Call Me Zebra

by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi

  Friday came and Ludo decided that we needed to get some air. A weekend in the great outdoors would give me a chance to ventilate my thoughts, a chance, he said, to build intimacy, to take my parents for a walk. I said nothing. I was in no mood to discuss my parents. Ever since my visit to the museum, my father had been less and less present. His absence—his manifest emptiness—was less felt. He wasn’t pressing his face against my void as often as he had been, and each time he did, he seemed slightly more decomposed than the last: His nails had begun to fall; his mustache, though longer, was thinning; his muscles and tissues were degenerating, leaving his dry skin clinging to his bones. He was in the process of disappearing. Ludo’s presence seemed to accelerate my father’s decay. I wondered if he was punishing me. I wondered if I hadn’t looked at Ecce Homo long enough when he’d asked me to. So I agreed to go with Ludo on a long drive up the coast. I told him that I was only motivated to do so because the brackish air of the sea would do my father some good. I could tell he had taken offense at that, but he said nothing. He swallowed his hurt feelings as if they were a pill.

  We drove up the rugged winding hills of the Costa Brava all weekend. Once we were out of the city, the road curved through mountains densely packed with pine, cork trees, aloe, cacti, eucalyptus. Near the French border, the wild jagged coastline gave way to the harsh mountainous regions of the Parc Natural del Cap de Creus, Dalí’s stomping ground. We arrived just before sundown and went up through the park all the way to the lighthouse. A soft beam of light was slowly circumnavigating the surrounding waters of the Mediterranean. Underfoot, the terrain was sharp, beige, black; full of holes, slits, craters. It looked like it had been sliced and hammered. We sat inside a rock that had been hollowed out by the waves. It was like a hammock made of stone. It was December. The winter sun was halfway down the sky. In the restaurant near the lighthouse, families were sitting down to order fresh fish, squid, octopus, sea urchins.

  Ludo said, “If you lean over the edge, you might be able to see the Cova de s’Infern.”

  I didn’t think anything of it. I leaned over to look at the Cave of Hell, a slanted slit in the rock that made the shadowy waters on the other side look like molten silver. By the time we got up to leave, the rocky, wind-battered plateau was backlit by a static orange-peel sky that gave me the impression of walking on the moon. I told Ludo as much.

  “I suppose so,” he said in his usual humorless manner.

  I turned back to look at the sea again. Below us, the Mediterranean, with its morbid, languorous temperament, looked vast, infinite, intimidating.

  We drove back down the coast. We stopped at the Cala de la Fosca because Ludo wanted to look at the famous castle that sits on the edge of the beach’s brass-colored cliffs. I walked along the shore barefoot. Ludo pushed his way up the cliff to the castle. He stopped at this or that rock to wave forcefully in my direction and yell that I was missing out or to chastise me for not exerting sufficient physical effort, for neglecting to capitalize on the complicity and happiness that our drive up and down the coast promised to offer. I yelled back to Ludo that only goats are meant to hike up such a steep cliff and that, besides, my feet had gone numb from wading in the cold winter water.

  “It’s not that steep,” he yelled.

  I ignored him. He looked smaller the farther up the cliff he hiked.

  Overhead, the sky was white, as thin as glass, about to vanish. Ludo disappeared behind a wall of pines, and I waited for my father to stir. Nothing happened. I looked for dead fish. I found one at the opposite end of the bay from the castle—a sea bass—that had been tangled up in driftwood and kelp. It had been pecked at by seagulls; it smelled like death. I crouched down and sniffed it, hoping to trigger my father’s presence, to get his blood to move the way it had on those last days of his life when I would take him to Brighton Beach and he would dig his cane into the sand and morosely move his eyes from side to side, furious at his looming death in the so-called New World but resigned to it nonetheless. I needed confirmation that he was still there. That he hadn’t turned his back on me. What would I do if I was left with no one other than Ludo, a faulty descendent of the Bembos? But nothing worked. My void remained hollow, empty. I was about to faint from the rotten smell of the dead fish when I heard Ludo’s voice. He was right behind me. I turned to look at him. He had a rabbity grin on his face. He was standing there with his arms at his waist.

