Call Me Zebra(42)

We made our way to one of the food stalls and sat at the counter. Ludo ordered for the both of us while I looked through the glass display case at a row of tourists sitting at the opposite counter. I felt a palpable hatred toward them, those stupid tourists with their white-gloved inspection of the most marketable qualities of another nation, another culture, their experience purified of the painful clutter of the past, of the horrifying traces of the accretion of history. While I pasted onto my face the same vacuous grin I witnessed on theirs, Ludo ordered wine, squid, poached eggs.

“What’s wrong with your face?” he asked.

“You mean their faces,” I said, pointing my fork at the tourists.

“Mimicry is the greatest form of flattery,” he offered. There it was again: that edifying tone of his. “If you don’t like them, I suggest you pretend they don’t exist.”

“Mimicry,” I corrected in breathy stabs, “is mockery.”

He reached for my hand. With his other, he lifted his wineglass.

“Cheers,” he said, trying to redirect my attention. He took a sip. Then he sat there looking pensive, thoughtfully gazing at the tourists I had pointed out.

I drank as rapidly as I could. I needed to move the image of those tourists, who roam freely in green pastures while the rest of us are enclosed in the Pyramid of Exile, into the pile of ruins that is the past. Never mind that I was sitting right next to them, shoveling the same food into my mouth, looking just like them. What distinguished me was invisible, abstract. It was the feeling of nothingness that I carried with me wherever I went, a void I was convinced they had never experienced and that I, in contradistinction to them, had carried for so long that it had consumed my life. The only way I knew I was alive was by watching the pile of ruin grow, the rubbish attract rubbish until the garbage of my life was insurmountable. I felt a sharp ache in my void. I was anxious it was going to burst. I didn’t say any of this to Ludo. I ate, nodded, thanked him, said how good everything was.

Encouraged, Ludo ordered more food and drinks. Beer-battered pork cheeks, black rice cooked in squid ink, crisp white wine. And when we were done with the meal, he ordered ratafia.

“Taste this,” he said. “It’s a delicacy.”

I tasted it.

“What do you think?” he asked with boyish charm.

I told him the ratafia smelled like wet soil, limestone, clay, volcanic rock, freshly cut grass, worms, a brackish wind coming down through a mountain pass, dusty herbs, heaps of licorice. He ran his hand up along my arm and tucked a strand of hair behind my ear. “You’re so beautiful,” he said.

“Don’t lie,” I said. “Besides, even if I were beautiful, it would not be by any merit of my own.”

“You have a great nose,” he said.

“It’s true. I have a great nose,” I said. Then, to avoid saying what I wanted to tell him, that my nose is so sublime it can smell spilled blood from as far away as the deep past, I asked: “Do you like living in Girona?”

“People around here like to say it’s the Florence of Catalonia. But I wouldn’t go so far. The Spaniards are known for exaggerating.”

“Where I come from,” I informed him, leaning in and whispering warmly in his ear, “we have a saying about people who exaggerate. We say: Those who haven’t seen see poorly.”

“Exactly. Brava. They are narrow, provincial, out of touch,” Ludo said sympathetically, sipping at the black liquor. “Where do you come from?”

“You saw my flight details. New York.”

“No, before that.”

“I hail from the land of Cyrus, King of Kings!” I announced.

“You mean Iran?” he asked, laughing.

The tourists paid and left. I watched them make their way to the door and disappear into the dark folds of the sky. Afternoon had given way to evening. In their absence, I felt I could breathe again. I started to speak in aphorisms, in riddles. I explained that it’s not just when a country hasn’t seen much that there’s a problem; if a country has seen too much, it stops seeing clearly as well. I told him there is a delicate balance. Ludo, who hails from a fallen empire himself, nodded along knowingly, his face blooming like a daffodil in the sun.

“If the balance is disturbed—if one does not see enough, or one sees too much—then, according to your beloved compatriot Calvino, the eye does not see things but images of things that mean other things.”

“Do you mistake things for other things?” he posed.

“When I see a palm tree,” I said, feeling my void tighten in response, “what I see is my mother’s ashen face and her lifeless corpse.” I watched his features drift apart. I could see his tongue working that adorable gap between his front teeth.

“Aren’t corpses lifeless by definition?” he posed awkwardly, narrowing his eyes.

“Not initially. Life leaves the body over a long period of time, slowly, quietly, with grace. It lingers in the atmosphere until it is absorbed by the mind of the universe. In the case of my father, however, I intercepted the mind of the universe,” I said, smiling vaguely. I could see Ludo’s wheels spinning. “Did the Bembos pass down only a fraction of their knowledge to you?” I asked.

“The Bembos? What do you mean, a fraction?”

“All I’m saying is that your naiveté concerning death is incongruous with your literary past. But then again, I’ve learned that in life anything is possible!”