Call Me Zebra(55)

I realized if I traveled to the city’s highest vantage points—Montju?c, Tibidabo, the Christopher Columbus monument, Park Güell, this or that rooftop—I could, in fact, turn Barcelona around in the palm of my hand as if it were a Rubik’s Cube. I walked back to the port and rode the last cable car up Montju?c. From there, I looked at the city’s rooftops, at the wretched statue of Christopher Columbus, at the spires of the cathedral, at the darkening glass of the cone of Torre Agbar, at Tibidabo and the angled Sagrat Cor facing out at the sea. Further west, there were the hills of Montseny that looked like sculpted black mist. I had already gone up to Park Güell. The only other peak I could make it to before the day’s end was an unpleasant one, to say the least. I had to face the devil himself. No. Worse. I had to go up his rear end.

Why had I come to such a fecund conclusion? Because the view had allowed me to gain insight into the fact that the New and the Old Worlds formed a single unbroken fabric stitched together willy-nilly by the blood-stained hands of white imperialists. After all, Christopher Columbus had returned to the Port of Barcelona after traveling the high seas to what, from his paltry point of view, was the “unknown.” So, I concluded, it is my duty to train my nose to detect an approaching assailant from as far away as the back of the beyond by sniffing the stench of Christopher Columbus’s rear end. I—a living dead—whose heart had been flattened into a sheet of paper due to excess grief, a sheet that had turned as brittle as ice through overexposure to the biting draft of history, needed all the lead time I could get. I needed all the advantage I could cultivate.

I walked down the flank of Montju?c and over to the port. I went inside the Christopher Columbus monument, paid four euros—money well spent—and rode the elevator to the top. I stood in the round, anus-shaped room, and looked out at the pudgy-faced explorer’s crooked finger, which was supposedly pointing at the so-called New World. By the time I turned around to look at the city, night had fallen. It was too dark. Nothing more could be seen. It was as if the light had permanently gone out of the universe. It had been beaten back by the hand of violence.

As I took the elevator back down, I remembered my father’s words. “Child,” he had said to me. “You must mourn your mother’s death through literature. If we, the ill-fated, begin to cry, we risk drowning in our own tears. What will we have achieved then? Life is bitter, time remorseless, and people remain civilized only so long as their own needs aren’t threatened. Not a second longer. They will suck the marrow out of your bones if you let them.” I remembered, too, that at the sound of those words my small body had ached with the sting of hollowness. I felt the needle of betrayal prick at my void. As a remedy, I whispered the great poet Pitarra’s words, which were later repeated by the novelist Roig, both of whom my father had translated and transcribed. I said: “Al fossar de les moreres no s’hi enterra cap tra?dor!” There are no traitors buried in the Grave of the Mulberries! On September 11, 1989, the year we had arrived in Barcelona, Pitarra’s quote had been inscribed into a concave metal memorial in an empty square in La Ribera. At the top of the slender, curved memorial, a single flame burns night and day in honor of the Catalan heroes who fell on September 11, 1714, when Barcelona was besieged during the War of Spanish Succession. I thought of other September elevenths, of the thread of violence that connects us all: September 11, 1697 (the ruthless Battle of Zenta, which precipitated the collapse of the Ottoman Empire); September 11, 1973 (the dark date of the U.S.-backed Chilean coup d’état, which led to the rise of the bloody dictator Pinochet—at that, I saluted Morales); and, finally, September 11, 2001 (the al-Qaeda attack on the United States, which gave the squint-eyed, red-faced Bush an opening to launch another reckless war in the greater region of my ill-fated birth, one more in a string of inconclusive wars that barrel on with no end in sight). Every year on September 11, so many parts of the world are in mourning, proof of the interconnected fabric of being, which, as the Hosseinis well know, is fast brought into relief through the violence that plagues our pitiful species. By the time I was done recounting all those infamous dates, I was nearly in tears. I tilted my head back and reabsorbed those brackish waters. Have my organs eroded? I wondered. The elevator doors opened. I exited the monument, and before I knew it, I was immersed in the city again, walking its streets with no perspective whatsoever.



A few days later, Ludo Bembo returned. When he asked me what I had been up to, I told him, without an ounce of resentment, that I had spent my days reading, walking, transcribing my father’s transcriptions, filling the pages of my notebook with the blood of literature, and then convalescing, sometimes alone, and sometimes in the company of that groggy, volatile bird, Taüt. I also told him that I had tried to get in touch with Quim Monzó, which was only half true. I had made an unresolved attempt at tracking the man down. To what end, I don’t know. I suppose I had a vague feeling that my time in his stuffed dwelling was running out, that things were coming to a head.

I had unearthed what I had come to unearth in Barcelona. After all, by mourning my father’s death, I had discovered the residue of my mother. I had used my consciousness to unreel the yarn of time. This experience signaled to me that the void and its characteristic emptiness had been there all along—a latent condition—which had, upon my parents’ deaths, suddenly become manifest. So I had sunk as deep as I could into the portion of the void of exile that corresponded to Barcelona, the City of Bombs, the Rose of Fire. Where, I wondered, as I looked Ludo up and down, was I going to go next?