Call Me Zebra(93)

For days, I fell asleep and woke up at odd hours. At one point, I don’t know if it was in the middle of the day or night, I sat bolt upright in bed. I had woken up from a dream in which I had seen my parents. Or not my parents. Not exactly. I dreamt I was standing in front of a tableau vivant of Goya’s Two Old Men Eating Soup, but the two shriveled-up men in the painting, with their toothless jaws and hooded heads, had been replaced by my parents. My mother’s bruised hand reached out from the dark shadows of the painting. She held the spoon out to my mouth, inviting me to take the soup of death. Her skin was freckled and spotted with purplish hues; it was paper-thin, a trembling hand. I drank the soup. Then my father reached out and wiped my mouth with the edge of his sleeve. He was still wearing that outmoded suit, but he was bald: no mustache, no hair on his head. Had I ever seen his mouth? I barely recognized them. “Where are you? What realm do you live in?” I stepped forward to ask, but they immediately retreated into the canvas, and the painting was static again. I ran my hand across the surface of the portrait. I was hoping my hand would go through so I could join them on the other side. But there was nothing there. Nothing except air. Air full of the residue of the living and the dead.



Finally, Ludo slipped into my room one night. He got into bed next to me and drew me onto his chest. “I have no other way of getting through to you,” he confessed. “Your notebook is the only inroad, the only way in.”

I didn’t know what to say. I lay there and listened to the beating of his heart. It sounded like the deep roar of the sea, the white noise of the universe. Again, I thought, the parts don’t add up to a whole; there is always a residue. At least I, I reassured myself, am trying to account for that residue.

“I have good news for you,” Ludo said.

“Is that so?”

“National borders are an artificial construct,” he said.

A protracted silence ensued. I am an orphan, I thought, as he ran his hands through my hair. He was trying to untangle the knots, but he gave up halfway through.

“Madonna!” he said.

“An artificial construct that has controlled the terms of my life,” I finally answered. “There is nothing abstract there.”

He didn’t speak after that. I could tell he was sulking again.

“You know,” I said to him, “according to Nietzsche, wisest Autodidact, Anarchist, and Atheist of all time, those who remain silent are almost always lacking in delicacy and courtesy of the heart. Silence is an objection; swallowing things leads of necessity to a bad character—it even upsets the stomach. All who remain silent are dyspeptic.”

I thought he was going to push me off his body and leave. But he didn’t.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay.”

We drifted off to sleep.

Halfway through the night, I woke him up, and said, “You know, Ludo, there is nothing noble about my suffering. It is the result of an exhaustive investigation into the deepest recesses of human nature—its senselessness and propensity toward fakeness, its lack of honesty. We have made very little progress, Ludo Bembo. The march of progress is the biggest lie of the twentieth century.”

I could tell that he was out of his depth. It was as if a tide had dragged him out of the shallows. He was half-asleep. He was struggling to keep his head above water.

He said: “I wish you would say you love me.”

I wanted to speak, but I felt as though my mouth had been taped shut. The pilgrimages were the only way I knew to dissolve life’s resistance toward me, my resistance toward it—but I had only just begun. I rolled away. I didn’t want him to see me weeping. Ludo moaned. He reached out and tried to pull me back into his embrace. I swatted his arm. He faced away from me and went to sleep. The tides of his mood had again turned. Tomorrow he would withdraw from me. He would be obstinate, cheerless, as ornery as a child. I got up and paced the hallway. How comfortable for him to escape into sleep, I thought, after returning to that word love. A love I was in no position to receive despite desperately needing it. No. Not I with my castaway, homeless body. Where would I store it? It would fall right through me, sink into the depths of my void. I would have needed so much love, more than any one person is capable of giving, to fill that gaping hole at the center of my life. And, besides, his love had been capricious, inconsistent, flighty.

When I walked back into my bedroom, I heard him murmur the word unhappiness. His eyes momentarily flooded open. He looked unplugged. An old wound seemed to have come loose and extinguished the light from his eyes. Later, much later, I would look back on this moment and realize that my hypothesis had been correct, that Ludo Bembo had come searching for me not only because our fates had been, as I had always known them to be, united in the poetic dimension but also because in my company, alongside the Dame of the Void, something Ludo had long suppressed could finally burst forth and arrange itself among his other memories—a certain darkness he secretly carried within that he, a utilitarian, an optimist, a linear-minded, rational man, would rebel against and use as an excuse to refuse me. Psychological morbidity is not for the weak.



Days turned to weeks. Time passed. Though the distance between Ludo and me began to calcify, we each held on to our relationship the only way we knew how: by yanking each other around. As a result, we both grew increasingly doleful, despondent, aggrieved.

Soon, March ended and April began. It was the anniversary of my father’s death. The sky was glowing with a bright spring sun that cast a straw-colored hue on the gray stones of Girona. There was an uncharacteristic chill to the air. I again stood with my fellow Pilgrims of the Void in the parking lot.