Call Me Zebra(102)

“THREE,” he continued, deaf to me. “Consecutive days during which you remain in bed, stinking up the bedroom as if you were a corpse!”

I told him this was no way to say good-bye. I told him he had a lot to learn from Agatha on the art of politeness. I looked around. Where were Agatha and Fernando? Petita came rushing to the door. The clay busts of Agatha followed the dog with their eyes, an army of Agathas. The dog sat at my heels. I sucked in little patches of air between gasps of disbelief. I could feel shock spreading through my veins. I gathered myself.

A shaft of light shone through the skylight, burnishing the tip of Ludo’s umbrella, the silver buckles on his leather suitcase. He was returning home to Florence. He had stuffed his suitcase with English wool, tobacco, his collection of historical dictionaries, and left everything else. He told me his elderly father had fallen ill; his bones had grown brittle, his heart was weak, and as a natural consequence of that, his mind was engulfed in a fog through which he could no longer see clearly.

Does your father have a mustache? I was tempted to ask, but I kept my mouth sealed. I am no fool. I could see that Ludo was lying. My duty to my dead father, whom I had absorbed through metempsychosis and whose presence I had carried within my void, had eclipsed my relationship with Ludo, limiting the attention I was able to bestow upon him. Now this literary heretic, uninventive descendent of the Bembos, was using my narrative to justify his own. He was pelting his father at me. He was taking revenge.

I remembered, as lucidly as a déjà vu, when Ludo had asked me after a terrible fight, his voice exasperated, guttural: “What are you hoping to find? It’s not a treasure box,” he had said, referring to the void.

With great theatricality, I had responded: “My friend, my dear, dear friend, I am searching for a flame in my void that will shine so brightly, brighter than the brightest dawn, that it will roll back the shadow of death!”

But that wasn’t true. It was just something I had said. What I had wanted to confess to him was this: My wound is inside me. It is the wound of a lack of love. But I couldn’t bring myself to expose my weaknesses, my vulnerabilities. Too much had come to pass. All I could see was history’s chain of frauds. The world had turned into a reckless mirror image of itself and cut off my oxygen. Who was I to trust? The world had no solidity.

Petita let out a cry of anxiety. I opened my mouth. I said: “This is love, when death’s involved.”

Ludo stared at me. I couldn’t tell if he was bemused or disturbed. I stared back at him. I rolled his name on my tongue: Ludo, a living being among other living beings, who was standing at the threshold, suitcase in hand, about to depart forever; Ludo, who had turned a blind eye to all signs of turbulence when I needed him most, to the generalized disturbance being alive engenders, to the nothingness that is inherent in everything we do.

Ludo reached for his pipe and then swiftly slipped it back into his pocket and patted his chest. For a moment, I thought he might change his mind, that he would step over the threshold and cross the boundary he had drawn to protect himself from—as he had so crudely intoned in the past—the death-slapped and warped nature of my mind. I pictured him dropping his leather suitcase, detaching himself from his umbrella to embrace me. I imagined our bodies collapsing into each other. I imagined him pushing me backward into his room, furiously unbuttoning my shirt, caressing my breasts, lowering his head to lick my hardened nipples; Ludo, salivating, impish, ready to take on the task of mending the disrepair our relationship had fallen into. Sex has a way of doing that, of raising our courage.

But instead, he stood in the doorway scratching his beard. He had let it grow. Until now, Ludo had always been clean-shaven, tiresomely groomed. I interpreted the stubble on his face as a sign of his grief. I looked into Ludo’s eyes and saw myself there, a shadow in the glassy pond of his irises looking back at me. I saw the love and the hate that had bonded and repelled us, the sexual appetite we had untethered in each other. The black surfaces of his pupils shrank; my image vanished. I was exiled. He was sweating. His nostrils flared again. I didn’t know what to expect. Sexual attack? Sudden departure? The odds were even. Then, poof, the moment vanished. He was steady and severe.

I examined his face. I told him he had a lovely Roman nose.

“It gives you the look of a man capable of building things—aqueducts, roads,” I said. Ludo lifted his upper lip and bared his teeth.

“You,” he said, lifting his leather suitcase with one hand and whipping the shaft of his umbrella against the door frame with the other. “Have come into my life to torture me.”

Ludo clutched his departure paraphernalia the way a man lost at sea clutches a raft. He left abruptly, vanished before I could respond, before I could remind him that he was the one who had pursued me, muttering the word love all along and confessing that my vagina was like a tunnel of light he could swim into the way a fish swims into a channel to protect itself while the world is being lacerated by a deathly wind.

I walked to the living room and—spent, shocked, bruised—pressed my face against the latticed panes of the terrace doors. I watched him march down the street. He was soldiering his way to the train station. I peeled the shutters open and stepped onto the terrace between our dying plants. I was as empty as the wind-beaten sky. I didn’t know what to do. Against my will, against my better judgment, I yelled: “We all wake up to realize we are stuffing the wrong holes with the wrong things!”