Call Me Zebra(88)

“In the words of beloved Shakespeare . . . ,” they repeated.

“What’s past is prologue!”

“What’s past is prologue!” they echoed into the air.



A week later, I gathered the Pilgrims of the Void at the Centre Fraternal in Palafrugell, a modernist-style casino and bar with a yellow facade and several Catalan flags that hung over its windows and awnings. This was the cultural center where Josep Pla used to spend his evenings drinking with his friends, practicing objectivism, discussing literature into the wee hours of the morning.

The waiter, seated at a stool behind the bar, refused to rise when we entered. He simply waved us in the direction of a round table at the far corner of the large rectangular room. We walked single file across that tiled floor, navigating the tables and chairs, the scrutinizing gaze of the other customers—four wrinkled men, all dressed in brown slacks and green wool sweaters, whose eyes momentarily drifted away from their plates and their newspapers to apprehend our collective figure.

We sat at a table sandwiched between a floor-to-ceiling window and the bathrooms. A good omen. Ludo whispered something to Agatha. He, the King of Food, was in charge of ordering for us. We had each chipped in four euros. That was all we had. I looked at the waiter. He had a phallic nose and bloodshot eyes and gnarly little fingers, which he had likely plunged into the earth, digging up roots and planting seeds his whole life.

“The man looks so powerful fixed to that stool!” I declared under my breath.

Gheorghe, who had taken to me, leaned in, and whispered, “Too true.” His belly awkwardly grazed my arm.

“Gheorghe,” I said, seeing that Ludo was about to order a round of tap beers. “You are not to drink. You are a pilgrim now, and you need to keep your wits about you, protect your faculties.”

He looked crestfallen. The flap of skin that ran from his chin to his ears, a fleshy bib, shook each time he felt despair. I could hardly stand to see him that way. I wanted to cheer him up.

“I’ve assigned you a central role in today’s pilgrimage,” I said. “You are going to be the corpse of Josep Pla.”

Remedios gasped in horror and reached immediately for a napkin from the dispenser at the center of the table. She dabbed her rash, which had taken on a glossy finish in that steely light.

“Do you want to volunteer as a corpse?” I asked her.

She said nothing. Mercè sat there with her face in her hands, her yellow bob spilling over her fingers. She looked like a mop that had been used to sweep up urine.

“It’s a time-honored tradition, Remedios,” I said, turning back to Gheorghe, who was nervously weaving his fingers because the waiter had finally detached himself from his stool and was carelessly setting down the cold steins of beer on the table. The foam ran over the lip of the glasses. Ludo cleaned each one.

“Gheorghe!” I called out, trying to claim his attention. “Josep Pla, too, had a mole that looked out at the world like a third eye”—I stared at his mole as I delivered my lines—“so astute was his gaze among the world’s commoners, the willfully blind.”

He regained his resolve. The rest of us chugged our beers. We each ate a plate of sausages and rice. Ludo, who had more money than all of us combined, ordered coffee and crema catalana. He used his spoon to crack the crystallized surface and then proceeded to consume the entire concoction without offering any to the rest of us. Self-centered beast, I thought. But there was no time to pick a fight with him. We had a long day ahead of us.

I’d left Taüt inside the miniature museum. As I had walked away, I’d heard him hissing and pacing, sucking in air through the drilled holes. He released macabre screams at fixed intervals throughout our meal.

“He’s calling out in panic to see if I’m around,” I announced to the pilgrims. Everyone except Ludo nodded in agreement. To distinguish himself, he rolled his eyes.

“Taüt!” I yelled. “Taüt!”

Remedios nearly jumped out of her seat.

“So he knows I’m here,” I assured the pilgrims, turning to look at Ludo’s face, which was flushed. The other men in the casino were staring at me wide-eyed, jaws dropped, newspapers in their laps, cigars hanging from the rafters of their mouths. Ludo took it upon himself to cast a regretful gaze in their direction.

“Offering apologies on my behalf?” I asked, pointing at his empty dish of dessert.

He got up and went to the bathroom. His chair almost flew out from under him. A few minutes later, he returned with an artificial calm. He leaned back, removed his pipe from the pocket of his tweed jacket—all his actions rehearsed—and placed it between his lips with those nimble fingers. He smoked with a superior air.



The Pilgrimage of the Memory Man was not without obstacle. It took us three hours to walk the old road from Palafrugell to El Far de San Sebastià, where the young Josep Pla would sit, crack open his notebook, and record triumphant descriptions of the glorious landscapes of his birth. We got lost on the way. We didn’t have maps. We ended up on a rugged downward pass that led to a cluster of trees. Taüt, thrilled to be out of the casket, was miming the noises of the wild: the ping of a walnut falling from a tree, the sound of rocks detaching from the hills and knocking against one another in those vast tracts of forest densely packed with cork oaks, pines, eucalyptus.