Call Me Zebra(56)

“That’s excellent news,” Ludo said with a distracted air. He was sitting across from me, drumming his fingers on the dining table. What part of what I had shared was excellent? I wondered, scrutinizing him up and down. There was something different about him. He was leaning back in his chair very casually. He looked older, more self-possessed, consolidated in a way I hadn’t seen before. He was wearing a short-sleeve button-down shirt beneath his cardigan. I could see the crease of the sleeve under the wool every time he flexed his arms. Until then, he had always worn full-length sleeves. Anything else he considered improper. This sudden change was a red flag. No doubt about it. And, in fact, there was not just one but two red flags: to begin with, his typically rigid and outmoded choice in fashion and, to end with, the fact that he had suddenly broken that very same dress code. I moved from the dining-room table to the recamier to get a better look at him. I took note of the fact that he had zoned out halfway through my answer and of the carefree body language he had adopted—clear signs that he was, and continued to be, a compartmentalized man, a man whose head had been subdivided into casket-size boxes. In fact, I thought, intellectually speaking, he had regressed. A man living in exile, but who is afraid to walk to the edge of the abyss and peer into it, runs the risk of playing into the hand of the imperialists and the colonizers because he is cut off from his wounds and his ill-fated peers. How can a man like that be trusted? But, perhaps, I considered, that is not it. Perhaps, though it might not have appeared this way at first glance, his mannerisms may very well have been subconsciously designed to protect him from acknowledging the inherent pitfalls of our dynamic, the fight that had caused him to storm out of the apartment like a disheveled mummy. This denial, I considered, feeling yanked around by my thoughts, was productive in its own way because it allowed us to continue servicing our respective crotches. As it turned out, my suspicion of his foul nature was muddled by my desire for the warmth of his embrace, the curve of his penis. I stood there staring at him, confused by my mind’s chaotic clutter.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” Ludo asked, brushing a few stray curls out of his face.

“Like what?” I posed, leaning back into the recamier and petting the three famous crevices, digging my fingers into the charred holes.

“Like what? You’re sitting all the way across the room and staring at me squint-eyed!”

Was this his way of making peace after our fight? If he was going to appear and disappear at random, throwing salt into the Hosseini-shaped wounds carved in my heart by my ancestors’ deaths, then I had no choice but to push him away. Finally, I thought, a burst of clarity.

“Squint-eyed? This is nothing,” I said. “Boy, do I have a story for you! You should have seen the woman I saw at the post office the other day. She was incredibly short and fat. Actually, scratch that. She was rotund—that’s a better word—so much so that her arms were floating laterally because there was a mass of flesh holding them up. And she had a tiny pink purse that she had managed to hook onto her arm; it stuck to her as if it had been glued. When her number was called, she slipped off the waiting room chair and rolled to the window. She was like a wheel that had been fixed with a purse!”

“What does that have to do with anything?” he pressed.

“You don’t think it’s funny?” I asked.

“It is, but I don’t see the connection.”

“Laugh and I’ll tell you.”

He forced himself to laugh. A weak chitter emerged from his lips. I’d been hoping for something more committed, but I let it go.

“The connection,” I declared, employing a diplomatic tone, “is that those are both examples of bodies in distress: I’m squint-eyed; the lady at the post office is rotund.”

He seemed pleased enough with my answer. Or fed up and ready to change the subject. I couldn’t tell. When he asked me what I had been doing at the post office, I told him I was weighing my notebook. He didn’t show any interest. It had become impossible to get a read on him.

As they famously say, delivery is key; there is no use laying facts at an opponent’s feet as if they deserved the red-carpet treatment. Ludo Bembo certainly didn’t. Not after disappearing on me only to reappear without explanation days later. And who knows what he’d been doing in between. Lecturing at the university in Girona or screwing the Tentacle of Ice.

Sooner or later, I reasoned, an opportunity will come along that will allow me to employ the information I’ve gathered against him—the mental notes I’d been taking, the conclusions I’d come to during my walk—to my greatest advantage. I wouldn’t want to waste all the thinking I had done. Given the enormous sums of stupidity that afflict humankind, no one can deny that thinking is meant to be treated like a rare precious stone, guarded, pampered, secured in a vault. To be used with maximum discretion.

One other thing was clear: Ludo Bembo was no black-toothed, blue-eyed, skeletal art guard who had been through the ringer and had acquired, as a result of his extreme suffering, both empathy and a sense of humor. He was a Bembo who had defected, breaking away from his ancestors, whose sweat and tears are still watering the fertile trenches of literature. He was a man who pretended to be working in the service of the Matrix of Literature but was nothing more than an amateur. Why had fate brought us together? Because, I suddenly decided, it was my job to get him back in line.