Call Me Zebra(104)
Hours later, in the silence of the night, I sat bolt upright in bed. Camus’s words were swimming around the labyrinthine corridors of my mind: Everything is strange to me, everything, without a single person who belongs to me, with no place to heal this wound . . . I am not from here—not from anywhere else either. And the world has become merely an unknown landscape where my heart can lean on nothing. I got up and paced the corridor. Taüt, loyal companion, hopped off the bed and walked at my heels.
A week passed during which I could not sleep. Each night, I paced the corridor. My emotions surged and retreated. I was walking through the shallows and profundities of my mind. One moment I was downtrodden, grief-stricken; the next, restless, enraged. But, irrespective of the highs and lows of my mood, one question looped through my mind, a question with roots: What had the pilgrimages exposed? Finally, one day, in the feeble light of dawn, while Agatha and Fernando were asleep in their room, I heard: my total inadequacy in the face of life. I felt struck by the lacerating precision of those words. Who had written them? Benjamin, Levi, Unamuno? That’s when it hit me: I couldn’t believe Ludo was gone.
I walked into his room. I dragged my sick hand across the yellow walls, the surface of his desk, the rug on his floor. I opened his closet and smelled his clothes. I went through his drawers and his books. I found a note in his handwriting, which was timeless, elegant, floral. I recognized the words.
The note contained a transcription of the sentence the elder Nietzsche had used to criticize the work of his youth: badly written, ponderous, embarrassing . . . uneven in tempo, without the will to logical cleanliness, very convinced and therefore disdainful of proof.
Had Ludo been keeping a philological commentary on the record of my suffering? I wondered. For a moment, I felt indignant, inflamed. I rolled those words off my tongue: badly written, ponderous, embarrassing! In that bitter heat, I remembered Nietzsche’s other words: equality before the enemy: the first supposition of an honest duel.
But as soon as I retreated to the corridor, I felt confused. Who was the enemy? And where did the enemy lay hiding? Was the enemy manifest, like death, within me? There was no way of knowing. I sat on the floor next to the busts of Agatha and wept uncontrollably. I was in the hollows again. No one was home. Taüt ambled down the corridor and nudged my sick hand. I lifted it to pet him. He had picked up new habits from the dog. He cooed and cawed in response to my touch, and I heard that bass voice of his come at me as if from across a great distance. I was exhausted. I felt as though I was outside this world looking in—already dead and yet still slogging through, dragging my ignorance behind me. What parts of my mind had I fed? I wondered, as I stroked the bird’s wings. What parts had I starved? I had been faithfully devoted to the person who had set off on the Grand Tour of Exile, but that person no longer existed. I had been reborn in the pile of ruins like a phoenix, that pile to which I had added my own cold cruelty, my own wretchedness.
After that, I slept for days. In the limpid light of sleep, the questions metamorphosed; they blended together and took on dramatic proportions. One afternoon, while I was aimlessly walking through the verdant hills and valleys of Sant Daniel, I thought: What does equality consist of in a case where it remains unclear who the enemy is? I flipped through the possible candidates—Ludo Bembo, the knotted and knobby paths of my ill-fated life, the world’s leading dictators who have acted upon it ruthlessly—and again felt my sadness give way to rage. My anger became focused. I felt irate at this bloodthirsty, disordered universe, disgusted for being a part of it. My thoughts spooled and spun. I wondered: What would the greatest revenge be? I scanned the limpid, wind-polished sky. I saw the answer, which had presented itself to me in so many forms and facets throughout the Grand Tour of Exile and against which I, fearful and uncertain, had repeatedly thrown myself only to be repelled, as if it had been written across that sky in ink. The greatest revenge, I saw, lay in the simplest revenge of all: to love against all odds, to prevail, to persist in a world that fought tooth and nail to eliminate me. That’s all there was. That’s all there ever had been. I stood there utterly dumbfounded. How stupid, I thought, how utterly simple. I felt a fool. I picked up a rock as if I were picking up that word: love. I put that rock in my mouth and sucked on it. It was unyielding, hard, an object I could not metabolize or break into parts. I returned home terrified, confused, and yet somehow resolved, determined to pursue Ludo, to draw a new path of exile across the map of my ill-fated life. I sucked on that rock the whole way back to his apartment. It left a mineral taste in my mouth.
The next day, I packed my things. I was done in no time. I didn’t have very much. I had Taüt, my notebook, the rock, the clothes on my back. I had lost everything. I had very little money left; the objects of my past were long lost. I had no identity and yet, I thought, I was infinite, multiple. Like a blank page, I can be whatever I want. I heard Agatha moving around in the living room. A copper light was filtering through the window. It cast the room in an amber glow. I watched her silently for a moment. She was hovering over the aquarium. She had combed her hair to one side; it was dangling over her shoulder. I could see the fish darting across the tank through the gaps between the thick strands of her hair.
“I’m leaving,” I announced. “I can’t bear the thought of Ludo’s abandoning me like this, hanging by a thread like a piece of laundry.”
“Where to?” she asked.