Call Me Zebra(23)
My neighbor stirred in her seat. Her head dropped again to the opposite side, and she momentarily opened her eyes. I leaned over to pry. Her eyes were gray blue. She began to snore more loudly. I was close enough to her face that I could smell her malodorous breath. I imagined forest insects crawling out of that bird’s nest on her head.
“Never mind,” I said, and sat back.
I turned away from her and looked out the window. The sky was clear. We had made it to the other side. We had arrived at the golden blue sky I had seen in the distance. We had arrived at what only a moment ago had been the future, and in its soft atmosphere, the plane glided with ease. I looked back at the darkness that was now behind us. I saluted the abyss of my past and thought of the exile that had repeated throughout my life like a bad joke, like a wretched eternal return that had leveled my psyche and left in its wake a void through which I could hear the wind whistle.
The pilot said, “We have a few hours left until we land in Barcelona.”
Barcelona. I pictured General Franco’s face: the puffy, childlike cheeks; the distant, austere look in his eyes; his squared mustache; his chin always held high as if he were proudly surveying the spoils of his labor—the look of an adult harboring an angry, tormented inner child. I remembered my father saying that we, like the Catalans, had survived—no, thrived—under the sign of death, under the threat of erasure. That’s why we had fled to Barcelona: because the Catalans, according to my father, were our brethren, and Barcelona—the City of Bombs, the Rose of Fire, the Manchester of the Mediterranean—was the home port of the AAA. I got a whiff of my father. He smelled like bergamot, cardamom, and eucalyptus. Just then, a large cascading cloud rolled over the wings of the plane to a great and striking effect. It reminded me of Nietzsche’s mustache and my father. I watched as it glided over the plane. I remembered reading Dalí’s words. That mustache is a Wagnerian mustache, the mustache of a depressive! He hated Nietzsche’s mustache.
The cloud quickly disappeared. I pictured Dalí’s paintings, his hyperreal renditions of the Catalan landscape, and immediately remembered walking along the white shores of Catalonia with my father, climbing to the top of a huge granite cliff out of which cork trees and marine pines emerged like horns. The Mediterranean Sea lay slack and purple below, and black birds darted through the sky at dusk like missiles. I remembered being pushed along the coast by the tramontana, that great wind that left in its wake a polished, limpid, unornamented sky. I wanted to have that emptiness—that flat periwinkle expanse rinsed clean by the hand of the tramontana—hanging over my head every day. That void was the same void I had experienced when my father had placed the black band of blindness over my eyes as we were crossing into Turkey. I wanted to inhabit literature beneath that sky that represented the nothingness of my illfated life, the void of exile.
The flight attendant got up and reached for the intercom. She fixed her glassy eyes on us, and announced, icy, cold, metallic, “You are now free to move about the cabin.”
Free. I parsed that word—free—on my tongue. I remembered the mathematical principle I had devised in the weeks following my father’s burial: liberty = death = nothingness = literature. I wanted to stamp my neighbor’s body with that formula. I wanted to impart an education to her. Others should stand to benefit from the knowledge arriving to me in spontaneous droves from the Matrix of Literature. What good are the illfated if we do not open our fellow men’s eyes to their willful blindness? I retrieved a red pen from my belongings and traced the formula in a circle on her hand. It looked like ringworm.
On that first evening in Barcelona, I met Ludovico Bembo. He came to pick me up at the airport, thanks to Morales—Chilean exile, Communist who had redistributed university money to fund the Grand Tour of Exile, beloved literary guru with a knobby forehead who had called in favors on my behalf.
According to Morales, Ludovico Bembo, who went by Ludo, was a runaway philologist from Italy and the literary protégé of an old friend of his who had warned Ludo Bembo to get out from underneath the shadow of Berlusconi as quickly as possible because—according to her logic, which was not unlike my father’s—a country run by a buffoon is no longer a place to think. Before departing, I’d also conducted my own investigation into Ludo Bembo and discovered that he was a man of exceptional literary pedigree. He was a descendent of none other than Pietro Bembo, the famous sixteenth-century literary scholar, poet, Petrarch connoisseur, and member of the Knights Hospitaller. Pietro Bembo’s father, Bernardo Bembo, had erected a tomb to Dante Alighieri in Ravenna, a city that I discovered was referred to by the mighty Russian symbolist Alexander Blok as the realm of death, and by the wild Oscar Wilde as the city where Dante sleeps, where Byron loved to dwell. From all of this, I’d deduced that, like me, Ludo Bembo was part of the .1 percent.
As I walked through the airport, I imagined Ludo Bembo standing in the dusk air beneath a row of palms at the curb, sniffing the brackish Barcelona air. I thought to myself that even though Ludo Bembo, an expatriated Italian living in Catalonia, is among the world’s unfortunate he isn’t as unlucky as I am. I was thinking of the Pyramid of Exile, which I had conceived of upon exiting the New World. I located myself somewhere in the middle of the pyramid, sandwiched between an infinite number of sorrowful rodents who are pressed together in the craggy plateaus beneath me and the more fortunate ones like Ludo Bembo, who occupy the upper echelons.