Call Me Zebra(26)
“So you are laughing in order to age well?”
“Yes,” I retorted. “Like a good pickle!”
He let out a generic grunt.
We looked at each other, and even though his lips were wet, he managed to let out a dry, stiff smile, a Bembo smile, which I recognized from the various portraits I’d seen of his bearded ancestors. I decided to reward him for his effort.
“If you must know, I’m laughing because I’ve devised a terrific theory.”
“What’s that?”
“The Theory of the Pyramid of Exile.”
Ludo pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. His expression was one of quiet contemplation. “Go on.”
“Think of Ravenna,” I said. “Think of Dante buried there in exile. Forgotten. Abandoned. Banished. He lives at the bottom of the pyramid. Not in its catacombs, which are reserved for those even less fortunate than Dante, but at the bottom nevertheless. But you,” I said, “live somewhere at the top of the pyramid. As a man in voluntary exile, you have access to the most oxygen. You are at the peak of a mountain, filling your lungs with pure oxygenated air, unaware that each time you take a step you are stomping on the heads of those less fortunate than you. I am one of those,” I said. “I live in the middle of the pyramid. There is a sea of refugees beneath me. The pyramid constantly gets fed with fresh blood.”
“The upper echelons?” he retorted. “Not bad.” He seemed pleased with himself.
We made a series of ninety-degree turns and maneuvered around octagonal chamfered blocks until he located the address I had given him: Carrer de Girona, 37. I was renting a room from a certain Quim Monzó. We were in the somber grid of L’Eixample, a neighborhood designed by Ildefons Cerdà, a whiskered man obsessed with geometric lines. I looked through the window at the rectangular nineteenth-century buildings with their delicate ironwork balconies, floor-to-ceiling windows sealed with wooden shutters, and high angular foreheads evoking alertness, intelligence, equanimity.
“So this is it,” Ludo said, pulling into an empty spot beneath a row of plane trees. He turned on the overhead light, wrote his number down on a piece of paper, and handed it to me. “I teach at the university most days, but there’s always someone who can cover for me.” He put his hand on my leg. I let it sit there. I felt heat radiate out from his palm. I felt his cardboard rigidity give way to longing, to a deep tenderness; how easily one person can become laced with another. Then he lifted his hand and tucked my hair behind my ear. I was convinced my lecture had turned him around, rehabilitated his tone. So I barreled on.
“I’d like to know where you live. You already know where I will be living, which gives you an unfair advantage. But before you answer,” I said, putting my hand up to stop him, “I’d like to acknowledge that this is a ludicrous, one-dimensional, earthbound question. No one really occupies a concrete, singular position in space, which is what the question erroneously implies. Where do you live?” I huffed mockingly. “We should really be asking in what places do you tend to lead your multiple lives or what is the geography of your inner world because, as much as we would like to divide life along categorical lines, interior and exterior, we can’t, because each of those surfaces is composed of other intersecting surfaces, which means that life, generally speaking, is a confused and blurred experience. Let’s return to Dante for a moment. Think of the first verse of The Divine Comedy: The straight way was lost. Blurred and lost.”
As cool as a cucumber, he said, “I live in Girona. You’re welcome to come and see for yourself if the roads are straight or crooked.”
“Finally,” I said, “a thorough answer.” I didn’t tell him I had been to Girona long ago with my father. I just applauded him for having found his stride.
He looked like a frog had jumped down his throat. I looked around distractedly. There were cars parked alongside the curbs, small delivery trucks double-parked on the corners, bikes and scooters between the pruned plane trees on the sidewalks. I saw a few people drunkenly stumble out of a café. Night was spreading its dark wings, stroking Barcelona to sleep. I turned back to Ludo.
“So you came all the way to Barcelona from Girona just to pick me up?” I asked.
“We pass our favors forward here. It seems my mentor owed your mentor a favor.”
“How long do you pass them forward for?”
“Generations,” he said.
“Then I suppose this is as good a moment as any to tell you that all of my relatives are dead. With the exception of Morales, I have no contacts left in this vast and ghastly universe.”
I thought of my suitcase. When I had pulled my father out of the chest, his mustache had been bent out of shape. I’d had to flatten it into place by putting my hand over his mouth while using the other to tug on the long bristly ends of his mustache. As I remembered this, I felt a sudden tightness in my chest. It was as if the edges of my paper heart were being folded and torn at the seams.
“Well,” Ludo said callously, as I sat there remembering the trials and tribulations of my dead father’s mustache. “It’s a good thing you can always procreate.”
I pressed my hand against my chest to dull the ache and pushed the memory aside. Then I told him that I don’t believe in procreation, that I would never do anything to perpetuate this worthless race of humans. “But I do believe in sex for the sake of sex, and should we have it, I plan to be on top since, metaphysically speaking, I’m already carrying your burden on my shoulders.”