Call Me Zebra(99)

“Save your sandwiches for later,” I said to the pilgrims. They all got up. One injured soul after another. A sour mood hung over them.

We hiked up the plateau for several hours in silence. I could hear the pilgrims panting behind me. Ludo, that shortsighted amateur, hung his head and stared at the ground. I gazed into the distance, into the future of my past, which we were fast approaching. What lay before us were abrupt cliffs, ravines, slender cascades rippling into small pools, twisted strata of crystalline rocks. Up ahead, there was an elongated terrace of creased and pleated rock marked by depressions where the mountain seemed to suddenly drop off. I took in that crisscrossing labyrinth of sierras, massifs separated by bright valleys and shallow glaciers. To lift the mood, I turned around and recited verses from “Canigó,” Verdaguer’s epic poem. My mustached father had recited those same verses to me.

“The Canigó is an immense magnolia,” I declared, “that blooms in an offshoot of the Pyrenees.”

“The fog is thickening,” Agatha gently observed.

“What does that have to do with anything?” I asked.

“There’s no one else walking these trails. We don’t even have a map,” Mercè protested through the black cloth that continued to hang from her face. She was walking arm in arm with Remedios.

“The blind leading the blind,” I said.

“No one is blind here,” Ludo interjected. “This is a bad sign—a sign of dangerous weather.”

“Dr. Bembo, fog is the state of the world, nothing more, nothing less,” I retorted. “It is our job as pilgrims to stand at the brink of the void. You cannot be a pilgrim and be invertebrate!”

An argument ensued. Here and there, I heard sighs of despair. I heard Paola complain to Gheorghe about her hip. The pair of them were in a grave mood.

“We’re lost,” Mercè cried out through that cloth of death. “We’re lost! We won’t be able to find our way back again.”

“And the light is already waning,” Remedios added.

“Isn’t that what God is for?” I asked her. “To fill your spirit with light when you most need it?”

She fell back silent. But it was true. The light was waning. It was also true that we had all overexerted ourselves. We had pushed our bodies up the wide pedestal of the mountain. We had hiked through forests and past streams, up steep green slopes, and crossed paths flanked by sharp sheets of silver rock.

“Mercè,” I said. “I suggest you remove that cloth from your face. What is wrong with you?”

“There’s nothing wrong with me. I’m just shy,” she said.

I couldn’t take it anymore. I grabbed a stick and whipped it at their ankles. “Onward!” I barked like a shepherd’s dog. I herded them up the mountain. We pushed our way up the steep slopes in fits and bursts. I could see their arms and legs pumping through the thickening fog. Vertical walls of rock were closing in on us. Gusts of wind were barreling down. It sounded like a million knives were being sharpened at once. The wind was burning our skin. I scooped Taüt off my shoulder and held him in my arms. Agatha put Petita on a leash. I could hear the dog chattering in the cold wind. Finally, I admitted that we were lost. There were no signs anywhere. We had gone off the trail. I no longer had the faintest notion where we were in this maze of peaks and knolls.

“Let’s take five,” I said, and we sat down against a wall of rock. I opened my notebook to a random page.

“Not this again,” Ludo said.

“How many times do I have to tell you that these sentences are our roadmap to the future?”

There was a strong gale, after which Remedios finally broke.

“What does the book say?” she asked, on the verge of tears.

“Thank you for asking, Remedios,” I said, rather joylessly.

“According to the book, this book that is the book of books, its sentences highways that allow readers to travel in multiple temporalities simultaneously”—I took in a breath against the wind that was blowing everywhere—“according to this book, terrorists are those who desire absolute freedom and who behave during their lifetimes not like people living among other living people”—I paused to swallow the soot spreading through the atmosphere—“but like beings deprived of being, like universal thoughts, pure abstractions beyond history, judging and deciding in the name of all of history.”

Ah, the prophetic Blanchot.

“We are literary terrorists,” I said to my companions. I heard that word—terrorists—echo back from the mess of rocks. I looked up. There was no one there. Everyone had dispersed. One minute they were sitting against the chiseled facade of the mountain, and the next they were nowhere to be seen. I was alone with Taüt, sitting in a dusty bowl. I felt abandoned, alone once again with the heavy burden of my illfated past.

Time folded over itself. The gates of memory opened. I leaned over the edge of the mountain and took in the dizzying expanse beneath me. Memories emerged like troops from the dark recesses of my consciousness. I tried to push them away from my face with my sick hand. I felt the present distend into the past, contract toward the future. I heard my father’s muffled voice pour out through the gaps in his waning mustache. I was standing next to him at the top of Mount Sahand.

“I spit on you,” he said, “you bunch of patriarchal nepotists!”