Call Me Zebra(64)

I felt a few pangs of hunger. Before leaving Barcelona, I had counted the money Morales had given me. It was halfway gone. As a result, my food rations had become even more meager than before. To distract myself, I opened my eyes and looked at the Mobile Art Gallery. I took inventory: the typewriter, the telephone, the gas mask, the bronze statue of the bull, the miniature plastic reproductions of the toilets, the ghost globe. To my view, I hadn’t stolen any of Quim Monzó’s objects. I had merely reappropriated them. I had given them new life by turning them into art objects. Quim Monzó, Dadaist though he is, hadn’t taken things far enough. It was I, to whom the world had offered nothing, who, by creating a box in a valise in the Duchampian spirit, had taken the literary critic’s belongings to their logical conclusions.

I had spent hours designing the interior of the suitcase. I had attached a retractable wooden cross to the inside of the lid and fastened The Hung Mallard to it. Now, when I opened the lid and extended the cross, the painting would unfold and hang over the rest of the objects with a great deal of somber ceremony; the Hosseini mantra—in this false world, we guard our lives with our deaths—hovered ominously over the objects in the gallery.

I had built shelves for the miniature reproductions of the toilets, the bronze bull, the ghost globe. I arranged my portable library at the bottom of the valise. I squeezed in our rusty samovar and our rug. On top of the rug, I fitted the typewriter, telephone, and gas mask. Inside the valise, these last three objects, ordinarily pitiable due to the abuses inflicted upon them during the world wars, had suddenly taken on the dignified, grave look of art.

The train carried on. We went past raked fields of wheat, vineyards, poles, towers. I sat there with the composure of a mannequin and reviewed the Mobile Art Gallery’s function with surgical precision. I had built two foldout tables that I could secure to each side of the chest. I pictured myself sitting at the desk with the typewriter, practicing the Irrational-Pragmatic methodology by transcribing five sentences, one for each member of the Hosseini lineage (including me), before moving over to the telephone on the opposite desk; there I would pick up the receiver and listen to the silence at the other end for a corresponding number of minutes. This silence, I decided, which was loud enough to hear, was the white noise left over after the devastation of exiles the world over, those of us whose fates have been bludgeoned by failed constitutional movements, world wars, dictatorships, coup d’états, and counterrevolutions. In other words, by coupling the Irrational-Pragmatic methodology with the Art of Transcription, I had caused a live Dadaist performance to be born. What would Quim Monzó have to say about that? I wondered smugly.

One evening, while I was sitting on Quim Monzó’s red recamier in the smoky light of dusk, I had raised my grief antennas and received the following message from the Matrix of Literature: Since I have a more refined sense than most for the virtues of literature in relation to the total problem of life, it is my job to expose the macabre state of the world to its tired and tried posers through a series of performative transcriptions designed to put the uselessness of our suffering on display, to expose the only truth that exists: the truth of literature, an ugly truth disguised in the form of a beautiful lie. It is my job, I considered, to warn the world that we have not yet hit rock bottom; that we, members of the twenty-first century, the supposed moderns, are on the cusp of a profound and prolonged senselessness, a senselessness that will be even more senseless than its senseless predecessors. No one will be spared. There will be war everywhere, a sporadic, remorseless war that will appear and disappear at random, a war that will spread to the Four Corners of the World. At this thought, I rose from the red recamier and announced: “Squirmy little rodents, if one of us is ill-fated, sooner or later we will all be ill-fated. Bah! The war to end all wars is the biggest lie we have ever been fed.” I sat back down.

After my epiphany, I affixed wheels and a handle to my chest-shaped suitcase. That way, I could easily transport the Mobile Art Gallery. There would be no place out of reach. If I was going to sound out a warning, I would have to do it without bias. Its message was meant for everyone; it didn’t matter how remote a village a person lived in. They deserved to know the truth, and the Mobile Art Gallery was capable of delivering that truth anywhere, anytime. My notebook, though filled to the brim, was not enough. What about the illiterates and abecedarians of the world? Who would sound out the Hosseini alarm to them? I needed a visual representation of my notebook, a three-dimensional sculpture that would drag the ghosts of our past into the present and ask: Why is the present, which is history itself, not being addressed?

The train was beginning to slow down. I looked out the window. We were pulling into the station in Girona. Soon, I would see Ludo again. I felt as though a hundred horses were galloping across the flat fields of my heart. The train came to a stop on the elevated tracks, and the doors pumped open. I got off and stepped into the powdery light on the platform. There I was: a ghost of my former self, a double alien in Girona, a stranger once again. Taüt pressed his talons into my shoulder. He held on tightly.

I left the station. It was raining, and I stood for a while under the awning of a nearby store. There were blue buses idling in the parking lot, rings of smoke rising from their exhaust pipes only to be pushed back down to the ground by the dense, moist air. I turned around to look at the station’s facade. A giant round clock, flat and cream-colored with two thick, rigid arms, hovered at the top. With its fascist severity, the clock brought to mind Franco’s moronic face, as indifferent and withholding as the moon.