Call Me Zebra(70)

I returned to the living room, and announced, “Ludo, I can take Bernadette’s room. You won’t even know I’m here.”

Fernando suddenly appeared, screaming at Bernadette.

“Ma che fai? Ma che fai?” He approached from the opposite side of the room and tackled Bernadette, who was drawing the shutters closed.

“Lasciala stare!” Agatha announced from the sofa.

“What’s happening?” I asked Ludo.

“Fernando is telling Bernadette to stop closing the shutters, and Agatha is telling Fernando to let her be,” he said resentfully. I was about to remind him that I didn’t need a translator because both my father and Morales had dutifully taught me Italian, that what I needed was context, when he added: “Fernando needs all the light he can get to work on his sculptures and Bernadette likes to nap in total darkness.”

“It’s morning,” I said.

He frowned. “It’s all beyond the scope of my comprehension.”

I could tell he was softening up again. The surrounding chaos had made of us a pair of adoring insects on a floating leaf. Even Taüt seemed more tender. Bernadette freed herself from Fernando’s grip. She was going for it. She was closing the house down.

“Would you say she is perennially hopeless?” I asked Ludo.

“I would say she is.”

It was a rare moment of agreement.

“What were you pointing at?” I asked.

“Didn’t you see? One of the drunks slid off the wall,” he said. “I think he’s dead.”

At that, his roommates all froze in place.

“Un morto? Ma che dici?” the three of them asked in unison, a traveling Italian chorus. It seemed Fernando understood the word dead regardless of any language barrier. I was beginning to like him as much as I liked Agatha. I was surprised to feel this way. I was surprised to like anyone at all. Perhaps I had found my tribe of exiles. I imagined stitching my life—which is, of course, a living death—to theirs.

Agatha rushed to the terrace. She pushed the shutters open. We all leaned out to see. It was true. One of the drunks had slid off the wall and fallen face-first onto the concrete of the parking lot. His carton of Don Simon had exploded from the impact. There was red wine running in serpentine paths down the cracks in the parking lot. His friends had vanished.

“Is he really dead?” I asked, remembering the way my father’s skin had turned pale and his muscles had gone stiff after his death. I felt my face slacken again, become blank and expressionless once more.

“I think so,” Agatha said somewhat desperately.

I had a vague feeling that the man, like my father, would find another way to go on. Even while lying there dead, he seemed as stubborn as wood.

“We shouldn’t all be standing here,” Agatha said. “This terrace isn’t trustworthy. A view like this comes at a price,” she said, looking in my direction and then past me at the man lying face down on the ground and then farther out at the Pyrenees, bald and exposed without the dense morning fog.

“Which drunk is it?” I asked.

“The one who showed us his asshole,” Ludo said with some hesitation.

A dog scuttled onto the terrace.

“Petita!” Agatha said, and leaned down to kiss the dog on the forehead. It was a miserable little thing. Taüt guffawed at the sight of her. Next to that mangy dog, he looked like a finely groomed prince.

Just then, the neighbors burst out onto their respective patios and terraces, each of them holding their phones to their ears with one hand and gesticulating at us, the only ones with an aerial view, with the other.

“What’s going on?” The question resounded in Catalan from every corner of the quarter. It lingered in the air. “Is he dead?”

Ludo hurried down the hallway. He returned a moment later, cell phone in hand.

“No, officer,” he shouted into the phone. “He is not asleep. He is D-E-A-D!”

His face was red. His ears were crimson. I had never seen him annunciate a word with so much fierce passion. He removed his glasses and threw them on the sofa.

“You tell him!” I said.

There was a helpless look in Ludo’s eyes. Without his glasses, his vision was strained. He searched the room indecisively, bleary eyed, as if he couldn’t tell which figure was mine.

“I’m right here,” I said, once he had located me.

He almost smiled. He hung up the phone and dragged his hands over the sofa to recover his glasses.

“Madonna santa!” Fernando said impulsively. The neighbors across the parking lot leaned over their terraces, and the family who lived adjacent to the lot dragged their chairs to the edge of their patio and stood on them so they could see over the wall.

The situation had gone from bad to worse. One of the dead man’s friends had returned. He was pacing violently in front of our door.

“Dear god,” Agatha said with that melodious voice of hers. “The cocaine addict is back.”

The dog circled at my heels, looking up at the bird. “Don’t touch that dog. It’s a sack of fleas,” Ludo said menacingly. His eyesight was twenty-twenty again. “You see all these locks on my door? I put them in so this sack of fleas wouldn’t enter my room. But still I come home to find dog shit on my carpet, or a torn-up bag of rice on my bed.”