Call Me Zebra(44)
“What’s the strangest thing you did as a child?” I asked.
For a second, he looked remote, as if he were excavating the ruins of memory. Then he told me that when he was a child his parents had owned a house in the Tuscan countryside, that he used to go walking through the fields, writing out the alphabet on the rocks in chalk. “I felt as if I were inventing language!” he said with a nostalgic whisper.
“That’s the strangest thing you did?” I asked.
“Yes. Is there a problem with that?”
“It seems mild.”
He didn’t say a word. He just sat there with his muzzle in his plate like a sad dog, then he folded and unfolded his napkin. I considered slipping him another note, one that said: “In case you didn’t know, silence is a weapon!” But before I had a chance, he had paid and his mood seemed to have lightened a bit. He put his hand on my leg, and said, “Let’s go. They’re closing up here. We wouldn’t want to keep the cooks waiting. Besides, you need to get out of your head and have some fun.”
I should have known then and there. A fake philologist. A thought murderer. The din of those words echoed in my ear: “Get out of your head. Have some fun.”
We stepped into the evening. We were slogging through the world together, pushing through the crowds on La Rambla, heading into the narrow enclosures of the Gothic Quarter, pausing at the Pla?a Reial. The world seemed smaller, darker. I felt my mood plunge. I looked up through the buildings on the perimeter of the pla?a toward the rectangle of sky above; it looked like a wounded sheet of paper. The crowd was swelling. With each passing moment, there was less air. I was feeling my way through masses of thoughts, through various facets of mind. I thought I heard a donkey braying in the distance. I thought I heard a house collapse. I thought I smelled the rotting of corpses. I imagined the sky splitting open, ink spilling through it.
Ludo was keeping close. There were beads of sweat running down his neck, which was long and delicate, like a swan’s. My thoughts doubled over themselves. What, I wondered, am I doing with this man when I am bereft of everyone I have ever loved? When I can’t endure any more loss? I feared that the blanket of grief would lift momentarily in his company only to come crashing down with added force. After all, I had loved my mother and father, and what had that led to but pain? More people spilled into the pla?a. Ludo put his arm around my shoulders, drawing me close. His lips grazed my hair. I searched the ground at my feet. The stone floor was silver, polished; it gleamed like the surface of the moon. My thoughts folded over themselves, yanked me this way and that. I thought, I have no one left to love, no firm foothold in the universe. I let him draw me into his embrace. The fronds of the palms flapped in the breeze. The lampposts had been decorated with ribbons, garlands, festoons, fake flowers. Fireworks spilled through the sky, and for a brief moment, it seemed like there was something beyond the darkness—a flicker of light.
Ludo leaned in, and said in a grave tone: “Brace yourself. Soon there will be fire everywhere.”
I noticed the crowd was emptying out of the pla?a. Very few people were left, and those who remained lingered at the edges, standing under this or that door frame. Voices ricocheted off the stone walls of the buildings. I heard someone say, “Viva la Mercè!” Then came the deafening sound of drums, and the streets were lit up with flames.
A pack of devils spinning firecrackers came running toward us, followed by dragons spewing fire. As the devils lurked down the streets, their serrated red tails dragged along the pavement like snakes. I stood beneath the black sheet of the night sky and felt time increase its velocity, buckle under its own brute force, and come to a sudden halt. Time assumed the rigidity of death. Then, instantly, it was resurrected and pierced space with its triumphant speed once more. A sign of the apocalypse. I looked around. The city had taken on definite overtones of unreality: Opaque screens of smoke rose from the asphalt, then thinned out into the atmosphere. In the distance, beyond the shimmering veils, ordinary people dressed in plain street clothes ducked into the corridors of fire and then emerged unharmed at the other end, as if they were already dead.
We walked through the world’s ashes and ghosts, through curtains of smoke and tunnels of heat that extended like veins across the horizon. I felt a gust of wind. I turned around. A procession of papier-maché kings and queens built to dizzying heights streamed past us, followed by mythical beasts and smaller statues with giant protruding heads. The human statues were holding pig bladders and knives in their rigid pink hands. Artificial rays of light, beamed from a mysterious source, danced on their broad, happy foreheads, on their disproportionate teeth, which were as large as the keys of a piano. The giants twirled down the street. They vanished into the urban horizon, and the lights searched the emptiness left in their wake.
I felt disoriented. Time itself had become warped, the atmosphere distorted. I wondered, who is the hunter? Where is the prey? The wind thickened. I could see feet covered in canvas shoes sticking out from beneath the extravagant costumes of the giants. People had crawled into their hollow shapes. Sacks of blood bounced in the wind, Catalan flags flapped and rolled, rising threads of smoke shrank into white commas, into gaseous bubbles, into incandescent spiders that crawled up the monolith of the black sky. Suddenly, a dull thud. Something slammed against the back of my head. I looked around. A solitary she-devil with a sly, impish smile waved her pitchfork at me. I stood motionless, gazing at her spindly legs, her great tufts of red hair, her pale eyebrows, her glittering eyes. I screamed, but my voice thinned out like smoke.