Call Me Zebra(52)

I scanned the room in the opposite direction. On the book shelves lining the corridor, I caught sight of three miniature reproductions of a toilet bowl. A quick inspection revealed that one of the bowls was filled with small turds of poop, the other with urine, the last with vomit. Together, I thought, the bowls and the bull indicated that life is hardly worth enduring on the one hand, and on the other, that Quim Monzó’s apartment was asking for an inspection. I made a note to take inventory of his disparate collection of Dadaist objects in order to extract once and for all from this humble abode everything I was destined to extract. I had come to believe that each of Quim Monzó’s objects was triggering an insight I was meant to record, calling up something old and stale within me that I, in loving memory of my mother and father and their mothers and fathers, whose asses were gorged by the horns of history and who were left with no sustenance but their own bodily fluids, had to transcribe in my notebook.

I walked over to the recamier and lay down. I caressed the three cigarette burns. I thought of myself, of the parts of me that are dead, like my mother long dead and my father, newly so. I cried a little. A few meager tears pooled in my eyes. There was a pressure in my chest, as if a paperweight had been laid on my heart, pinning it down against the elements. I filled each crevasse in the recamier with a little water. This is how lakes are formed, with the tears of the world. I thought of Lake Urmia and its dead waterfowl. I thought of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, self-proclaimed King of Kings, of his wife draped over a velvet fainting chair, wrapped in a silk robe, clad in jewels. I said: “Decadence, the fraternal twin of decay.” I heard my father clapping in my void. But just as quickly as he appeared, he was gone.

With an air of despondency, I thought on. Not even Ludo Bembo, I considered inwardly, who thrusts his member into me with fiery passion, who drinks from my vagina as if it were a well of water, and from whose lips the word love leaps as easily as frogs from a pond, can endure the consequences of my company. An ill-fated who laughs with the hysteria of unresolved pain. I felt a chill go through the negative space where my father had been. I felt my energy drain. I thought: I am ugly, unlovable, worthless, inadequate. No one has ears large enough or patient enough to listen to an ill-omened person tell the story of their survival, of what it means to be crushed at the bottom of the Pyramid of Exile. I would have to bear the weight of my past alone.



This earth, stuffed to the brim with blood and corpses and hay, is like a self-cleaning oven. The buried don’t remain buried for long. They turn into flowers, fertilize our food. They nurture us even as we are haunted by them. In other words, what goes up must come down, and what goes down will eventually reemerge and begin its upward climb once more.

It wasn’t long before I was wishing Ludo Bembo would return or that Taüt would reappear. There was no use waiting for them draped on the recamier. As the deaf masses of the supposed New World say, I was feeling blue.

I tried to get over it. I thought to myself, it’s time for another Pilgrimage of Exile. If you’re feeling blue in Barcelona, what could be better than to go to the Picasso Museum and witness the gradual reduction of the chromatic range of that genius’s paintings, from vivid yellows, greens, and reds to the saddest of blues in his aptly named Blue Period? With the resolve of a bull, I got dressed, washed my face, and charged through the door. I received a signal from the Matrix of Literature: He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging. Ah, Walter Benjamin, again reminding me of my mission. I walked through the city with a singular intention: to investigate the pain of my past by metabolizing art and architecture. To gaze at the city would not take matters far enough; I had to drill into its most symbolic elements. I had to digest its parts. I named the walk the Pilgrimage of Remorseless Excavation and went on my way.

I walked through the gray maze of gas lamps, gnarled stone, and menacing gargoyles in the Gothic Quarter, and continued east. It was November. The sky was pale blue and garnished with patches of ashen clouds. In the distance, a tepid sun was shining, too weak to cut through the misty sea breeze sweeping the streets. There was a mild autumn storm brewing. The kind that would soon have the sea spitting rotten logs and purple jellyfish onto the city’s wet golden coast.

I passed the row of soot-covered buildings near the Jaume I metro stop on Via Laietana. I felt something moving around in my gut. My father. I remembered. During our stay in Barcelona, whenever we walked along Via Laietana, he would stop to lift the tips of his mustache and spit on the old police headquarters where General Franco had ordered one man after another to come in for interrogations, likely leaving my fellow ill-omened peers on the roof to wet themselves like leeches in the rain. I cursed that foolish mime of Hitler and their mutual thirst for blood. “Bah!” I declared to the building. “General Franco, even your mustache was a coward’s mustache! You couldn’t grow enough hair to reach the ends of your putrid mouth.” This was enough to settle my stomach, to please my father.

I turned onto a crooked arterial alley and immediately the light was sucked out of the street. I had reached the narrow cobbled streets of La Ribera, the old merchant quarter. Inside those labyrinthine streets, the world seemed to have been reduced to a miniature cardboard stage. I wanted to hold the neighborhood in the palm of my hand. I wanted to turn it around like a Rubik’s Cube.

I arrived at a small opening in the street. I could see the sky again. It looked wounded; it was tinged with purple and the clouds were the color of lead. I was standing in front of Santa Maria del Mar. I peeled open the church’s carved wooden doors and ventured into the darkness within.