Call Me Zebra(78)
Suddenly, all was clear. Displaced transcriptions would no longer do. I had to retranscribe Josep Pla’s literature in the places and spaces represented within its pages—namely Girona and Palafrugell—Joan Maragall’s in Barcelona, Walter Benjamin’s in Portbou, Jacint Verdaguer’s on a hike to the peak of the Canigó. I had to retrace the long walks my father and I had embarked on in the Corridor of Exile in order to transcribe literature in situ. And what did this exactness, this topographic precision, provide? The opportunity to impose the truth of my complex and many layered void on any nonexiles who would be walking along those same routes engaging in some banal form of literary tourism out of the delusion that there is such a thing as an original or a singular self, a coherent “I” conducting an apprehensible life—the delusion par excellence of the imperialists of the so-called New World, of the supposed march of progress. After all, where was Walter Benjamin or Unamuno or Mercè Rodoreda? These writers were everywhere and nowhere at once; their consciousnesses—the network of sentences into which they had breathed life—were being reproduced, plagiarized, lifted from this or that text to be infused back into the world. By transcribing those sentences in situ, I would be producing a thread, however meager, of hope that the willfully blind, the nonexiles who would be slogging along the same literary routes as I, would finally acquire the courage not just to see but look.
I smiled at the thought of it all. I had struck gold. The harvest was approaching. It was clear to me now, crystal clear, that it wouldn’t have been enough to drag the Mobile Art Gallery hither and thither at random. What a premature idea that had been! What an oversight! I remembered standing alongside my father staring at the landscapes Josep Pla had written about: the cork trees of Palafrugell, the cauliflower heads that burst out of the village’s moist red earth, the rusty masts of the fishing boats that rock hypnotically in the wind and the waves. I saw my future self returning to Palafrugell at a time when half of Europe was again collapsing like a battered building that’s subsided and falling apart, as it had been during Pla’s youth, when he’d written those words. I felt emboldened, powerful, buoyed by my many former selves. I thought, I am a person capable of simultaneously existing in multiple planes of time. What an exhilarating thought that was! I repeated it inwardly, and then I said it out loud to be absorbed by the trees and the sky and the birds moving through it like missiles.
The entire province of Girona was Pla’s territory. This was an undeniable fact. Just like Cadaqués, Port Lligat, and the Cap de Creus had been Dalí’s. And Portbou, at the end of the great calamity that was his life, had been Walter Benjamin’s.
I wrapped up my thoughts: It was clear I needed to resume my pilgrimages. I had to design literary routes for each of these writers—the primary authors of my father’s Catalan oeuvre—in order to merge the metaphysical experience of the Matrix of Literature and its network of archives with a physical experience in situ. I opened my notebook at random again to make sure I had pushed my thinking as far as it could go.
“Dante, vindictive and severe as any artist in exile,” I read, “used eternity as a place to settle old scores!”
Who had said that? I could not recall. I took my thoughts one step further. I was reaching the bottommost plateaus of my void, the icy, burning center at the core of my existence. What did I find there? A raw and savage pain: rejection, humiliation, despair. The world had planted within me the seeds of its own ruthlessness. Just like Dante, I was going to settle my old scores; only I was going to do so in Catalonia. I was going to stage a metaphysical insurrection and reclaim my place among the other beings of this trifling universe. Because how, I wondered, was I going to sound out the Hosseini alarm while living apart from others, barred from the good life, invisible? I couldn’t stand the way people looked through me as if I were transparent. Who would be able to ignore me, or literature, which is my life, if I, Dame of the Void, walked along literary routes dragging the Mobile Art Gallery behind me and transcribing literature as I went? The nonexiles and imperialists of the world, all those who had made of me a monster, a sublime and ghastly being, would have to stand in awe and fear of me. They would have to stop and look at my pain.
I understood, finally, that this was why I had invented the Mobile Art Gallery. I was going to use that miniature museum on every single pilgrimage; I would use all the decrepit writing machines I had embedded within it to contaminate life with literature, modernity with tradition, the New World with the Old. I walked through the herd of trees. I went back over the bridge, shoes in hand. Words, suggested by the scenery, started flowing freely from my mouth. “I am a wandering speculative border intellectual, surviving by my wits, roaming the land. Not unlike Ibn al-Arabi, BashÅ, Omar Khayyám, and Badi’ al-Zaman, those solitary walkers, extemporaneous philosophers, literary tricksters, the wise and wicked ancestors of Cervantes, Rousseau, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Acker.” My void caught fire. I thought I was going to lift off like a balloon and fly into outer space. I pressed my feet into the ground. The asphalt was cold and pebbly. Like any good guru, I thought, all I need are pilgrims, a roving pack of the world’s marginalized and exiled, other .1 percenters, who, unlike Ludo, would understand my poverty, the sting of my uninterrupted loneliness.
“Why?” I heard the trees ask.
“Because rebellion means nothing when done alone,” I answered, thinking of Camus. “But rebellion means everything when the wronged rise together against the toxic secretions of the world’s evildoers and despots.”