Call Me Zebra(75)

“In Albanyà, on the Internet?” I heard him ask, bewildered.

“World Wide Web, World Wide War!” I declared, though I had no clue why.

He said nothing after that.

I walked to the end of the gravel path. The dog, a white mutt, raised his head and let out a halfhearted growl. I knocked on the door of the farmhouse, which was tucked behind a row of cedars out of view from the road. A clean-shaven man with a round pale face opened the door. He grunted something; it was barely audible. He was either very timid or very drunk, round at the waist, and his eyes looked bruised. Widower rents room in quiet Albanyà farmhouse, the ad had read. He let me into the living room. He kept his eyes on the rug that ran across the floor, as if he had lost a few coins and was searching the ground, hopeful but demure. There was a grandfather clock in the back of the room. It ticked and tocked. I watched the golden pendulum swing inside the glass case, then I looked at the walls, which were covered with a vivid floral wallpaper that featured peonies, chrysanthemums, roses, pinecones, and cinnamon ferns on a green background. It was a tasteless hodgepodge affair.

Without lifting his eyes from the floor, my chubby host, whose face turned crimson upon speaking, told me that coffee and a boiled egg would be served in the morning—breakfast was included in the price of lodging. If I insisted, he continued, turning as red as a plum, he could add a piece of toast and some peach jam he had preserved last year. But I insisted on no such thing.

He promptly showed me to my room, a small rectangular enclosure perched atop a spiraling flight of wooden stairs, furnished with a single bed and a child’s desk and chair. I saw myself as a child, sitting at that desk, my father standing over me.

“What are the major and minor cities of our sorry nation?” my father inquired.

“Isfahan, Shiraz, Tehran, Qom, Tabriz, Ahvaz, Mashhad, Bandar Abbās, Kerman, Zāhedān, Yasuj, Hamadān, Izeh, Behbahan,” I heard myself answer.

I felt something sweet and tender in my mouth. The taste of dates from our palm trees in the Caspian.

“And who are we?” he inquired, his mustache still dark with youth.

“Autodidacts, Anarchists, and Atheists,” I answered.

“Good child!” he declared. And with that, the chair was empty again.

The timid host had long retreated. We didn’t bother each other again until the next day at breakfast.



That night, before going to bed, I said out loud to no one: “I have come to Albanyà to rake the floor of my void and think spontaneously far from the unforeseen interruptions of Ludo Bembo’s testicles.” I swallowed my saliva. I was hungry, but I refused to eat. Fasting clears the mind, I insisted, and persevered, retrieving my notebook whose inky pages were, by then, full of prophetic declarations made by the writers of exile; authors of death and discontinuity whose words implied a metaphysical rebellion, whose sentences communed together in the limitless expanse of the matrix. These writers’ sentences deposited me at the edge of the unknown, far from the repulsive banality of reality others refer to as life.

I pushed my fingers into my notebook as if it were the oracle of Hāfez. My notebook, I considered, is currently bursting at the seams with transcriptions of my father’s Catalan oeuvre, which was itself a series of transcriptions of Rodoreda, Dalí, Pla, Verdaguer, Roig, and Maragall. “Ah, Maragall, that failed anarchist,” I muttered. After the bombings of the Tragic Week and the defilement of the corpses of nuns, the man had turned soft. He had become a protector of the bourgeoisie. Yet my notebook was spilling over with retranscriptions of my father’s transcriptions of Maragall’s translations of Nietzsche’s oeuvre from the French, since Maragall, known as the poet of “La Paraula Viva,” hadn’t learned a lick of German. La paraula viva, the live word, I thought, laughing hysterically and sitting bolt upright to bang my notebook against the mattress.

“As if there are any dead words!” I spoke into the smoky air of night. Somewhere in the house, a chimney had been lit, logs stoked, embers sent flying.

I looked out the window at the verdant valley; the tops of the trees, shimmering with the reflected light of the moon, appeared as white as craniums against the black sky. I had no idea what time it was. Time, that remorseless thief. But, in the depths of my mind, I knew that whatever time it was, I wasn’t yet ready to open my notebook. I wasn’t hungry or lucid enough. To pass the time, I stood up and exited the room. In the absence of a corridor, I began to pace the stairs, muttering various incendiary phrases into the atmosphere as I ascended and descended the creaky wood.

“I am going to use my sick hand to grab hold of the Matrix of Literature,” I cried out on my first downward flight.

“I am going to leap headfirst into the senselessness of the world,” I added on my upward climb.

Once I was at the top of the staircase again, I yelled: “I am going to hurl my void, which hosts literature’s spears and daggers and the pain of my multiple selves, at life. I, a literary terrorist, am going to force life to dissolve its resistance toward me.”

I started back down again.

“I, Zebra, Dame of the Void, am going to express my desires, enigmas, obsessions, and passions for everyone to see.”

I paused and sniffed the fiery air.

“Long live Zebra!” I projected, just as my host’s round face, red from the heat of the fire, appeared before my own.