Call Me Zebra(45)

Ludo grabbed my hand and pulled me along. He kept leaning over to speak to me, but I heard nothing. The path curved, a sinister bend, and we were suddenly standing in front of the Casa Batlló. It was as if the city had folded over itself, cut out its unwanted parts, and left only its crown jewels standing together on a single reduced surface.

In the dim light of the night, the undulating surface of the House of Death glittered and swelled as if it were made of clipped waves, susceptible to the moods of the moon. Mercurial beads slid down the skeletal architecture. I felt exasperated, drained, confused. I thought of Taüt. I wondered how long I had been out of the house. I couldn’t remember. I had the sensation I was seeing the world through a convex glass and that on the other side of the distorted panel the crowds were marching on, going about their business, unaware of my displaced gaze. Police cars came and went.

Before I knew it, we were standing in the lobby of Quim Monzó’s building. Ludo was coming along with me. I warned him. “I live with a bird that has the aura of a death maker.” But there was no deterring him. Yet again, I felt ambushed by my thoughts. I wondered if by letting Ludo into the dark folds of my life, he, too, would die like everyone else. The lobby turned red and then white with the passing light of a police car. I turned around to look at him. He was staring vacantly at the stairs, and as the unflattering light slid over his face, he looked ghostly pale.



In the foyer of the apartment, I felt Ludo take a step toward me. It was dark enough that I couldn’t see him, but I could feel his moist breath on my neck. My limbs, my hips, my waist—they all felt heavy. He continued to stand there, mute, immobile, breathing on my face.

He was a force to be reckoned with, detached and rigid, a rational man who clings to realism one moment and is gleefully attentive, his words tinged with absurdity, the next. Who knows what goes on in other people’s heads? There was an enigmatic quality to Ludo that drew me in, an attraction I couldn’t negate.

Suddenly, I wanted nothing more than for him to come closer, press his palms against my pelvis, push me back against the wall, lift me onto a table, unbutton my jeans. I wanted him to slide his hands under my shirt, cup my breasts, and say something lyrical consistent with the fact that our ancestors had led their lives according to the laws of literature, under the sign of poetry. I wanted him to say: “Ah, a pair of perfect pomegranates. The fruit of the earth!”

I was about to take his hands to my breasts and say “Repeat after me” when he leaned in and kissed me with a surge of passion I hadn’t expected. I felt utterly dispersed and fully embodied at once. I felt as if parts of me had been scattered on different surfaces of the globe and, at the same time, as if Ludo Bembo had siphoned lead into my body, pinning me to the ground. When he pulled away at the end of the kiss, I was stunned. I was afraid of being drawn into the hot vortex of sexual passion, of being wrenched away from the Matrix of Literature. I felt the doubts that had cycled through my head rise to the surface, a doleful loop that played on repeat. So I turned on the lights, and said, for no reason, “Do you know what Silenus replied to King Midas?”

“I have no idea,” he said, slightly vexed, waving his hand impatiently.

I could tell he wanted to keep kissing. Reel in, push away, I thought; it’s the only way to protect myself and simultaneously protect him, by keeping his death from advancing due to contact with my ill-omened fate. He was looking around to see which way the bedroom was so he could lead me to it smoothly. I carried on with my lecture.

“It will serve you to know that Silenus replied: What is the best of all is utterly beyond your reach: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second best for you is—to die soon.”

His mind stopped in its tracks.

“Are you telling me I’m unworthy of life right before we have sex?”

He removed his glasses and rubbed his face. His eyes, which were deeply set, seemed to have sunk farther into his head. He looked tired. Now, standing apart from me, his stubborn reserve, which had gone up in flames when we kissed, had returned.

“I implied no such thing,” I said. My thoughts were colliding into and contradicting one another. I felt them cross-pollinating in my head and added a little white lie, a cliché to smooth things over. “Besides,” I said, “sex is a way of dying; so if you think about it, I am giving you the opportunity to walk through the double gates of sex and death.”

“No small thing,” he said stiffly, making an effort.

“Exactly, Mr. Bembo. You are on the right path,” I exclaimed, to reward him. Then, in a lower register, I offered a more adequate closing statement: “So put that in your pipe and smoke it. The double gates of sex and death!”

But he was so hard by then that he couldn’t hear me. I could see his penis bulging through his pants. There was no use in trying to discuss literature under those circumstances. I let myself go. I walked up to him and unbuttoned his vest. One button at a time, I felt him soften under my fingers.

“Careful,” he said. “My pipe.”

Ludo Bembo, I concluded, was the kind of man who regularly polishes his shoes, who irons his shirts. I reached up and pulled his pipe out from his breast pocket. He moaned. He was already losing himself. I bit his lip. It tasted like strawberries dipped in honey and had the aroma of dry herbs and tobacco. And then there was that gap between his teeth, that gap that signaled the void. I could have sucked on his lips for hours, but instead I gently inserted his pipe into his mouth, and said, “C’est ne pas une pipe!”