Call Me Zebra(33)

The next morning, however, my plans were delayed due, in some measure, to the fact that the bird had finally made his debut. I looked at him. What a mongrel. He was pecking at the piece of bread I had left in the bed my first day in the apartment. The bedroom was engulfed in darkness. There were no windows. I had barely eaten. The last person I had interacted with was the grocer. I hadn’t gone outside since Ludo Bembo had dropped me off. I felt trapped, unreal, far away from the world. I examined the walls. I could have died, or disappeared, or been absorbed by the objects in the room. No one would notice my absence. No one, I reconsidered, but Quim Monzó’s bird.

Without light, it appeared as though the surfaces surrounding the bird, which was white, marked the edges of a black hole. I reached out and turned on the table lamp. The ceiling came into view. It sagged in the middle. It reminded me of the droopy sacks of yogurt I had seen hanging from village trees and swinging in the rancid wind of that decimated no-man’s-land. I ran my hand across the bird’s back. It occurred to me that if the room was a black hole then my hand and the bird were on the edge of an event horizon, a precipice of sorts. “Oh, the ecstasy of darkness,” I said out loud to no one.

The bird turned his head and peered at me through his right eye. He looked haggard. What did I look like? For all I knew, my face was a void—a symbol of the very abyss of exile that had summoned me. I hadn’t looked in the mirror since I had arrived in Barcelona. There was a high probability that I had been reduced to nothing more than a sick hand. A hand that knows nothing other than my notebook. I laughed helplessly at the idea.

I stroked the bird. Some of his feathers were bent upward and grainy to the touch. I remembered his tyrannical look in the photograph, his claws grasping the air, his rigid stance.

“Here, here,” I said to the bird, as I stroked it. “I come in peace.”

My words echoed back: I come in pieces. With the suddenness of a revolving door, Taüt cocked his head to the side and snapped his beak open and bit my finger. I let out a shrill scream. There was a drop of blood on his beak. I could see the drop glistening in the dull light of the lamp. I remembered the stain of blood spreading across the flattened sheet of my heart in my dream. I backed away from the bird. Taüt retreated. He knocked his feathered head back and gargled as he retreated across the bed. Then he stopped and pressed his talons into the sheets. He spread his wings and shimmied from side to side.

“Taüt!” the bird screeched in an impatient voice, before gathering himself and exiting the room.

I wondered if the apartment was diseased. I wondered if Quim Monzó, the retired literature professor, had gone to Greece to disabuse himself of the idea of order; perhaps he was engaging in some kind of entropy tourism, a tour of the authentic disorder of life.

The darkness quietly tugged at the objects in the room, reeling them discreetly into its hollow sphere while the weak light of the table lamp pushed meekly against it. I felt myself begin to unreel. It occurred to me that the apartment, cluttered and potentially diseased, was, in fact, a hospital. I slipped out from between the humid sheets and ambled down the corridor. I wanted to confront the rest of the apartment. No, not confront, I corrected as I walked out of the bedroom; I wanted to extract information from it. I walked past my chest-shaped suitcase full of books and heirlooms. I got a whiff of my father’s death. I walked down the corridor, the corridor of exile—the long dark corridor of my mind. As I paced, it occurred to me that before walking through Barcelona I had to commit to the nonsense of the apartment, the nonsense of the bird, which was no different from the nonsense of the world, nonsense that people deny because their consciousness has been reduced through the falsification of history to a singular dimension. The falsification of history! The words gave me a distinct pleasure.

I entered the kitchen in a mild state of hilarity, made coffee, poured it into a dusty cup, carried it to the window. The Catalan flags hanging from the buildings on the other side of the street looked limp, defeated. The four vertical red stripes looked rusty, like dried blood. The street was largely deserted. It was still early in the morning. There was a radio perched near the window. I turned it on. I heard, “The whole world is a potential front. We are all foot soldiers.” I turned it off. A plump woman in an apron appeared in a window on the opposite side of the street. She leaned out and began to beat her flag with a broomstick. Patches of dust lifted off into the dense air. The bells sounded out; their peal receded into the enormous distance.

I got up and moved to the red recamier. In the living room, I noticed a Swiss cuckoo clock I hadn’t seen before; the pendulum was swinging, making a rhythmic clicking sound. The rooms of the apartment had begun to reveal their true colors over the course of the past week, coming forward with all they had initially withheld. It was like being inside Velázquez’s Las Meninas. There was a mirror on the wall opposite the window. In it, I saw the attenuated reflection of the pendulum, the curved end of the recamier, the bronze studs lining the velvet seams, the wooden shutters beyond the window, and blue strips of sky through the louvers. The clouds had moved on. The sun was shining.

I ran my hand across the red velvet cushions on the recamier. There were cigarette burns in the fabric. The crusted edges reminded me of the mouth of a volcano. I thought of Mount Sahand. “That comatose beast!” I said out loud, and laughed. I felt time slow down, come to a halt. Everywhere I looked, I saw holes, depressions, ditches. In the shadowy yolk-colored light, the objects of the apartment seemed to be acquiring density, pulling me toward them. Again, I had the sensation that the apartment was a black hole. Quim Monzó, whoever he was, had taken his leap. I had to take mine: the leap into the void, into the nothingness of exile. I was preparing myself to walk the streets of Barcelona, a stranger once again. Or worse than a stranger, I thought, a restranger, a double alien ready to approach her buried past.