  “I’m going to take you out to dinner,” he said. “You don’t have to eat that.”

  “What’s it to you?” I asked, getting up from the sand.

  In the interim, the sky had darkened. It was a deep navy blue, and a few hazy stars had appeared. The water was lapping gently against the shore. It was no longer olive-colored, vintage green; it looked black and viscous. We were the only two people on the beach.

  “Nothing,” he said. He took my face in his hands. Then, with all the sweetness in the world, he said, “What am I going to do with you?”

  A moment earlier, he’d had me perilously leaning over the edge of a cliff to look at the Cave of Hell. Now he was all tenderness. I couldn’t make heads or tails of it.

  “I’m not an object,” I informed him tersely. “I’m not a bronze statue you need to decide where best to display!”

  “A bronze statue?”

  “Whatever! What I’m saying is, I’m not an impulse purchase!”

  “I didn’t say you were,” he said. Then he added, “We’re having a great time. Let’s not get started.”

  “Fine,” I said, mentally going over my notes.

  He had it coming. He was asking for it.

  Ludo was always concerned with his stomach. Earlier in the day, on our way up to the Cap de Creus, we had stopped at the beaches and marshlands of Roses. We had eaten cheese-and-pork sandwiches, walked along the shore, jumped from metallic salt-corroded rock to rock. We had picked flowers in the hills.

  The next day, we drove farther south to have lunch in Sant Feliu de Guixols. We stopped to eat at the Nou Casino la Constancia, a neomedieval building with arabesque features. The building had a romantic flair about it, but the waiters were slow, rude, indifferent. Their white shirts were stained, their black vests unbuttoned. They were making inconclusive efforts at resurrecting the charm of the Old World.

  I never paid for our meals. I couldn’t bring myself to spend the little money I had left in the world on anything other than shelter and mint-and-onion soup. So Ludo fed me, bought me beach towels, sweaters, hiking shoes. I didn’t care.

  That night, we drove back north to have dinner in L’Escala, a fishing village famous for its anchovies. The beach was dotted with tiny black boats, which had been laid to rest upside down on the shore. We sat on the sand and looked out at the sea. Ludo lit up his pipe. The smoke lifted into the night sky in slow, steady streams. There was a thin mist hovering over the water. Everything looked black, blue, white; the edges of the landscape shone with a metallic tinge. The moon emerged momentarily and then disappeared behind thick clouds, exhausting all light from the sky. We barely spoke. Or rather, we spoke only of banal things: his friends, Tuscan wine, his dreams of owning an olive grove. I said next to nothing. It was the only way to guarantee peaceful conversation. No one wants to have their nose rubbed in manure. No one wants to be accountable to the truth. I was alone in my efforts. Alone even when I was in Ludo’s company because, like everyone else, he refused to acknowledge his own hurt.

  We had dinner in a café near the water. We ate fish-head soup, black rice cooked in large shallow clay dishes, cod baked with garlic, olives, tomato. We drank a flask of wine. Ludo told me about a friend of his who had lost his mind because he had gone foraging for mushrooms and had accidentally eaten a poisonous one.

  “What does he do now?” I asked.

  “He wanders. His mother takes care of him,” he said, and that was that.

  The waiter brought me a fruity cocktail with a decorative umbrella and a beer for Ludo. I removed the decorative umb
rella and tucked it behind Ludo’s ear.

  “This isn’t Hawaii,” he said.

  “The world is a lot more contaminated than you think,” I answered, and then I got up and left.

  I walked out onto the beach. I grabbed a stick and carved the following lines from Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo into the sand: Why do I know a few more things? Why am I so clever altogether? I was hoping to bring my father back. Nothing. And what’s more? There was Ludo again, standing behind me.

  “What are you doing?” he asked scornfully. “We were still eating.”

  With that black sky behind him and the mist that was hovering over the water, he looked like Nosferatu: elongated in all the wrong ways.

  “I am being one with Nietzsche,” I answered.

  “So you can’t be one with me, but you can be one with Nietzsche?” he challenged.

  “I couldn’t have said it better myself,” I answered in a mellowing tone.

  That’s when he lost it.

