Call Me Zebra(57)

I got up, walked across the room, and gave him a kiss on the lips. This was designed to disarm him. He grabbed my arm and pulled me onto his lap. We had sex then and there.

Halfway through, he said, “I like it when you ride my dick like that.”

I rode him harder. At some point, I have no idea why, I felt myself fuse with Don Quixote. I was riding Rocinante—that meek, skeletal horse of his—across the Castilian plains. I saw giant windmills in the distance. The blades were cutting the air the way history had chopped up my ancestors. I felt a fierce need to attack those windmills.

“Faster, Rocinante!” I cried out.

This energized Ludo. He cupped my ass and lifted me up and down as fast as he could. As soon as we were done, he asked: “Are you saying I need to gain weight?”

“No,” I said, slightly out of breath.

“Then why did you call me Rocinante? That horse was all bones!”

“Never mind,” I said. “Don’t worry about it.”

Ludo leaned his head onto my shoulder. I could feel his moist breath on my neck. I patted him on the head. I said: “You’ve made progress. You’ve acknowledged that life is less truthful than literature.”

He tried to say something, but I pressed his head against my chest and put my hand over his mouth to muffle the noises. Silly fool. He thought I was teasing him, so he playfully bit my finger.



After that, Ludo and I proceeded in relative peace. One could even say, as the Flauberts and Prousts of the world would, that we spent days of trust, of joy, of profound companionship. Days without a cloud in sight. We had sex. We laughed over Quim Monzó’s assortment of trinkets. We teased the bird by hiding from him every time he made an appearance. Ludo cooked. I ate my heart out. I stuffed my void with his food.

Friday came and Ludo decided that we needed to get some air. A weekend in the great outdoors would give me a chance to ventilate my thoughts, a chance, he said, to build intimacy, to take my parents for a walk. I said nothing. I was in no mood to discuss my parents. Ever since my visit to the museum, my father had been less and less present. His absence—his manifest emptiness—was less felt. He wasn’t pressing his face against my void as often as he had been, and each time he did, he seemed slightly more decomposed than the last: His nails had begun to fall; his mustache, though longer, was thinning; his muscles and tissues were degenerating, leaving his dry skin clinging to his bones. He was in the process of disappearing. Ludo’s presence seemed to accelerate my father’s decay. I wondered if he was punishing me. I wondered if I hadn’t looked at Ecce Homo long enough when he’d asked me to. So I agreed to go with Ludo on a long drive up the coast. I told him that I was only motivated to do so because the brackish air of the sea would do my father some good. I could tell he had taken offense at that, but he said nothing. He swallowed his hurt feelings as if they were a pill.

We drove up the rugged winding hills of the Costa Brava all weekend. Once we were out of the city, the road curved through mountains densely packed with pine, cork trees, aloe, cacti, eucalyptus. Near the French border, the wild jagged coastline gave way to the harsh mountainous regions of the Parc Natural del Cap de Creus, Dalí’s stomping ground. We arrived just before sundown and went up through the park all the way to the lighthouse. A soft beam of light was slowly circumnavigating the surrounding waters of the Mediterranean. Underfoot, the terrain was sharp, beige, black; full of holes, slits, craters. It looked like it had been sliced and hammered. We sat inside a rock that had been hollowed out by the waves. It was like a hammock made of stone. It was December. The winter sun was halfway down the sky. In the restaurant near the lighthouse, families were sitting down to order fresh fish, squid, octopus, sea urchins.

Ludo said, “If you lean over the edge, you might be able to see the Cova de s’Infern.”

I didn’t think anything of it. I leaned over to look at the Cave of Hell, a slanted slit in the rock that made the shadowy waters on the other side look like molten silver. By the time we got up to leave, the rocky, wind-battered plateau was backlit by a static orange-peel sky that gave me the impression of walking on the moon. I told Ludo as much.

“I suppose so,” he said in his usual humorless manner.

I turned back to look at the sea again. Below us, the Mediterranean, with its morbid, languorous temperament, looked vast, infinite, intimidating.



We drove back down the coast. We stopped at the Cala de la Fosca because Ludo wanted to look at the famous castle that sits on the edge of the beach’s brass-colored cliffs. I walked along the shore barefoot. Ludo pushed his way up the cliff to the castle. He stopped at this or that rock to wave forcefully in my direction and yell that I was missing out or to chastise me for not exerting sufficient physical effort, for neglecting to capitalize on the complicity and happiness that our drive up and down the coast promised to offer. I yelled back to Ludo that only goats are meant to hike up such a steep cliff and that, besides, my feet had gone numb from wading in the cold winter water.

“It’s not that steep,” he yelled.

I ignored him. He looked smaller the farther up the cliff he hiked.

Overhead, the sky was white, as thin as glass, about to vanish. Ludo disappeared behind a wall of pines, and I waited for my father to stir. Nothing happened. I looked for dead fish. I found one at the opposite end of the bay from the castle—a sea bass—that had been tangled up in driftwood and kelp. It had been pecked at by seagulls; it smelled like death. I crouched down and sniffed it, hoping to trigger my father’s presence, to get his blood to move the way it had on those last days of his life when I would take him to Brighton Beach and he would dig his cane into the sand and morosely move his eyes from side to side, furious at his looming death in the so-called New World but resigned to it nonetheless. I needed confirmation that he was still there. That he hadn’t turned his back on me. What would I do if I was left with no one other than Ludo, a faulty descendent of the Bembos? But nothing worked. My void remained hollow, empty. I was about to faint from the rotten smell of the dead fish when I heard Ludo’s voice. He was right behind me. I turned to look at him. He had a rabbity grin on his face. He was standing there with his arms at his waist.