Call Me Zebra(46)

He tilted his head back and smiled before removing the pipe from his mouth and setting it down on the armchair behind us.

When he came back, I moved my hands down to his pants. He swung his head around and kissed my neck, bit my shoulder, nibbled on my ear.

I noticed something strange. A sensation I had never experienced before during any other erotic encounter: The tips of my fingers were hurting. I had no idea what this meant. Electricity coursing through my sick hand?

He pushed me down the corridor. He kept grabbing my hips from behind and pressing himself against me.

“Here,” I said. “This door.” And we went in.

We lay down on the bed and undressed each other. Ludo looked up at the bedposts. There was a glimmer of light in his gaze.

“Do you want me to tie you to the bed?” I offered.

“No, no,” he whined. “Please, don’t. You’ll just start preaching about death.”

I told him he had understood more than he let on, that now I had solid proof that he was a descendent of the Bembos.

“What’s all this about my being a descendent of the Bembos? Of course I’m a descendent of the Bembos.”

“Exactly,” I said, before offering to nibble on his penis.

“Nibble?”

“To begin with.”

And so I nibbled, and he swelled in my mouth. I pulled away and told him that his penis had a very well-defined head.

“That’s nice,” he said.

Then he slipped his fingers inside me, went down on me, reemerged, stroked his penis, and then took my hand to it so I would stroke it for him. He slipped inside me and let out little noises as if he were in pain, and I thought I heard him say, “There is something about you, a darkness that scares me,” but by the time he had pulled away from me—leaving me wanting more because I had not yet come—he had switched his tune. “Your vagina,” he said, “is like a tunnel of light. It feels so good.” He kissed me gently on the edge of my mouth. “Did you come?” he asked, pleased with himself.

“No,” I said dryly. “You’ll have to carry on.”

His face, which had become flush, went pale again.

Just then, Taüt, that impish bird, walked in. His sulfur crest was raised. He looked disheveled. The plumes on his wings were sticking up. He crossed the tiled floor with a pigeon-toed walk he had not displayed until now. I wondered where he had been. Maybe there was a hole in the ground he had dug with his beak, some place he liked to hide at random.

“This,” I lied with stale breath, “is my bird.”

My mouth was bitter and hot from all the alcohol we’d had. I needed water. I went into the kitchen and came back with two glasses filled to the brim. I spilled the water on Ludo when I got back on the bed. He let out a screech. The cold liquid was running down his loins.

“That takes care of that,” I said. “Now you don’t have to take a shower.”

“Right,” he said. His voice was uncertain.

The bird was still there, scrutinizing the situation on the bed, the steamy entanglement that he may or may not have witnessed.

“Was that bird in your suitcase?” Ludo asked mechanically.

I had forgotten he had picked me up at the airport. It’s a good thing lies are naturally elastic, I thought.

“Yes,” I said. “This bird is one portion of the corpse of my past. He was lodged in there with everything else.”

As I spoke these words, Taüt raised his right talon and saluted Ludo. Then he turned around and shimmied back out the door.

“Unamuno, una-mano,” I ululated nonchalantly, as I watched the bird retreat. Ludo leaned over and his hair brushed against my cheek.

“Shouldn’t we get back on track?” he asked, sitting with his back against one of the bedposts and his ankles crossed. His penis, having completed its business, had shrunk back and was lying limply on his balls.

I made a face at him. I parted my lips and turned the corners of my mouth down and squinted sadly. I said, “If your penis were a person, this is what it would look like.” I held that face for a while. I could see Ludo’s eyes moving from side to side, metabolizing the information he had just received. “And if my vagina were a person?” I asked, extending an invitation for him to dramatize my reproductive organ in return.

“I suppose your vagina would be running down the sidewalk throwing its arms up in the air, helplessly distressed,” he offered.

“You think I have a stressed vagina?”

“And the pubic hairs would be sticking out, particularly at the top, above your clitoris.”

“That’s not how I see it at all.”

My vagina, I explained to him, would be gliding down the sidewalk, saying blup-blup blup-blup, like a fish in an aquarium.

Taüt came running back down the corridor. He went past the bedroom door at top speed, squawking as if he were being assassinated.

“What is that bird doing?” Ludo asked, running his fingers along my back, trying to pull me into his arms.

I swatted his hand away because just then I’d received a signal of magnificent proportions from the Matrix of Literature. Words by Unamuno, the man himself. It was as if he were standing next to the bed with his hatted head and pointy bearded chin, commanding me through his thin dry lips to inform Ludo Bembo, who at that very moment was asking me what he could do to help me come, to give it up because it is a known fact that love is a battle and that as a result he and I will only experience a simultaneous orgasm when the heavy pestle of sorrow has ground down our hearts by crushing them in a mortar of mutual suffering.