  He pointed out that my features had a mercurial quality about them that put him ill at ease. “Your expression changes in a flash from grave introspection to childish mischief, or from a callous indifference to anguish,” he said, as if he were reading from a book or, even worse, my notebook. “Sometimes,” he said, “you look as if you were suddenly being skinned alive. What is wrong with you?”

  “Why do you sound like a text?” I inquired.

  “A text?” he mocked.

  What had happened to Ludo’s silence on all matters regarding my ill-fatedness? Ludo’s literary disengagement? I considered the possibility that there were multiple versions of the same Ludo Bembo, two physical versions of the same man, each version inclined to duality, making four Ludo Bembos altogether. He seemed to have become me. He was speaking the way I would have spoken to him had I ever had the opportunity to share the mental notes I had made as a result of all my tireless thinking. I asked him to sit down on one of the boats. I even wiped off the sand to make sure he would be comfortable. He sat down with a hopeful expression on his face. I started mildly. I explained to him that most of our issues originated, on the one hand, as a result of his insistence on pursuing pleasure, on his own self-love, which he had confused with love for me, and on the other hand, from his apparent ignorance of the poetic and philosophical efforts exerted by his ancestors, the Bembos, efforts that he was recklessly throwing into the wind by living as if life were a loyal dog that walked at his heels.

  It was at that moment that my father returned. His head emerged in my void. Seconds later, it sank back down in the deep dark folds of the abyss. I was devastated. I looked down at the sand. For a moment, I wasn’t sure where I was. I had the impression the sand was lifting, peeling off the ground to blind me. I looked around to see if there were bombs falling, if there were corpses splayed in the corners of the landscape. I could hear Ludo murmuring something about how I was coldhearted, how I acted as if I had overcome my need for affection, for the company of my fellow humans.

  Without looking up at him, I said: “I haven’t touched rock bottom yet. If you think this is hard, wait till I get to the bottom of the abyss. I still have tenderness. The window opens now and again.”

  This left him speechless. We said nothing to each other for the rest of the evening. We drove back to Barcelona. I didn’t think he was going to come up to Quim Monzó’s apartment with me. But he did. He even stayed over. He fell asleep with a hopeful grin on his face. I stayed up the whole night. What, I wondered, thinking back on Ludo’s words, would happen to me if I let go of him and my father didn’t return? What would I do if there wasn’t even a single thread connecting me to this cruel and trifling universe? I spent hours searching his face, staring at that hopeful grin. Perhaps, I thought, there was a way forward, an opening at the bottom of the abyss through which I could climb back into the world.

  At dawn, I got out of bed. While Ludo continued to sleep, I paced the corridor reading my notebook. Reading was my only remedy, my only recourse; it was the only tool I had for navigating the void. Taüt was perched on the arm of the swivel wall lamp. He was sleeping. His sulfur-crested head was tucked into his plumed back. He looked fluffier and squatter than ever.

  I walked past the room where Ludo’s naked body lay stretched out between the four tall bedposts. He was clinging to my pillow, and the whiteness of his skin next to the red of the sheets made him look like an octopus wrapped around the rocky protrusion of a coral reef. Who is he? I wondered again. How is it that he has come into my life? I couldn’t ask the question enough.

  I carried on down the corridor. I looked into the bird’s room to see if it had eaten. I always made sure to pour fresh seeds into his cage bowls. But, as usual, the bird, fellow steward of death, hadn’t eaten a thing.

  I returned to the living room.

  There was a gauzy light coming through the windows. I set my notebook down on the coffee table. The next time I opened it, I read: Love is a divine architect who, according to Plato, came down to the world so that everything in the universe might be linked together. I recognized the handwriting. It was Ludo’s. So, I concluded, he had interfered with my notebook. The moon was shining through the windows with a borrowed light. I thought back to the red flags. I had been right to be wary of him. What could be more manipulative than to invade another with love?

