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Call Me Zebra

Page 18

by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi


  I walked out of the museum in tears. The floodgates had opened. I sat on the staircase leading down to the internal courtyard. There were palms growing in terra-cotta vases. The sky was darker, the air colder. A security guard walked up to me. He had blue eyes and a thin face, a pronounced jaw and blackened teeth that were broken and had sharp reptilian edges.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked in Catalan. He sat next to me. There was a knowing kindness in his voice. He was a guardian of art.

  I told him the truth. “I’m crying because of Franco’s evil and pompous penis and the many ways in which it sabotaged, with its dimpled little head, an entire nation of people.”

  The security guard laughed a painful laugh. He said, “You don’t have hair on your tongue!”

  “It’s true,” I confirmed. “I’m a straight shooter.”

  I explained to him a very complicated thing, a thing not everyone would have the capacity to grasp. I told him that I speak directly because in order to stay alive I must always work to make up for the time I’ve lost due to the fact that, as an ill-fated citizen of this negligible world, I am subjected to being constantly attacked by history and that I have been trained by my literary-minded ancestors to combat the dulling effects of the psychic and emotional wounds caused by these violent attacks with verbal efficiency. Language is my sword, I told him. I may be gored by history, but I hack away at its horns with the ethereal sword of literature. I don’t win. But I’m able to keep myself at ground zero. I survive in order to leave testimony.

  “I understand better than I can express,” he said. “We Catalans respect directness. We are not like the gold-loving yet provincial Spanish who weave a web so tangled that even the Argentines, who live near the South Pole, thousands of kilometers from here, have gotten tangled in it.”

  He removed a silk handkerchief adorned with the Catalan flag of independence from his pocket. He offered it to me to wipe my tears. I dabbed my face with those four vertical stripes of blood.

  I told him that where I come from, when we are shocked by something someone says, we register our surprise by saying, I grew hairs on my tongue.

  Then I said: “See, my friend, the world is so much more interconnected than we are willing to admit. If someone without hair on their tongue from your home speaks to someone from mine, they immediately grow hairs on theirs!”

  We both laughed a great deal at this. Then I walked home again, having safely swallowed my tears. Oh, the guard of art and I, I thought to myself, we are like fingernail and flesh, an expression my father and I had adopted when we were in Catalonia long ago and that I chose to adopt again now.

  In order to sink deeper into the past, in order to drill into my forgetfulness so that my buried memories could resurface, I walked to Parc de la Ciutadella. I had walked there many times with my father. It was a walk of victory. The Catalans had thrown down the fort Philip V had built during the War of Spanish Secession. Philip V had launched cannons against the Catalans, aiming with his rectal hole. He had leveled the neighborhood of El Born, razed it to the ground, and driven its inhabitants under its fallen stones like ants and cockroaches in a gelid draft. Centuries later, the Catalans had reclaimed the space and turned it into a magnificent garden—Parc de la Ciutadella—a field of sensorial pleasure. I sat on a bench. I looked around. I contemplated. To attain joie de vivre, I concluded, one has to dig through the palimpsest of grief; there is no way around it. I looked up from the shady paths hugging the palm trees and magnolias, and saw the silhouette of the Temple Expiatori del Sagrat Cor sitting on the summit of Tibidabo in the distance. The sky was the color of ink, with indigo threads running through it. Beneath that sky, Tibidabo looked as soft and plush as a crib. I got up and walked to the Cascada, with its monumental waterfall and pond. A few geese were languidly drifting across the pond’s mint-colored waters. When they approached the waterfall, they circled around with knowing eyes and came back again, taking in a 360-degree view of their surroundings. It occurred to me as I watched them that they had it better than anyone. They were always surveying their space, keeping an eye on things. It was clear I had to do the same. I had to embark on a Pilgrimage of Perspective.

  I realized if I traveled to the city’s highest vantage points—Montjuïc, Tibidabo, the Christopher Columbus monument, Park Güell, this or that rooftop—I could, in fact, turn Barcelona around in the palm of my hand as if it were a Rubik’s Cube. I walked back to the port and rode the last cable car up Montjuïc. From there, I looked at the city’s rooftops, at the wretched statue of Christopher Columbus, at the spires of the cathedral, at the darkening glass of the cone of Torre Agbar, at Tibidabo and the angled Sagrat Cor facing out at the sea. Further west, there were the hills of Montseny that looked like sculpted black mist. I had already gone up to Park Güell. The only other peak I could make it to before the day’s end was an unpleasant one, to say the least. I had to face the devil himself. No. Worse. I had to go up his rear end.

  Why had I come to such a fecund conclusion? Because the view had allowed me to gain insight into the fact that the New and the Old Worlds formed a single unbroken fabric stitched together willy-nilly by the blood-stained hands of white imperialists. After all, Christopher Columbus had returned to the Port of Barcelona after traveling the high seas to what, from his paltry point of view, was the “unknown.” So, I concluded, it is my duty to train my nose to detect an approaching assailant from as far away as the back of the beyond by sniffing the stench of Christopher Columbus’s rear end. I—a living dead—whose heart had been flattened into a sheet of paper due to excess grief, a sheet that had turned as brittle as ice through overexposure to the biting draft of history, needed all the lead time I could get. I needed all the advantage I could cultivate.

