Call Me Zebra(98)



Ahead of us, the Canigó was in full view. A gorgeous beast.

I turned to look at the pilgrims in the back seat. Agatha’s face looked pudgy in the morning light. Remedios’s cheeks had acquired a purple hue; she looked as wounded as ever. Mercè had hung a black cloth over her head. She looked like a corpse mourning her own death.

“Get that bird away from me,” Ludo briskly ordered. Taüt, who was perched on my shoulder, had extended his neck across the divide to nibble on Ludo’s ear. The bird had a knack for provoking him. Ludo turned to look at me with a troubled visage. I didn’t appreciate his rejection of the fumes of my mother. “Stay in your own zone,” he reproached. His breath smelled like garlic.

“In case you’d forgotten,” I observed, “as exiles, Taüt and I lead a zoneless existence.”

“Jesus Christ!” Ludo exclaimed. He was extremely agitated.

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A few hours later, we were standing in the verdant valley surrounding Saint Michel de Cuxa, looking at the Benedictine abbey’s cloister and crypt, parts of which had been dismantled and transferred to New York City. I remembered standing with my back to the Cloisters in Fort Tryon Park. Time folded over itself, an unconscionable map. Behind me were the Cuxa, the Bonnefont, the Saint-Guilhem, the Trie. Below me, the Hudson, green, serpentine, slithered lazily by. More than a year had passed since my father had been swallowed by this soggy earth.

I stepped back and searched the steely summits of that wide mountain. There was something violent about the Canigó: the mass of elongated rocks, the snowcapped summit, the alpine forests that grew out of its flanks and passes. I looked at the pilgrims. There was nothing lithe or nimble about any of us. The only athletic being among us was Petita, whom Agatha had brought along for the day. She was sniffing at my heels.

We began our climb. Two hours later, we were barely one-third of the way up the mountain. Already, we needed rest. The pilgrims sat on a pile of rocks near a brook. They ate their sandwiches, caught their breath.

“Sensitive being of the world,” I said to the dog. “What can I do for you?”

“You’re enabling that dog’s anxiety,” Ludo interfered righteously, fixed to his station under a row of trees.

“How do you know that her anxiety isn’t a direct consequence of her awareness of the deep and irresolvable contradictions of the world?”

A crow landed near Ludo’s feet and busied itself pecking at the gravel. I approached him. Petita followed at my heels.

“How is she supposed to reconcile being beaten and abandoned with the grace bestowed upon her by Agatha and, except you, the rest of the household?”

I had never had a home in my life, and yet that word—household—rolled right off my tongue, leaving behind a saccharine taste in my mouth. Ludo broke off a piece of his sandwich and threw it at the crow.

“And what you are doing to Taüt?” he said. “You think that’s normal?”

Doing? I wasn’t doing anything to the bird that hadn’t already been done. I told Ludo that the abusive machinations driving Taüt’s domestication had been set into motion long before I came into the picture. I had stolen the bird, but only because I had detected that the bird carried the fumes of my mother. Still, I somberly wondered, what was the effect of this transition on Taüt? I reflected quietly. Had I further distorted the bird through my actions? Had I intoxicated him with and then squeezed the fumes of my mother out of him? I felt a gnawing ache in my gut.

“We are all in the mud,” I finally said to Ludo. “Thinking beings and feeling beings and trees and the wind and the objects we surround ourselves with. We are all in the mud together.”

“But you,” he said, “spend most of your time ignoring reality!”

“Reality? Whose reality am I ignoring? Because I’m sweating bullets trying to untangle the great knot of my past.”

“At the expense of the present?” he retorted sarcastically.

“Yes,” I said, with the cool detachment of an investigator. “I plan to salvage my integrity even if it causes me pain. And besides, time isn’t linear. Minutes don’t stack in an orderly fashion. They aren’t soldiers.”

“Even if it causes others pain. Try to wrap your mind around that,” he said.

I looked up at the sky. A thick fog had begun to roll in. Suddenly, it was evident: I had caused Ludo Bembo pain. I felt as if someone were drilling holes in my heart. I imagined those holes, and an image of Dalínian proportions appeared to me. I tried to push the image away.

“We have to get going,” I said. “A rational man would understand that.”

The weather was shifting. We had a long way to the Pic del Canigó. I had been there with my father in June, on the night before Saint John’s Day when a fire is lit near the cross at the summit, which is covered in the Catalan flag. We had kept vigil with strangers through the night and lit torches on the fire. Not in the spirit of Catholicism but in the spirit of Catalan identity. I remembered watching the torches light up, one after the other, down the flank of the mountain. I remembered seeing the chain of people, their silhouettes against the orange flames that licked the dark night air. Now, a gelid breeze was barreling down the mountain pass. It didn’t matter what time of year it was. The weather turned quickly in the Pyrenees.

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