Call Me Zebra(103)

The earth was finally beginning to warm up. A hot wind whistled through the crooked cobblestone streets of the medieval quarter; it moved in broad strokes, polishing the sky. A vermillion band of light was beginning to form over the mountains in the distance. I heard the wind pick up; it cartwheeled its way through the streets of Girona. The Catalan flags of independence, hung here and there on poles, the buildings, the terraces—they all clapped as if in response. In the midst of the narrow alleys, flanked by their dense stone walls, I spotted Ludo.

He emerged through the arch at the end of the stairs that hug the convent. The wind knocked over empty bottles of wine that had been left at the door of a wine bar the night before. They rolled, trailing behind Ludo, chiming against the cobblestone street. The wind cast aside anything that hadn’t been bolted to the ground. I watched Ludo duck menus and plastic patio furniture. He was walking down La Rambla now, the city’s main promenade. He crossed the bridge, the Pont de Pedra, rushed over the river, then disappeared into a flood of light. A white sheet Mercè had hung out to dry on her rooftop tore away and floated upward, softly at first, and then in a panic, the way a dove released at a funeral jets into the sky, eager to get away from all the grief-stricken people left on earth.

Once Ludo crossed the Pont de Pedra, I lost sight of him. I knew him well enough to know he would take the road we always took. I also knew that those streets operated as corridors for the wind, that the wind would have to narrow its scope in order to push through them, and that in doing so it would pick up pressure and speed. An unusually strong xaloc was blowing up from the Sahara. Ludo would have a hell of a time getting to the train station. He would have to throw all his weight into the wind to avoid falling backward. He would have to lift his legs one by one with tremendous focus, as if he were walking across the moon, and even then, he would still arrive at the station panting, out of breath.

The bells tolled again. I stepped back in and sealed the shutters. I looked around the apartment. Where were Agatha and Fernando? It seemed they had been gone forever. I had been deserted in an outdated apartment, left to rot among the broken telephones and VCRs, the old vacuum parts, those bits of technology the three of them—Ludo, Agatha, Fernando—had kept in the event that the ones in regular use ever broke. They had been taught to do so by their parents and grandparents who had survived the world wars. Those shattered bits of technology were proof that the ravenous events of the twentieth century were still hungry for fresh blood. They may deny that proof, but I saw it clearly: the rupture in communications, the feelings of uncertainty activated by the world wars, had barreled on from generation to generation with an increasingly greedy appetite. I felt the blood, which had only just begun to course through the fleshy corridors of my heart, halt and retreat.

I walked past Agatha’s busts to Ludo’s room and sat down on the edge of his bed, numb. I was as empty as the sky. I felt as though someone had wiped my chest clean. I felt a harrowing, ancient terror begin to rise. The yellow walls of Ludo’s room closed in on me. I wondered if I was suffering from a nervous disorder. I thought, this must be what it’s like to be born. This must be why infants scream when they first exit their mothers’ wombs. Their scream is a scream of confusion. I calmed myself. I reminded myself that this is what I had asked for in retracing the path of my exile: to die in order to begin again. Only I hadn’t expected to feel so increasingly disoriented. I felt like I was trapped in a maddening replicative mirror that kept projecting the dark and stormy event at the center of my life: the void of exile. Was this life? I wondered. A web with no center? An eternally repetitive sequence of events without origin?

Hours swept by. I walked onto the terrace a few times, as though it were a landing with a vantage point from which I could see Ludo regardless of where he might be. What else did I have now that Ludo was gone? The goldfish was circling its tank, pumping the slimy green waters with its extraordinary gills. Taüt was walking the corridor. Petita was trailing behind him. I had only the company of these animals.

I returned to Ludo’s room and threw myself on his bed. I stared at the ceiling. I listened to the calm susurrus of Girona through the walls. I sank into the swampy Matrix of Literature. In my mind’s eye, I navigated its dark waters until I felt time collapse into a single surface, indicating that everything had both already happened and was about to happen. So, I said to myself as I drifted off, neither here nor there: Ludo has left me before; Ludo will leave me again.



Sometime later I awoke. Was it yesterday, today, tomorrow? I couldn’t tell. The first thing I saw when I opened my eyes was Taüt. A cyclone of thoughts unreeled in my mind. How am I supposed to reconcile being an exile with loving someone? Where is my mother? My father? Where is the archive of my nation? What nation? Which one? Which one could I claim to call my own? Taüt was sitting at the end of the bed. He lifted his talon and saluted me. He was completely calm.

“Taüt,” I said. “Who can bear a pointless torment?”

The bird opened his beak.

“The heart of the future is ancient,” he said.

“Indeed,” I said. “Indeed it is.”

Then I thought, what am I going to do with the abyss—incalculably large—I have found myself in? This abyss into which I have leapt only to come out the other end more mired in shit than I had been in to begin with? I stared at the ceiling until I drifted off to sleep again.