Call Me Zebra(65)

I felt something move inside me. It was my father. He was making an appearance after a prolonged caesura. I felt renewed by his presence, emboldened. He had always liked Girona. I remembered him spitting with excitement: “Catalonia is Spain’s literary and political frontier, and its capital, Barcelona, is famous for attracting and producing thinkers, writers, artists. Barcelona is the Manchester of the Mediterranean, the City of Bombs, the Rose of Fire. But Girona . . . Girona is a hothouse and exporter of exiles!”

It was true. Sandwiched between France and Barcelona, Girona had been the corridor through which exiles had come and gone from Catalonia for centuries.

“Verily!” I said to my father with a bucolic glee, delighted to see him now, caressing his mustache. He rolled its ends around his finger and tickled me.

“Moronic fascist! Moronic clock!” he exclaimed, gagging with laughter.

Despite my father’s sporadic entries, I had observed a disturbing pattern: He had become more desultory with every passing day. He was aging in his death. He was decomposing. There were pieces of his nails and hairballs and flakes of dead skin on the floor of my void. He kicked them up every time he made an appearance, causing parts of his body to blow about my inner deserts as recklessly as tumbleweeds in the wind. He seemed to be running out of breath more quickly than before. Seeing him come undone, I felt as though I, too, could suddenly evaporate, dissolve into nothingness, become an echo of the past. My sick hand ached.

“Father?” I inquired in vain. But there was no answer. He had submerged himself in my void once more.

I began advancing through Girona without him, crestfallen and glum. The interlocking network of streets returned to me in segments, block by block. I didn’t have an umbrella, so I hugged the sides of buildings as I made my way. Taüt moved to my right shoulder, the side protected from the rain. By the time I had made my way to the Pont de Pedra—an arched stone bridge that hangs over the Onyar River and marks the center of the Old Quarter—the rain had ceased and a diaphanous glow filled the evening sky.

I stood on the bridge for a moment and stared at the still, moss green waters of the river. The rain had kicked up soot and dirt. The water looked dreary, a metaphor of doom and gloom. A line of Dalí’s piped into my mind: I have never denied my fertile and elastic imagination the most rigorous means of investigation.

I emitted a pained laugh. “The most rigorous means of investigation!” I repeated.

My mind, I considered, is even more centerless and elastic than Dalí’s. My mind is as supple and resilient as the Matrix of Literature, which, by nature of being a working cartography of the literature of the void, is itself infinite. How am I supposed to carry around a mind like that? I thought. A mind that never stops stretching? A mind that contains all of literature?

I looked straight ahead into the vanishing point of the landscape that stretched before me. There were more bridges farther up the river and colorful buildings crowding the embankment. Their windows resembled a row of eyes, and the iron railings of their terraces protruded like swollen mouths. They stared back at me dumbly, each one a different color—salmon, mother-of-pearl, mint, toast, olive, white, mustard, pistachio, red, muted orange.

Rain clouds moved quickly overhead, and the glow of the sky diminished. A grainy evening light emerged. I navigated the darkling streets. I went deeper into the Old Quarter. I walked up stone-paved plazas, through cobbled alleyways. The distant hum of conversation flowed out from the doors and windows of dimly lit restaurants and spread across the deserted streets. Everyone was eating, drinking, carrying on with their lives. My reflection in the glass superimposed itself on their figures: I looked sordid, miserable, ragged. The skin around my eyes and mouth was tight, my lips were as thin as a razor. I was livid with envy. The people on the other side of the glass were living the good life, feasting on pleasure and bliss while Taüt and I—and the Mobile Art Gallery, corpse of my past turned future—walked along utterly invisible.

I continued on. I passed recessed wooden doors affixed with rusty knockers shaped like gargoyles, barred windows, gas lanterns, and metal rings previously used to tie horses. I thought of our dead ass, of its ashes scattered across that no-man’s-land, and felt my envy calcify. I looked up. The sky was a long, solitary black strip, as narrow as the road. This was the kind of street, I thought, where the sun would go to die. It would plunge itself headfirst into this frigid narrow path. What did Ludo Bembo think, I wondered, as I dragged my body through that ghostly tunnel; that I was just going to lie down and die? Or lick my wounds out of view like a wild animal under a bush? That I was unable to speak, to resist, to react, to push back against the injustices the world and its subjects, including him, had assailed on me?

It was true that I, as a middle-ranking member of the Pyramid of Exile, hadn’t had the willpower to shape my own life—a life that had been subjected to an infinite number of independent variables—let alone exert myself as a force upon the lives of others. But things change. The people who have been trapped in the ghetto of the pyramid eventually emerge to contaminate the world with their power and mirror back to this miserly universe its own terrible distortions. I am one of those people. An emergent. Combative. A literary terrorist. This dishonest globe, I thought, as I dragged all of my parts and their corresponding objects up the steep street, is inhospitable to writers and thinkers, not to mention members of the AAA. It has acted upon me with cold cruelty. I have been made an enemy. But I have endured the world with grace for long enough. I have been conditioned to become warlike by the perpetual war imposed upon my corner of the world, by the cultural assassination politely referred to as exile. Imposing myself on others in order to educate them is one of my duties. And Ludo Bembo, a literary amateur and underresolved member of the Pyramid of Exile, was in need of an education. He was a betrayer of exiles, an embarrassment to the legacy of the Bembos.