Call Me Zebra(50)

Daylight was waning. The vast darkness of night was approaching. I looked down at the ground. The bird, I noticed, was looking more haggard than ever. I wondered if he had absorbed my father. If somehow the fumes of my father’s death had seeped out of my pores and gone into the bird. I felt as if my lungs were filling with water. I collapsed on the red recamier. I needed to cry. No. Cry was too mild a word. I needed to sob. I needed to wail. But I couldn’t. My eyes burned from the dry sting of arid tears. Eventually, I slept. I awoke right before dawn, those early hours when the light is soft and silver and tinged with a faint yellow by the emerging sun. There was a knock on the door. It was Ludo Bembo. The water drained out of my lungs. I could breathe again. I stared at that curly head of his through the keyhole. He was holding a stack of books in his hand. For a moment, hopeful, I thought he had gone out to study, to open himself up through reading to the redundant nature of the universe. But then I suddenly remembered the Tentacle of Ice, that vampire woman, and felt myself clam up with distaste. I wondered if he had gone to sleep with her in order to lighten his load, discharge himself of any built-up sexual tensions, and if the books were just a cover for the time he had spent with her. I knocked back to let him know I was on the other side of the door.

“So you’re there,” he said tenderly and somewhat desperately.

“Were you with the Tentacle of Ice?” I inquired with rehearsed detachment.

“Who?” he whined.

A liar and a bore.

“That icy lady with the long curls and the sexy shoes you were kissing at the market.”

“You saw that?”

“You know I saw that. This is the second time I’ve caught you lying to yourself. In a short span of time, too.”

We exchanged all this through the thick wooden door. Our voices were muffled, distant. “I was at the library,” he exclaimed. “Then I saw my friend Fausta. She’s a rare-book dealer.”

“Fausta, as in the female version of Faust, related to Goethe?” I asked with intrigue.

“You can look at it that way if you want,” he murmured into the wood.

He begged me to open the door. Through the keyhole, I could see contempt in his eyes but also foreboding, helplessness, fatigue—a man reeling from sexual withdrawal. I told him I was reluctant. I told him that I had perceived a few things in his absence. For one, that he was a man with a dual nature. In other words, that there were two versions of himself encapsulated within a single body, but that rather than acknowledging his multiple selves, as I had, he was forcing one self to hide self-consciously within the other because he refused to be at ease with the contradictions of his character. This, I warned him, would be his greatest downfall. This refusal to be multiple. If he insisted on switching masks, from rigid to tender, cold to passionate, he would forever give the false impression of being a fake even though he was one of my own, an ill-fated man sorrowfully living out his days in exile. Why else would he be attracted to me? After that, I told him it was clear he had some healing to do. The ill-fated, I lectured him, gain their power by being subtle, bold, detached, messy; in other words, by being many things at once. I assured him that even though he had a long way to go before he could accept his own fragmentation I was sure he would get there through diligence and hard work. I told him I would be willing to help him along. All of this came out of my mouth so naturally, and with such warmth, that I could see the positive effects it had on him. He was listening attentively on the other side of the door. He had his ear pressed up against the seam, and he kept nodding. I could see his curls bouncing up and down. I warned him to step away; I was about to open up.

We collapsed into each other almost immediately. It was the best sex we’d had yet. I experienced, simultaneous with his, a long sweet spasm that took me beyond the limits of my body and then brought me back again. When he had finished, he muttered something through his lingering ecstasy.

“God,” he said. “Oh God, that was so good.”

I had no choice but to issue a second warning. I made sure to be gentle. I said the bare minimum. I quoted Stendhal through Nietzsche.

“God’s only excuse is that he does not exist.”

“It’s just a figure of speech,” he said.



Over the next few weeks, Ludo came over with increasing frequency and always stayed the night. He often cancelled his classes or sent someone—I don’t know who—to cover his lectures for him. Most likely the Tentacle of Ice. Judging from the brief but telling exchange I had witnessed between them at the market, she was desperate for his attention. After all, she had ornamented herself as if she were a Christmas tree. It seemed to me she was perfectly capable of driving sixty miles to stand before his pale-faced students and lecture on the etymology of words in order to ingratiate herself with him, Ludo Bembo, singular man whose head is, according to my diagnostics, subdivided into containers designed to avoid all manner of cross-contamination between thoughts, feelings, impulses; a man in possession of terrifying amounts of self-control; a man who, paradoxical to his inherent interest in literature, invests a great deal of his psychic energy in negating the void. A man like Ildefons Cerdà.

But still, I thought to myself, he was drawn to me in order to become multiple and to pasture, as the ill-fated do, on contradiction, pessimism, pain. He was drawn to someone who, like him, had gone through the ringer of exile. One of the many who munch on manure, where the earth’s darkest humors lie; who are loud, messy, content to live in contradiction, both alive and dead, composed of a thousand shimmering fragments and as slender as a ghost at the same time. Those who haunt their hunters.