Call Me Zebra(90)
At this, I lunged forward and took in a deep breath, and said, “THREE. Last but not least, at the end of his life, Josep Pla, suspicious of his fellow man and aware that monotony is the only counterweight to our perpetual fear of death—a little factoid that I, one of the unlucky, learned early on—returned again to the nauseating boredom of Palafrugell and there he rewrote—no, he falsified—his diary, which he had originally composed during his first exile when he was just a failed young law student. He thereby plagiarized and regurgitated his younger self, and then published his fabricated ‘diary’ as the work we now know of as The Gray Notebook, thereby also,” I said, faint with vertigo, “proving Nietzsche’s theory of the cyclical nature of time as well as Borges’s philosophy of the eternal return, notions likely borrowed from other sources, Eastern sources,” I said, nearly out of breath, “which I shall later consult!”
I almost fainted. Who was I lecturing? I suddenly wondered. Everything was a blur: the trees, the pebbled road, my hands. But I couldn’t stop; a final message was pushing its way up.
“In 1918,” I mumbled into the misty air, “while the Memory Man walked the streets of Palafrugell under the gauzy light of a gunmetal sky not unlike the sky we have above us today and thought of Montaigne, Proust, Stendhal, Mallarmé, and Nietzsche, death was making its rounds in the form of the plague. In other words, Pla’s literature dawned in the dark and drafty abysmal void of death.”
My thoughts were doubling over themselves. I thought of the pile of illfated corpses. That image, I realized, had a prophetic quality to it: It was a kind of afterimage, reoccurring both as memory and premonition. I remembered my father and me, paper-thin as we had traveled across that ashen no-man’s-land, repeating: The world is a savage place; we are crossing not death itself but the death of life; we are becoming literature. He would have been proud that I had found others—the marginalized of the world—to join me. I saw the pilgrims sitting before me, listening with their inner ears. I felt my heart turn to flesh, blood pumping through its corridors. I was overcome with gratitude. This cluster of humans, I thought, who had appeared in the most ordinary way, were helping me move along my path toward nothingness. We were going to cross the event horizon of the black hole we each harbored at the center of our lives and kick up the dust, rove the depths, until the information the void had swallowed—our multiple selves from which we had been severed—would rise out of it as residue, transformed, ready to sound out the alarm of truth: that death will send the Four Corners of the World collapsing and that no one, no matter how astute, wealthy, or robust, will be spared. Our bodies will be reduced to ash. But, I comforted myself, our minds will barrel through this cosmos again and again, a continuum that would exist everywhere and nowhere at once. And how long would this cycle perpetuate itself, this mirage? There was no way of knowing. This, too, was a certainty, a terrifying, malodorous truth.
By the time we reached the summit of San Sebastià, the lighthouse situated at the top of the cape had taken on a mythical quality. Its beaming light, enclosed in a crowned glass dome, roved the sparkling silver waters of the Mediterranean. The shrubs and trees—the bushes of lavender and thyme, the juniper and olive trees, the maritime pine, the broom plants and palmetto scrubs—all woven into the rocky shelves, formed an avalanche of granite and foliage that led to the Calella de Palafrugell, where wooden fishing boats had been pulled out of the water and left strewn across the sandy coast. Behind the lighthouse and El Far Hotel, abandoned in winter, was an archaeological site with ruins of an Iberian settlement.
“Look around,” I said to the breathless pilgrims. “This stunning view is what Josep Pla observed daily during the plague. He hiked up here and sat for hours with his notebook, searching for well-endowed adjectives to describe the landscape.”
I could tell they were impressed, but they also seemed exhausted from the laborious journey of digressions it had taken to get there.
I observed Ludo from a distance. He stood on the hotel terrace taking in the view. Then he lit his pipe and sucked on it with his eyes closed, head tilted back, face pressed into the radiant metallic sky. He seemed at peace. I wondered if he had come to terms with our collective endeavor, if his wall of defenses had come crumbling down. But I couldn’t be sure, and I knew that even if he had opened up his heart to our objectives it wouldn’t last long. He had become shifty, a woeful, unpredictable man.
I busied myself with setting up the Mobile Art Gallery near the lighthouse. Against the mercurial waters of the sea, The Hung Mallard truly looked like a pirate’s flag. I set up the telephone and the typewriter. I unwrapped the gas mask. Then I went in search of the pilgrims who were prowling around, breathing through their mouths. It was time to transcribe.
“Pilgrims,” I announced. “Report to the miniature museum immediately!”
Everyone showed up. Mercè looked on anxiously, hands over her mouth, eyes peeking out. I offered her the gas mask.
“For your personal relief,” I said.
She turned her back to us and slipped it over her head, then turned around again and looked at us with her rubber face. I picked up the telephone and listened to the devastation coming through it, to the residue of silence left over from the worldwide wreckage, a portion of which had annihilated the Hosseinis. The world had slit its own throat with such reckless abandon! I ordered Gheorghe to stand at the typewriter. Agatha broke into a premature applause. She looked up at Ludo’s face, and boldly said, “What a show she is about to put on!” I thought Ludo might bolt, but he stayed put, firm in his spot. Mercè stood next to him. With the gas mask covering her face, she had no trouble gazing at him lovingly. He looked down at her a few times and forced a polite smile. The architecture of Ludo Bembo’s interior life is as knotty as an irregular home full of interlacing staircases, hallways, rooms. Who could read the tides of his emotions? He’s a man with a Byzantine character and a Roman nose!