  I walked down the flank of Montjuïc and over to the port. I went inside the Christopher Columbus monument, paid four euros—money well spent—and rode the elevator to the top. I stood in the round, anus-shaped room, and looked out at the pudgy-faced explorer’s crooked finger, which was supposedly pointing at the so-called New World. By the time I turned around to look at the city, night had fallen. It was too dark. Nothing more could be seen. It was as if the light had permanently gone out of the universe. It had been beaten back by the hand of violence.

  As I took the elevator back down, I remembered my father’s words. “Child,” he had said to me. “You must mourn your mother’s death through literature. If we, the ill-fated, begin to cry, we risk drowning in our own tears. What will we have achieved then? Life is bitter, time remorseless, and people remain civilized only so long as their own needs aren’t threatened. Not a second longer. They will suck the marrow out of your bones if you let them.” I remembered, too, that at the sound of those words my small body had ached with the sting of hollowness. I felt the needle of betrayal prick at my void. As a remedy, I whispered the great poet Pitarra’s words, which were later repeated by the novelist Roig, both of whom my father had translated and transcribed. I said: “Al fossar de les moreres no s’hi enterra cap traïdor!” There are no traitors buried in the Grave of the Mulberries! On September 11, 1989, the year we had arrived in Barcelona, Pitarra’s quote had been inscribed into a concave metal memorial in an empty square in La Ribera. At the top of the slender, curved memorial, a single flame burns night and day in honor of the Catalan heroes who fell on September 11, 1714, when Barcelona was besieged during the War of Spanish Succession. I thought of other September elevenths, of the thread of violence that connects us all: September 11, 1697 (the ruthless Battle of Zenta, which precipitated the collapse of the Ottoman Empire); September 11, 1973 (the dark date of the U.S.-backed Chilean coup d’état, which led to the rise of the bloody dictator Pinochet—at that, I saluted Morales); and, finally, September 11, 2001 (the al-Qaeda attack on the United States, which gave the squint-eyed, red-faced Bush an opening to launch another reckless war in the greater region of my ill-fated birth, one more in a string of inconclusive wars that barrel on with no end in sight). E
very year on September 11, so many parts of the world are in mourning, proof of the interconnected fabric of being, which, as the Hosseinis well know, is fast brought into relief through the violence that plagues our pitiful species. By the time I was done recounting all those infamous dates, I was nearly in tears. I tilted my head back and reabsorbed those brackish waters. Have my organs eroded? I wondered. The elevator doors opened. I exited the monument, and before I knew it, I was immersed in the city again, walking its streets with no perspective whatsoever.

  A few days later, Ludo Bembo returned. When he asked me what I had been up to, I told him, without an ounce of resentment, that I had spent my days reading, walking, transcribing my father’s transcriptions, filling the pages of my notebook with the blood of literature, and then convalescing, sometimes alone, and sometimes in the company of that groggy, volatile bird, Taüt. I also told him that I had tried to get in touch with Quim Monzó, which was only half true. I had made an unresolved attempt at tracking the man down. To what end, I don’t know. I suppose I had a vague feeling that my time in his stuffed dwelling was running out, that things were coming to a head.

  I had unearthed what I had come to unearth in Barcelona. After all, by mourning my father’s death, I had discovered the residue of my mother. I had used my consciousness to unreel the yarn of time. This experience signaled to me that the void and its characteristic emptiness had been there all along—a latent condition—which had, upon my parents’ deaths, suddenly become manifest. So I had sunk as deep as I could into the portion of the void of exile that corresponded to Barcelona, the City of Bombs, the Rose of Fire. Where, I wondered, as I looked Ludo up and down, was I going to go next?

  “That’s excellent news,” Ludo said with a distracted air. He was sitting across from me, drumming his fingers on the dining table. What part of what I had shared was excellent? I wondered, scrutinizing him up and down. There was something different about him. He was leaning back in his chair very casually. He looked older, more self-possessed, consolidated in a way I hadn’t seen before. He was wearing a short-sleeve button-down shirt beneath his cardigan. I could see the crease of the sleeve under the wool every time he flexed his arms. Until then, he had always worn full-length sleeves. Anything else he considered improper. This sudden change was a red flag. No doubt about it. And, in fact, there was not just one but two red flags: to begin with, his typically rigid and outmoded choice in fashion and, to end with, the fact that he had suddenly broken that very same dress code. I moved from the dining-room table to the recamier to get a better look at him. I took note of the fact that he had zoned out halfway through my answer and of the carefree body language he had adopted—clear signs that he was, and continued to be, a compartmentalized man, a man whose head had been subdivided into casket-size boxes. In fact, I thought, intellectually speaking, he had regressed. A man living in exile, but who is afraid to walk to the edge of the abyss and peer into it, runs the risk of playing into the hand of the imperialists and the colonizers because he is cut off from his wounds and his ill-fated peers. How can a man like that be trusted? But, perhaps, I considered, that is not it. Perhaps, though it might not have appeared this way at first glance, his mannerisms may very well have been subconsciously designed to protect him from acknowledging the inherent pitfalls of our dynamic, the fight that had caused him to storm out of the apartment like a disheveled mummy. This denial, I considered, feeling yanked around by my thoughts, was productive in its own way because it allowed us to continue servicing our respective crotches. As it turned out, my suspicion of his foul nature was muddled by my desire for the warmth of his embrace, the curve of his penis. I stood there staring at him, confused by my mind’s chaotic clutter.

