Call Me Zebra(82)
I felt as if I had either arrived too late or too early to my own life. I thought of my truncated voyage. It dawned on me: My plan to retrace the path of my exile was impossible. I could make it all the way to Van and salute the Iranian craggy border, but I could go no farther. I would be killed instantly for being a woman traveling alone or for being a Western spy. Me, a speculative border intellectual, a Western spy! My future self took offense at the potential insult. What good would it do for me to be buried in that no-man’s-land alongside my mother? What use would I be to the world?
I was caught off guard by my sudden impulse to remain alive, by the savage energy of survival. I realized that the Pilgrims of the Void would need me, their dame, to be in tip-top shape. I needed to train my mind in the lucidity of death through the limpid territories of sleep. I returned to convalescing in that borrowed room of mine, which still smelled of Bernadette, of the unlikely pairing of frankincense and toilet-bowl cleaner. Sequestered in my bed, I slept for days.
Whenever I woke, I found I was totally lucid, consumed by hunger, and began furiously making plans. I mapped out various routes. I designed the Pilgrimages of the Corridor of Exile: Pilgrimage of the Memory Man (Josep Pla), Pilgrimage of the Wide-Eyed Genius (Salvador Dalí), Pilgrimage of the Catalan Resuscitator (Jacint Verdaguer), Pilgrimage of the Martyr of Thought (Walter Benjamin), Pilgrimage of the Perseverant (Mercè Rodoreda), Pilgrimage of the Tireless Excavator (Montserrat Roig). The list went on and on.
Afterward, I dusted off the Mobile Art Gallery. I tended to it. I made flyers calling on interested parties to attend the first meeting of the Pilgrims of the Void, scheduled to take place in March, at the site of the ruins of Josep Pla’s childhood school directly adjacent to the parking lot beneath Ludo Bembo’s apartment. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t noticed the plaque on the side of the wall until the day before: Here Josep Pla went to school. A formidable sign!
On a crisp morning, I left the apartment to distribute the flyers among the regulars at the soup kitchen, among students in the hallways of the university, among those going up and down the steps of the cathedral. I was looking for people who, despite searching, had been unable to fill their void and who were willing to dive into the depths of their doubt. In addition to other bits of useful information, I had included the following points of reflection on the flyers: “Are you willing to drown in inquiry? There is no point in rebelling alone!”
I was hopeful I’d get a good crop.
After several days of this, Ludo finally knocked on my door. He let himself in, holding a plate of rice stained black with squid ink and a salad of arugula and radishes. He put the food down on my desk.
“You have to eat something,” he said. He had a look of concern on his face. “I can bring you some wine. Do you want some wine?” he asked.
“Yes, bring me some wine.”
I wanted to send him off again because I was in the midst of my thoughts. Literature, I had been thinking, happens in advance of history; it is a form of precognition. Why else would my notebook operate as an oracle with such finesse?
Ludo returned and stood over me, silently observing. Then, finally, he asked: “Why do you spend so much time alone?”
He was looming over the bed, peering down at me. He looked huge to me then and rooted into the ground, as if there were a whole other Ludo branching from his feet into the earth, pinning him to this trifling circumference. I, in contradistinction, had been blown hither and thither by the whims of time. I had been gored to death by the bull of history. I would have needed so much more tenderness than what could be offered in a plate of food and a ten-minute display of affection. I needed to be held. I needed fresh layers of skin to wrap around my raw wounds. I needed someone who didn’t retreat so easily to show me how to love them in return.
I dug deep and grabbed hold of my voice.
“Because I can smell character. I can smell bad blood,” I said, without looking at him. “I can smell the shit that’s gathered at the center of any given person.”
He turned stoic again and stared at me with the cold remove of a stately marble statue. Who did he think he was? The embodiment of God? The questions rose like steam from the frozen lake of my heart.
Finally, I mumbled: “God is an indelicacy against us thinkers.”
“What does that even mean?” he cried out, before disappearing into the corridor.
I threw the plate of food at the door to close it shut behind him.
But just a few days later, in early March, my luck finally turned: Taüt reappeared. I took his spontaneous reappearance as a validation from the mind of the universe and, therefore, from the fumes of my father for the direction in which I had chosen to take the Grand Tour of Exile. I had spent the morning in my room hunched over Bernadette’s old desk, transcribing Maragall’s translation of Nietzsche in reverse, from right to left, a departure from my previous methodology, which had followed the Western order of reading and writing. What was my purpose? To recover the fumes of my mother, which I had likely absorbed upon her death. In other words, now that my mother tongue had been uncovered perhaps I could also uncover my mother. I contemplated the matter: Who’s to say my father had been the only one to absorb her? Or that I should consider sufficient the impoverished traces of her that I had absorbed through the absorption of my father? After all, I had been at the site of her death. My fingers were still sore from digging her grave. Furthermore, I reasoned, there was no chance I could have expelled her. Because before expelling my father, I had conversed with him, his voice had echoed through my void; no such phenomenon had occurred with my dead mother. Her fumes, I concluded, remained lodged in my consciousness, waiting to be discovered. And, if I was going to go on various Pilgrimages of Exile, I wanted her to be present to inhale the brackish Mediterranean air!