Call Me Zebra(81)

“The only thing you are missing is a lighter on a pulley,” I informed him.

“That’s what you’ve come to say?” he asked reproachfully, not even bothering to lift his head. He sucked on the end of his pipe and held the smoke down in his chest.

“No,” I said, attempting to break our cycle of misunderstandings. How many senseless blows could we withstand to receive from each other? “I have come to make myself understood.”

He exhaled from his nose and the emerging smoke made me think of a bull breathing in the middle of a frost.

I spoke my truth. I shared the words I’d gathered from Goethe.

He reflected quietly for a moment. The dim light coming from his lamp illuminated the wall behind his bed and cast the others in shadow. I felt as though I were standing in the chiaroscuro of a Renaissance painting—an annunciation of sorts. He sat up and set his pipe on the wooden side table. It, too, lay supine in the light of the lamp. I looked at all the wood in his room, at the walls, which were painted a soft yellow. His face recomposed itself. He looked grave, a man on the cusp of delivering a verdict he has been patiently waiting for. He licked his lips.

“To do two things at once,” he said somberly, “is to do neither.”

Ah, Publilius Syrus: the Iraqi thinker who had been enslaved by the Romans, my estranged brethren. I pushed my way deeper into his room and sat on the edge of his bed. I crossed my legs.

He leaned back and slipped his pipe between his lips again. In the back of my mind, I saw soldiers in camouflage marching single file behind a wall of sandbags on the shore of the Caspian. A leftover memory shard emerging from the ruins of the first, I reasoned, and suppressed the image.

“You look tired,” Ludo said, exposing the thread of tenderness that ran beneath his stoicism like a subterranean river. “You should get some sleep.”

I turned to look at him. He was holding his pipe away from that seductive mouth of his. The vaporous cloud had diffused, or else my eyes had adjusted to the smoky veneer of the room.

“Everyone has the face they deserve by the time they approach thirty,” I said, looking at myself in his eyes. Orwell. He, too, had gone to Catalonia. He had fought alongside the Republicans. And what for? Injustice always reconstitutes itself. My reflection shrank from Ludo’s eyes. A second later, he blinked and I was gone. I sat there somber, silent, servile, until Ludo Bembo, unaccustomed to my sorrow even though it seemed to have been what he had wanted all along, finally spoke.

“You want platitudes, I’ll give you platitudes: Anyone who doesn’t take love as a starting point will never understand the nature of philosophy.”

There was Plato again. There was Ludo’s false rhetoric of love.

“Put your money where your mouth is,” I said, and left his room.

The corridor, as usual, was like a Greek temple. I paused for a moment and examined the clay busts. In that strange caesura, Nietzsche’s voice came rushing at me. The whole of European psychology is sick with Greek superficiality! Due to their excessive number, Agatha’s busts were both a reproduction and a dissolution of life. I stood there staring at them, lost in that dim corridor. My thoughts looped and spun. Love. What is love? Had I ever received it? I couldn’t be sure.

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After that, I treated the apartment as a hospital where I was convalescing. I sought refuge in my books. I needed to regain my strength. I needed to sharpen my wits, bolster my willpower. How else was I going to execute the plan that the poetic consciousness of nature had unveiled to my many minds in Albanyà?

One morning, as I continued honing my plan, I walked in circles around the dining-room table while the others ate their breakfast just as I had in the oval library of my childhood. I whispered Dante’s verses in ghostly tones while I went.

The three of them—Agatha, Ludo, and Fernando—whispered to one another. “She has turned into a goat,” Fernando dryly said.

“She is like a clove of garlic!” Agatha humorously agreed.

They were speaking in Italian but using Spanish idioms to agree with one another that I had lost my wits.

“Me? I’ve turned to stone,” Ludo uttered resentfully. “This is beyond words.” He poured sugar into his espresso cup and stirred the granules until there were no uneven surfaces left. Is that what he had wanted to do to me? Grind me down, sculpt me until all my rough edges were gone?

“I can hear you loud and clear!” I said to them. “And if you want a Spanish idiom, I can give you a Spanish idiom: I am healthier than a pear!”

Immediately, I thought of Ortega y Gasset’s words: the gem like Spain that could have been were it not a country obsessed with foreign imitations. This, I thought, is where the Catalans distinguish themselves. “They are no imitators,” my father would have said. Just then, the words of one Ehsān Narāghi, a man whose work I had once encountered in my father’s library of unatheist books, cascaded down the walls of my void: What should be done to allow the Oriental countries, and Iran especially, to become conscious of their national and cultural existence and be “for-themselves,” without falling either into blind imitation of Western patterns or into extremist reactions to such patterns?

A torrential outpour followed. The floodgates had opened. I waited for everyone to leave the apartment, and then I walked up and down the corridor, sobbing for hours. In the wake of the Islamic Republic of Iran, these questions had been extinguished. There had been a near total physical and psychic massacre of the country’s leading thinkers, writers, intellectuals. Contemplation, musing, and doubt were no longer allowed; an extreme line of zero tolerance had taken root. I wept at the thought of the damages we had endured. When would Iran show its true colors? I wondered, sipping on my salty tears. Its radiant and stratified pluralism?