Call Me Zebra(94)

I was wearing a Wagnerian mustache—an ode to my father. I had fashioned it from hair deposited in garbage bags outside of one of the city’s hair salons. The pilgrims, with their sea of greasy heads, were looking at me with knitted eyebrows. They had multiplied.

Fernando had joined us. He was perched elegantly on the hood of Ludo’s car. A finely sculpted man. Gheorghe, having repossessed himself of his person, had found a companion: a short blond woman named Paola, who was graced with leathery skin and sagging breasts and a protruding belly that hung over her skinny legs. Based on her appearance, it was clear that the pair of them had shared an alcoholic past and that now they planned to leap hand in hand into sobriety; from the pits of the abysses they had been avoiding within themselves, they would pump temperance and restraint.

Aside from them, there was the usual crowd: Remedios, whose rash had spread, covering her right cheek—she looked as though she had been freshly slapped; Mercè, who arrived wearing the gas mask, looking the part of a shiny beetle; Agatha, who had ornamented her face with Venetian earrings for the occasion; and Ludo, who had tied a silk scarf around his neck and was lying obscenely on the hood of his car next to Fernando, as if to say: Here I am, Cleopatra’s male counterpart. He was up to something. What, I did not know. Only time would tell.

Taüt was nibbling on my mustache, smoothing the hairs the wind had ruffled.

“Why are you wearing a mustache?” Mercè’s muffled voice emerged from the mask, a childish whine. I pushed the bird’s head aside.

“Before disappearing altogether,” I said, adopting a grave tone, “the growth of my father’s Nietzschean mustache had miraculously increased. As you all know, we are about to embark on a Dalínian pilgrimage, and while Dalí commands all of my respect, his lifelong rebellion against Nietzsche’s Wagnerian mustache also drains my deference. Dalí’s fixation with Nietzsche’s mustache paradoxically represents Dalí’s lack of differentiation from him, making Dalí Nietzschean to the core”—I made a fist with my sick hand and vehemently punched the palm of my opposite hand—“Nietzschean in the depths of the depths of his heart.”

I paused thoughtfully and scanned the faces of the pilgrims. They looked pained. I took a softer approach.

“We are all the very thing we rebel against. Take this man as an example,” I said, pointing at Ludo Bembo. “In the depths of this man’s soul lies a labyrinthine network of abysses not unlike mine, which explains why, despite his conscious efforts to go toward the darkness of life, he is continually attracted to me, whose life is a prolonged meditation on the clear light of death.”

In the presence of that word, attracted, Gheorghe and Paola exchanged a magnetic glance. Mercè hung her rubber-wrapped head in defeat. Ludo drew his legs together and sat up. I fixed my gaze on him and continued with uncompromising conviction. “In the depths of this Bembo’s soul lies, like a madam cast in marble, the fear of his own mortality.”

Ludo opened his mouth to speak, but a group of giggling American tourists flocked past us just then. I could smell the swamplands of their psychology, their disturbed intestines. They smelled like mildew and mud. I watched those abusers of history disappear under the archway and down the stairs that hug the convent walls. I felt the residual toxins of my childhood clog my airways. It was extremely painful and difficult to breathe. I closed my eyes. When I opened them again, a different figure was advancing toward us unflaggingly. It was the Tentacle of Ice.

“What’s she doing here?” I asked Ludo.

“She is an interested party,” he said tonelessly.

She took her place next to him, tossed her long curly hair to one side.

“What is the object of her interest?” I posed.

“L-I-T-E-R-A-T-U-R-E.” He annunciated every letter. I could see each one float out from the gap between his teeth.

“Don’t fool yourself. The only thing that woman is interested in is your sex organ.”

Ludo smiled at me with false teeth. Who could trust a man with such incongruities? She leaned over and gave him a kiss on the cheek. She was twice my size: voluptuous, large breasted, with hips designed to procreate. Her hands were manicured. She had plucked her eyebrows, applied makeup to her face. Mercè, realizing she was third in line, had begun to cry. The glass panels over her eyes had fogged.

“Look what you’ve done,” I said to Ludo. “Mercè is sobbing. She is falling apart. She looks like a heap of moist flesh.

“Is that not so?” I asked Mercè.

“I’m crying,” Mercè lied squeakily, “because I spent the morning chopping onions.”

“Onions?”

“Onions!” she insisted.

“A great symbol of putrefaction and decay,” I said to Ludo Bembo, “of which you understand next to nothing!”

The Tentacle of Ice wrapped her frigid arms around him. She was reclaiming him. I stared at her smooth upper lip.

“Let’s go,” she said evenly. She whispered something hotly into his ear.

Ludo agonized for a moment, then swiftly assembled his thoughts and followed her. I felt my sick hand cramp in response to his absence. I felt as if the air were being squeezed out of my lungs. How could I have let a non-Hosseini into the craggy pits of my void? Ah, the redundant sting of betrayal, I thought, and forced myself to carry on without him.