Call Me Zebra(97)
I sat up in bed. I looked around. Taüt was sleeping on a pile of clothes. Petita was curled up next to him. Had they figured out how to love each other? I pushed that word—love—down into the deepest recesses of myself. I lit it on fire. I watched it burn to ash. I extinguished it from my repertoire of emotions so that it, too, could be reborn like a phoenix in all the scattered ash of this sooty globe.
A few weeks later, Ludo came to me asking for forgiveness. He kneeled on the floor, put his head in my lap, and wept. He was sobbing over the twists and turns of our mangled fate. He kept saying, “No matter how hard I try, you keep pushing me away. What’s the point of living as if you were already dead?” I didn’t know what to say. I cupped his head in my hands. I brushed his hair out of his face.
A week later, having barely recovered from our bitter wars, we went on a solo pilgrimage to Portbou, the burial ground of Walter Benjamin. We ate macarons, walked along the oxidized rocks lacerated by the sea, and took turns listing the names the Mediterranean has been called throughout history: liquid continent, bitter sea, the great green, sea of refugees, Sea of Sunken Hopes. At the end of the day, holding hands, we walked to the Walter Benjamin memorial. We entered the steep narrow passageway carved into the seawall as if we were entering a tunnel to the afterlife. We descended the stairs toward the aquamarine waters, stood on the last step, and watched through the protective glass panel that seals the memorial from the sea as the Mediterranean knocked its head against the limits of the land.
We stood there in quiet contemplation for a long time. It was I who broke the silence. I couldn’t help myself. I had toned down the literary activities of the pilgrimage as much as possible. I had left behind Taüt and the Mobile Art Gallery. I couldn’t restrain myself any further. I pointed at the engraved panel of glass, and said, “This is symbolic of the potential escape the philosopher hoped for but never achieved. Walter Benjamin was forced to take his own life. Where does that leave the rest of us? Our destiny is no brighter.”
Ludo let out a generic grunt. I moved on. I took a picture of the glass panel, which is to say I took a picture of the future that had been forbidden to the philosopher by way of that dark and stormy event at the center of modern history, that old persistent wreckage of the world wars, the human carnage, the unutterable scale of that mass genocide from which I doubt we will ever recover. In the picture, my shadow was superimposed both on the glass surface, which is inscribed with a German verse I couldn’t read, and on the sapphire waves churning in the background: my death, my ghostly pewter-colored double, my shadow, superimposed on that impossible future.
“Let me see,” Ludo demanded. The camera fell out of my hands. Ludo swatted at it like an impetuous child. Now he was holding the camera, looking at the photograph. “Try again,” he said, with a dismissive wave of his hand. “This time without the shadow.” He acted as if my shadow, my negative—and I, by extension—were a problem, an interference that needed to be eradicated. I didn’t say a word after that. I emerged from the Benjamin memorial and stood under a struggling olive tree near the cemetery. Ludo sat on a rock like Rodin’s The Thinker, head in hand. I ignored him. At some point, he lit his pipe. He leaned back on a rock to stargaze. I watched that same sky in silence. The dark silky folds of evening descended through the retreating light. Ludo’s trail of smoke rose against it, a ghostly thread eclipsing, like a secondary ethereal world, the falling darkness.
We started to drift even further apart after that. Ludo started coming home late. A few times, unbeknownst to him, I followed him to work and saw him leaning in the door frame of this or that colleague’s office, casually drawing smoke through his pipe. Once I saw him sitting at his desk, leaning back, enlarging his chest. The Tentacle of Ice was standing over him. I stayed away. I kept to my bed. I convalesced from the fresh punches of life. The apartment took on a morose atmosphere. Ludo and I started to take bigger stabs at each other, to punish each other with silence. Even Agatha seemed disconsolate. I could hardly stand to see her that way. One night I walked in on Ludo while he was working at his desk. He was leaning over a stack of books. He turned to look at me. He had a weary expression on his face. I proposed we go on another pilgrimage.
“Pilgrimages heal the heart,” I suggested, picking up his umbrella and pointing it at his chest. He pulled on the end of the umbrella and reeled me in.
“Straddle me,” he said.
We undressed. I got on top of him. When we were done, he leaned his sweaty head against my chest. He panted like a traveler spent from a long journey around the world. Our boundless magnetic lust helped us to recover. Sex had become the only thread holding us together. I felt limited, empty in a different way than I usually did, sick of my own story.
A week later, on the first day of spring, we set off to hike the Canigó with the other pilgrims. We embarked on the Pilgrimage of the Catalan Resuscitator.
It was June when we crossed the Spanish-French border in Ludo’s car. We were headed to Saint Michel de Cuxa, in the Conflent region of France. Agatha, Mercè, and Remedios slept in the back seat. Gheorghe and Paola followed close behind on her scooter. I watched the stars shine through the black sky with their dead light. I watched spongy patches of fog drift over the plump moon. When the sun finally rose, it released a peach-colored light. The moon looked thin, transparent. I looked in the rearview mirror. Gheorghe had his arms wrapped tightly around Paola’s slim figure; he had a highly unpleasant expression, likely the result of hardly being able to breathe against the wind. He had forgotten to bring a helmet.