Call Me Zebra(77)

The morning unfolded like a reel of paper. I took my coffee and boiled egg at the dining-room table while my host stood motionless, staring out the east window in silence. We had our backs to each other.

“Is this yesterday’s coffee?” I asked.

He turned around and nodded. His face looked marbled in the filmy light of morning. He looked even sadder than the night before.

“Did your wife die in the morning?” I asked.

He retreated into the kitchen rather unhurriedly, then returned with the pot of coffee and refilled my mug with the liquid tar.

“She died at dawn,” he confirmed. His face shrank as he said the words.

I offered him my condolences. Useless to ask if he had absorbed her through metempsychosis, I contemplated, as I observed his deflated demeanor. It was unlikely that his body or mind could accommodate two people.

“No wind or clouds today,” he said with a sinking voice, as he returned to the window and looked through the polished glass at the boulders and rocks hemming in the valley.

“Nothing like a clear sky,” I replied. “A personification of the void,” I murmured.

Then, thinking of Benjamin, I told him that I had to get going because I had my work cut out for me, that my life was composed of a series of appearances and disappearances (I said nothing of Taüt), that as a result of this profound disorientation, I had been retracing the crooked path of my exile in order to map on the page the uselessness of my suffering, and that I have been waiting for myself—my multiple selves, I corrected—to appear in my notebook legibly, which so far had been an inconclusive affair, derailed by an unforeseen enmeshment with a man so profoundly attached to rationality, a man with an inflexible mind, a mind as linear as the stick of a broom! A man ready to deny the evidence of his senses, I told the man angrily, echoing Dostoyevsky’s words. A literary amateur, who only has thoughts about the thoughts of others and not a single one of his own, like most scholars, who, on the whole, are thoughtless and witless heretics who approach literature with their rational mind as if it were a technical tool, purely mechanic. My timid host looked shocked and bored—perhaps slightly more bored than shocked. The good news, I barreled on, gurgling my saliva, is that I have come to Albanyà in order to get back on track; it is my conviction that I will be able to get to the bottom of things in this remote and verdant valley, and finally enter the red-hot center of this sinister journey I have come to refer to as the Grand Tour of Exile.

He looked at me with those wet eyes of his but said nothing. He peeked inside my cup to see if I had finished. I had. He removed the cup and the empty plate where the egg had been. Indifference, I concluded, is the driving force of his character; his wife may have killed herself out of boredom. I wiped my mouth and flew out the door with that shiny boiled egg bouncing around in my intestines.



I walked over a bridge into the town cemetery. I stared at the remains of the dead. Small vases were affixed next to each headstone, and a variety of pink and white plastic flowers, their leaves weathered and paper thin, sat in sooty containers. I could smell the stench of the decomposing corpses through the wall, an overpowering bacterial smell that brought to mind fungi, rotten meat, bile, shit. When I’d had enough, I walked back and stood on the bridge that was suspended over a glacial sapphire brook that widened into a small crystalline pool. I spotted an opening in the hilly surroundings and made my way through a cluster of trees. Once there, I sat on the rocky shore and cast smooth stones into the emerald green waters, prepared to unleash my most fanciful and mercurial thoughts.

With each stone I sank into the water, I verbally reproduced Benjamin’s sentence. I duplicated and quadrupled the phrase until I’d worked myself into a frenzy. The seeds of my thoughts were sprouting. I arrived at a more nuanced edition of the revelation that had presented itself to me the night before: By hurling my void at life, I, Zebra, was putting all my many disparate selves, the seemingly distant “realities” they pertained to—modernity and tradition, the New and Old Worlds, life and literature—on a collision course.

I disclosed my thoughts to the trees and the sky and the birds in the bush.

A response emerged from the rugged surroundings, and I repeated it for the world to hear: “You are going to continue to reproduce yourself, thereby preserving the discontinuity of exile and confronting the self-satisfied ignorance of the unexiled, but you are also going to embed yourself again in the fabric of tradition, the depths of your childhood self.

“How?” I asked.

“By stitching your multiple brains to the landscapes that have produced them.

“And what will I use to thread the needle?

“The spooling lines of the literature of exile produced in the very places you will traverse!”

I was having a Socratic dialogue with the environment. I was speaking to the poetic consciousness of nature and nature was responding. The wind blew, the trees bowed, the birds chirped, the water rippled along its stony path. And as each thing moved, my conviction that I was on the right track was reinforced. I pressed on.

Finally, the hidden message in Benjamin’s prophetic line arrived. It sounded out from the smooth granite of the Eastern Pyrenees and inserted itself into the labyrinthine corridors of my mind. Once there, it scurried about like a rat in a maze: “Replace the word reproductions with the word retranscriptions,” the mountains seemed to say. I opened my notebook. I wrote: Retranscriptions lack one element: their presence in time and place.