Call Me Zebra(92)
Ludo and I didn’t speak for three days after the pilgrimage. If our eyes accidentally locked while passing each other in the hallway, he looked down at his feet. I counted the busts of Agatha’s face, which seemed to multiply like the miracle of the fish.
On the fourth day, I considered giving him a piece of my mind.
In the feeble light of evening, Ludo looked like a ghost of himself. I looked at Agatha’s busts planted in rows along the walls on either side of him. They resembled garden topiaries in the obscure light. I could hear Petita in another room scratching herself. Taüt was at my heels, his countenance majestic, resolute. He had the loving aura of Bibi Khanoum. Ludo pursed his lips. He looked down. A shadow fell over his face. Then, as if from the subterranean channels of the world, his voice emerged before mine. His words—each one a sword, a dagger—dangled in the air.
“According to Montaigne,” he said, “Plutarch says of those who dote over pet monkeys or little dogs that the faculty for loving which is in all of us, rather than remaining useless, forges a false and frivolous object for want of a legitimate one.”
I scooped Taüt up. The bird protested and bit my finger. He tore the skin. I remembered lying in Quim Monzó’s bed under that sagging ceiling, sucking on the blood Taüt had spilled. I put my finger in my mouth to stop the bleeding.
“Plutarch?” I said to Ludo, removing my finger from my mouth. “I’ll give you some Plutarch: There is no point in getting angry against events: They are indifferent to our wrath!”
“You should tell that to yourself,” he said, and rushed past me.
I managed to grab hold of his arm before he could storm out the door. He turned to look at me. His face had collapsed.
“Do you ever consider taking off your mask?” he pressed.
“What mask?” I asked reproachfully.
“The mask of literature!”
“You’re the one speaking in platitudes,” I insisted.
“Me? Me? Me? No, no, no,” he said. He was shaking his head with a violent passion. I thought he was going to get stuck reproducing those two words forever. But then he steadied himself. “This is our problem: We have become entangled with each other!”
“With each other and the whole world,” I said. “The self is a porous thing.”
“Not my self.”
He was facing the door again.
“You’re an exception to the rule?”
He opened the door.
“You should get ahold of your self,” he murmured into the threshold of the apartment. “You’re the one dragging a bunch of lost souls up and down hills as if they were your indentured servants. You should try examining your thoughts before you decide to act on them!”
“Are you suggesting that I don’t deserve to make friends? That I should suffer indefinitely from this ancient loneliness I carry within me?”
“By dragging those miserable wretches into our lives?”
“I am a miserable wretch!” I said, my eyes damp with tears.
His eyes welled up, but he just stood there in silence, as stubborn and impassive as a bull.
Beyond the door, the staircase was darker and dirtier than ever. I watched him walk down the stairs, turn the corner, and disappear. I was alone again. Alone with Taüt, Petita, with that slimy, stubborn fish. I stared into the darkness of the staircase and remembered looking down at the ruins of Van, my eyes sore from having been wrapped in the rough cloth of that black band. Do we ever see anything at all? I wondered. Everything in my life had turned into an afterimage; the past had transcribed itself onto the future, annihilating the present. I closed the door behind him. I put Taüt down. I let him roam at his will.
After that, I went to the bathroom and stood in front of the mirror. I saw my eyes, my nose, my lips, but I couldn’t see my face. My features refused to come together; they seemed to either be drifting away from one another, an exploded view, or were stacked together, an overlapping mess of organs.
I retreated to my room to plan the next pilgrimage: a pilgrimage of Dalínian proportions: the Pilgrimage of the Wide-Eyed Genius. It wasn’t easy. I felt both drained and panicked. But there was no turning back. I had gone too far. I had to carry on. Faced with the failure of the Pilgrimage of the Memory Man, I had decided that I would try again, persist until my nerves were raw—a wisdom born of all my mutilated parts blended together. That failure had made my desire to hurl my pain at the world even more assiduous. I experienced a rapid cycling of moods: a sense of exhilaration followed by sudden defeat during which my mind felt consumed, charred, burned to a crisp. I churned my mind. I forced it to produce more routes, to recall the quotes and maxims that my father had stuffed into it, that I had been feeding on through his old age, his macular degeneration, his death, his resurrection within my void, his return to the mind of the universe. But something was off. A tangible sense of estrangement.
I stared for hours at the surfaces of my life, my death: the high cracked walls of the living room, the shuttered panes of the terrace window overlooking the city—elegant, resolved, draped in gray stone. Hours later, deep into the night, I went on a long walk along the Onyar River. It was slipping silently past the houses lined up along its banks. I stared at their reflection in the water, at the bridges that arched across the divide, the seagulls that plunged into the water from the roofs and railings, remorselessly attacking the fish in the night—ugly, whiskered, lazy, sucking on the mud and waste of the riverbed—and then, finally, at myself. My own dumb, round face in the water, and next to it, Taüt’s beaked countenance. I looked swollen. My eyes were puffy, my hair uncombed. Who am I? I wondered. How is it that I have ended up here, adrift and alone in the world with no money? For one brief, fugitive moment, I longed for Ludo’s embrace, but were he to offer it to me, I couldn’t be sure that I wouldn’t refuse it. No one had ever been in a position to protect me. How could I trust someone who was offering to protect me now? I was bereft. My life was small and narrow. I didn’t know what to do, how to generate love.