Call Me Zebra(83)

I thought about her life. Bibi Khanoum’s fate had been one of total extinction: metaphysically assassinated by the confused politics of our nation—Free women! Let them live in bondage! Cover them up but allow them to be educated! Women are our warriors! They must be hanged if they are immodest! They must be jailed if they do not expose their bodies and acquiesce to Western standards of progress!—physically pounded by the house of ruins that collapsed on her head while she was searching for food in that corpse-strewn no-man’s-land, and psychologically outmaneuvered even in death by my father’s absolutist positions, beloved Autodidact, Anarchist, and Atheist, head of our family.

As I continued with my reverse transcriptions, not only did I recover the parts of my childhood self that contained my mother but also the fumes of my father, his final residues. Flakes of skin. Balls of hair. Nails. All these, I recalled, my mother kept and trimmed for him. At one point, my father’s right ear floated up to the surface of my void. It bobbed around the dark folds of my personal abyss like an abandoned boat in a vast open sea. Who was my mother? I asked, but his ear, eroded and soft, capsized and disappeared. I placed a period at the beginning of a sentence and went into the kitchen to make myself some tea. There was no one home. I spoke aloud, addressing the many busts of Agatha’s face.

“My mother was Bibi Khanoum,” I said. “A woman with infinite patience and an uneven gait. That is all I know about her.”

Agatha’s busts nodded and smiled empathetically.

“Long live Zebra,” they whispered.

I opened the cupboard to grab a glass, a spoon, some sugar; and there, much to my surprise, in the midst of the tableware, was Taüt. He was roosting in a silver dish as if he were an exotic bird prepared by a Roman chef to be served to Julius Caesar. I couldn’t believe my eyes.

“Taüt!” I screamed.

He lifted his head and, drawing a deep breath, looked hard at me. His head was glowing. I removed the dish and set it down on the kitchen counter. His whole body was glowing!

“What have you done?” I marveled.

The bird looked at me smugly. He was in the pink of health. Had he been oiling his feathers? I remembered that some days earlier I had overheard Ludo militantly drill into Agatha and Fernando the proper use of olive oil, which he, I discovered while eavesdropping, bought from rare artisanal producers who cultivated the flanks of Mount Etna. “Cold-pressed virgin oil stored in dark chambers,” he said, “so as to avoid being ruined by the light of the sun.” He paused before stating firmly, “Hence it’s bright, almost neon green, glow! Do you know the value of that oil? At any moment those trees could be turned to ash in an outpouring of lava.” Neither Agatha nor Fernando could defend themselves, Fernando because of his habit of carefully weighing his words and Agatha because of her sweet disposition, which could tame a wild boar. “We’ve barely cooked, Ludo,” she said in honeyed tones. “It’s you who does most of the cooking.” I remembered Ludo’s final words: “I always use the oil with great discretion.”

My fate really did seem to have taken a turn for the better. Taüt had been on a spa vacation, dipping freely, presumably in the night, into Ludo Bembo’s precious oil, and Ludo was not home to make the discovery. I stood there observing Taüt. How had he gotten into the cupboards? Where had he been all along? How many deaths had he survived during his disappearance? How many lives had he led? Clearly, he had been spoiling himself. But what had he endured before giving himself such a lavish full-body oil bath? I would never know.

I stood there until, rather suddenly, it occurred to me that Taüt must be my mother. A thought of dizzying proportions. Why else would he have reappeared right now just as I was recovering all that was left of her? She must have reincarnated into this bird, and Quim Monzó had been keeping her for me without even realizing. Or, I thought, maybe while I’d been releasing the fumes of my father in Quim Monzó’s house, I had also released some of the fumes of my mother, and the bird—through the power of metempsychosis—had absorbed them. I hadn’t stolen him for nothing!

I scooped Taüt out of the dish. He protested and whined, but I didn’t care. I had to wash him off before Ludo returned. I had to protect whatever of my mother remained inside him. I shoved him under my shirt. I pressed him against my chest. I only let him out once I was in my bedroom with the door closed. There, I gave him a lecture. I told him that as my only remaining frame of reference he was no longer allowed to disappear. He took offense. He squatted down on the desk and fluffed his sticky feathers, which stuck out like needles.

“You look like a porcupine,” I said, and he turned and looked the other way.

I bathed him several times in a bowl of tepid water, scrubbing him with mild oatmeal shampoo. He seemed to enjoy his bath, to perceive it as a welcome extension of his retreat at the spa. He cooed and rubbed his head against my hand. I took this as a sign that he had missed me as much as I had yearned for his haggard and unwilling company, for that bass voice of his. I went into Agatha’s bedroom, grabbed a fresh towel, and rummaged through her jewelry until I found an amber bracelet that was too small to fit her wrist.

I dried Taüt off and put the bracelet around his neck, an amulet that would serve to protect him and, in doing so, also protect the fumes of my mother.

“You look so handsome,” I said to him.