Call Me Zebra(11)
Though he agreed to test my memorization skills during our weekly meetings, he was quick to follow up with a countercondition. If we were going to work together, he said, employing an edifying tone, he needed to know that I understood and would abide by one thing.
“What thing?” I asked.
He answered with the following: There is no such thing as reading; there is only rereading. As cool as a cucumber, he relayed his expectation that I should read every book several times at different hours and in different settings, and that I should recite quotes in the original language as well as the English translation. I agreed. It was a brilliant idea. I would be dispatching different parts of my mind—each language I had learned was housed in a subsector of the same quadrant—to metabolize texts. In other words, I would approach each text from multiple angles, employing the sum of all my disparate parts.
All winter, I studied under his guidance; I read more than I had ever read before. I matured my Spanish, Italian, Catalan—languages over which Morales had an impeccable command. I worked my way through the canon, then through the avant-garde. I read this and then that. I underlined, scrutinized, read again. I skipped over certain things to make way for others. I read various translations of the classics. I combed through every line multiple times. Each time, as Morales had implied, the line appeared differently. It made a different sound, produced a different meaning, stirred awake this or that buried self.
I reported all of this to Morales during our weekly meetings, which he spent awkwardly pacing through his overflowing office in his Communist uniform, hands clasped behind his back, head hanging as he stepped over stacked columns of books, empty boxes, unopened mail. Every once in a while, he paused to push his glasses up the bridge of his nose.
If I really impressed him with my pronunciation and memorization skills, he would say, “Brava, brava!” and gently tap my head with his spent copy of Tercera Residencia. Under the shadow of that book, I recited the works of Jorge Luis Borges, Octavio Paz, Clarice Lispector, Cristina Peri Rossi, Alejo Carpentier, María Luisa Bombal, Miguel de Cervantes, Dante Alighieri, Francesco Petrarca, Josep Pla, Mercè Rodoreda, J. V. Foix, Quim Monzó, Salvador Espriu. The list went on and on until the names blurred together.
On a particularly blustery day in January, while I was headed toward Morales’s office for my weekly recitation, a girl with a nose piercing and a purple Mohawk and pale green eyes that looked out from their sockets with a mixture of pride and disgust stopped me near Washington Square Park.
“Not so fast,” she said, raising her gloved hand as if I had been trying to avoid her.
I stopped. She was tall and thin, all angles, no curves, as sharp as a whip. She looked like a futurist statue. Even as she stood still, she gave the appearance of being in motion, as if she were headed someplace more important, where things stood a chance of being resolved. She was wearing a studded dog collar, and the metal bits kept catching the bright winter light, nearly blinding me. She had deliberately cut holes in each layer of her outfit. She wore black surfaces all the way down, leading me to conclude that it was her sole purpose in life to expose the depth of the darkness that surrounds us, to signal the infinite and stratified nature of the abyss. I immediately liked her.
She pulled a book out of her bag and knocked me over the head with it in the same way Morales would knock me over the head with his copy of Neruda’s saddest poems. I never knew which good-bye between my father and me would be our last, and these whacks, delivered from the realm of literature, drew me out of the fog that settled over me each time I left our apartment. I examined her face. I understood immediately: She, too, had been an informal pupil of his. There were many of us. Morales was using official means to nurture the dissident tendencies of his unofficial advisees, who had flocked to him like moths to a light. No wonder the university was trying to fire him.
“I studied with Morales for a while,” she spat out. “And it’s true, there is no one like him.” She paused thoughtfully and turned her nose to the sky. Then she added, “But he never gave me this.” She handed me the book she had pulled out of her bag. “This is a book one anarchist woman gives to another. Read it. It will make you feel a lot better about all of this shit.”
I looked at the book. It was Don Quixote by Kathy Acker. I had never heard of her before, and I felt my heart quicken with excitement at the thought of discovering this radical woman’s sentences. The cover was a glossy gray blue, and it featured a photograph of the author. In the picture, she has her back to the camera. Her shoulders are bare, exposing a flower tattoo that extends across her upper back. The photograph appears to have been ripped to pieces and then fit together along the edges of the seams. I took these fissures to be indicative of what lay between the covers. I was stunned by the beauty of the composition. By the time I looked back up, the girl had begun walking away. I stood there and watched her; her Mohawk made an incision in the sky, tearing the godless heavens asunder.
I sat in the park at the foot of the commemorative statue of Giuseppe Garibaldi. I saluted the short, bearded “father of fathers” drawing his sword and, under his aura of resolve, prepared to inhabit Acker’s sentences. I took pleasure in lifting the book to my nose. I picked up mild tones of sage, black olives, nicotine. I noticed wine stains on the spine. The pages were brittle, yellow. I opened the book three times at random. In the Hosseini tradition, I consulted it as if it were an oracle.