Call Me Zebra(105)

She turned around. Her face caught the golden light. She looked serene, pale, tranquil. If there is anyone to whom I can speak the truth, it’s her, I thought to myself.

“I’m going to pursue Ludo,” I said.

“How?”

“On the next ship,” I declared. “I am going to cross the waters of the Mediterranean, Sea of Sunken Hopes.”

She looked at me, stunned. Her jaw had dropped slightly, enough for me to see that the corners of her mouth had grown wet. “Shouldn’t you give things a rest for a while?”

Her tone was somber, as if a tide of worry had risen and drowned her voice. She regarded me with a look that betrayed feelings of pity, confusion, fear. It was as if by addressing me, her mind had come into contact with something rough, incoherent, disturbed. That expression seemed to be everywhere lately, superimposed on the faces of people I knew and strangers. As soon as people looked at me, their faces would collapse. It was as if they could see through me to the shattered bits of my father and mother that had drifted in my void like tumbleweeds in a drafty desert. I, a perpetual stranger in every city. Was I subverting its norms from the inside? I had no idea. I had no idea about anything. It had been so long since I had looked in the mirror.



That evening, I boarded the ship to Genoa with Taüt on my shoulder. I retreated to my cabin. It would take seventeen and a half hours to cross the Mediterranean to Italy. In Genoa, I would walk to Terminal Traghetti and board a train to Genova Brignole station. From there, I would transfer to a train headed for Florence. I was sure Ludo would be waiting for me in the geometric city that had produced him. I closed my eyes. I imagined knocking on his door. He would open it, and through the slit, I would see his father, defeated, old, frail, lying supine on a bed in front of the television in the living room. Ludo hadn’t lied after all. I imagined the blue glow of the television screen giving him a pasty, ghostly look. I imagined he would be tense at first. He would stand rigidly before me. He would try to forbid me from coming in. I would remind him that my father had died many deaths; I would tell him that I had watched my father’s face transform in life and in death and that each time I had to sever my attachment to him. I would tell him I know what it means to enter the uncharted waters of grief. I would tell him that I could be a mountain of wisdom for him to lean on, that our long macabre dance had whittled down to this moment, this simple gesture of making sure he would not be pacing alone in the shadow of his father’s imminent death. His lips would tremble. His father would turn his leathery face to look in our direction. His eyes would be puffy, small, and watery, but his gaze would be conclusive, determined, the gaze of a man aware that he is standing on the verge of his own death. He would say something, a quick protest about the draft we were letting in through the open door, and Ludo would let me in. He would shut the door behind me. We would stand in the foyer contemplating each other in silence, considering each other’s faces, the many selves we had either silenced or resurrected within each other. I would be the first to speak. After all, it was I who had come all this way after him. What choice did I have? My father had vanished from my void. So had my mother. They had joined the residue of the world. They were everywhere. They were in the very air I breathed. They existed in my inky veins as knowledge. What did it matter what streets I walked on? What did it matter where I sank my anchor when the whole world was a single surface, an infinitely unreeling roll of paper?

“Ah, Ludo,” I would say. “What a tragedy. What a drama. Once again, the world as we know it is coming to an end. Is this what it means to be human?”

Ludo would stagger toward me in the dark. Without saying a word, he would reach out and grab my hand; he would pull me into his embrace, and we would cry together. That night, we would lie motionless on his bed, our eyes open in the dark, the colossal weight of the tragedy of our young century hovering over us, the television still on in the living room, the patter of his father rising from his bed, reaching for his walker, rolling his way to the bathroom, remorseless words floating up from the set, congealing in the air, taking on enormous proportions: “suicide bombings,” “air raids,” “mass death,” “dearth of food, of water, of justice,” “severed limbs of children,” “buildings covered in soot.”

After a prolonged silence, Ludo would utter into the air: “We need the rest of our lives to untangle the toxic knots of our childhoods.”

I saw then that he understood why I had eaten the mud. We were on the cusp of recognition. Soon, half the world would be rising up in revolt. Half the world would be eating dirt. I closed my eyes. I saw blurry shadows, eddies, trenches, craggy mountains, the endless black waters of the seas and oceans. I raised my hand and waved it in the air.

“War is a contagious affair. Sooner or later this violence will spill over. We will all be drawn into it. This is the beginning of another end,” I would say. “We are all poor. We are all starved. We are all persecuted.”

“Yes,” Ludo would say. “If one of us is persecuted, we all are.” He would roll over and climb on top of me. His cheeks would be wet with tears. We would make love. Then, panting, weary, exhausted, I imagined that he would say: “I don’t know what it means to be human. I thought I knew, but that, too, has been undone along with everything else.”



We had been warned the sea was high. A storm was brewing. I sat in a windowless cabin. The ship pitched precariously in the inky waters. I could hear rain falling. A heavy, warm rain. It was the last storm of the year. I could hear the waves rising up to scrape the underbelly of the damp sky. Restless bodies moved impatiently outside my cabin door. Dante’s voice came at my side: For the straightforward pathway had been lost.