  I had to avenge myself. I went in search of Ludo’s books, the ones he had brought back with him after his supposed visit to the rare-book dealer, his friend Fausta. He had left them in the corner of the kitchen. Those poor forgotten books—all of them historical dictionaries—sitting on the kitchen counter as if they were steaks waiting to be seasoned. On a napkin, I penned a citation from the diaries of Josep Pla, who I had thought of upon entering Quim Monzó’s apartment for the first time, an author who defends the banal, who is straightforward, whose mind is a machine full of extremely sensible sentences, all of which he wrote several times over, because he revised his diary for so many years that eventually he was plagiarizing himself, citing and falsifying himself until there were so many Josep Plas that the original one could no longer be found; he was a man of unapologetic contradictions, a literary hero, and the best choice for retaliating against Ludo Bembo’s interference in my notebook. Here is the citation I wrote on the napkin, transcribed verbatim: When one’s heart hasn’t turned to stone, one cannot kill off vanity, the painful longing to be heard, flattered, loved, cherished, et cetera. Our vain heart leads us to do the most absurd things and embark on lunatic initiatives: to interfere in other people’s lives, to catechize them in one way or another—in a word (and this I underlined for emphasis), to invade their solitude.

  While I was leafing through the first dictionary to insert the napkin, I found something far worse that the sentimental verse Ludo had copied into my notebook. Embedded in its frail yellow pages was a folio that was, believe it or not, more manipulative than the quote about the divine nature of love. The folio, too, was in Ludo’s handwriting. He had crafted his letters to look as elegant and poised as the font of a medieval manuscript. His f looked like a flamingo, his s like a swan, his m like an orangutan. He had conducted an in-depth analysis of the history of the word inquietare.

  The word leapt off the page and slapped me in the face. Why that word in particular? Inquietare, I repeated to myself, mentally archiving its various unsettling definitions as I returned to the recamier: to disturb someone (gravely); to block or alienate someone; to diminish their peace and quiet.

  The pair of red flags, which had initially been waved in my face by the rupture in Ludo Bembo’s dress code, were twice validated. What more proof of his caprice did I need?

  I considered eliminating him from my life. After all, I had spent most of my days on this ghastly universe in grave solitude. Why should I cling to another—a non-Hosseini—now? I walked into the bathroom. I felt a fool for having let him into my life. I looked at my face in the mirror. I couldn’t remember how old I was: twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-five
. I could have been any age. I was young and old at the same time. Then I saw my mother’s flattened face, wounded and bruised, looking back at me. I felt lonelier than ever. I reached out to touch her face, to soothe her. But her image vanished from the mirror’s reflective surface. “What am I going to do about Ludo?” I murmured into the still air. I felt as though, without him, I risked turning into dust, into ashes that would be scattered about the world by the gale of history. He was the only person, other than my mother and father and Morales, who had known me, and as a result, my fate had become inextricably linked to his. There was no getting rid of him. Even if I tried, I would fail. I had grown accustomed to him. I even needed his stubborn resolve. Without it, there was nothing anchoring me to the world.

  I went to the living room and sat on the recamier, a trail of images running through my head. That dry and sordid no-man’s-land, my father and I and our ass, a trio of lamentable figures. I thought to myself, exile begins long before the exiled person is banished from her country. One is first expelled psychologically, emotionally, intellectually; physical exile is the final blow. My father and his father and his father’s father had all been condemned to death. What for? For being thinkers. I got a whiff of the Caspian. It smelled like oil, watermelon, moist soil, rusted beams, a forest of eucalyptus. I thought of Dante the Pilgrim, of the words of warning he had received: You will know how hard a path it is for one who goes ascending and descending others’ stairs.

  That death sentence, I thought, hangs over my head. Perhaps it is best to finish things off, conclude the long trial once and for all. My thoughts had regressed. They folded over themselves and spun a tangled web. I got off the recamier and paced the corridor—the real corridor of the apartment and the symbolic corridor of my exile. The apartment seemed different again. Certain objects I hadn’t noticed before stood out in unnatural relief against the background chaos, the most striking of which was a desk globe, its surface wiped clear. The globe was devoid of land and water masses; the representation of the world had either eroded or been scraped off, leaving a pure white surface, as though the universal clock had been set back to the beginning of the beginning. Or rather, I thought, correcting my thinking, the desk globe represented a nonplace where time did not exist, or if it did, its fabric was undifferentiated—the past, present, and future had folded over one another, rendering their boundaries indivisible, unclear.