Call Me Zebra(48)

I couldn’t stand watching Ludo Bembo sit there offended, as if I had slighted him. I told him as much. “You have no idea what it means to be slighted!”

His lips were trembling. He looked as though he might start crying.

He said, “I went down to get us croissants, and you haven’t touched a single one.”

I couldn’t believe it. He was offended because I hadn’t eaten? I ripped off the end of a croissant and ate it. Then I asked him if he considered himself a friend of Sancho Panza, who was also always worried about funneling food down his esophagus. Ludo’s jaw dropped. I ripped off another piece of the croissant and affectionately put it in his mouth.

“To each his own,” I said. “But let it be known that I align myself with Don Quixote, the Knight of the Sad Countenance, for whom food is anathema because he, like me, feeds on the flesh of language.”

Ludo was sitting there in his underwear, his elbows resting on the table, his shoulders hunched over, his hair disheveled, his glasses dirty, the piece of croissant I had stuck in his mouth hanging out like the severed claw of a boiled crab.

“Why don’t you chew?” I insisted.

He spat the bread out.

“You are impossible,” he said, before succumbing to a string of Italian mutters. I heard something about the Madonna and then the word intrattabile, followed by its distant cousin inquietare and then mamma mia, mamma mia, mamma mia. He said the word mamma so many times with such profound desperation and melancholy that I began to wonder if his mother, like mine, was dead.

I followed him into the kitchen. It was clear that I needed to break things down for him, that he needed me to reconstruct the story of my destruction, to pick myself up one speck of dust at a time and glue myself together in order to showcase for him the origins and terms of my modus operandi. So I shoved my tattoo in his face and told him that I—the final member of the AAA—am antilove. I also informed him that I am a body composed of various dispersed particles of dirt and that because people walk on dirt all the time I am constantly being stepped on and, thus, further pulverized. There is nothing I can do about my ill-fatedness, I informed him, except to retreat into the Matrix of Literature; there, I said, my mind can roam free and become extremely refined, a supraconsciousness.

“So you see now why I don’t accept the use of the word love?”

A long miserable pause ensued. I assumed he was formulating an appropriate response. As it turns out, I was wrong.

“Why are you staring at me?” Ludo finally said.

“Because I am waiting for you to display curiosity.”

“Curiosity? After that lecture?”

“There is such a thing as a follow-up question.”

“To your declaration of antilove?”

“Yes.”

“Would you like to outline the conditions under which we are allowed to relate to each other?”

“I could ask you the same thing. Would you like to impose your love on me?”

“Impose?” he huffed, and set his mug down angrily.

I couldn’t believe it. The man had been drained of empathy. How was I going to drill through his dense brain?

“Let’s go over this again,” I said.

“Again?”

“Time is more linear than we think,” I lied. “And the only way we can come to an understanding is by returning to the ground zero of our argument and reliving the whole thing over again even though during the reconstruction process we will come across minor blind spots—nothing drastic, but holes nonetheless, small deaths we will have to account for later.”

He looked at me, as mute as a cow.

I decided to barrel on: “It’s the job of the few who cherish a distrust of love and who are aware, as Pascal famously warned, that faking love turns you into the lover—or as the gentle-spirited Pessoa put it, that love is a thought—to make sure that the other weaker members of the human race are perpetually reminded that love is a senseless fabrication designed to disinherit us from ourselves, because once the loved one dies, one is left confused and disoriented with nowhere to go, like a rat in a maze. While you are loving someone, you are subject to false feelings of permanence, but love can’t keep anyone alive; therefore, it is deceitful, impermanent. So you see, my sentimental Ludo, love is a useless emotion that accomplishes little more than putting two people on a violent collision course from which they will never recover.”

I felt a chill go down my spine. My hands were shaking. I could see that being exposed without warning to the toxic fumes of my life was causing Ludo to retreat. He was growing increasingly frustrated and angry. Is he going to leave, I wondered, and never return? Another disappearance to add to the inventory?

“I’ve had it,” he said, and stomped out of the kitchen. He was muttering, “Impossible, impossible.”

I followed him down the corridor. Taüt was at my heels again.

“Why do you repeat everything twice?” I asked desperately.

He said nothing at first. Then he turned around, bore into me with his eyes, and said: “Because it is the Italian way!”

“The Bembo way?”

There was steam coming out of his ears. He got dressed in a hurry and went out on a walk without brushing his teeth or washing his face. I told myself that he would be back. A man like Ludo Bembo doesn’t stay out for long if he hasn’t properly groomed himself. And besides that, there was the addictive nature of the sex we’d been having, which I knew would have him back at my door in a matter of hours.