Call Me Zebra(32)

By dawn, at the edge of despair, I had moved from the bed to the red recamier. I thought, what remedy do I have but to resort to literature? The sun, round and orange, rose into the sky. It looked like a ball of fire. I stared at it through the window. I sat in quiet contemplation. Hours later, in a somewhat more pragmatic state of mind, I remembered that some of my father’s translations—not the ones we had lived off of, but the ones belonging to his private collection—consisted of transcriptions, of copying a text word by word just as a medieval scribe would have done in the days of yore. My father had never explained the theory behind his transcriptions to me, but with my mind sufficiently primed to receive spontaneous signals from the Matrix of Literature, I instantly deduced his logic. Obvious was the fact that the practice of transcription had served as an additional tool for his memorization, ensuring his position as a scribe of the future. The more striking revelation, however, was the following: Had my father not gone nearly blind and thus continued his practice, the Art of Transcription would have led him to a very desirable state, a kind of nirvana, which men of a lesser constitution could only reach through the use of opium. It was midday. The sun’s rays pierced through the window and stained everything with a copper tinge. My thoughts, nurtured by the rusty fall light, spread into a complex web. Due to the inevitability of human error inherent in the manual reproduction of texts, which guarantees that each version produced is minutely different from its predecessor, the practitioner is able to recognize life’s infinite multiplicity, its capacity for perpetuating and recycling itself. In turn, I concluded, this recognition allows the practitioner to take comfort in two basic facts: (1) the interconnected fabric of humanity (we have all been erroneously reproduced by others; we are degenerate copies of one another), and (2) the nothingness of being (despite being connected to a million other strands of life individuals can expire suddenly without warning, not to mention that, more often than not, the people one is connected to fail to help us move along our path because they are too busy avoiding their own wretchedness, pulling rank, grasping for power at the cost of others and to their own detriment). I had expanded upon the Hosseini Commandments by culling wisdom from the abyss. My manifesto had grown wings!

Over the course of the following nights, I managed to reread most of the authors my father had transcribed during our Catalan years. I filled pages and pages of my notebook with transcriptions from each of the following writers, all of whom, in one way or another, had been touched by exile: Josep Pla (a man of immense candor), Salvador Espriu (a man in possession of a labyrinthine mind with a great propensity toward codes), Mercè Rodoreda (a genius of the double-edged sentence, apparently blunt but actually emotionally cutting), Miguel de Unamuno (a man with an encyclopedic sensibility), Federico García Lorca (a lyric erotic) and his friend Salvador Dalí (eccentric, hyperrealist, provocateur, whose work I can never get enough of), Joan Maragall (a Hellenistic bore who became an antianarchist halfway through his life, but one I am inclined to forgive for his splendid translations of Nietzsche from the French; the man didn’t speak a lick of German), and Montserrat Roig (eloquent, graceful, master of embedded dialogue, highly attuned to the ways in which architecture absorbs historical grief).

When I was done with my list, I closed my notebook. It was the middle of night. I ran my sick hand over the engraved title. I paced the corridor. Immediately, I heard: Forgetfulness is the only revenge and the only forgiveness. Ah, Borges. I laughed at his maxim. Because, contrary to his missive, I was experiencing a loss of forgetfulness. I was regressing through the chain of selves produced by exile and, in doing so, was recovering patches of memories, of feeling, none of them exact, all of them falsified due to the patina of time. I was in the mood for conclusions. There must have been a full moon causing the tides of my mind to rise to unprecedented heights. I looked through the window at the end of the corridor. There it was, hovering over L’Eixample, a wide silver disc. I raised my grief antennas. I concluded the following: I had retraced the words my father had transcribed during our time in Catalonia; soon I would have to retrace the paths we had walked together. I would have to leave the apartment.

I stood in the corridor a while longer and thought of our long walk of exodus through that putrid no-man’s-land, and for a moment, my feet hurt, the bony knobs of my knees ached. I remembered the bitter cold, the frozen terrain, the spectral snow of those final days. My father had been dragging our suitcase along while carrying me, his ragged coat drawn over our backs. Fatigued, breathless, he put me down on a glistening icy rock, and I remembered looking up at him and seeing my own reflection in his eyes. We were undernourished, skeletal, a pair of living dead. Our lips were blue. Our eyes bulged out of their sockets.

I sat on the red recamier and watched the moon’s glow fade behind a traveling herd of clouds. I closed my eyes. For better or worse, I thought to myself, I am approaching my own buried past. And that’s when I realized: I had returned to Barcelona to set off on a series of walks—no, not walks, Pilgrimages of Exile—during which I would conduct myself as a man digging, unafraid to return again and again to the same matter. I realized the enormity of the task and nearly succumbed to panic. I drew in little breaths. I calmed myself by thinking of how literature’s interconnected network of sentences would chaperone me into a great silence, into the void at the center of my life, into the dark folds of the universe. “Ah, Benjamin, martyr of thought,” I murmured as I retreated to the bedroom and put my notebook on the nightstand. For the first time in a week, I went to sleep at night. My job was done.