Call Me Zebra(29)

As I moved through the apartment, my breath was labored and shallow. Still, I could smell damp feathers, barley, cheese, and rotting vegetables. I remembered Quim Monzó’s bird. Quim Monzó had told me the bird’s name was Taüt, and I tried calling for it as I walked around. “Taüt,” I said a few times, each time louder than the last. There was no answer. I headed to the kitchen. I sucked in little patches of air. I turned on all the lights along the way. I watched the darkness retreat. The walls, sound and stable, came into view. In the kitchen, there was a string of chili peppers hanging from a nail in the wall and a container of coffee beans that had been left on the counter. I opened the fridge. Inside, I found a half-empty jar of mayo, three cloves of garlic, a package of jamón, manchego cheese, and an old baguette. I broke off a piece of the bread and chewed on it. I thought to myself, There is not a thing that is more positive than bread. Dostoyevsky. I walked through the rest of the apartment. The furniture was old and heavy, indicating a long genealogy of owners. In the living room, a recamier and a chesterfield were separated by a wooden coffee table (too heavy to move even an inch). Lined against the walls, like a moat surrounding the central decor, were twelve armchairs with cabriole legs and splats that finished off in palmettes. There was something worn and patient about the chairs, as though they had recently served to cup the shocked bodies of mourners after a funeral. In the corner, resting on a broken Corinthian-style column, was a telephone in the shape of a lobster tail. I pictured Quim Monzó speaking through that tail. I remembered his Dadaist inclinations. The chairs, I concluded, may have been arranged for a séance or a group session of automatic writing inspired by hypnosis.

I moved on to other surfaces. A long table sliced the dining room in half. I detected ghostly water rings and wine stains on the wood, sugary red bumps that prompted me to look through the pantry for a bottle, which I quickly found: a middle-of-the-road reserve rioja from 2009. I sat on one of the dining chairs, uncorked the bottle, and drank half of it at once. A line piped into my head: I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans. Hemingway. I drank some more wine. I snapped off another piece of the baguette. I felt drunk, queasy. I said, “Rigor mortis,” out loud to no one. I felt a sharp pang in my chest. I got up and opened the window. I opened the molded shutters. The wind had picked up. There was a mild fall chill. I leaned my head out. Catalan flags of independence, marked with their four red stripes of blood, were hanging from the iron terrace of the building across the street, being dealt remorseless blows by the wind.

Once my breathing had steadied, I sealed the window and resumed my tour. I walked down the narrow bleak hallway and opened all the doors. The first two gave way easily, but I had to force the third door open; it was as withholding as Ludo Bembo. I banged on it. I kicked. I side-slammed the door. Finally, it jerked open. I fell across the threshold into a room devoted entirely to the bird. A small square window carved into the back wall let in a dim trickle of light from an interior courtyard. Perching branches had been screwed into the walls. In the bleak light, the branches blurred into scissors, blades, spades, swords. The room looked like a fake forest. Plastic ivy plants hung from the ceiling in woven baskets. The bird had chewed through the straw. A tall wide cage rested on a gilded stand in the center of the room. It was empty. The bird was nowhere to be found. I lingered in the room. I looked through the window at the darkening bands of the universe. A thick canopy of clouds veiled the stars.

I felt exhausted, drained, confused. I had the distinct sensation of being in multiple places at once. I retreated from the bird’s room and moved methodically down the hallway. I felt my eyes close against my will. I forced them open again. The final door led to the bedroom. An oversize mattress was nestled in a wooden bed frame with dramatic turned posts that looked like obelisks. “Taüt,” I called out one last time, and pictured the bird emerging from the mouth of a mysterious tunnel to greet or attack me.

I dragged in my suitcase of books and set it down next to the bed. I flung myself on the mattress. I turned away from my suitcase to avoid inhaling the fetid odor of my father’s death. My head spun with little patches of memories. I remembered that Quim Monzó had sent me a photograph of the bird as an attachment in one of his e-mails. In the photograph, the cockatoo is perched on the arm of a swivel wall lamp in the living room, his crown and right tarsus raised, his toes tense and spread wide as though he were simultaneously saluting and warning the cameraman to halt. The bird had cast a stubborn and furtive glance at the camera, wickedly aware that his picture was being taken. I had never seen anything like it. Then I remembered the bird’s date of birth: January 1, 2000. So that bird, wherever he was, had been born the same day that the odd parade of the twenty-first century began, which so far had been a century of haphazard bombings, of revenge killings, of undeserved misery, of terror without reprieve, of death. It wasn’t the Great War, but it was the end of the world as we know it all over again. I heard my father’s voice boom across my void. He said, It is always the final hour. My heart, that soiled and wrinkled piece of paper, folded over itself like an envelope.

I smelled my hands, sniffed them like an animal seeking comfort in the porousness of the earth. They smelled like dirt and onions. I said to myself obtusely: “You are in Barcelona; the Grand Tour of Exile has begun!” I started laughing hysterically, laughing at the thought of my body being tied to the bedposts and sacrificed in the night. I fell asleep with my clothes still on, my lips stained with wine, a stale chunk of bread in the palm of my hand. If I had seen myself from above, say from a helicopter after an air raid, I would have mistaken my body for a corpse.