Call Me Zebra(91)
“Gheorghe,” I said. “Lay your hands on the polished keys of the typewriter.”
He did.
“Your life has been evacuated of meaning; it is, therefore, a welcome campground where Josep Pla can pitch his tent. It is as if you were an empty house beckoning for a squatter. See Josep Pla walking around the labyrinthine corridors of your mind. He lifts his head to stare at the ghastly void of your existence. He presses his face against your void, and for a moment, you feel a reprieve from your loneliness. This is a sign that his words are being transmitted to you. See his beady eyes, his crooked nose, his square and narrow smile, his slick pink tongue sticking out between his teeth—the mouth of a misanthrope, of a person repulsed with life. It feels as though you were looking in the mirror, doesn’t it? Now transcribe in situ!”
Gheorghe began to type before I had a chance to dictate the transcription to him. I stood there staring at him in awe. Had he usurped the spirit of Josep Pla? He removed the paper from the platen and read what he had written to us. His beady little eyes glowed with the reflected light of the paper.
I was born in Palafrugell (Lower Ampurdan) on March 8, 1897. My family is entirely from the Ampurdan. The landscape of my life encompasses Puig Son Ric, in Begur, in the east; the Fitor mountains, in the west; the Formigues Islands, in the south; and the Montgrí in the north. I have always felt this a very old country. All sorts of wandering peoples have passed this way.
“Wonderful factoids,” I said. Gheorghe nodded, his eyes closed. I scanned the crowd of pilgrims. Remedios’s eyes were wide and dry. Her rash had calmed. It was no longer oozing. It was pink instead of a glistening red. And Mercè was wheezing happily next to the object of her longing, Ludo Bembo, who looked on with a gravity usually reserved for those men who diligently attend church but understand nothing. Agatha was standing with her arm wrapped around his, a saccharine smile spread across her lips.
“There’s more,” Gheorghe stammered. “Hardening of the heart isn’t congenital,” he said forcefully, between fits of coughing while everyone looked on, entranced. I recognized the words. He was reciting quotes from my notebook. “It’s an acquired condition. It depends on experience of life. What poets and novelists call narcissism is generally congenital and is symptomatic of genuine abnormality.”
Gheorghe snorted several times. I felt Ludo’s gaze on me. When I turned to look at him, he was mouthing the words genuine abnormality at me. I felt as though I had been punched in the gut. Gheorghe looked over at him nervously before carrying on. He coughed distinctly before speaking.
Taüt paced nervously between my shoulders. Then he paused and hissed in Ludo’s direction. Remedios began to scratch her rash again. It started to peel and form little patches of blood that caught the silver light of the sky here and there.
“The level of loathing reality brings,” Gheorghe stuttered, “clearly can increase in relation to one’s experience of life. But it would be pretentious”—at this, Ludo mouthed pretentious, confirming my suspicion that he had paid Gheorghe off—“however painful the experience has been, to act like someone who has overcome everything and is completely coldhearted.”
Gheorghe cast a pleading look in my direction. “I look on in horror,” he said, “as everything drives me into a state of callow indifference, but I’d be a clown to act as if I’ve touched rock bottom.”
The whole lot broke into nervous applause. Gheorghe bowed, pleased with himself. I felt humiliated, devastated, as if the very Matrix of Literature had turned against me, along with the Memory Man, for whom I had organized such a lavish homage. I walked off with Taüt and settled on one of the chairs on the terrace. That fleshy mole-covered face came running after me.
“Did he pay you?” I asked, pointing at Ludo Bembo.
“Pay me?” he repeated stupidly. “I spent everything I had on lunch. I don’t have a euro to my name!”
“I’ll forgive this trespass,” I said, breathing deeply in order to gather my wits again. “But you are not to trust him. I’m beginning to suspect he is not a Bembo at all. He may very likely be the reincarnated spirit of the murderer and philologist Eugene Aram, whose terrible actions and personality are referenced in the literary works of Hood, Wills, Orwell, and P. G. Wodehouse. Do you understand?”
He shook his fleshy chin and walked away with his head hanging over his body in shame. I sat there staring out at the vast sea below. I was dumbfounded. I understood nothing. I had tried to hurl my pain at the world, but it had been intercepted by Ludo’s scheming. And where were my witnesses, I thought, the pitiless and inhuman members of society, those who don’t hesitate to make the less fortunate pawns in their provisional game of chess? I thought again of Ludo.
We had come to Calella before, Ludo and I, in the autumn. At the end of a long day spent foraging the forests for mushrooms—bloody milk caps with their red and orange hues and green flecks; king’s testicles; yellow-footed chanterelles; and my favorite, black trumpets, the trumpet of death. We had eaten a feast of pig: foot cartilage, cheeks infused with beer, jamón cut from the flanks of hogs fed on acorns. At the end of the day, we lay on the sandy shore locked in an embrace to keep warm. We had fallen asleep like that on the beach.
What had happened now? Who is the victor? I thought, looking over at him. He was watching me in pain. Who is the victim? There was no way of knowing, I thought, no way of making head or tail of this condition of the world. The moon rose. Its round face shone in the sky. I felt low, down, lackluster. Another day had been ineffectually swept into the ruins of time.