  “Why are you looking at me like that?” Ludo asked, brushing a few stray curls out of his face.

  “Like what?” I posed, leaning back into the recamier and petting the three famous crevices, digging my fingers into the charred holes.

  “Like what? You’re sitting all the way across the room and staring at me squint-eyed!”

  Was this his way of making peace after our fight? If he was going to appear and disappear at random, throwing salt into the Hosseini-shaped wounds carved in my heart by my ancestors’ deaths, then I had no choice but to push him away. Finally, I thought, a burst of clarity.

  “Squint-eyed? This is nothing,” I said. “Boy, do I have a story for you! You should have seen the woman I saw at the post office the other day. She was incredibly short and fat. Actually, scratch that. She was rotund—that’s a better word—so much so that her arms were floating laterally because there was a mass of flesh holding them up. And she had a tiny pink purse that she had managed to hook onto her arm; it stuck to her as if it had been glued. When her number was called, she slipped off the waiting room chair and rolled to the window. She was like a wheel that had been fixed with a purse!”

  “What does that have to do with anything?” he pressed.

  “You don’t think it’s funny?” I asked.

  “It is, but I don’t see the connection.”

  “Laugh and I’ll tell you.”

  He forced himself to laugh. A weak chitter emerged from his lips. I’d been hoping for something more committed, but I let it go.

  “The connection,” I declared, employing a diplomatic tone, “is that those are both examples of bodies in distress: I’m squint-eyed; the lady at the post office is rotund.”

  He seemed pleased enough with my answer. Or fed up and ready to change the subject. I couldn’t tell. When he asked me what I had been doing at the post office, I told him I was weighing my notebook. He didn’t show any interest. It had become impossible to get a read on him.

  As they famously say, delivery is key; there is no use laying facts at an opponent’s feet as if they deserved the red-carpet treatment. Ludo Bembo certainly didn’t. Not after disappearing on me only to reappear without explanation days later. And who knows what he’d been doing in between. Lecturing at the university in Girona or screwing the Tentacle of Ice.

  Sooner or later, I reasoned, an opportunity will come along that will allow me to employ the information I’ve gathered against him—the mental notes I’d been taking, the conclusions I’d come to during my walk—to my greatest advantage. I wouldn’t want to waste all the thinking I had done. Given the enormous sums of stupidity that afflict humankind, no one can deny that thinking is meant to be treated like a rare precious stone, guarded, pampered, secured in a vault. To be used with maximum discretion.

  One other thing was clear: Ludo Bembo was no black-toothed, blue-eyed, skeletal art guard who had been through the ringer and had acquired, as a result of his extreme suffering, both empathy and a sense of humor. He was a Bembo who had defected, breaking away from his ancestors, whose sweat and tears are still watering the fertile trenches of literature. He was a man who pretended to be working in the service of the Matrix of Literature but was nothing more than an amateur. Why had fate brought us together? Because, I suddenly decided, it was my job to get him back in line.

  I got up, walked across the room, and gave him a kiss on the lips. This was designed to disarm him. He grabbed my arm and pulled me onto his lap. We had sex then and there.

  Halfway through, he said, “I like it when you ride my dick like that.”

  I rode him harder. At some point, I have no idea why, I felt myself fuse with Don Quixote. I was riding Rocinante—that meek, skeletal horse of his—across the Castilian plains. I saw giant windmills in the distance. The blades were cutting the air the way history had chopped up my ancestors. I felt a fierce need to attack those windmills.

  “Faster, Rocinante!” I cried out.

  This energized Ludo. He cupped my ass and lifted me up and down as fast as he could. As soon as we were done, he asked: “Are you saying I need to gain weight?”

  “No,” I said, slightly out of breath.

  “Then why did you call me Rocinante? That horse was all bones!”

  “Never mind,” I
said. “Don’t worry about it.”

  Ludo leaned his head onto my shoulder. I could feel his moist breath on my neck. I patted him on the head. I said: “You’ve made progress. You’ve acknowledged that life is less truthful than literature.”

  He tried to say something, but I pressed his head against my chest and put my hand over his mouth to muffle the noises. Silly fool. He thought I was teasing him, so he playfully bit my finger.

  After that, Ludo and I proceeded in relative peace. One could even say, as the Flauberts and Prousts of the world would, that we spent days of trust, of joy, of profound companionship. Days without a cloud in sight. We had sex. We laughed over Quim Monzó’s assortment of trinkets. We teased the bird by hiding from him every time he made an appearance. Ludo cooked. I ate my heart out. I stuffed my void with his food.

 

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