Call Me Zebra(66)

By the time I arrived at Ludo’s doorstep, my ears were hot with fear and rage. As I knocked on his door, I thought to myself: What if he refuses my company? What if he invites me in? My thoughts spun and stretched. I knocked again, but no one came to the door. I was temporarily thwarted.

I was forced to spend the night on a bench in the mud outside Ludo Bembo’s apartment. The bench was affixed to a dirt-covered overlook planted with a few young plane trees. It offered an astounding view of the foothills. The Pyrenees possessed an unnatural gleam. The range’s dense black form, composed of deep grooves and ridges and moss-encrusted rocks, was shrouded in a fine layer of mist—vapor that appeared to have been backlit. I sat there with Taüt and stared into the distance until the curtains of night were drawn. The sky turned purple before it turned black.

“What is the nature of my predicament?” I asked Taüt. “I am from nowhere. Homeless, adrift, bewildered, crippled with endless estrangement.”

Taüt nodded along in agreement with the calm patience of a man who has been locked up his whole life. He was weary from traveling, and his exhaustion had transformed him into a polite and cooperative being.

“What does that make me?” I asked.

He shrugged his wings as if to say, How should I know?

Just then, I heard a breathless voice yell: Like the clear-eyed Edward Said, you are a specular border intellectual! It was my father’s muffled voice coming from deep inside my void. I barely recognized him.

I swooned over Said’s name; it warmed my inky blood. It was true. As usual, my father’s assessments were spot-on. Though mutilated by my perpetual exile, I, Zebra, was at home in my homelessness. I refused to blend the unreconciled veins of nationhood running through my body. I refused to produce a singular whole self, free of gaps and fissures, a being that poses less of a problem to the rest of the world. Instead, I, Dame of the Void, will continue to inhabit a liminal space between worlds, a position that affords me a vantage point from which to envision new formations of thoughts, to live beyond the frontiers of ordinary experience.

I was soon on my legs, standing before Ludo Bembo’s home. The door had a hand-shaped metal knocker. I stared at that sick hand. It had a prophetic aura about it. It was moss green and freckled with rust, as if blood had been sprayed across it. I looked down at my hands. My fingers were hurting again, the way they’d hurt when Ludo and I had had sex and the way they had hurt when I’d nudged my father out of his stupor upon my mother’s death. I felt noxious. I retreated to the bench and watched the violet fog roll softly over the mountainous frontier.

The day’s rain had kicked up the faint smell of my father’s death. I leaned back into the bench and put my legs over the miniature museum. I comforted myself with the thought that Ludo Bembo would have to return home eventually. Soon, I thought, I will have to introduce myself to his friends. I found a muddied piece of old string in the dirt and tied Taüt to the bench. He had begun to strain my shoulder. I walked over to the young plane trees, which had barely taken root in their terra-cotta planters, and introduced myself to them as if they were Agatha, Fernando, and Bernadette.

“Hello,” I said to the first tree, shaking a handful of its thin and supple branches. “I am a non-Western encroaching on the territories of the West.”

I stepped back to reflect. A non-Western encroaching on the territories of the West. The phrase fell short of what I’d wanted to say. It was an approximate unit of thought, incomplete, reductive, uncomplicated. It didn’t account for the fact that the West had aggressed upon me while I was still in the East and that this invasion, the cultural assassination imposed upon me by the West, had forced an agonizing and psychologically maimed version of me to cross over into the West and contaminate its territories with the very distortions it had caused but now refused to acknowledge—that, on top of everything else, the West was gaslighting me. That’s right. I had been gaslighted by the imperial powers of the world. But, much like the New World, this tree was too young to understand. It said nothing in return. I gave it a little kick and moved on.

Taüt, whose fate was no better than a hostage’s, expressed his delight by hopping up and down on the rim of the bench as far as the string permitted.

“Hello,” I said, petting the soft foliage of the second tree. “I, Zebra, am recrossing borders I have already crossed in order to map the literature of the void and prove once and for all that any thought worth preserving in our pitiable human record was manifested in the mind of an exile, an immigrant, a refugee”—my mind and my mouth had aligned themselves to perfection—“persons fleeing from persecution, and/or otherwise homeless beings.”

The tree bowed.

“At the center of the archive of Western thought,” I continued, encouraged by the tree’s grace, “is the pain of those who have suffered at the hands of the xenophobic and militant fascists of the West and their puppets in the East.”

I looked at the tree. It was sulking empathically. The tips of its branches were pointing despairingly at the ground.

“Spain, of course, is no different,” I informed the doting tree. “Spain is the original culprit. It is singularly responsible for the establishment of the so-called New World, for the invention of the West. The Spanish of yore were expert annihilators and inquisitors, all of them.”

Just then, the moon emerged and with it a soft Sephardic tune of loss and longing rose from the Museum of Jewish History, which was directly downhill from us. The church bells at the Cathedral of Saint Mary of Girona chimed in.