Call Me Zebra(59)

It was at that moment that my father returned. His head emerged in my void. Seconds later, it sank back down in the deep dark folds of the abyss. I was devastated. I looked down at the sand. For a moment, I wasn’t sure where I was. I had the impression the sand was lifting, peeling off the ground to blind me. I looked around to see if there were bombs falling, if there were corpses splayed in the corners of the landscape. I could hear Ludo murmuring something about how I was coldhearted, how I acted as if I had overcome my need for affection, for the company of my fellow humans.

Without looking up at him, I said: “I haven’t touched rock bottom yet. If you think this is hard, wait till I get to the bottom of the abyss. I still have tenderness. The window opens now and again.”

This left him speechless. We said nothing to each other for the rest of the evening. We drove back to Barcelona. I didn’t think he was going to come up to Quim Monzó’s apartment with me. But he did. He even stayed over. He fell asleep with a hopeful grin on his face. I stayed up the whole night. What, I wondered, thinking back on Ludo’s words, would happen to me if I let go of him and my father didn’t return? What would I do if there wasn’t even a single thread connecting me to this cruel and trifling universe? I spent hours searching his face, staring at that hopeful grin. Perhaps, I thought, there was a way forward, an opening at the bottom of the abyss through which I could climb back into the world.



At dawn, I got out of bed. While Ludo continued to sleep, I paced the corridor reading my notebook. Reading was my only remedy, my only recourse; it was the only tool I had for navigating the void. Taüt was perched on the arm of the swivel wall lamp. He was sleeping. His sulfur-crested head was tucked into his plumed back. He looked fluffier and squatter than ever.

I walked past the room where Ludo’s naked body lay stretched out between the four tall bedposts. He was clinging to my pillow, and the whiteness of his skin next to the red of the sheets made him look like an octopus wrapped around the rocky protrusion of a coral reef. Who is he? I wondered again. How is it that he has come into my life? I couldn’t ask the question enough.

I carried on down the corridor. I looked into the bird’s room to see if it had eaten. I always made sure to pour fresh seeds into his cage bowls. But, as usual, the bird, fellow steward of death, hadn’t eaten a thing.

I returned to the living room.

There was a gauzy light coming through the windows. I set my notebook down on the coffee table. The next time I opened it, I read: Love is a divine architect who, according to Plato, came down to the world so that everything in the universe might be linked together. I recognized the handwriting. It was Ludo’s. So, I concluded, he had interfered with my notebook. The moon was shining through the windows with a borrowed light. I thought back to the red flags. I had been right to be wary of him. What could be more manipulative than to invade another with love?

I had to avenge myself. I went in search of Ludo’s books, the ones he had brought back with him after his supposed visit to the rare-book dealer, his friend Fausta. He had left them in the corner of the kitchen. Those poor forgotten books—all of them historical dictionaries—sitting on the kitchen counter as if they were steaks waiting to be seasoned. On a napkin, I penned a citation from the diaries of Josep Pla, who I had thought of upon entering Quim Monzó’s apartment for the first time, an author who defends the banal, who is straightforward, whose mind is a machine full of extremely sensible sentences, all of which he wrote several times over, because he revised his diary for so many years that eventually he was plagiarizing himself, citing and falsifying himself until there were so many Josep Plas that the original one could no longer be found; he was a man of unapologetic contradictions, a literary hero, and the best choice for retaliating against Ludo Bembo’s interference in my notebook. Here is the citation I wrote on the napkin, transcribed verbatim: When one’s heart hasn’t turned to stone, one cannot kill off vanity, the painful longing to be heard, flattered, loved, cherished, et cetera. Our vain heart leads us to do the most absurd things and embark on lunatic initiatives: to interfere in other people’s lives, to catechize them in one way or another—in a word (and this I underlined for emphasis), to invade their solitude.

While I was leafing through the first dictionary to insert the napkin, I found something far worse that the sentimental verse Ludo had copied into my notebook. Embedded in its frail yellow pages was a folio that was, believe it or not, more manipulative than the quote about the divine nature of love. The folio, too, was in Ludo’s handwriting. He had crafted his letters to look as elegant and poised as the font of a medieval manuscript. His f looked like a flamingo, his s like a swan, his m like an orangutan. He had conducted an in-depth analysis of the history of the word inquietare.

The word leapt off the page and slapped me in the face. Why that word in particular? Inquietare, I repeated to myself, mentally archiving its various unsettling definitions as I returned to the recamier: to disturb someone (gravely); to block or alienate someone; to diminish their peace and quiet.

The pair of red flags, which had initially been waved in my face by the rupture in Ludo Bembo’s dress code, were twice validated. What more proof of his caprice did I need?

I considered eliminating him from my life. After all, I had spent most of my days on this ghastly universe in grave solitude. Why should I cling to another—a non-Hosseini—now? I walked into the bathroom. I felt a fool for having let him into my life. I looked at my face in the mirror. I couldn’t remember how old I was: twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-five. I could have been any age. I was young and old at the same time. Then I saw my mother’s flattened face, wounded and bruised, looking back at me. I felt lonelier than ever. I reached out to touch her face, to soothe her. But her image vanished from the mirror’s reflective surface. “What am I going to do about Ludo?” I murmured into the still air. I felt as though, without him, I risked turning into dust, into ashes that would be scattered about the world by the gale of history. He was the only person, other than my mother and father and Morales, who had known me, and as a result, my fate had become inextricably linked to his. There was no getting rid of him. Even if I tried, I would fail. I had grown accustomed to him. I even needed his stubborn resolve. Without it, there was nothing anchoring me to the world.