Call Me Zebra(73)
“Who is Scheler?” he said with an air of desperation.
“Who is Roquentin! Who is Scheler!” I said mockingly.
“Do you think this is seductive?” he said, reaching for his glasses and putting them back on his face. He looked at me through the lenses. His bulge had, in fact, deflated.
“Who cares!” I said. “How can you talk to me about moods when your own are abysmal and likely designed to distract me from the fact that you have a dirty conscience?”
“A dirty conscience?” he inquired, offended, as if he had never interfered with my notebook.
“Yes, a dirty conscience,” I repeated. Then I got up and I left. Hours later, I slipped a note with the word inquietare under his bedroom door. That was as much of a clue as I was willing to give him.
We didn’t speak for days. During that time, I swung between feeling sullen, dispossessed and angry, betrayed. But then, somehow, we got back to business as usual. He came home one night, pushed me up against the wall, and stuck his tongue in my mouth. He grabbed my arm and pulled me into his bedroom. “Leave Taüt with the ghost of Bernadette,” he said breathlessly, when I tried to retrieve the bird. It didn’t occur to me then that he sounded like me. I left the door to my room open. Taüt was perched on the edge of the wooden desk chair. He will likely stay put, I thought, following Ludo. We fucked like animals.
“Why does your pussy feel so good to me?” he cried out.
His mouth smelled like another woman. The Tentacle of Ice, I thought, as I finished. My suspicions were finally confirmed: During the weeks we hadn’t seen each other, she, a member of the unthinking masses, had returned to his life to provide him with uncomplicated pleasure. He had sought solace in a woman—the Tentacle of Ice—who was, relative to me, in less pain and whose desires had nothing to do with art or literature or the total problem of life. As I went over these thoughts, I often felt a cold draft blow through my void. It stung the flattened sheet of my heart that had begun to thicken, to gather dimensions, to warm up—an entirely disorienting sensation.
The next morning, confused and hurt, I went back to my room looking for Taüt. I needed to take solace in his company, but he was nowhere to be found. The bird had disappeared. It was one thing when the bird had vanished in Quim Monzó’s apartment, but another thing entirely in Ludo Bembo’s. I organized a search. I put Agatha in charge of looking through all the nooks and crannies of our respective bedrooms.
“Don’t hesitate to search inside pillowcases,” I ordered, “even if they are stuffed with pillows; that bird knows how to shape-shift. And make sure you look under mattresses, behind wool sweaters piled in our closets, and inside drawers with handles he could have hooked his beak onto and drawn open.” She proceeded with her usual convivial manner, spreading her soothing scent through the apartment as she conducted her search.
I put Ludo, who was grumpier than ever, in charge of the kitchen. “Open all the cabinets and look under the kitchen sink, inspect the pots and pans, especially the large ones you reserve for boiling your noodles.”
“You mean pasta,” he rudely interrupted.
“And make sure you don’t forget to look inside the fridge and the washing machine; Taüt may have needed to tumble around a bit or sit privately for a moment in the chilly air of the refrigerator.”
Ludo stood there, staring at the dining-room wall, which was blue and bare. He would make a terrible soldier, Ludo Bembo, with the protracted firing of his neurons.
“Can you go about your business in a more committed fashion?” I asked, pushing him through the kitchen door.
But to my dismay, he began brewing coffee. He was determined to be idle. I watched his nimble fingers unscrew the moka. Outside, the tramontana was thundering down the streets, rattling doors and windows, banging shutters. All the noise of a firing squad, I thought, looking at the composition of colors beyond the window, the mustard lichen covering the neighbor’s terra-cotta roof. The colors reminded me of the Catalan flag, that blazing gold overlaid with four stripes of blood.
“Well?” I said, pressing Ludo with a businesslike dryness.
He cast me a defiant gaze, lit the stove, put the moka on the grills. Then he removed his glasses and calmly wiped the lenses with the edges of his pajama shirt.
“This is the best I can do given the absurdity of the task,” he stoically answered, putting his spectacles back on.
I looked out the window at a misty-eyed pigeon, hoping it would turn into Taüt. Its pink feathers gleamed in the cold winter sun. It was February. I listened to that reckless wind howl furiously as it swept through Girona. What am I doing here? I silently wondered. What am I ever doing anywhere? The coffee brewed, filling the kitchen with a light steam that carried the scent of chocolate and lemon peel, with a hint of cow dung. Love. What is love? Was it the bird-shaped hole in my heart? I looked at Ludo.
“I don’t want to hear the word love come out of your mouth ever again,” I said bitterly. “It is as clear as the sky, crystal clear, that you have understood nothing.”
“Nothing?” he posed with an implacable inquisitorial expression.
“Nothing.”
I walked away, nearly in tears. I felt myself to be the unhappiest person in the world. I could feel my hands and lips trembling. Where was Taüt? Had someone left the door ajar? Thrown the windows open? He couldn’t fly. He was a bird whose wings had been clipped so often, they had refused to grow back. But he could have scaled the walls. Did he suffer from phantom-feather syndrome? I shut myself inside the bathroom and silently cried. I cursed the disastrous calamity of my life. I looked in the mirror. “Is this me?” I asked. I watched my lips form the words in the mirror. The coarse hairs of my father’s mustache floated across the black sea of my void. There was hardly anything left of him. “Does everything I touch have to disappear?” I mumbled. I looked down at my sick hand. Then I cupped it over my mouth and shoved the screams of pain that were on the cusp of emerging back inside.