Call Me Zebra(38)

Rather suddenly, my thoughts came together like the angled points of a star. It occurred to me that a book is only a good counselor if it calls up the wounded zones of our consciousness—in other words, if the act of reading it wounds us. I thought about how the word star is only one letter different from the word scar, and this thought reinforced my conclusion that Baudelaire, that beloved dandy, had not taken his rebellion against the bourgeoisie, those who cling to security at the expense of the vulnerable, far enough. No. Because in order for a book to be a good counselor, I persevered, it must be negotiating a danger zone; there must be a transgression, a leap, a move beyond a prohibition. I went underground, got on the metro. “A good book,” I said to myself, “is cannibalistic. An object that calls up the ghosts of our past in order to reflect the haunting instability of our future world.”

The metro doors closed. The train moved along the tracks. Immediately, a woman’s amplified voice emanated from somewhere in the crowd. “Who is the enemy?” she asked. Someone answered, “The adversaries are everywhere.” Another voice said, “We are confronted with a case of leaderless resistance.” I looked around. A group of wiry teenagers were leaning against the doors gloomily. Everything else was just a sea of heads. I couldn’t tell where the voices were coming from.

There, in that nonplace, in the city’s gutters and underground corridors, the dark rooms of grief I carried within me were suddenly called up, the insurmountable loss, the irreparable wound that had led me to retrace my life’s journey in punctuated movements from West to East. I was there revisiting the dark events or, rather, the senseless phenomena that had conspired to destroy me. I was trying to recover a fraction of what had been lost from my memory. I closed my eyes. I felt like a ghost. I felt as if, with my presence alone, I were sounding out a warning of doom and gloom.

“Who am I?” I asked aloud.

I heard: “Another corpse in the illfated pile.”

An hour later, slightly nauseated, I was standing beneath an ashen sky in the Metaphysical Garden of Exile. A storm was gathering. Another hour and the rain would be pouring down. The sensation I had in the metro lingered as I walked through the park. I slipped through a hedge and lumbered around the aloe and palms. I walked through the Portico of the Washerwoman; I could feel the wind moving through the gaps between the columns of the arcade, sifting through the branches of the trees, rushing through the coastal brush. It sounded like the park was sighing.

“What am I doing in Barcelona?” I asked myself. There was no one else around.

I answered, “I am leaping into the void of exile in order to stain my notebook with the inky residue of the past.

“And who will read your notebook?” I asked.

“Nobody,” I answered despairingly, and carried on beneath the parade of clouds.

I walked through the park as a shadow, a ghost, already dead and yet still alive. I stood on the terrace with serpentine benches, looking out over Barcelona, and from that vantage point, I could sense a slight shift in the air, in the landscape of my mind. For a second, I considered leaping off the overlook. I considered killing myself, going, like a good book, toward my own disappearance. I looked out at the sea, slack and purple in the distance; at the cranes hovering over the spires of La Sagrada Familia; at the domes and turrets of the city; the slick blue glass and reddish hues of the Torre Agbar; the clay tower of the warden’s house in the park; and the fronds of palm trees in between. I thought to myself, yes, indeed, I will leap off the terrace and, as Borges said, my tomb will be the unfathomable air.

I looked backward and forward at the fundamental fatality of my life, its senselessness and lack of reason, the swamp air of my childhood, and remembered that right before his death my father had raised his hand and grazed the yellow tips of his mustache with his leathery fingers. Then he’d tapped his temple with his index finger, and weakly said: “This, up here, is the only liberty you will ever have. Guard it with your life, your death.”

I stared out at the city’s skyline. Barcelona was emitting a low hum. I looked at the Sea of Sunken Hopes, at its infinite horizons and mists. Even from that impossible distance, I could hear the waves breaking against the shore—the sea swelling and retreating—and for a moment, I had the impression that Barcelona was free of thresholds, as if its perimeters were melting into the sea, the Old and the New Worlds blending together. In my mind’s eye, I could see the statue of Christopher Columbus standing by the shore at the end of that long promenade, La Rambla: his face proud, his finger pointing at the myth of the new.

There it was again, that terrible word: new. New! Scoffing at the word immediately made me feel better. I had survived my duel with the unthinking masses dining on the artifice of the so-called New World. I thought of its companion term: now. I denounced them both. “I would sooner believe in nothing, sooner in the devil, than in the now,” I said out loud to no one, echoing Nietzsche’s words. The ill-fateds’ now had been and would continue to be leveled by history’s remorseless blows; it had been beaten out of our repertoire of tenses.

Just then, I noticed a girl with a broad forehead and a sharp chin standing next to me. She was wearing a blue dress with a passenger pigeon printed on the skirt. She had the most unexceptional face. She was American.

She turned to me, and asked: “Were you speaking to me? I didn’t hear what you said.”