads of those less fortunate than you. I am one of those,” I said. “I live in the middle of the pyramid. There is a sea of refugees beneath me. The pyramid constantly gets fed with fresh blood.”

  “The upper echelons?” he retorted. “Not bad.” He seemed pleased with himself.

  We made a series of ninety-degree turns and maneuvered around octagonal chamfered blocks until he located the address I had given him: Carrer de Girona, 37. I was renting a room from a certain Quim Monzó. We were in the somber grid of L’Eixample, a neighborhood designed by Ildefons Cerdà, a whiskered man obsessed with geometric lines. I looked through the window at the rectangular nineteenth-century buildings with their delicate ironwork balconies, floor-to-ceiling windows sealed with wooden shutters, and high angular foreheads evoking alertness, intelligence, equanimity.

  “So this is it,” Ludo said, pulling into an empty spot beneath a row of plane trees. He turned on the overhead light, wrote his number down on a piece of paper, and handed it to me. “I teach at the university most days, but there’s always someone who can cover for me.” He put his hand on my leg. I let it sit there. I felt heat radiate out from his palm. I felt his cardboard rigidity give way to longing, to a deep tenderness; how easily one person can become laced with another. Then he lifted his hand and tucked my hair behind my ear. I was convinced my lecture had turned him around, rehabilitated his tone. So I barreled on.

  “I’d like to know where you live. You already know where I will be living, which gives you an unfair advantage. But before you answer,” I said, putting my hand up to stop him, “I’d like to acknowledge that this is a ludicrous, one-dimensional, earthbound question. No one really occupies a concrete, singular position in space, which is what the question erroneously implies. Where do you live?” I huffed mockingly. “We should really be asking in what places do you tend to lead your multiple lives or what is the geography of your inner world because, as much as we would like to divide life along categorical lines, interior and exterior, we can’t, because each of those surfaces is composed of other intersecting surfaces, which means that life, generally speaking, is a confused and blurred experience. Let’s return to Dante for a moment. Think of the first verse of The Divine Comedy: The straight way was lost. Blurred and lost.”

  As cool as a cucumber, he said, “I live in Girona. You’re welcome to come and see for yourself if the roads are straight or crooked.”

  “Finally,” I said, “a thorough answer.” I didn’t tell him I had been to Girona long ago with my father. I just applauded him for having found his stride.

  He looked like a frog had jumped down his throat. I looked around distractedly. There were cars parked alongside the curbs, small delivery trucks double-parked on the corners, bikes and scooters between the pruned plane trees on the sidewalks. I saw a few people drunkenly stumble out of a café. Night was spreading its dark wings, stroking Barcelona to sleep. I turned back to Ludo.

  “So you came all the way to Barcelona from Girona just to pick me up?” I asked.

  “We pass our favors forward here. It seems my mentor owed your mentor a favor.”

  “How long do you pass them forward for?”

  “Generations,” he said.

  “Then I suppose this is as good a moment as any to tell you that all of my relatives are dead. With the exception of Morales, I have no contacts left in this vast and ghastly universe.”

  I thought of my suitcase. When I had pulled my father out of the chest, his mustache had been bent out of shape. I’d had to flatten it into place by putting my hand over his mouth while using the other to tug on the long bristly ends of his mustache. As I remembered this, I felt a sudden tightness in my chest. It was as if the edges of my paper heart were being folded and torn at the seams.

  “Well,” Ludo said callously, as I sat there remembering the trials and tribulations of my dead father’s mustache. “It’s a good thing you can always procreate.”

  I pressed my hand against my chest to dull the ache and pushed the memory aside. Then I told him that I don’t believe in procreation, that I would never do anything to perpetuate this worthless race
of humans. “But I do believe in sex for the sake of sex, and should we have it, I plan to be on top since, metaphysically speaking, I’m already carrying your burden on my shoulders.”

  He flushed and looked away. It was clear I would have to spoon-feed the man. I got out of the car. There was nothing left to say or do after that. I slammed the door. Then I pressed my face against the window to look at Ludo Bembo again. He looked offended. His features—nose, mouth, eyes, eyebrows—had drifted together and formed a knot in the center of his face. I walked around the car and knocked on his window.

  He rolled the window down. I could tell he was annoyed by my sudden leap out of the car, but with an amicable reserve, he said, “Let me take care of your suitcase.”

