Call Me Zebra(39)

“No,” I said abruptly.

I examined her dress. I hated its whimsical flair. Then I thought: Why shouldn’t I speak to her? Why should I keep my thoughts to myself when the world perpetuates itself by torturing exiles, immigrants, refugees? It is my duty as a lucky-unlucky to take revenge on the world by contaminating it with my thoughts and my suffering, which are one and the same thing. She was looking at the sprawling view of Barcelona, at the blue surface of the sea, which looked like hammered leather with the wind pressing into the water, causing depressions, waves, foamy peaks and valleys.

“Actually, I was speaking to you,” I said.

She turned to face me again with that plain, broad forehead of hers.

“You,” I said, “are at liberty to turn your nose away from the cadavers of history, to protect your stupidity and your innocence”—her smooth cheeks flushed and her blue eyes went round—“but I could never do the same.”

She took a step back.

“Even if I wanted to turn away from the miasma of death,” I added, stepping toward her, “I couldn’t because I have been ghettoed in the Pyramid of Exile for the benefit of people like you.”

“You don’t know anything about me,” she said. She was on the verge of tears.

“I know what I know,” I said. “And I also know when I see what I know.”

I stopped paying attention to her. I reviewed my words: I know what I know and I also know when I see what I know. It was the most brilliant declaration I had made all day. More brilliant than the educational intervention I had offered the grocer.

I watched her walk away; her skirt billowed in the wind. After that, I walked to a remote corner of the park, found a moist patch of earth, and dug a hole in the ground. I scribbled that wretched word—new—on a piece of paper and buried it in the hole. I sniffed my fingers. I remembered the smell of the earth where my father and I had dug my mother’s grave. It was acidic, poisonous, dry. Then I remembered the moist, grassy smell of the hole into which the undertakers had lowered my father’s casket. The Hosseinis—all dead except me—were scattered across the world. The next time I looked up, I saw the Angel of History hovering above the city, mouth agape, batting its wings. There it was: history appearing before my eyes as a single catastrophe. I thought, the Matrix of Literature is a centerless swarm of interconnected books that tirelessly mirror back to us the pile of ruins that is humanity.

I kept on walking. I walked past a performer wearing a leopard-print shirt and a pair of purple leotards. He had long brown hair, a terrible wide mouth, and his eyes were hidden behind white-rimmed sunglasses. He was playing an electric guitar. A few people were gathered around, looking at him with begrudging grimaces.

I carried on. I walked away from the park through the Nature Square and the Austria Gardens with its non-native plants. I weaved my way through the Doric-inspired columns of the hypostyle room, past the famous statue of the dragon spewing water, walked down a flight of stairs that looked like the long train of a bride’s dress in the dusk air, past the famous shimmering salamander. Before I left, I looked back at the Metaphysical Garden of Exile and realized that the architecture of the park was a mirror image of the infrastructure of my life: everything a bit off, disorienting, misshapen. I spotted a group of tourists near the park gates, heads down in their laminated maps. It occurred to me that in opposition to them I, whose ancestors are buried here, there, and everywhere, our dust scattered across the Four Corners of the World, am destined to remain lost. Their Achilles’ heel—an aversion to gaps and fissures—is my greatest strength.



I made my way to the Block of Discordance. Certain names were coming back to me, certain facts about the city. L’Eixample, that political project, I remembered again, was designed by the utopist Ildefons Cerdà. It occurred to me that Cerdà must have organized information in his mind as sterilely as he’d designed the neighborhood’s square clinical blocks, by archiving thoughts and memories into specific containers in order to avoid any risk of cross-contamination. The same way corpses are buried in times of so-called health: in individual caskets rather than piles. A middle-aged woman with a bell-shaped haircut was standing at the corner searching through her purse; she looked distraught, as if she were peering into an abyss. She kept plunging her hand deeper and deeper into her purse. Her face looked as if it were about to fall off. I walked up to her, and said, adopting an ironic tone: “It seems to me you stand to benefit from the legacy of Ildefons Cerdà: enemy of the old, anticannibal, a man eager to purify the world from the clutter of the past. Anyone who walks the streets of L’Eixample will immediately experience linear thought patterns because Cerdà has modernized the city by flattening it into a singular surface. Go on!” I encouraged. “Walk through L’Eixample! Simplicity awaits you! It is a field of answers!” I looked at her purse. It was brown and shiny. It looked like a clam. She sealed that clam and scurried off with great haste.

At the intersection with Carrer de Girona, it suddenly occurred to me that in contraposition to Ildefons Cerdà, Quim Monzó lived on the plane of antiquity, accumulating rubbish from the past that he had to grapple with day and night. I concluded that his apartment, littered with objects, represented a sustained rebellion against the rigidity of the built environment in which he lived. I felt a surge of affection for that retired literary critic.