Call Me Zebra(58)

“I’m going to take you out to dinner,” he said. “You don’t have to eat that.”

“What’s it to you?” I asked, getting up from the sand.

In the interim, the sky had darkened. It was a deep navy blue, and a few hazy stars had appeared. The water was lapping gently against the shore. It was no longer olive-colored, vintage green; it looked black and viscous. We were the only two people on the beach.

“Nothing,” he said. He took my face in his hands. Then, with all the sweetness in the world, he said, “What am I going to do with you?”

A moment earlier, he’d had me perilously leaning over the edge of a cliff to look at the Cave of Hell. Now he was all tenderness. I couldn’t make heads or tails of it.

“I’m not an object,” I informed him tersely. “I’m not a bronze statue you need to decide where best to display!”

“A bronze statue?”

“Whatever! What I’m saying is, I’m not an impulse purchase!”

“I didn’t say you were,” he said. Then he added, “We’re having a great time. Let’s not get started.”

“Fine,” I said, mentally going over my notes.

He had it coming. He was asking for it.



Ludo was always concerned with his stomach. Earlier in the day, on our way up to the Cap de Creus, we had stopped at the beaches and marshlands of Roses. We had eaten cheese-and-pork sandwiches, walked along the shore, jumped from metallic salt-corroded rock to rock. We had picked flowers in the hills.

The next day, we drove farther south to have lunch in Sant Feliu de Guixols. We stopped to eat at the Nou Casino la Constancia, a neomedieval building with arabesque features. The building had a romantic flair about it, but the waiters were slow, rude, indifferent. Their white shirts were stained, their black vests unbuttoned. They were making inconclusive efforts at resurrecting the charm of the Old World.

I never paid for our meals. I couldn’t bring myself to spend the little money I had left in the world on anything other than shelter and mint-and-onion soup. So Ludo fed me, bought me beach towels, sweaters, hiking shoes. I didn’t care.

That night, we drove back north to have dinner in L’Escala, a fishing village famous for its anchovies. The beach was dotted with tiny black boats, which had been laid to rest upside down on the shore. We sat on the sand and looked out at the sea. Ludo lit up his pipe. The smoke lifted into the night sky in slow, steady streams. There was a thin mist hovering over the water. Everything looked black, blue, white; the edges of the landscape shone with a metallic tinge. The moon emerged momentarily and then disappeared behind thick clouds, exhausting all light from the sky. We barely spoke. Or rather, we spoke only of banal things: his friends, Tuscan wine, his dreams of owning an olive grove. I said next to nothing. It was the only way to guarantee peaceful conversation. No one wants to have their nose rubbed in manure. No one wants to be accountable to the truth. I was alone in my efforts. Alone even when I was in Ludo’s company because, like everyone else, he refused to acknowledge his own hurt.

We had dinner in a café near the water. We ate fish-head soup, black rice cooked in large shallow clay dishes, cod baked with garlic, olives, tomato. We drank a flask of wine. Ludo told me about a friend of his who had lost his mind because he had gone foraging for mushrooms and had accidentally eaten a poisonous one.

“What does he do now?” I asked.

“He wanders. His mother takes care of him,” he said, and that was that.

The waiter brought me a fruity cocktail with a decorative umbrella and a beer for Ludo. I removed the decorative umbrella and tucked it behind Ludo’s ear.

“This isn’t Hawaii,” he said.

“The world is a lot more contaminated than you think,” I answered, and then I got up and left.

I walked out onto the beach. I grabbed a stick and carved the following lines from Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo into the sand: Why do I know a few more things? Why am I so clever altogether? I was hoping to bring my father back. Nothing. And what’s more? There was Ludo again, standing behind me.

“What are you doing?” he asked scornfully. “We were still eating.”

With that black sky behind him and the mist that was hovering over the water, he looked like Nosferatu: elongated in all the wrong ways.

“I am being one with Nietzsche,” I answered.

“So you can’t be one with me, but you can be one with Nietzsche?” he challenged.

“I couldn’t have said it better myself,” I answered in a mellowing tone.

That’s when he lost it.

He pointed out that my features had a mercurial quality about them that put him ill at ease. “Your expression changes in a flash from grave introspection to childish mischief, or from a callous indifference to anguish,” he said, as if he were reading from a book or, even worse, my notebook. “Sometimes,” he said, “you look as if you were suddenly being skinned alive. What is wrong with you?”

“Why do you sound like a text?” I inquired.

“A text?” he mocked.

What had happened to Ludo’s silence on all matters regarding my ill-fatedness? Ludo’s literary disengagement? I considered the possibility that there were multiple versions of the same Ludo Bembo, two physical versions of the same man, each version inclined to duality, making four Ludo Bembos altogether. He seemed to have become me. He was speaking the way I would have spoken to him had I ever had the opportunity to share the mental notes I had made as a result of all my tireless thinking. I asked him to sit down on one of the boats. I even wiped off the sand to make sure he would be comfortable. He sat down with a hopeful expression on his face. I started mildly. I explained to him that most of our issues originated, on the one hand, as a result of his insistence on pursuing pleasure, on his own self-love, which he had confused with love for me, and on the other hand, from his apparent ignorance of the poetic and philosophical efforts exerted by his ancestors, the Bembos, efforts that he was recklessly throwing into the wind by living as if life were a loyal dog that walked at his heels.