  A proper gentleman. He got out. He pulled my suitcase out of the trunk and put it down on the ground. Then he leaned in and gave me two kisses. That was the first time I saw myself in his eyes. I was standing in the dark center of his pupils, looking out at myself, my notebook in hand. I waved at my reflection. Ludo Bembo waved in response. I saw my image as if from across a great distance. I was standing there alone in the midst of ruins.

  During my last weeks in the so-called New World, I had done so much more than mentally compose my manifesto. I had made arrangements and phone calls, searched for a place to stay, ran errands that required a great deal of effort. I had found the apartment I was subletting from the previously mentioned Quim Monzó online. His advertisement read: Recently retired literature professor rents room in very desirable neighborhood of L’Eixample. Dada fanatic. Proud owner of a pet cockatoo. Not to be mistaken with the writer Quim Monzó.

  As it so happens, I had met the writer Quim Monzó months before at the Cervantes Institute in New York. Quim Monzó, the writer, is a master of irony, literary joker par excellence. This other Quim Monzó, former literature professor, had instructed me to pick up the keys to his apartment from the grocer near his building. He had gone to Greece to say his good-byes to the archipelago. He had written to me in an e-mail: Off to salute one last time that cradle of civilization, which is once again in the process of collapsing.

  I located the grocer easily. The yellow streetlights illuminated the dust on the shop’s glass door. I pushed it open and stepped in. Quim Monzó had assured me that the grocer was a reliable man, a trustworthy type he considered to be an extension of himself, since he, the grocer, had been the grocer for as long Quim Monzó could remember, and he, Quim Monzó, had lived above the grocer’s store for as long as the grocer could remember. In fact, before the grocer had become the grocer, he had been the previous grocer’s son. Quim Monzó had gone on for so long about the grocer, and repeated the word so often, that I had begun to think it was a code for something else or, at the very least, that the grocer would turn out to be an indicator of certain mystifying events, a possibility that quickly confirmed itself almost as soon as I was on the other side of that dusty glass door.

  I left my suitcase in the entryway and, in my best Catalan, told the grocer—a stout, bald man with a bulbous red nose—that I was there to pick up Quim Monzó’s keys. The grocer retrieved the keys from a rusty register and handed them to me. The exchange took less than a minute. He didn’t ask any questions. He just grunted and dismissed me with a wave of the hand. His fingers were thick and black. There were walnut shells piled on the counter. The lights in the glass display cases were off; the cheese and the meats were spoiling in the darkness. The grocer’s physiology—thick, heavy, rooted—confirmed Quim Monzó’s narrative that he, the grocer, was a fixture in the neighborhood, that he was born on that block and would die on that block.

  The grocer’s cat, which until now had remained hidden, jumped up on the counter and knocked over the pile of walnut shells. The grocer lifted his blackened hand to pet it on the head, and almost immediately, I thought of Schrödinger’s cat. It occurred to me that we are all living in that sealed box of Schrödinger’s. At any given moment, any one of us could be dead.

  Bells I hadn’t heard before rang. How long had I been standing here for? I had lost track. I started to pile rice into a clear bag. I looked at the grocer. In contradistinction to him, I thought, I was a body that, through its haphazard intention of folding the path of exile back over itself, had registered, in the path’s senseless progressions, the meaningless course of human affairs, that mixture of error and violence that is history; I was a body without a home. I looked down at my hand grasping the metal handle of the scoop. The skin on my hand was cracked, exposing ancient violence embedded in matter. My body, due to exile, was undergoing a steady process of erasure; soon it would be annulled, negated by my perpetual homelessness. My writing hand, I thought, looking down at it and thinking again of Blanchot, is a sick hand.

  The grocer was still petting his cat, which was licking its paw. I walked across the store toward a stack of onions. I picked one up. It looked like a shimmering globe. Morales’s ancient mineral voice echoed in my ear: Catalan literature will speak to you. It had spoken to him, a Chilean exile. It had spoken to my father, too; I remembered him feverishly pacing around his translations of Catalan authors, and saying: “Barcelona is the world’s literary frontier!” I tossed the onion up in the air and watched it spin. Right before I caught it, I said in Catalan: “According to Mallarmé, everything in the world exists in order to end up as a book!”

