Call Me Zebra(74)

Hours later, I’d finally calmed myself down. And who did I think of? Fernando. Where was Fernando? I burst out of the bathroom looking for him. He was hovering over another one of Agatha’s false faces in the living room. Time had swept past; it was midafternoon. The glass doors leading out to the terrace were open. I closed them immediately, then I stood there and looked at the prune-colored sky through the window. It was radiant, breathtaking. The crystalline blue of the morning had bloomed into a metallic violet that shone with the cool light of the winter sun. In the distance, the Pyrenees looked like silver needles lined up to sew the regal fabric of that purple sky. I turned to Fernando.

“Fernando,” I said with rehearsed calm. “Taüt has disappeared.”

“Sparito?” he asked rhetorically.

Where had he been this whole time? Where were Ludo and Agatha? No one had come knocking on the bathroom door; they hadn’t even told me they were leaving.

“Sparito,” I answered with a funereal gravity.

He put his chisel down. I told him I needed him to sit at the dining table, close his eyes, and retrace Taüt’s footsteps in one of his grave visions. I told him, “That bird walks everywhere like a dog.” Then I looked at Petita, who was curled on the couch; her ears perked up immediately. Had she eaten the bird? I walked over to her and lifted her flews. I smelled her mouth. Her saliva smelled like metal. I forced her mouth open. She was innocent: no feathers, no blood. I let her go back to sleep again.

Fernando did as he was told. He sat at the table with his eyes closed. When he opened them, he said, “Taüt will be back in his own time.”

“Where is he now?” I asked, leaning across the dining-room table. The wood felt cold against my palms.

“I have no idea,” he said. “All I see is darkness. Everything is black.”

I wanted to bang my head against the wall. I wanted to slap him in the face.

“Taüt?” I called out in a shrill voice, hoping the bird would appear at my heels. He did not.

Afternoon turned to evening. It was unclear when Ludo and Agatha would be back. Perhaps, I wistfully thought, they were searching the streets. I hadn’t wanted to leave the apartment. I wanted to be there in case Taüt returned. The sky turned a velvet black. I felt despondent, foolish. I thought to myself: Being with others only leads to more loss, more pain. I was humiliated. I reached for my notebook. I looked around, searching for a hole or a crevasse to sink into, to be alone with my endless wretched thoughts.





ALBANYà

The Story of How I Oxygenated My Multiple Minds in the Verdant Valley of the Pyrenees and Engaged in a Socratic Dialogue with Nature





By the next morning, I was harboring a terrible resentment toward Ludo. I considered pelting hot coals of anger at him, but if I did, my sick hand would burn. I wasn’t sure how much more pain it could hold. I decided that the best course of action was to take a temporary leave of absence. Besides, Bernadette’s room, despite being a dark and damp hole, was too close to Ludo; it was no place to think. I needed to bathe in forests, to breathe oxygenated air.

That afternoon, while nursing a violent headache, I boarded a bus to Figueres, the stomping grounds of Dalí, that mustached genius. There, I changed buses. I headed northeast to Albanyà, a tiny village in the valley of the eastern Pyrenees situated along the Muga, a river that passes through Boadella i les Escaules and Castelló d’Empúries, and that proceeds to deposit its chilled waters into the Sea of Sunken Hopes at the Gulf of Roses.

As the battered bus pitifully made its way north, I realized that my very ability to think had been corrupted by Ludo’s destructive pattern of advances and retreats, the constant making and unmaking of our relationship, not to mention his remorseless indifference toward Taüt’s tragic fate. Ludo’s moods, I hypothesized, had several origins. Primary among them was the fact that, due to his unresolved issues with literature and death, and therefore with his ancestors, the Bembos, he was simultaneously attracted to and repulsed by me, final descendent of the Hosseinis. By keeping me in close proximity, he was both working out his issues, which he longed to do—hence his confessions of love—and, concomitantly, was perplexed by the disturbance such processing required of him—hence his sudden withdrawals and subsequent numbness. So what lesson had I taught him regarding love’s false and intrusive nature? None. I had been a fool. My defenses had been blown. I had walked straight into the trap of love. I felt as though someone had gutted my organs.

We reached the lofty peaks of Mare de Déu del Mont and Puig de Bassegoda. As the steep cliffs and deep ravines of Albanyà came into view, I was reminded of the mountainous terrain of that no-man’s-land my father and I had traversed, our harrowing exodus. Neither love nor home, I thought despairingly, apprehending the high mountain crests that sliced away at the sky, are capable of keeping anyone alive.

I got off the bus. Albanyà was deserted. There wasn’t a soul in sight. A stray dog was lying lazily at the end of a gravel path. A few pigs were sniffing at the muddied grounds behind him. There was a lonely horse standing by the edge of a corral, whipping her tail. I imagined Ludo’s voice coming at me from afar.

“Where in the world are you going?” he asked, swiftly exposing his annoyance.

“I found a room for rent on the World Wide Web!” I told him.