Call Me Zebra(100)

Our hands were sore from burying my mother.

Then, suddenly, without warning, the sky cleared. It was limpid again. I was standing on the bald summit of the mountain. I had, despite all the obstacles, ascended the Canigó. I could see Casteil, Taurinya, Valmanya, Vernet-les-Bains. I looked beyond France at Italy. I turned and looked in the direction of Spain. Then I looked beyond it at the New World.

“Pitiless persecutors!” I said, thinking of Franco, Mussolini, Hitler, the King of Kings, Bush. “This is not the end of them. The fascists will keep reconstituting themselves!” I declared, and tried to get up, but I couldn’t. I felt as though I had been fused to that delirium of rocks. Had I made it back to Iran? I wondered. To that mercurial country of my youth? My mind was unreeling. My thoughts were spooling, spilling over. And what, according to my father, was so vile about Iran? How, I wondered, could he have considered it worse than Spain with its rampant colonialism, its inquisitions, a country with centuries’ worth of blood on its hands? And what about the so-called New World? How had we ended up there, caught up in its lies and dissociations? The New World, I thought, a direct extension of the Spanish and the British imperialists? We, whose lives had been shaped by the interests of the British, had returned to live among their descendents in the New World, to be pulverized again and again by them.

“What is wrong with us?” I said. “What is wrong with us all?”

“Who are you speaking to?” It was Ludo. I turned around. He looked crestfallen, wind battered. He said, “We lost each other. I came looking for you.” Petita was at his heels.

I wanted to go toward him, but I couldn’t. The storm picked up again. It sprayed the dirt of the world into our faces. We were both squinting in the wind. Ludo asked, “How can someone who hates love love literature?” His voice was shattered, spent, consumed.

“Literature is risk free,” I lied. “Each book is a perfect boat you ride into the darkness, but you are guaranteed to emerge unscathed.”

“Are you sure about that?”

Petita scurried over and sniffed Taüt’s tail. The bird bowed in response.

Sure? Sure about what? I wondered.

“So you are advocating a categorical absence of risk?”

There was a strong wind. My life, I thought quietly, has been subject to one putrid gale after another.

“Listen to me,” Ludo said desperately. “Do I have to bear the risks of loving you alone?”

His voice was being carried across the mountains on the wind.

“Look at me!” he demanded pleadingly. “Look at me!”

I looked at him. His face looked ancient, familiar. His shirt was torn. His hands were scarred. I plodded through my mind. I came across roadblock after roadblock. Love is the enemy. Love is a thought. Love needs reinventing. Hate I shall if I can; if I can’t, I shall love, though not willingly. There were no words. I had run out of lines of defense. I said nothing.

“Enough,” he said. “Enough. I’m here, aren’t I? Through all this absurdity?”

My voice released in weak bands. “Absurdity? There is nothing absurd about any of this. I am simply living by the laws that have governed my life.”

“And these poor impressionable nitwits you’ve dragged into this mess with you?” he asked.

Nitwits, I thought. As if those people had no willpower, no agency of their own. How could I explain that to a man like Ludo? I would have to destroy him in order to reconstruct him from the ground up. And how could I know that I wouldn’t get shattered in the process?

“Where is everyone anyway?” I asked.

“They headed back down the mountain,” he said. “And I suggest you do the same. There is a terrible storm on the way,” he warned. “This is the calm, the calm before the storm. I can’t take care of you. You have to decide to do this on your own.”

Is that the best you can do? I wanted to ask, but I didn’t know who I was addressing the question to. Ludo? My dead parents? The wretched leaders of my lost nations?

I started walking. My legs were trembling beneath me. Petita led the way, sniffing the ground. An hour later, we had come to a valley that sliced the mountain in half. I felt as though we were walking up and down the craggy plateaus of hell. I thought of Dante the Pilgrim. I heard Virgil’s voice: Ruthless striving overcomes everything. I heard the anxious neighing of horses. I heard the creaking sound of trees folding at the waist in the wind.

I stopped in my tracks. I turned around to face Ludo.

“I have been pushed by the world into a state of psychic feudalism. And you want me to make myself vulnerable to you. How much vulnerability do you think one person can take? Do you want me to rip my skin off and stand in the wind, bleeding and raw?”

“What do you want me to say to that?” he answered, pushing me along.

We walked another hour against the wind. I could barely breathe. I sat down on a chopped log that had mushrooms bursting out of its wet peeling bark. Then I got up again. Through the alpine forests, I had spotted a house in ruins. I thought of my mother searching for food. Before I knew it, I was standing in that ruined house and Ludo was standing on the other side of it, begging me to come out, to keep going.

“You’re taking this too far,” he cried. “You’re putting our lives in danger.”

It was true. I had taken things further than anyone had before.