Call Me Zebra(35)

“Poor Unamuno!” my father deployed from the cave of our double mind. “Tortured by the simpleminded Franco for possessing a tragic sense of life!” His voice echoed as if it were emerging from an ancient grotto.

“Poor Unamuno,” I answered my father in agreement, “whose famous lines express the importance of contemplating nothingness, an activity relegated to the world’s misunderstood and disenfranchised, and the very wheel that animates the Grand Tour of Exile!” Then I told my father, “Listen to this one: The deepest problem: the immortality of the crab.”

My father pounded his cane against the walls of my void as he laughed. My paper heart crinkled in response. The sound of his laughter was a balm to my wounds.

I felt as though I had been admitted into a world of sublime parallels and auspicious coincidences. I stood there, leaning against the kitchen counter, daydreaming, thinking about the immortality of the crab until the church bells struck eleven. Two ones, I thought. It was the hour of the double, of duality. Under the retreating peal of the bells, Unamuno multiplied, acquiring a second self in addition to his first.

“Take that, General Franco,” I said, with great pride. “You who will always remain locked in your grave for lack of imagination, for not allowing your mind to fold over itself and fan open like flowers toward the sun, for being a degenerate nonreader, for neglecting to cultivate your consciousness and, consequently, for being incapable of surviving death. You,” I barreled on, “will suffocate in your grave while Unamuno, like all the other honest writers of our senseless world, will double and triple and quadruple at the hand of future writers who echo his tragic sense of life and who will plagiarize his words, therefore inserting his legacy again and again into the world.”

After a moment’s pause, I yelled out: “Unamuno, una-mano!”

With a definitive air, I raised my sick hand and gave the pájaro sabio a pat on the head. The bird winked at me. He was still walking across the counters.

“Aha,” I wrote in my notebook. “At last, the bird and I are on the same page.”



I sealed my notebook and stood in the kitchen with my eyes closed. I raised my grief receptors, which allow me to receive infinite amounts of data from the most recondite reservoirs of the matrix. I received the following message from the benevolent Rousseau: It’s time to go for a solitary walk.

“Yes,” I intoned. “A Pilgrimage of Exile!” It was time. The walk took form in my mind. I considered its shape. I decided that my first walk through Barcelona should consist of an Architectural Pilgrimage of Fragmentation. Away with the sourpuss seriousness of L’Eixample! Exile had shattered my identity and caused me to suffer a grief of dizzying proportions. I needed to lay my eyes on mercurial buildings, vertiginous structures. It was the only way to trigger memories and feelings I had long repressed, severed from my consciousness. I wanted those shards of forgetfulness to pierce through the manure of my mind and rise to the surface.

“Where should I begin?” I asked myself, opening my eyes and walking over to the recamier.

“At Antoni Gaudí’s famous Park Güell,” I answered.

I visualized the park: an upward slope speckled with coastal brush and petrified stone, with paths as knotted as sheep’s intestines.

“No one,” I concluded, “can deny that the roads in Gaudí’s park mimic the dead-end roads on which the homeless exile walks, triggering the multiple parts of herself to resurface like shrapnel absorbed during a long remorseless war. In other words,” I said, watching Taüt, who was busy walking in figure eights on the living-room floor, shaking the sugar crystals off his wings, “it would be more honest if Antoni Gaudí’s Park Güell were renamed the Metaphysical Garden of Exile!”

It occurred to me that everything that goes up must come down. If I were to hike up to the Metaphysical Garden of Exile, I would then be obliged by the laws of physics to descend to the city’s opposite point—the port—and, once there, officially salute the Mediterranean, that Sea of Sunken Hopes. I realized, almost instantly, that the main road connecting the Metaphysical Garden of Exile to the Sea of Sunken Hopes is the legendary Passeig de Gràcia, a section of which is, incidentally, also known as the Block of Discordance. What could be more complete? I smiled vaguely. I felt as though I had stepped from shadow into light.

I thought of Walser, committed walker and authorial sage, and declared: “It is time to leave Quim Monzó’s room of ghosts.” I washed my face, got dressed, grabbed my notebook, tucked a pen behind my ear, and opened the door. Immediately, I heard a voice, in a jubilant tone: “So you never said. Where are you headed with that suitcase?”

It was Ludo Bembo. I could hardly believe it. He had finally found his way. I felt as if the tension, built up over the course of those long nights, was being released at once, causing me to stagger and feel giddy in his presence. He was standing on the other side of the threshold wearing a linen vest over a white shirt with his sleeves rolled up. He had the same mildly apprehensive expression on his face he’d had when he picked me up at the airport, but he had switched his tune. Now his timidity—if it was timidity—stood in sharp contrast to the seductive robustness of his question.

“Well?” he went on.

“Morocco,” I joked. I told him that if he hadn’t picked me up I would have arranged for a donkey to meet me at the airport. “I would have ridden that animal across the deserts of Spain and, upon arriving at the port city of Tarifa—famished, as thin as a rake—I would have pushed the donkey, which would be dead by then, into the water and used it as a raft to get across the channel to North Africa.” I told him that, like a true explorer of the literary abyss and not unlike the nauseated Roquentin, I would have sat on the dead ass’s belly and dangled my feet in the clear water, allowing the currents to transport me hither and thither.