Call Me Zebra(53)

There was something about the church that reminded me of Ludo. The exterior was ornamented with statues and floral motifs, tender, dignified, carefully groomed. But inside, a dark, cold, austere silence engulfed me. The interior, with the exception of a few stained glass windows, was spare and somber. Man and building, I decided—each had a second face: rigid one moment and poetic, even sentimental, the next.

I paced around the nave, breathing in the heavily incensed air. I avoided looking at the image of Christ pinned to the cross. If I did, my father would wage war from inside me. He would lash out against my bowels. He would say, addressing himself to the man’s pitifully hanging head, “Living is a sacrifice. Get over it!”

Instead, I proceeded systematically with my thoughts. I kept my eyes on the ground. The church and Ludo Bembo, I resolved as I admired the skulls carved into the tombs underfoot, were doppelg?ngers. Yes, indeed. There was no denying it: Ludo was the human equivalent of a medieval Catalan building—his external self freely gave out tender, lyrical gestures while inside he hid a severe, rational, withholding second self. In other words, Ludo Bembo, I concluded, digging my heels into the dirt and the dust, is a wounded person who keeps his wound a secret even from himself. The fastest way to become your own worst enemy. I made a mental note to tell him as much.

“A wound,” I recited in advance, “is meant to be looked at, examined. Otherwise, Ludo Bembo, it will fester, wreak havoc, strip the walls of your stomach as if it were acid. Ask any doctor, no matter how mediocre. He will tell you the same.”

There was a tour guide leaning against the cold, damp stone walls of the nave. He nodded along in agreement. He was watching over a group of pale, plump Russians who were whispering things to one another near the altar and taking pictures. I ignored him.



By the time I walked into the Picasso Museum’s ample courtyard, another fact had become clear: Unlike Ludo, I was a Gaudí—a disruptive, colorful mosaic composed of shattered bits of tile and glass. A whole that doesn’t correspond to the sum of its parts. If I wasn’t transcendent, I would be vain. With this thought in mind, I, a collage in my own right, entered the museum.

I went about my business. I stood before this or that painting. I walked into the galleries featuring Picasso’s Blue Period. I needed to look at something more blue than blue or else I would start crying. I could feel the water level rising in my lungs again. I looked at several paintings of Barcelona’s rooftops. But Barcelona’s rooftops, I reasoned, are beige, red, orange, ochre. Picasso, who was from Málaga, painted Barcelona’s mood at dusk in his studio in Paris, where he lived during his famous Blue Period; which is to say, he was painting Barcelona at a double remove. Even a fool knows that a place is not the same thing as its interpretation through the falsifying prisms of memory, but this alone, I concluded, does not explain Picasso’s so-called Blue Period. I was sure these rooftop paintings weren’t merely a rendition of Barcelona as he recalled it—apparently intimate, seductive, full of melancholia and longing, and yet confidently resolved—but rather a result of an emotional deficiency he later corrected. The sweetest of thoughts, I reflected, arrive like the wind on the heels of doves.

Why had Picasso’s affect flattened? Why had he suddenly become a monochromatic man? Because he wasn’t able, at first, to navigate the multiple selves he had acquired by retreating first from Málaga to Barcelona and then from Franco’s oppressive Spain to an electric Paris. Take one look at the bold, broad, colorful lines of Picasso’s reproductions of Velázquez’s Las Meninas, at his depiction of the Infanta Maria Theresa, with her disproportionately large and heavily distorted face—that dwarf forebear of the cold-blooded Bourbon, Philip V, who sacked the Catalans during the terrible War of Spanish Succession, paving the way for General Franco’s systematic suffocation of what was left of them—take one look at the series’ geometrical fragmentation, at the crooked forms that fold over themselves, at the cruel hooks that hang from the ceiling in the painting’s foreground, at the weblike rendition of Velázquez’s sober meditation on the vanishing point—which is just another word for the infinite nature of the space-time continuum famously referred to by Nietzsche as the eternal return—and my argument regarding Picasso’s progression as a man and an artist quickly gains ground: He had to learn to hold the wound of multiplicity, of fragmentation, the wobbly curvature that Gaudí had mastered so early due to his prolonged solitude, his misanthropy, and his understanding of the hostile beauty of nature. But! But! But! I rocked back and forth on my feet with excitement. Picasso wasn’t able to open himself up to the entropy of pluralism until he was pushed over the edge by that childish monster General Franco. His reproductions of Las Meninas are from after the Civil War. His Blue Period from before. Case in point.

Suddenly, for reasons I couldn’t understand, I wasn’t feeling well. I had a mild but distinct vertigo. My father was whispering something from inside my cavernous void. His voice was thinner than ever. I stuck my fingers in my ears to block out the sound of the other museumgoers. I turned toward my inner ear. In a wispy voice, my father said: “Ecce Homo, Ecce Homo.” He was making a request. Ecce Homo, the most reproduced painting in history and the title of one of Nietzsche’s greatest works, not to mention the opening words of the first Hosseini Commandment! I worked my way back through the galleries to Picasso’s Ecce Homo. The bald, short, beer-bellied Picasso had portrayed himself at the center, in the place of Christ, and had surrounded his figure with people from the art world and several hairy, voluptuous, coquettish women who were parting their labia with their hands as if their folds were theater curtains. My father laughed. He beat his cane on the ground of my void several times. He caressed his mustache with affection. His eyes rolled in their sockets. I had to walk away just to calm him down.