Call Me Zebra(27)



He flushed and looked away. It was clear I would have to spoon-feed the man. I got out of the car. There was nothing left to say or do after that. I slammed the door. Then I pressed my face against the window to look at Ludo Bembo again. He looked offended. His features—nose, mouth, eyes, eyebrows—had drifted together and formed a knot in the center of his face. I walked around the car and knocked on his window.

He rolled the window down. I could tell he was annoyed by my sudden leap out of the car, but with an amicable reserve, he said, “Let me take care of your suitcase.”

A proper gentleman. He got out. He pulled my suitcase out of the trunk and put it down on the ground. Then he leaned in and gave me two kisses. That was the first time I saw myself in his eyes. I was standing in the dark center of his pupils, looking out at myself, my notebook in hand. I waved at my reflection. Ludo Bembo waved in response. I saw my image as if from across a great distance. I was standing there alone in the midst of ruins.



During my last weeks in the so-called New World, I had done so much more than mentally compose my manifesto. I had made arrangements and phone calls, searched for a place to stay, ran errands that required a great deal of effort. I had found the apartment I was subletting from the previously mentioned Quim Monzó online. His advertisement read: Recently retired literature professor rents room in very desirable neighborhood of L’Eixample. Dada fanatic. Proud owner of a pet cockatoo. Not to be mistaken with the writer Quim Monzó.

As it so happens, I had met the writer Quim Monzó months before at the Cervantes Institute in New York. Quim Monzó, the writer, is a master of irony, literary joker par excellence. This other Quim Monzó, former literature professor, had instructed me to pick up the keys to his apartment from the grocer near his building. He had gone to Greece to say his good-byes to the archipelago. He had written to me in an e-mail: Off to salute one last time that cradle of civilization, which is once again in the process of collapsing.

I located the grocer easily. The yellow streetlights illuminated the dust on the shop’s glass door. I pushed it open and stepped in. Quim Monzó had assured me that the grocer was a reliable man, a trustworthy type he considered to be an extension of himself, since he, the grocer, had been the grocer for as long Quim Monzó could remember, and he, Quim Monzó, had lived above the grocer’s store for as long as the grocer could remember. In fact, before the grocer had become the grocer, he had been the previous grocer’s son. Quim Monzó had gone on for so long about the grocer, and repeated the word so often, that I had begun to think it was a code for something else or, at the very least, that the grocer would turn out to be an indicator of certain mystifying events, a possibility that quickly confirmed itself almost as soon as I was on the other side of that dusty glass door.

I left my suitcase in the entryway and, in my best Catalan, told the grocer—a stout, bald man with a bulbous red nose—that I was there to pick up Quim Monzó’s keys. The grocer retrieved the keys from a rusty register and handed them to me. The exchange took less than a minute. He didn’t ask any questions. He just grunted and dismissed me with a wave of the hand. His fingers were thick and black. There were walnut shells piled on the counter. The lights in the glass display cases were off; the cheese and the meats were spoiling in the darkness. The grocer’s physiology—thick, heavy, rooted—confirmed Quim Monzó’s narrative that he, the grocer, was a fixture in the neighborhood, that he was born on that block and would die on that block.

The grocer’s cat, which until now had remained hidden, jumped up on the counter and knocked over the pile of walnut shells. The grocer lifted his blackened hand to pet it on the head, and almost immediately, I thought of Schr?dinger’s cat. It occurred to me that we are all living in that sealed box of Schr?dinger’s. At any given moment, any one of us could be dead.

Bells I hadn’t heard before rang. How long had I been standing here for? I had lost track. I started to pile rice into a clear bag. I looked at the grocer. In contradistinction to him, I thought, I was a body that, through its haphazard intention of folding the path of exile back over itself, had registered, in the path’s senseless progressions, the meaningless course of human affairs, that mixture of error and violence that is history; I was a body without a home. I looked down at my hand grasping the metal handle of the scoop. The skin on my hand was cracked, exposing ancient violence embedded in matter. My body, due to exile, was undergoing a steady process of erasure; soon it would be annulled, negated by my perpetual homelessness. My writing hand, I thought, looking down at it and thinking again of Blanchot, is a sick hand.

The grocer was still petting his cat, which was licking its paw. I walked across the store toward a stack of onions. I picked one up. It looked like a shimmering globe. Morales’s ancient mineral voice echoed in my ear: Catalan literature will speak to you. It had spoken to him, a Chilean exile. It had spoken to my father, too; I remembered him feverishly pacing around his translations of Catalan authors, and saying: “Barcelona is the world’s literary frontier!” I tossed the onion up in the air and watched it spin. Right before I caught it, I said in Catalan: “According to Mallarmé, everything in the world exists in order to end up as a book!”

Just then, I stumbled over my chest-shaped suitcase—my father’s first grave, his pregrave—and landed in the open bags of rice. For a moment, right before I fell, the grocer’s store acquired larger dimensions; it appeared to have doubled in size. I was a speck of dust in the infinite, dizzying whole. A dark smile spread across my face. The grocer came around and stood over me. I saw my reflection in his eyes. I was horrified. I had a miserable, scrawny, skeletal frame. The grocer continued to stand there. He looked stupefied, like a fish that’s been shocked out of the water. Then he opened his thin, chapped mouth.

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