Call Me Zebra(89)

“No sense of direction!” Ludo said breathily.

I was the one leading the way through that abysmal network of unpaved roads.

“No sense of direction!” Taüt mimed. Then he chirped like a canary because he heard a canary chirp in the dense fabric of shrubs.

“That wretched bird!” Ludo said.

“That wretched bird!” Taüt echoed.

“Agatha,” I said. “Can you tell Ludo that I can hear everything he’s saying?”

Agatha threw her hands up in the air.

“So now you won’t speak to me?” Ludo huffed from the dusty cul-de-sac. He reached up and yanked a tree branch. He had a wool scarf tied around his neck and a red cardigan under his tweed jacket. He looked like a fussy Englishman.

“Are you going to fan yourself?” I posed.

It wasn’t as cold as his stuffy outfit suggested. Winter was finally giving way to spring.

“Fan!” Taüt squawked, raising his sulfur crest. Ludo released the branch. I had never seen the bird so animated. I secretly rejoiced that my mother was getting to see other parts of this woolly world.

We were lost in the hilly folds separating Palafrugell from the sea. I could hear the noise of those waters batting against the earth from across a vast distance. A roar at the margins of the universe that reminded me of the deep roar of the Caspian. I looked at Gheorghe. What a vulnerable being! He looked exhausted. He and Remedios—the corpse and the devotee—had been in charge of either dragging or lifting the Mobile Art Gallery over their heads as if it were a casket. Fernando, who had been groggy that morning, even more introverted than usual, had refused to join the pilgrimage. His loss! I thought, and ordered Gheorghe and Remedios to put the miniature museum down because I had decided that this dead end offered the perfect conditions for delivering my lecture on the dim forests of Josep Pla’s interior exile.

I told the pilgrims to gather around, that it was time to edify them on the nuances of our collective mission. Ludo, in a petulant mood, lingered at the edges. I refused to care.

“Soon we will find our way,” I said to them, as they gathered before me. “But even if we don’t, nothing is lost.”

Gheorghe nodded along. He had caught on rather quickly; a sharpness lay hidden beneath all that flesh. Remedios, on the other hand, looked more leaky eyed than ever.

“My rash is burning,” she interrupted shyly. “From all the sweat.”

“My dear Remedios, discomfort is a literary experience you have to learn to bear. Imagine how you will feel once you are standing in the center of the void. Terrible! That’s how! You have to build your endurance.”

She was quick to retreat, her saving grace.

Mercè, having caught her breath, brought her hands over her face and, with a stutter more appropriate to Gheorghe, asked, “Ex-cuse me, b-but who is Josep Pla?”

Who is Josep Pla? What kind of Catalan was she?

I heard Agatha let out a gasp. “Everyone knows who Josep Pla is,” she said sweetly.

Mercè shook her head of hair, a sign of distress.

“Mercè,” I said, with rehearsed patience. “Josep Pla, alias the Memory Man, is”—“was,” I corrected—“the most prolific and controversial Catalan writer of the long and cruel twentieth century, which concluded just a few years ago, though the brutality it unleashed is still showering down on our heads. And the life of Josep Pla,” I said, suddenly—decisively—connecting the dots, “registers the trauma of that century; one just has to look at his comings and goings to see the irrevocable damage of the times on his person. The man, a provincial boy turned cosmopolitan dandy, was forced into interior exile in Palafrugell several times throughout his life. That is why we are gathered here today.”

Mercè’s blood pressure leveled. She was peeking at me through her hands, listening intently.

“We should keep moving. It’s getting cold,” Ludo rudely piped from the end of the path, an army of trees behind him.

“The voice of reason!” I yelled back. “The march of progress!”

He kicked the pebbled ground.

“Care to join our lecture?” I asked.

“Care to join our lecture?” he mocked. He had lost his mind.

Taüt, dignified creature and charitable host to my mother, didn’t perpetuate the thread.

“To each his own,” I said, turning back to the crowd.

“Now, Pilgrims of the Void, memorize the facts of the life of Josep Pla.” I saw their ears fan open like flowers in the sun.

“ONE,” I declared, employing a pedantic tone. “Josep Pla, born in Palafrugell on March 8, 1897, a shy and suspicious soul and a terrible student, studied law in Barcelona until he was forced to retreat to his hometown in October of 1918 during the second and deadliest wave of the Spanish flu. This retreat led to his first literary adventures, adventures cultivated in an atmosphere of mass illness and death. He read and wrote under conditions of interior exile. It was in this cruel atmosphere that Josep Pla, the writer, was brought into existence, overtaking Josep Pla, the imminent lawyer.”

I paused briefly to catch my breath.

“TWO,” I spat. “In the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, which lasted from 1936 until 1939, after traveling across Europe and North Africa conducting acts of reportage, the Memory Man, who was both Catholic and Catalanist—a contradiction during the inflexible trials of war, which reduce the world and all its citizens to good versus evil—was banished by both factions. The Catalans accused him of being a fascist and a betrayer, and the Francoists dismissed him for being a Catalanist and therefore also thought of him as a betrayer. So he again retreated to Palafrugell.”