Call Me Zebra(49)

I leaned out the window at the end of the corridor and saw him marching down the gray sidewalk. He looked so stiff that I thought he was made of cardboard. I told him as much.

“Any stiffer, Ludo Bembo, and people will mistake you for a fake! Part of the 99.9 percent!”

But he didn’t hear me. He had turned the corner by then. I stood at the window feeling empty. I was reeling from the startling crescendo of our fight. I looked around. I was alone again, far from everyone. I sat on the recamier and caressed the three crusty crevices. The clock struck noon. A moment later, my father, whom I had thought of less and less over the course of the week, was stirring inside me. His mustache had grown. Hair grows even after a person has died. It’s innately insistent, just like the ever-mutating, multiplying self. His mustache, with its frayed broomlike ends, was dragging on the floor of my void, sweeping the abyss. He wielded his cane to tap the base of my mind, and said, Child, take the wisdom of your ancestors one step further. Complete Pessoa’s sentence. If he writes “love is a thought,” then finish his verse by writing “love is a thought not worth having.” Then he retreated again into the deep dark folds of the void. In my mind’s eye, I saw him sink slowly, as if he were being sucked into a pool of quicksand. His mustache floated on the surface for a moment—long, white, illuminated by a ray of light. Then it, too, disappeared into the darkness. And Taüt was nowhere to be found.



Ludo’s absence lasted considerably longer than I’d expected. While I waited for his return, I paced the corridor with this or that book in hand. After an hour, I had devised a system. I went through Quim Monzó’s shelves and picked up books by authors whose last names began with a B. This I did as a twofold tribute to Ludo Bembo, whose last initial needless to say is a B, and who, it appeared, was a man in the habit of saying certain key words twice; therefore, B, being the second letter in the alphabet, was doubly resonant for him because it complemented his linguistic tic beautifully.

At first, I consulted the authors I had chosen—Borges, Barthes, Beckett, Blanchot—recklessly, with a haphazard air. Whenever it struck me to read a sentence, I opened the book at hand to a random page and read one. I didn’t pause to extract from each line whatever mystical message was embedded within its grammar. I had to make up for lost time. During the days I had spent with Ludo, I hadn’t consulted the Matrix of Literature. I hadn’t advanced the Grand Tour of Exile. I had betrayed the Hosseinis by allowing myself to be derailed by lust. But now that I had committed the deed, it was my duty to extract from the obscure folds of literature whatever information I could find regarding Ludo Bembo. To ask: What is his role in my miserly, ill-fated life?

I continued pacing until eventually fate, or reason, or a breeze carrying with it the sweaty scent of Nietzsche—the perfume of action—stopped me in my tracks and forced me to reconsider. I realized that my plan was in need of further geometry. It was lacking in structure.

After a moment’s reflection, I concluded that I should consult a book only at the completion of the second length of the hallway, the twentieth, the two hundredth, and the two thousandth. If I wasn’t consistent in my tribute to the “double,” then the books would refuse to yield the information I needed in order to understand Ludo Bembo. They would become reserved, withholding, mute—frigid texts, like the ones that passive readers pick up so casually. They would no longer operate as oracles.

As soon as my approach had taken on the correct mathematical dimensions, the messages started to arrive with generosity, with pleasure, with a kind of jouissance that proved to me that the text itself desired me, that a two-way street existed between me and my chosen books, an open conduit, a clear and lucid channel of communication—proof that literature, as my father had taught me, is the only magnanimous host, the most charitable company, and evidence that despite my erotic digression I was achieving my goal of abolishing all boundaries between myself and the infinite, centerless labyrinth of mirrors that is the Matrix of Literature. After completing the hundredth length of the corridor, I paused to reflect and concluded that Ludo Bembo—despite his rude lack of understanding, his powerful ignorance—played a decisive role in advancing the Grand Tour of Exile and was therefore also influential in the advancement of my notebook, which, as a mirror and record, was in the process of carving out its own corner in the gossamer of the cosmos.

But what Ludo Bembo would come to symbolize, I hadn’t the faintest idea. For now, though, I was comforted by the notion that he would be back and that we would annihilate each other through hot passion once more. Comforted? I considered this and again felt suspicion raise its wary head. I felt my void swell. It was unbearably painful. My moods were cycling. To distract myself, I continued to pace the corridor. I wanted to arrive at two hundred so I could consult the oracle of literature once more.

The two-hundredth length afforded the following gift from Beckett, that lone wolf of language: What remains of all that misery? As I read Beckett’s words out loud, Taüt appeared at my heels. The bird paced with me like a loyal dog the rest of the way. I had to slow down significantly in order for the little beast to keep up.

The consultation after the two-hundred-twentieth length revealed Borges, whose mind is a mirror image of the matrix itself: Fate is partial to repetitions, variations, symmetries. My suspicion that Ludo would return was consolidated. At the two-hundred-twenty-second length, weak from exhaustion, I let my gaze fall on the following quote by Barthes, playful antisystematizer: Mad I cannot be, sane I do not deign to be, neurotic I am.