Call Me Zebra(28)

“Balls!” he croaked perversely, in his native tongue. He blinked and my image vanished.

As he walked away, I leaned back into the merchandise and made a mental note: Specimen demonstrates resistance toward literature. I let out a ghastly laugh. He didn’t bother to turn around.

I got up and paid for the rice and a single shimmering onion. As I counted out the euros I owed the grocer, I thought to myself, I am regressing through the forests of exile. I have come here to excavate my grief, to resurrect the memories I have buried in the deep crater of my life. I thought, I am in Barcelona, the least Spanish of Spanish cities. I have arrived in Catalonia, but I am also in Spain, a country with a bizarre tendency to cast history into the pit of erasure with one hand and with the other retrieve what shards of facts and memories can be salvaged from that very same pit, to restore them, so to speak, once they have been deranged by the passage of time. Spain, I argued inwardly, a country that is engaged in both the business of oblivion and of restoring historical memory, as if memories were like pieces of old furniture that could be restored to their original dimensions. Spain that is extremist to the point of death, Dalí had said. A reproduction of his painting The Persistence of Memory was hanging over the counter. There it was: time swollen. Limp, fleshy clocks clinging to nature in a dilated landscape of rocks: the past, the present, and the future leveled into a single undifferentiated plane. Beneath that warped temporal field, the grocer had started to go about his business again, moving between the aisles of vegetables, stoic, unaware, having, after a brief moment of concern, completely forgotten about me.



I made my way to Quim Monzó’s building. I rode the elevator to the third floor, exited, identified his door. “Quim Monzó,” I said, thinking of that other Quim Monzó, the writer I had met in the New World, as I fiddled with the key to retrieve it from the lock. I liked saying his name. The hard consonants, the q, m, and z, are exquisitely balanced by the sharp vowels, the o, i, and u. What could be better? I nudged the door with my foot. It was whispering its owner’s name as I was saying the writer’s: Quim Monzó, Quim Monzó. The two names, uttered by me and the door, enhanced each other.

The apartment was engulfed in darkness. I felt a sense of uneasy anticipation, of uncertainty, as I walked across the threshold. It seemed infinite, an elastic architecture that had the capacity to expand beneath my feet irrespective of the direction I walked in. I could make a series of left turns or walk straight, and the rest of the apartment would appear with its subtle, nearly imperceptible surfaces. I dragged my hand along the wall in search of a light switch but found nothing. I stepped into the darkness. I pulled my suitcase in behind me. Suddenly, I remembered what Quim Monzó the writer had said to me so many months earlier during his lecture in that false New World. I remembered his dark eyes, his uneven gray hair, his eyebrows’ inquisitive arc. Morales, who had been hosting him, had put me in charge of providing him with water. I’d handed him a bottle and asked him if he needed anything else, at which point he leaned in. His eyes looked like two drops of oil. He put his hand on my shoulder.

“Yes,” he said. “I would like a noose.”

I tore a napkin and rolled it into a noose. Just then, the New Poets walked into the room. Their hair was so greasy that it looked like it had been licked. As usual, they were wearing their overalls. They looked like a pair of dejected farmers. Overalls! As if intelligence could be harvested. True intelligence, I had thought to myself as I watched them—not the cerebral kind, but the kind that is born in the irrational mind of the heart—is earned through a degree of suffering the New Poets would never experience. For the sake of their health and the health of those who had swallowed the myth of the new, my ancestors and I had been adrift in the deserts of the world, inhaling toxins, stepping over charred corpses, pulling our ass this way and that. And what had they ever done for us? I felt livid. They were pink and plump. I could feel my blood coursing through my legs. I wanted to walk over and smack them across the head, but I stopped myself because ignorance cannot be slapped out of anyone.

I handed Quim Monzó the noose.

“A good luck charm,” I said.

Quim Monzó was delighted. He slipped the noose into his breast pocket. Halfway through his talk, he retrieved it, held it up to the light, looked through the ring as though it were a monocle, and said, “Love is just lust dressed up in a bow tie!”

I happened to be carrying a book by Badiou that day. I opened it at random, as if it were an oracle, according to the Hosseini tradition, and read: Love is no more than an imaginary canvas painted over the reality of sex.

A second later, the interviewer, a Catalan translator, asked Quim Monzó about Josep Pla, a writer also known as the Memory Man whose books I had been consulting that very morning. This double coincidence emboldened me. I felt as though I were descending the craggy, interwoven slopes of literature. The farther down I went, the more aware I became of the lie of reality, the treachery of this illusory world that, according to Josep Pla, is the sewer where we all slog. I looked at the New Poets and mouthed at them, “Unlike you, who are just a pair of amateurs, I navigate the labyrinthine corridors of literature with the speedy diligence of a dirty old rat in a maze!”

But that was months ago, long before my father’s death. Now I was alone, staring into the darkness of this other Quim Monzó’s apartment. I slid my hand across the surface of the wall, still in search of a light switch. I thought of the pile of illfated corpses. I thought, I am a stranger wherever I happen to go, a pitiable migrant with no one to hang on to. I thought of my mother. I imagined her rummaging through the house for food before its stones came down on her head. The tenses in my life were being radically demolished. The past was projecting itself into the future, becoming the future, while the future, I realized, had been sending signals all along to the present, which was now the past. Time itself was becoming literature. I dragged my hand along a different wall. Finally, I found the switch. The foyer lit up like a stage.