Call Me Zebra(10)
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.