Call Me Zebra(25)

“The plane?” I huffed. I was annoyed by how quickly he had engineered a change in topic. I pictured the stifling sky we had flown through. I said: “I flew here on the back of an ass!”

He let out a short rudimentary laugh, and in that laugh, I diagnosed the dryness of his character. A terrifying seriousness that lifted my spirits because it confirmed his relation to the Bembos, a somber bunch of poets. People shuttled past us on either side. A second later, a swallow fell through the sky. It hit a palm on the opposite side of the road and landed on the ground. It was dead.

“Did you see that?” I said to Ludo. He was fussing with the trunk of his car.

“Birds die all the time,” he said, with the dull indifference of an administrator.

I looked up at the sky. It was dusk. The dead swallow’s verminous friends appeared, a hovering black mass checking out the scene of death. A moment later, the birds gave up, disappeared. They left a streak of ink across the sky. The streak read: Like Sancho Panza to Don Quixote, so too Ludo Bembo to Zebra. I laughed with childish ebullience. I was giddy, weary, and worn-down from the trials and tribulations of my Final Exit and, at the same time, astonished, amazed that I had managed to get away from that wretched New World that had claimed my father’s life. My eyes misted over. Ludo cast me a circumspect look over the trunk of his car. I crossed behind the Fiat. I was eager to pose my question again, to return to the subject of his signage. “Have you e-ver possessed me?” I asked.

Ludo leaned against the trunk. His mouth looked like a sealed envelope. I wanted to open that envelope. I said, “Ludo Bembo, I, Zebra, beg of you: Speak now or forever hold your peace!”

His mouth opened. “That’s not the name I was given,” he said tersely. His cheeks puffed out a little, like a fish’s gills.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I recently acquired a new name.” I felt versions of my former self diffuse through my void. It was a terrible sensation. I scurried up to him to distract myself. “Now tell me: Have you ever possessed me?”

He stuck his head in the trunk. A weary little voice spilled out from inside that cavernous void: “It was just a sign!” he mumbled tiredly. He sounded as if someone had removed his lungs.

“If it’s just a sign, then why not play a little?”

His head reemerged. My commitment to reinvigorating him was producing moderate results.

“To the best of my knowledge, I, Ludo Bembo, have never claimed you before this moment.” His tone, though firm, revealed undercurrents of exhaustion; it was as if he had been called to the witness stand in a court of law.

I laughed. A second later, a smile broke across his face. It was a jagged, uncertain smile, but it was a smile nonetheless. He was coming along.

“So you stand corrected?” I asked.

“Sure,” he said, and plunged that curly head of his back into the trunk. I watched him push a car jack and some books aside to make room for my suitcase.

Security officers in neon vests were waving their hands at waist level, trying to get us to move along. I was standing directly behind Ludo. I was looking at his ass. It looked like a bowl of fruit. I heard him murmur something into the Fiat. One of the security guards approached us. A red-faced man with a goatee and a gash for a mouth. He ordered us to get going. Ludo nodded apologetically. Then he bent over my suitcase to pick it up.

“Ready?” he asked.

“Yes, but be careful,” I replied, pointing at my suitcase. “This here is the corpse of my past.”

I saw his face fall a little.

A moment later, we found ourselves in the car, enveloped in a dismal silence. I considered explaining myself. I considered telling Ludo Bembo that the corpse of my past is a metonym for my library of books, but it occurred to me that if I did the mood, after briefly trending upward, would most certainly wilt even further than the dire straits it was currently in. So I sat there quietly instead. I watched Ludo Bembo stuff his pipe, and roll the window down. He leaned his head back and sucked, then blew the smoke out of his mouth and nose. His eyes looked soft, sensual; his lips moist. Then he sat up, pushed the gearshift into first, and we drove off.

I watched the airport retreat into the darkness through the car’s side mirror. When I looked up, I saw the flank of Montju?c. My father and I had hiked that flank. I remembered his telling me that Catalonia’s thinkers had been shot and tossed over the side by Franco’s men; they had been kicked into an abandoned stone quarry and left to rot in the wind and the rain. I should have known then and there that the flank was a sign of the twists and turns ahead of me and Ludo Bembo.

We maneuvered around a series of roundabouts and merged onto the highway. We drove past factories, metal-processing plants, strips of freeway. The sky was darkening by degrees. Again, I could feel my father’s mind spinning within my own. He whispered: The exile is the cannibal of history. I let out a dark and labored laugh.

“What’s so funny?” Ludo asked, drawing on the end of his pipe with his sublime wet lips.

I considered telling him about the lines of literature that had become slogans for my Grand Tour of Exile. I considered telling him that I was laughing at the fate of the exile because, in order to survive, the exile must carve out a future that is neither discontinuous from the past nor a false replica of it, which is, of course, an impossible task because in this dissociative world of radical ruptures there are only two options made available: the amnesia of Don Quixote or the passionate yearning and nostalgia of Dante the Pilgrim. I considered telling him that the exile’s options are total forgetfulness or a complete collapse into the claw of history, both of which lead to discontent and to a self-perpetuating cycle of violence. But after all that thinking, I didn’t say anything; I wasn’t sure Ludo Bembo would understand. I sat there watching him look at the road through his glasses, those round silver-rimmed spectacles of his until, prompted by a glance he cast in my direction, I finally lied. Or rather I provided him with a red herring. I said: “With mirth and laughter let old wrinkles come. Shakespeare’s golden words.”