Call Me Zebra(76)

He had a disconcerted look in his eyes. You, whose wife is dead—what is a being? I wanted to ask him but held myself back. Instead, I bowed before him. He had been eating. He finished chomping the remains of his dinner and then asked me, rather irresolutely, if I could contain my activities to my bedroom. The man has suffered, I thought, and complied.

Back in my little rented room of writing, my room of ghosts, I surveyed the countryside through the window. I heard dogs howl, horses neigh, pigs snort hefty doses of muddied earth. I caressed the soiled pages of my notebook. The trees looked like wrinkled silk amid the folds of the night sky. The moon, pocked and slung low, looked like a wheel of cheese. A chilly draft came through the seams in the door and the window. It was time. Suddenly, impulsively, I opened my notebook. The following oracle emerged: Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and place, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.

“Ah, Benjamin, martyr of thought, sublime member of the Matrix of Literature!” I said to no one. A man much like Barthes, Borges, Blanchot, and Beckett—the writers of the B who had emerged in Quim Monzó’s corridor on the eve of one of Ludo’s first departures. Taüt, fellow steward of death, had spent that evening walking at my heels. “Where is he now?” I cried. I could feel the tightly woven tissue of my heart being pulled and stretched to make room for yet another absence. It was excruciatingly painful. I let myself weep. Then I redirected my attention to Benjamin, who, unlike Ludo Bembo, was a man unafraid of holding a candle to the night in order to measure the immensity of the darkness that surrounds us.

I reflected on Benjamin’s words. What message lay hidden in their nimble sound? I experienced a torrential sequence of digressive thoughts: like me, Benjamin was hyperconscious of his poorly designed fate. Stuck in Portbou, he had killed himself at the edge of the Catalan territories a day before Spain opened up its borders to those who were fleeing from Hitler, that evil despot, man of grotesque afflictions whose presence on this soggy earth we might never recover from. This, in turn, led me to think of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, self-proclaimed King of Kings, walking around the ruins of Persepolis in his bejeweled clothes looking like a torero. The smell of putrefaction arose from the ashen corpse-strewn landscapes of my childhood and tickled my nose. Before I knew it, my father’s ghostly voice was trumpeting through my void, that echo chamber of literature that I carried within me and that I had funneled an infinite number of words into.

“The Catalans are against bullfighting,” my father solemnly relayed. “A sign of their dignity, which was arrived at through excessive suffering at the hands of Franco.” He sighed deeply, then continued: “That fraudulent man with his Hitlerian mustache, against whom I rebel by growing a mustache of Nietzschean proportions . . .”

His voice faded as suddenly as it had appeared.

“Father?” I called, projecting my voice like a searchlight into the depths of my void.

But my father did not answer. He had been reduced to dust. He had been absorbed back into the mind of the universe, where he ultimately belonged. He was gone. Had the trace of my mother left along with him? I wondered. I felt my throat clog with tears.

I lay down on the bed, unsure of what to do. I closed my eyes. I pictured Walter Benjamin sitting with his head in his hands in Portbou, then I, too, sat that way. Hours later, I got myself together and read his mystical sentence several times in the bleak light of the lamp. Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and place, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be. The more I lingered on the phrase and its community of ideas, the more I felt as though I had encountered a loose thread from my own multiple minds, smeared and flattened onto the page.

In my father’s absence, my thoughts began to congeal like the night air. They became focused and took on gargantuan proportions. I, too, am a reproduction. My consciousness, battered by multiple exiles, is a constellation of distorted reproductions of my childhood self; in other words, just like a reproduced work of art, I had been detached from the domain of tradition, expelled from my home, banished from my origins; like an uprooted tree, I had been cut off from fertile soils and light, drained of my verdant aura, tossed into the shadowy pile of ruins. I wished Morales was around so I could share my revelation with him. But how was I going to push Benjamin’s thought further? How was I going to borrow his thinking to do what I intended: to hurl my void—that palimpsest of literature and my multiple stratified selves—at life in order to simultaneously expose its infinite multiplicity and its fundamental nothingness? Surely, Benjamin had gone far enough for his time. But years had passed since his life and death, decades. It was a whole new century, the twenty-first, a century with fangs, habituated by its predecessor, the twentieth, to drawing huge amounts of blood from us sorry little rodents.

I sat on the edge of the bed, clueless and yet certain I was on the cusp of an earth-shattering idea. I reveled in the euphoria of that liminal zone, the blissful space of potential between the germination and the harvesting of an idea. The sheets were rough against my feet. The room was growing draftier by the minute. I was shivering. I looked out the window. I saw my reflection in the glass. I looked through it at the moon, which was wheeling its way across the sky. I fell asleep, thinking only of the capricious cascade of thoughts that awaited me the next day in the remote village of Albanyà, with its glacial river and backdrop of granite and slate.