Call Me Zebra(106)
“Lost,” I mumbled into the vaporous air. The Grand Tour of Exile had come to an abrupt end. No, not an abrupt end. Like the many faces of my father, the Grand Tour of Exile had reproduced itself. It had acquired a second and third and fourth face; it had metamorphosed, acquired digressions. A new phase of exile awaited me in Florence. A new living death in that rational city with its open piazzas, its Haussmann-inspired boulevards, its bloody history, the Arno that floods its ochre banks every hundred years. In my mind’s eye, I saw the image of a bull plowing the earth with its horns, exhuming the dead. I said quietly to myself: “I am a patient born into an inhospitable world, an outsider, a spectator, a painmonger, a nonmember.” Words spooled through my mind. An alien, a fugitive, a castaway, a boat person.
Taüt nervously paced my shoulders. The sea was threatening to swallow us whole, as if enough people hadn’t already drowned in its brackish waters. The bird intermittently hooked his beak to my ear. I felt my stomach float up into my throat. I belched. I emptied myself out. Then I sniffed the acerbic, briny air.
It had been hours. We had likely passed Montpellier, Marseille, Cannes. The ship rocked and rolled in the violent waters. I nursed Taüt. I held steady through the night. I fell asleep a few times. I dreamt Ludo and I were raking the depths of the sea, gathering the bodies of the dead, resurfacing with them one by one. I was holding my notebook in one hand and scraping the seabed with the other. We walked in silence until we came across a sunken warplane. The rusted fuselage was covered with algae, barnacles, starfish, shrimp. Schools of tropical fish were moving through it. Ludo kept a certain distance from me as we examined the wreckage. He seemed rather suspicious of my presence. I climbed onto the blunted nose of the plane. I opened my notebook; it had acquired a prophetic aura underwater. In an oratorical tone, I declared: “The process of decay is at the same time a process of crystallization. Arendt on Benjamin through Shakespeare.”
Ludo considered my words. He had a pensive expression on his face. He dragged his nimble hands across the tendrils of algae. Those hands had tried to nourish me. I climbed back down and stood on the seabed next to him. We were moving with such grace underwater. He stared at me in silence for a long time. He opened and closed his mouth in rapid succession. When he finally spoke, his words were rich and strange.
“Crystallization,” he declared, “is that action of the mind that discovers fresh perfections in its beloved at every turn of events. From the commentary on your notebook,” he admitted.
“Ah, Stendhal,” I muttered forgivingly, content that our notebooks had multiplied and merged. “Sentimental weasel, doppelg?nger to Marie-Henri Beyle.”
A monkfish swam by. I stared at its huge mouth, its depressed head, its inwardly inclined fangs. It had been camouflaging itself in the sand.
“Lophius piscatorius,” Ludo said. Then he asked: “Where should we eat this evening?” We were getting along swimmingly.
I laughed, and replied: “Lophius piscatorius swims through the liquid continent, the great green, the inner sea, the corrupting sea, the bitter sea, but, most important, the Sea of Sunken Hopes, the sea of refugees.”
My words cut the jovial mood. Ludo’s eyes swept through the waters. He took a few steps back. He regarded me anxiously. He was preparing to ask the most conclusive question of all. “More important, when will you say the great and coherent yes to life?”
A deep silence ensued. In that chasm, I heard Nietzsche: A soul that knows it is loved but does not itself love betrays its sediment: what is at the bottom comes up.
Ludo, having posed his question, leaned against the engine of the plane. A school of pink fish swam through the gaps between the blades. His blond curls were floating in the saline water. He looked at me in that special way of his, with a petulant pout; he was sulking again.
“Ludo,” I protested. “We have to keep walking. We have to keep raking the bed of this inner sea.” But he refused to move.
“Then why not bring it all to an end?” he asked reluctantly. “Why this obstinate perseverance to live a life you are not committed to?”
The monkfish swam over the wings of the plane. I watched it pump the water out of its gills and carve its way through the water in sections. We can only conquer life a little at a time, I considered. There will always be a remainder out of reach. We have to make our peace with that. Would I make my peace? Would I conquer? I wanted to dig my head in the sand.
Suddenly, as I looked at Ludo, I realized he was upset with himself for loving someone who hadn’t yet managed to land on earth. To cheer him up, I swam over and perched on the nose of the plane. I said: “Ludovico Bembo, I came down to this earth through the same canal as everyone else: my mother’s vagina. In that regard, I am like everyone else. But in other respects, I am unique. I arrived physically, but there was a part of me that lingered behind. My descent was incomplete. This incompleteness, this gap, was widened by the cruel facts of my life, its elusive calamity, the cultural assassination of my ancestors, the psychological massacre of exile, the physical and transcendental homelessness that has marked my life. But don’t worry, I am an irregular genius who is in the process of synchronizing her multiple minds in order to acquire the privilege to rise in the morning and say a great and coherent yes to life.”
I expected him to come back with a rebuttal, but he just tossed his head back and laughed. We walked side by side through the seabed, raking the void.