  Just then, I stumbled over my chest-shaped suitcase—my father’s first grave, his pregrave—and landed in the open bags of rice. For a moment, right before I fell, the grocer’s store acquired larger dimensions; it appeared to have doubled in size. I was a speck of dust in the infinite, dizzying whole. A dark smile spread across my face. The grocer came around and stood over me. I saw my reflection in his eyes. I was horrified. I had a miserable, scrawny, skeletal frame. The grocer continued to stand there. He looked stupefied, like a fish that’s been shocked out of the water. Then he opened his thin, chapped mouth.

  “Balls!” he croaked perversely, in his native tongue. He blinked and my image vanished.

  As he walked away, I leaned back into the merchandise and made a mental note: Specimen demonstrates resistance toward literature. I let out a ghastly laugh. He didn’t bother to turn around.

  I got up and paid for the rice and a single shimmering onion. As I counted out the euros I owed the grocer, I thought to myself, I am regressing through the forests of exile. I have come here to excavate my grief, to resurrect the memories I have buried in the deep crater of my life. I thought, I am in Barcelona, the least Spanish of Spanish cities. I have arrived in Catalonia, but I am also in Spain, a country with a bizarre tendency to cast history into the pit of erasure with one hand and with the other retrieve what shards of facts and memories can be salvaged from that very same pit, to restore them, so to speak, once they have been deranged by the passage of time. Spain, I argued inwardly, a country that is engaged in both the business of oblivion and of restoring historical memory, as if memories were like pieces of old furniture that could be restored to their original dimensions. Spain that is extremist to the point of death, Dalí had said. A reproduction of his painting The Persistence of Memory was hanging over the counter. There it was: time swollen. Limp, fleshy clocks clinging to nature in a dilated landscape of rocks: the past, the present, and the future leveled into a single undifferentiated plane. Beneath that warped temporal field, the grocer had started to go about his business again, moving between the aisles of vegetables, stoic, unaware, having, after a brief moment of concern, completely forgotten about me.

  I made my way to Quim Monzó’s building. I rode the elevator to the third floor, exited, identified his door. “Quim Monzó,” I said, thinking of that other Quim Monzó, the writer I had met in the New World, as I fiddled with the key to retrieve it from the lock. I liked saying his name. The hard consonants, the q, m, and z, are exquisitely balanced by the sharp vowels, the o, i, and u. What could be better? I nudged the door with my foot. It was whispering its owner’s name as I was saying the writ
er’s: Quim Monzó, Quim Monzó. The two names, uttered by me and the door, enhanced each other.

  The apartment was engulfed in darkness. I felt a sense of uneasy anticipation, of uncertainty, as I walked across the threshold. It seemed infinite, an elastic architecture that had the capacity to expand beneath my feet irrespective of the direction I walked in. I could make a series of left turns or walk straight, and the rest of the apartment would appear with its subtle, nearly imperceptible surfaces. I dragged my hand along the wall in search of a light switch but found nothing. I stepped into the darkness. I pulled my suitcase in behind me. Suddenly, I remembered what Quim Monzó the writer had said to me so many months earlier during his lecture in that false New World. I remembered his dark eyes, his uneven gray hair, his eyebrows’ inquisitive arc. Morales, who had been hosting him, had put me in charge of providing him with water. I’d handed him a bottle and asked him if he needed anything else, at which point he leaned in. His eyes looked like two drops of oil. He put his hand on my shoulder.

  “Yes,” he said. “I would like a noose.”

  I tore a napkin and rolled it into a noose. Just then, the New Poets walked into the room. Their hair was so greasy that it looked like it had been licked. As usual, they were wearing their overalls. They looked like a pair of dejected farmers. Overalls! As if intelligence could be harvested. True intelligence, I had thought to myself as I watched them—not the cerebral kind, but the kind that is born in the irrational mind of the heart—is earned through a degree of suffering the New Poets would never experience. For the sake of their health and the health of those who had swallowed the myth of the new, my ancestors and I had been adrift in the deserts of the world, inhaling toxins, stepping over charred corpses, pulling our ass this way and that. And what had they ever done for us? I felt livid. They were pink and plump. I could feel my blood coursing through my legs. I wanted to walk over and smack them across the head, but I stopped myself because ignorance cannot be slapped out of anyone.