Call Me Zebra(54)

I hadn’t made it far when I remembered something that stopped me in my tracks. My father had paused near a pile of stones in that ashen no-man’s-land to tell me: “Child, every event has a precedent. Look here at Picasso’s The Dream and Lie of Franco.” I remembered our country’s ashes were being scattered by the wind all around us. I remembered there was a frigid bite to the wind and the sky was black and low. I remembered how weak I felt, how much my feet hurt. My father had tried to carry me on his back through the most difficult passages, but he, too, was weary from our long march. He pulled out a miniature reproduction of Picasso’s paintings from our suitcase, which he had dragged along with us. His hands were cracked and his fingers were trembling. “Picasso’s famous Guernica has its origin in these postcard-size drawings. In order to understand the future, you must blow yourself backward into the past. Then you will finally come to know history’s evil nature: that the past and the future are a mirror image of each other and that the present is history itself.” He had spread the drawings across the jagged rocks. I leaned over to look at them under the feeble light of the moon. I saw an image of Franco being gored by a bull. Another of Franco with a large penis. Yet another of Franco on a pig and wielding a spear. Finally, Franco feeding on a rotting horse. I read Picasso’s words written beneath the images: evil-omened polyp. “Take these images in,” my father ordered, “so you will know the past of where we are headed.” It was almost dawn. We could barely carry on. We hadn’t eaten in days. We huddled together against the rocks in the brutal cold and waited for the approaching daylight to wane.

I walked out of the museum in tears. The floodgates had opened. I sat on the staircase leading down to the internal courtyard. There were palms growing in terra-cotta vases. The sky was darker, the air colder. A security guard walked up to me. He had blue eyes and a thin face, a pronounced jaw and blackened teeth that were broken and had sharp reptilian edges.

“What’s wrong?” he asked in Catalan. He sat next to me. There was a knowing kindness in his voice. He was a guardian of art.

I told him the truth. “I’m crying because of Franco’s evil and pompous penis and the many ways in which it sabotaged, with its dimpled little head, an entire nation of people.”

The security guard laughed a painful laugh. He said, “You don’t have hair on your tongue!”

“It’s true,” I confirmed. “I’m a straight shooter.”

I explained to him a very complicated thing, a thing not everyone would have the capacity to grasp. I told him that I speak directly because in order to stay alive I must always work to make up for the time I’ve lost due to the fact that, as an ill-fated citizen of this negligible world, I am subjected to being constantly attacked by history and that I have been trained by my literary-minded ancestors to combat the dulling effects of the psychic and emotional wounds caused by these violent attacks with verbal efficiency. Language is my sword, I told him. I may be gored by history, but I hack away at its horns with the ethereal sword of literature. I don’t win. But I’m able to keep myself at ground zero. I survive in order to leave testimony.

“I understand better than I can express,” he said. “We Catalans respect directness. We are not like the gold-loving yet provincial Spanish who weave a web so tangled that even the Argentines, who live near the South Pole, thousands of kilometers from here, have gotten tangled in it.”

He removed a silk handkerchief adorned with the Catalan flag of independence from his pocket. He offered it to me to wipe my tears. I dabbed my face with those four vertical stripes of blood.

I told him that where I come from, when we are shocked by something someone says, we register our surprise by saying, I grew hairs on my tongue.

Then I said: “See, my friend, the world is so much more interconnected than we are willing to admit. If someone without hair on their tongue from your home speaks to someone from mine, they immediately grow hairs on theirs!”

We both laughed a great deal at this. Then I walked home again, having safely swallowed my tears. Oh, the guard of art and I, I thought to myself, we are like fingernail and flesh, an expression my father and I had adopted when we were in Catalonia long ago and that I chose to adopt again now.

In order to sink deeper into the past, in order to drill into my forgetfulness so that my buried memories could resurface, I walked to Parc de la Ciutadella. I had walked there many times with my father. It was a walk of victory. The Catalans had thrown down the fort Philip V had built during the War of Spanish Secession. Philip V had launched cannons against the Catalans, aiming with his rectal hole. He had leveled the neighborhood of El Born, razed it to the ground, and driven its inhabitants under its fallen stones like ants and cockroaches in a gelid draft. Centuries later, the Catalans had reclaimed the space and turned it into a magnificent garden—Parc de la Ciutadella—a field of sensorial pleasure. I sat on a bench. I looked around. I contemplated. To attain joie de vivre, I concluded, one has to dig through the palimpsest of grief; there is no way around it. I looked up from the shady paths hugging the palm trees and magnolias, and saw the silhouette of the Temple Expiatori del Sagrat Cor sitting on the summit of Tibidabo in the distance. The sky was the color of ink, with indigo threads running through it. Beneath that sky, Tibidabo looked as soft and plush as a crib. I got up and walked to the Cascada, with its monumental waterfall and pond. A few geese were languidly drifting across the pond’s mint-colored waters. When they approached the waterfall, they circled around with knowing eyes and came back again, taking in a 360-degree view of their surroundings. It occurred to me as I watched them that they had it better than anyone. They were always surveying their space, keeping an eye on things. It was clear I had to do the same. I had to embark on a Pilgrimage of Perspective.