Call Me Zebra(95)

I led the remaining pilgrims back to Calella de Palafrugell. We flipped one of the wooden fishing boats that had been abandoned on the shore and pushed it into the water. The sea was rough. We had to hug the coast. We sat around the Mobile Art Gallery, plunging our oars in the water.

Hours later, we rowed past the Medes Islands. They looked like the white teeth of a giant. The rocky plateaus of the coast changed textures along the way: the rock looked shaved one moment and as if it were peeling the next. The leathery water of the sea changed colors, too. It was black and laced with diamonds in the distance; aquamarine along the shore, revealing huge white rocks at the bottom of the sea; then icy fluorescent blue interrupted by shades of green farther out.

The tide almost pulled us out to sea a few times. We had to row fiercely to stay in line with the coast. No one spoke. When we were near land, we could hear the caves along the coast sucking in the sea then spitting it back out. Hours later, famished, exhausted, we arrived at the Cap de Creus, Dalí’s delirium of rocks. I took in that mass of savage stone: It was pleated, wrinkled, dimpled, rounded, conical, stratified. It looked like the Matrix of Literature with its coiled and complex pathways of interconnected sentences. In other words, it looked like my life.



We arrived at dusk. We set up the writing machine in front of Dalí and his wife and muse Gala’s house in Port Lligat. It was closed due to damages the building had sustained during a recent storm. Again, there were no witnesses. We, squalid misfits, were alone. What was I to deduce? I earmarked the thought and carried on. I had been inside that house before. Long ago. Or, perhaps, I thought, not so long ago. I couldn’t remember if I had been there with Ludo Bembo or with my father. Or with both. Dalí’s home was one of those houses with a complex network of interlocking rooms, each door leading to a window, each window showing a staircase beyond or an egg, white and smooth, sculpted in the terraced yard. It was opulent, magnificently irrational. I looked over at the pilgrims. They were sitting on the sandy coast, looking pale, overexerted from rowing, from the lack of food and water. They were at the brink of the void. Taüt, too, looked weaker than ever. The wind had sliced at his face, ruffling his feathers, as we had rowed. He was keeping to himself now, the way, it occurred to me, my mother had always kept to herself. He was on lockdown, wings tucked into his sides, neck turned, beak plunging like a dagger into his spine.

“How does one become what one is?” I suddenly asked, trying to lift the pilgrims’ spirits. I stood behind the miniature museum, which we had prepared for transcribing, and preached at them in an oratorical tone as if I were standing on a pulpit.

Gheorghe put his arms around his lady to keep her warm. Remedios’s face was so red from the chill that her rash blended in seamlessly with the rest of her wounded flesh. In Ludo’s absence, Mercè had removed her mask. Agatha sat in Fernando’s lap, smiling at her encouragingly. Fernando was examining Agatha’s face, memorizing her expression, I assumed, for the next bust.

“After reading Nietzsche,” I continued, “Dalí decided he would be the one to outdo the inventor of the overman, otherwise known as Zarathustra, Nietzsche’s most transcendent, mystical, and lofty creation, by developing a Dalínian cosmogony, a cosmogony littered with anuses. In other words, Dalí flipped Zarathustra on his head by ascending to sublime heights through the grotesque.”

Mercè turned as red as Remedios. Paola smiled coquettishly at Gheorghe. Aha, I thought, she has enjoyed it in the rear.

“Paola,” I said, “would you care to transcribe?”

She leapt at the opportunity.

“We will be weaving together the voices of Nietzsche and Dalí, and sprinkling in some Lorca, who made several amorous advances at Dalí, all of which he solemnly refused—an incomprehensible decision, but let us not digress from the task at hand. Now, Paola, transcribe the following twice.”

Gheorghe clapped to cheer her along. At the word twice, Fernando smiled wryly. He had understood. This exercise was not unlike his obsession with forging Agatha’s face.

“I am a doppelg?nger,” I declared, reading from my notebook.

“I am a doppelg?nger,” Paola repeated into the typewriter.

I picked up the phone and listened to the devastating silence, to the signal of literature, the residue and ruins of the universe. I heard: Much have I suffered, labored long and hard by now in the waves and wars. I kept Ulysses’s words to myself.

“I have a ‘second’ face in addition to the first,” I said to Paola, my voice breaking, my heart heavy with grief, “and perhaps also a third.” I was citing Nietzsche.

I have a “second” face in addition to the first, she wrote, and perhaps also a third.

“Now, on the same page, transcribe what Dalí said about his obsession with Nietzsche.”

She paused and looked at me, an intelligent creature.

“Nietzsche is a weakling who had been feckless enough to go mad, when it is essential, in this world, not to go mad.”

When it is essential in this world not to go mad, Paola typed.

“These reflections furnished the elements of my motto, which was to become the theme of my life: The only difference between a madman and myself is that I am not mad! It took me three days to assimilate and digest Nietzsche. After this lion’s banquet, only one detail of the philosopher’s personality was left for me, only one bone to gnaw: his mustache!”