Call Me Zebra(36)

“Who’s Roquentin?” Ludo retorted, looking down at his feet. His shoes were made of braided leather.

“Who’s Roquentin!” I repeated disdainfully. “And you call yourself a literary scholar.”

Mildly exasperated, he protested, “I’m a philologist!”

“And why wouldn’t a philologist know about Roquentin, beloved bearer of Sartre’s cross?”

“Because I spend my days working on dictionaries,” he whined.

“Ah,” I said. “So you are in the business of embalming words!”

This seemed to relax him.

“You’re very funny,” he said, undeterred, leaning casually against the frame of the door.

I leaned against the door, too. We were so close we could easily have kissed each other on the lips. Two .1 percenters. With a little training, I thought to myself, I can turn Ludo Bembo into a literary terrorist. The very thought of his company filled my lungs with purified air.

“Ludo Bembo,” I said, remote, philosophical, and in a silky tone. “You should know: Nothing is funnier than unhappiness.”

To my surprise, he let out a gleeful laugh. He seemed to have grown more resilient, more open, since I’d last seen him. Where, I wondered, was this Ludo Bembo before? This Ludo who was—in contradistinction to the anxious, reserved edition who had met me at the airport—calm, supple, curious.

We stood there in the hallway staring at each other. An old woman carrying a basket of freshly cut asparagus, whose gaze betrayed an artless candor, staggered up the stairs. Once she was out of view, Ludo volunteered: “I was in town yesterday and spent the night. I . . . I thought I would check in on you before heading back to Girona.”

“What did you do all night? Did you take a solitary walk?” I teased, thinking of Rousseau’s orders.

“No,” he intoned, looking away. “I spent the night at a friend’s house.”

I detected a hint of sexual melancholy in his voice, and his hair looked tousled. He obviously had slept with someone. I leaned in and sniffed him. He smelled like ferns. He stepped away from the frame and nervously reached for his pipe, which he had tucked into the breast pocket of his vest.

He asked me if I would be interested in getting a bite to eat at the Boqueria. He told me it was the Fiesta de la Mercè. I remembered the celebrations. There would be fireworks, a procession, neighborhood teenagers dressed up as devils running around with pitchforks and playing with fire. I agreed to meet but told him I had to run a few errands first.

“What errands?” he challenged.

“I am going on an Architectural Pilgrimage of Fragmentation,” I offered matter-of-factly. “But I can meet you in the afternoon when I’m done.”

He looked at me with a seriousness and a sensuality that implied soon we will be wrapped around each other in bed. He held my gaze for what felt like a long time, then teased: “Do you even eat?” He crossed his arms and tilted his head. His curls fell across his face.

I felt my corporeality evaporate. My mind clouded over. I saw myself double: I was standing outside that ruined house that had come down on my mother, and at the same time an older version of myself was leaning against the frame of a stranger’s door in Barcelona speaking to Ludo Bembo while wondering if my mother had found anything she could have eaten—fried liver abandoned on the stove, a bowl of walnuts, dried mulberries—before that house came down on her head. I felt my void clench.

Without realizing it, I mumbled: “I prefer not to eat.”

“We’ll have to fix that,” he said. “We’ll have to show you how to eat like a true Mediterranean.”

A sweet, cool draft blew through the door. I remembered that with each stone we had lifted off my mother’s body my father had recited Marx’s famous words, Change the world, followed by Rilke’s, which echoed not only Marx’s but also Nietzsche’s, illuminating a triangular pattern in the matrix: You must change your life. Change! I chewed on the word. I looked Ludo Bembo up and down. The word secreted a mild anxiety. Was there room for him in the Grand Tour of Exile? I was afraid he would derail me from my objectives. More than anything else in the world, I felt the need to record the uselessness of my family’s suffering in my notebook. That obligation to share our story, to sound it out as an alarm, had been assigned to me by my dead father and was so exhaustive that it competed with every rudimentary need: food, sleep, the company of others. And yet I was in a divided frame of mind. I knew I was also afraid that without another person anchoring me to this trifling universe I would fade into the ether entirely, vanish into nothingness.

Ludo reached out and squeezed my hand.

“That’s my sick hand!” I told him, trying to squash my desire. But, like a phoenix, it rose its dusty head once more.



We walked out into the yolky light of midday. Before we each went our own way, we agreed to meet in the afternoon at the side entrance of the Boqueria between the vegetable stalls. I watched Ludo retreat through the brutal grid of L’Eixample. Then I walked to a corner newsstand, which was run by a middle-aged woman with a fleshy face and kind eyes. I bought the paper. I checked to see if there was news of the Grand Tour of Exile. Perhaps Morales had dispatched a press release. I stood there and leafed through every page. Nothing. Not a word. There was news of a homicide-suicide, of stranded boats loaded with refugees adrift in that great green sea, of kings and queens, of politicians and their wives.