Call Me Zebra(62)
When I woke up, my head was pounding. My head, it seemed, was wrapped in cloth or plastic. My vision was shrouded, slightly muddled. I could see the contours of things, the angles of the room, the sharp spearlike ends of the bedposts, the sagging ceiling that was hanging there like a sack of yogurt. The books I had thrown onto the bed were still there. Some of them had been opened. Certain verses had been underlined. The edges of the covers had been chewed. It was clear: I had been feeding on literature.
There were other objects on the bed: a typewriter with a fresh spool of ribbon and paper that had been fed into the platen. In big bold letters, at the top of the page, I had typed the word DICTéE. I had been transcribing. I had been cloning texts, creating fake doubles like a monk, like a scribe in a monastery. I removed the paper from the typewriter. It read:
IN THE WORDS OF JOSEP PLA, WRITER OF DEATH, PERMANENT INHABITANT OF INTERNAL EXILE:
I’ve asked for nothing and dominated nobody, but I have defended myself with every noble and ignoble weapon there is when people have tried to dominate me or force me to take a step in their direction. I only ever wanted to get on with my life. The laws of the state increasingly encroach on us and the day may come when we have to fill in a form in order to grow a mustache.
Then again:
IN THE WORDS OF JOSEP PLA, WRITER OF DEATH, PERMANENT INHABITANT OF INTERNAL EXILE:
I’ve asked for nothing and dominated nobody, but I have defended myself with every noble and ignoble weapon there is when people have tried to dominate me or force me to take a step in their direction. I only ever wanted to get on with my life. The laws of the state increasingly encroach on us and the day may come when we have to fill in a form in order to grow a mustache.
I leaned over the Remington. There were bullet holes in it. It was bruised and beaten. It was from the war. Its consciousness had been violated in the trenches. It suddenly occurred to me: I had tried to kill myself.
I was returning to consciousness in portions, in shards; I was seeing things in segments. I slowly realized that there was a hose hanging from the center of my face. I tried to utter the word—hose—but the sound of my voice was muffled by whatever contraption I had wrapped around my head. The edges of matter, like the contours of reality, had frayed. I concentrated on the hose. I followed that plastic pipe with my eyes. It wasn’t easy. My senses were obstructed; I couldn’t see clearly. Space had turned into a collage, something I could experience only in discrete sections. And I, with all that industrial wreckage hanging off my face, was like a figure in a painting. I had fused with the apartment. I was completely Dada.
I walked into the bathroom and looked in the mirror. I was wearing a gas mask. My hair was sticking out between the clasps that buckled at the back of my head. I stared at the filter cartridge over my mouth through the two oval glass windows of the mask. I thought of the bestiality of war, of the machinations of history. “Who is spared?” I asked. “No one,” I heard myself mutter in response.
I unclasped the gas mask. It smelled musty, old; it was caked with dirt. I looked like a warrior. The mask left red marks on my cheeks and forehead. I looked at the replication of the bathroom in the mirror: the blue tiles, the edges of the tub, all those mute surfaces were doubled, their silence amplified just as I had been doubled, had died and been resurrected in literature’s echo chamber, had been regurgitated from the Matrix of Literature as residue.
I washed my face. I groomed myself. The mind, I thought inwardly, is a complex energy field capable of receiving information; it is subtle, porous. A sponge designed to soak up the dark waters of literature, all that spilled blood. I brushed my hair, then I set the brush down on the sink. I looked at myself. I had become more Zebra than ever before, as troubling as literature, as disquieting as language itself.
GIRONA
The Story of the Creation of the Miniature Museum and My Cohabitation with Ludo Bembo
Weeks later, on a wet January afternoon, I left Quim Monzó’s apartment for the last time.
It had been raining the whole day, and Barcelona was covered in a thick purple haze. The trees planted along the boulevards swayed as the wind plucked their leaves and carried them out of view into the dark veil of water coming down through the sky and rising from the ground in clouds of vapor. I was on my way to the train station when a strong flash of lightning forced me to hide underneath a doorway. Taüt was sitting on my shoulder. I had stolen the bird. I had left Quim Monzó with a false replica I had purchased, a wooden cockatoo I fastened to the swivel wall lamp where Taüt regularly perched. The real-life Taüt was breathing hard. His beak was ajar, and he kept blinking or anxiously nibbling on my ear, and his feathers were upright. He had a ghastly look. He looked objectionable. I told him as much. He seemed to take offense; he immediately grasped onto my ear with his right talon, carving his nails into my skin. In my mind’s eye, I saw my ear peeling off the side of my face and blowing into the distance, like the leaves being scattered here and there.
“If you don’t stop”—I cast Taüt a scornful look—“I’m going to have to shove you into the Mobile Art Gallery.” The bird squinted, aware that he might drown in the putrid odor of my father’s death.