Call Me Zebra(37)

“Tourist?” the owner exclaimed, nosily craning her head out of the newsstand’s opening, gesturing at the carefully arranged rows of trinkets, guidebooks, and maps of the city.

“No,” I exclaimed impatiently in Catalan. “A returning exile!”

She reeled her head back into the enclosure of the newsstand.

I picked up a map of Barcelona and slid it between my fingers. It was a pocket-size laminated map that folded conveniently over itself. Where would the Spaniards be, I thought, without Unamuno, the man who had introduced them to the art of paper folding? I purchased it. Then, thinking of Borges’s words, I asked the fleshy-faced woman if, in her opinion, the map I had bought was conscionable or unconscionable. She pretended not to hear me, so I repeated the question. “Conscionable or unconscionable?” I posed. But her phone rang before she could respond, and she walked to the back of the newsstand to pick it up.

“Una nena, una nena!” I heard her exclaim a second later. A girl had been born. She had popped her veiny blue head into this woman’s life.

I folded the newspaper and tucked it into my notebook. Then I opened the map. I searched for the street I was standing on. Carrer de Girona. When I found the street, I pointed at it and simultaneously tapped my foot against the ground in order to indicate to the various intersecting surfaces of the city that I, Zebra, Dame of the Void, was as receptive as an antenna, ready to channel information; that my double mind, which contained multiple subminds, each motored by a different language, was a fertile ground for receiving signals from the palimpsest of time that is, it goes without saying, contained within the Matrix of Literature. The first private communiqué I received kindly suggested I pass the map along to someone else with the following note: “Consider yourself warned: This map, like all maps, is a lie. Literature is the only true form of cartography in the world.”

I transcribed the message onto the map’s borders and then walked to the grocer’s. As soon as the grocer saw me, his face took on the disgruntled expression of a pug.

“I come bearing gifts,” I said.

No sooner had I spoken than the grocer’s face slackened and turned red as if it had been grilled and deboned. I put the map on the counter and told him that enclosed in the map is a message from the Matrix of Literature, indeed from the illustrious Borges, one of the matrix’s greatest masterminds, and that he, the grocer, a primitive, miserly, and nonliterary man, should consider himself lucky that I had chosen him as the recipient. “Open the map and read what I have transcribed in the margins,” I ordered.

After a moment’s hesitation, he opened the map. I watched him work the laminated edges with his gnarled walnut-stained fingers. He spread the map across the glass counter and examined it under the yellow glow of a dusty overhead light. He studied the map for a moment, then, like a man lost at sea, he mumbled to himself: “‘Consider yourself warned: This map, like all maps, is a lie. Literature is the only true form of cartography in the world.’”

“Excellent,” I said. “Message transmitted.”

The grocer looked bewildered, as though he had been slapped. I ignored the peaks and valleys of his facial expressions. There were things he needed to reflect on in order to transcend his ignorant state. To butter him up, I pointed at his poster of Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory and complimented him on his choice of art. After that, I told him that he would be a fool to ignore Borges’s message, since Borges had a great deal to teach us about the labyrinthine nature of both voluntary and involuntary memory, not to mention historical versus private memory, themes that greatly concerned Freud as well—I was speaking with the voice of my manifesto—the man who dared to ask: Where does a thought go when it is forgotten?

That did it. I had pushed the grocer over the edge. In a resentful nasal tone, he told me that it was clear to him that I suffered from certain incorrigible limitations and that I should get out before he was tempted to throw produce at me. He said this last part while looking sorrowfully at his pile of black walnuts. I wondered what those walnuts symbolized for him. His cat appeared with its orange stripes and its tail in the air, and this seemed to calm him, at least momentarily.

I took advantage of that brief caesura to stroke my notebook. I lifted it and smelled the musty sheets. Then, in the gentlest of tones, I said to the grocer: “My dear grocer, no one is spared. Someday you, too, will join the world’s unlucky, the world’s foot soldiers, the bearers of grief. And when that day arrives, you will finally understand that a book is a counselor, a multitude of counselors, and you will think back on me fondly.”

Naturally, nothing more was said. A thick silence enveloped me as I walked out of the store. Before I left, I looked back at the grocer and his cat through the glass door. He was a changed man. He and his cat both seemed resigned, aware of their smallness, of their powerlessness in the grand scheme of life. But that awareness of the dark side would soon start working on their behalf; because once trespassed, darkness begins to yield to its survivors—to the unlucky lucky—the secret revenge of laughter. I stopped to look one last time through the glass door. I could no longer tell where the grocer ended and the cat began.



The church bells let out a single stroke. I waited until the peal faded into the distance, then set off on the Architectural Pilgrimage of Fragmentation.

I walked across Avinguda Diagonal toward Park Güell. Tourists flocked past me on the boisterous, broad street. A man in an old blue Volvo honked at a woman on a scooter; she cut him off and whizzed on. Her head was enclosed in a red helmet. She looked like a giant beating heart moving unprotected through the street.