Call Me Zebra(63)

Before leaving, I had converted my chest-shaped suitcase into a miniature museum. In order to fill the space of my father’s absence, I had turned the fumes of our past into art, stuffed that sarcophagus with objects. In addition to my books, and my father’s, the miniature museum contained objects from the Room of Broken Heirlooms and from the apartment of Quim Monzó, objects that, like my mother and father and me, had been violently severed from their context.

I said in vain to Taüt, “I have been stripped of home and hearth. If I was deprived of these objects, which conjure for me the many origins and stages of my ill-fatedness, what else would I have left in the world?” The bird said nothing. He merely clawed at my ear.

There was no one around. The city looked like it had been abandoned. I felt as though I were standing outside the world looking in. The events of the last few weeks had left me feeling stranger than ever before: as raw as a newborn and, simultaneously, ancient, decrepit, weatherworn. I looked around. Lined shoulder to shoulder on the sidewalk, the facades of L’Eixample’s buildings reminded me of soldiers at the end of a long, hard war. I scanned the empty street. I had the vague impression that the city’s potential had been violently truncated, as if I were looking at an afterimage of a distant and brutalized Barcelona, a ghostly projection of the city’s composite past: Franco’s Barcelona, the Barcelona of the Civil War, the Barcelona of the Tragic Week, the Barcelona of the War of Spanish Succession, of the Reapers’ War. How many times had this city reinvented herself? How many times had she died and been resurrected? How many times had she been exiled from herself? The city seemed haunted by the ghosts of her own past. And yet, like the Hosseinis, she had persevered.

I was drenched. The wind was blowing sheets of rain left and right. I pressed my back against the doorway and saw my reflection in the first-floor windows. I looked like a fugitive. A fugitive attached to a stubborn and volatile bird whose beak hung ajar. I let my mouth drop open, too. Steam came rising out of it. I took a long, hard look at myself standing there with Taüt. Flattened onto the surface of the window, the bird and I seemed to be looking back at ourselves in disbelief from behind the smoky veneer of an old photograph.

Finally, the rain diminished and then ceased. A pale winter sun emerged, casting its mild light on the window. Taüt and I disappeared from view. The street started to fill up again. People moved about briskly, hoping to avoid the next downpour. I resumed my walk to the train station, sliding past lottery vendors, street sweepers, businessmen in slim black suits and pressed white shirts, middle-aged women in boxy colorful outfits that made them look like gifts waiting to be unwrapped; there were office clerks, cocktail waiters in double-breasted suits, teenagers wearing puffy down coats and shoes made of foam and rubber that looked good enough for walking on the moon, whose depressed, acne-pocked skin reminded me of the craters in the red recamier in Quim Monzó’s living room. These people had places to go, loved ones who would be angry, or worried, or disappointed if they failed to arrive. Next to them, I felt like a feral animal, untethered and unstitched. I felt the sweetness and the bitterness of my solitude in my mouth. As I watched them, it occurred to me that if I’m going to be condemned to death in life I should at least have a thinking chair. I wished I had stolen the red recamier, too.



On the train, I thought of Ludo Bembo. Ever since he had walked out and left me soaking in the tub, as wrinkled as a prune, I had been planning to show up at his house unannounced. He had abandoned me in a moment of need, thickening my distrust of humanity; he had poured salt into my Hosseini-shaped wounds. In an hour, I would be at his door in Girona. I would be able to impose myself on his life just as he had imposed himself on mine by interfering with my notebook.

I closed my eyes and assessed the sum of the thoughts I’d had in the weeks since Ludo had abandoned me. I remembered that for a few days I had considered my imposition on his home and hearth an artistic performance of what one of André Breton’s translators refers to as the love of the irrational and the irrational of love. I had consulted one of Breton’s books at random while pacing Quim Monzó’s corridor and his words had detached themselves from the page and hovered over the book in three dimensions, an occurrence that lent them a prophetic quality. Breton’s words had soon positioned themselves alongside my father’s: Love nothing except literature. Words taken from the First Hosseini Commandment.

The two phrases, stationed in my mind as opponents and prepared to engage in conflict—one steering me toward Ludo and the other away—had provoked in me a serene sadness that was almost blissful, joyous. The more I considered my options, the more intoxicated and elated I became. It was in that state that I deduced the following: By showing up at Ludo’s house unannounced and—how shall I put it?—prepared to move in, I was going to teach him a lesson. What lesson? The following: If love is irrational and if one loves the irrational, then it follows that one—i.e., Ludo Bembo—loves love; and when one loves love, one risks turning into a steamroller, a psychic murderer of one’s lover—i.e., me, the object of Ludo’s love. By moving to Girona and imposing myself on Ludo, I was going to demonstrate the damaging effects of love, its fundamental intrusiveness, and would thus be engaging with Breton’s missive and, simultaneously and rather paradoxically, would also be proving the inherent wisdom of the First Hosseini Commandment. In doing so, I would be establishing a complex truce between the two sides of my brain. By using literature to expose the lie of love, its false pretense of unconditional generosity and kindness, I would be proving yet again that literature is the only magnanimous host in this piddling universe, and as if that were not enough, I would be doing so in Ludo’s presence, which I was loath to admit I had missed.