Call Me Zebra(71)
“And you still haven’t learned your lesson?” I said, opening the door. “How about an apartment without frontiers? A home without borders? That is what this dog is here to teach you. Why put up such harrowing barriers when the world is grossly impermanent? Think about it: Is there any guarantee that you or I are not going to die today? The same thing goes for animals. Petita, Taüt—even that miserable goldfish!”
Ludo stood there measuring his thoughts, head down, lips pinched. Bernadette was standing behind Fernando, as mute and pink as a flamingo, as if he were her guardian and friend.
“So you’re sure?” Ludo asked. “You want to move in?”
“Yes,” I said. “I’m here to stay.”
“Fine,” he said curtly, and walked back into the living room. I saw a small smile wrinkle the edges of his lips. He had missed me, too.
I decided to stake my claim. I dragged my Mobile Art Gallery into Bernadette’s bedroom. I had to move her boxes aside to make space for the miniature museum. Once I was done with that, I looked at Ratzinger’s face—stern, secretive, resolved—until I felt Bernadette approach me from behind. I turned around and in my best Italian told her that I could take her down a lot faster than Fernando if I wanted to. I said, “Why should I be the only one without food and warmth?” She scurried away like a crab alongside the wall. Everything Ludo had said about her was true. I was astonished.
I went back to the terrace. The cops finally arrived. The cocaine addict slammed his hands down on the car hood. His hair, which already looked like the greasy end of a mop, stood up; he appeared to have been electrified.
“Everyone, please remain inside your homes,” the cops announced uselessly through their megaphone.
Across the parking lot, on the roof of a narrow stone building, a middle-aged woman was hanging white sheets on a line. They were as starched as the white sheet my father had been wrapped in before being slipped into the mud of the earth.
“Is she running a hotel?” I asked Ludo in Italian.
“No,” he replied. “The sheets are her alibi. She uses them to spy on the neighbors.” I wanted to swallow those elongated vowels of his.
Agatha came up to me, and said, “She has a bit of a crush on Ludo!”
Fernando cast her a punitive look.
“Well, it’s true!” she said.
The paramedics wrapped the dead man in foil, lifted him onto a gurney, strapped him down, then carried off the body. Soon, he too would be swallowed by the ground and, depending on the frequency of his brain waves, absorbed by the mind of the universe. The drunk’s friends, who had returned to the scene, lingered in the parking lot. One of them said something restless. Another let something slide out of his mouth that was of great offense to the third, a man with a head the size of a volleyball. He turned red with fury. The last man walked up to the wall where their dead friend had sat and delivered a long, eloquent aside. This show unfolded to the great indifference of the police officers who were busy pushing the cocaine addict into the back of their car. Once they drove off with him, all that was left was the puttering of feet, the chiming of the church bells, the ruffling of leaves in the cold wind of winter.
It was a stunning performance on the part of all involved. There it was, the theater of life rudely reminding us that we were still alive. The backdrop to all that death was tremendously beautiful. A raw light emerged over the mountains and came rushing through the windows. It was so bright that we all felt naked in it. No one said anything for the rest of the day.
By the next day, I had settled in, and Bernadette had moved out. No one knew where she went. No one cared. Ludo Bembo was in a good mood—a rarity—and he gave us all a laugh by imitating her by sliding down the corridor like a crab while pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose with his index finger. Agatha joked about how Bernadette was probably drinking her pale tea and eating a bland lunch—bread with mayonnaise or Nutella with a bread stick—under a tree at the Vatican, pulling her skirt down over her knees if it hiked up in the wind.
Over the course of the next few weeks, I began to get a sense of everyone’s lives. I learned the neighbors’ names, watched them all come and go, amble about, loiter, walk to the green hills of Sant Daniel to fill their empty jugs with stream water; they bought groceries; they laughed, cried, soothed, or shouted at one another depending on the day. I felt safe among them—safer than I had when I’d been alone in Quim Monzó’s apartment. There was Ester downstairs, a baker, whom we ordered our bread from every week. There was Mercè, who could almost always be found on her rooftop balcony spying on the neighborhood while removing dried sheets from the clothesline and pinning freshly washed items up in their place. Another, Agnès, appeared at dusk holding a fishnet with an extending pole handle, which she used to capture the neighborhood’s stray cats. She would then release them back into the parking lot a few days later, and they would disappear faster than comets in the night sky. Agatha informed me that Agnès believed this form of catch and release would warp the cats’ minds, effectively dampening their savage DNA, allowing them to lead happier lives; confused by the bewildering comings and goings of the other cats, they would be unable to engage in sustained fights or form enemy camps.
Inside the apartment, Fernando spent his mornings sitting quietly at the dining-room table, drinking tea and staring intently into the distance. He never said a word to anyone about what he was thinking. At noon, he would abruptly get up, march into the living room, and chisel away at a block of clay until another one of Agatha’s faces emerged. Petita slept on the sofa as Fernando worked. The fish came in and out of view with a regularity that depended on how long it had been since someone had last cleaned its tank. It was a fat goldfish with bulging eyes and tiny transparent fins; it was unclear how such disproportionate fins could propel its bulbous body through the water, which was usually thick with grime.