Call Me Zebra(79)

I skipped down the glum road, energized by this superabundance of thoughts. Halfway to the farmhouse, I sat on a chopped log on the side of the road and listened to nature. It was breathing all around me, and I was breathing alongside it. The sky was nourishing my mind. I sucked in little puffs of air. I held my breath. I absorbed the atmosphere into my cells. Instantly, my brain amped up its revolutions. I opened my notebook. I closed my eyes. I let my sick hand move across the page without thinking. I wrote: “I, Zebra, Dame of the Void, am convinced that the world will yield its mysteries to me so long as I embark on a series of pilgrimages, pilgrimages that would require me to travel physically through the Old World while simultaneously traversing through its mirage in literature, submerging myself in literature’s radical genealogy, yes, but also reproducing its pages, exhuming the corpse of the past.” My hand hurt, as if by writing I was spilling my own inky blood. “The landscape, as far as I am concerned,” I persevered, “has become my library, an archive that lays bare the subtexts of time, the tangled meanings I need to excavate in order to sound out the Hosseini alarm loud and clear.”

I sealed my notebook and opened my eyes. The air was full of mist. I could barely see the end of the road. How quickly the weather changes in these mountainous parts, I thought, as quickly as history itself. I got up and walked back to the farmhouse. “My next move,” I declared, as I walked past the horse, “has been decided.” The animal clapped its tail against the mist. The pigs made way. The dog bowed. Already I was more visible. I had thought my thoughts alongside the mind of the universe. The next day, whistling into the wind, I returned to Girona. There, I would forge my plan: I would map out my literary routes; I would find my fellow Pilgrims of the Void.





GIRONA

The Story of How I Traveled Across the Corridors of Exile in the Company of the Pilgrims of the Void





My plans were yet again stymied by a strange unfolding of events. The following morning, I returned to Ludo Bembo’s apartment, and immediately upon opening the door, I heard whispers in Farsi float up through the corridor. It had been so long since I had heard those melodic sounds that my ears grew hot, my knees buckled, my mind spun dizzily. I exited the building and stood dumbfounded on the cobblestone pathway. I observed the recessed door with its hand-shaped knocker. I was at the right door. I climbed back up the dusty steps.

I walked across the threshold cautiously and proceeded down the hallway. There they were: Ludo and Agatha, sitting cross-legged on the tile floor, reproducing the sounds of my mother tongue. They were passing a book between them: Persian for Italian-Speaking People: A Guide for a Journey into the Unknown.

They were so entrenched in the book, they’d taken no notice when I walked in. I stood there like a ghost and watched the spectacle unfold. Ludo was wearing a striped silk robe over his pajamas and his hair was uncombed. His curls, usually so precise, had an electric frizz that made it look like he had a halo. He was holding the book.

“Is there a dining car?” he asked in Farsi, returning the book to Agatha.

“What time does the train leave to Isfahan?” Agatha posed. She, too, was in her house clothes: thick sweats and a purple cotton shirt with a green wool sweater over it. She gently passed the book back to Ludo.

“Does this train make a stop in Herat?” Ludo asked.

Their accents were terrible. They might as well have stuffed their mouths with stones. I wanted to stop them from butchering my mother tongue. My mother tongue, I thought, and imagined my mother turning in her makeshift grave. My eyes welled up.

“Can you direct me to the bridge, please?” Agatha asked.

What if a strong wind had blown? What if her body lay there exposed next to the ruins of that demolished house? I stood there unable to speak or move. I had calcified. I had turned to stone.

Ludo took the book from Agatha and then brought it down to his knees.

“What’s the matter?” he asked in Italian.

“She’s here!” Agatha cried out, nodding in my direction.

“Who?” Ludo shuddered.

“Zebra! She is standing there like a statue.”

Those words delivered me from my sorry childhood. Me? A statue? What about her and her many busts? Ludo turned around, wide-eyed and bushy-tailed.

“You’re back,” he said cheerily, as though we had parted on a good note. Then he spoke to me in Farsi. He opened the book at random and asked the first question that stood out to him on the page. “Do you have a light?” he asked, retrieving his pipe from his robe and placing it rather seductively between his lips.

“I understand nothing!”

“Isn’t Farsi your mother tongue?” he asked, perplexed.

His eyes had drifted apart. His face always looked so distended when he was confused. I enumerated Ludo’s missed opportunities for demonstrating compassion: He had grown silent at the mention of my dead mother during our first meal; he had abandoned me in a lukewarm tub; he had neglected to search for Taüt. What right did he have to ask me about my mother tongue, to utter those words—mother tongue—before I was prepared to speak them, let alone hear them spoken by a pair of expatriated Italians? That pair of words was reserved for me to contemplate on my own time, in solitude.

“That language—Persian, Farsi, Pars—whatever you want to call it,” I lectured him (my voice was unleashed), “is reserved for my mustached father. To what end are you, Ludo Bembo, an Italian subject expatriated to Spain—to Catalonia, to be precise—employing it?”