His question echoed in my ear. How had I been? As I scanned the sky, I felt myself grow wary. No one had ever asked me that. I wondered if he was feigning interest in order to gain information about the aftereffects of his unethical interference with my notebook. I decided to quote Nietzsche, the best armor in the world.
“As summa summarum,” I said, “I was healthy; as an angle, as a specialty, I was a decadent!”
“Can’t you ever produce an answer that’s yours?” Ludo scowled, letting go of the banister and crossing his arms. He looked me straight in the eyes.
“Produce?”
“Yes,” he said. “Produce.”
There was something going on with the drunk men downstairs. Some disturbance that caused them to let out intermittent cries of anguish.
“I don’t produce answers,” I said. “Unlike you, I consider my speech acts very carefully. Besides, most of them come from beyond the frontiers of life. They are”—I swallowed—“sepulcher messages.”
“Madonna santa,” Ludo cried, looking away.
“Are you religious?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “No, look.”
He pointed his finger at the group of drunks. They were circled around a body. There was a great commotion outside, but I couldn’t see or hear anything clearly. Just then, Bernadette reappeared wearing a furry pink onesie and proceeded to close all the windows and shutters, to draw the curtains. Her arms, covered in the pink, furry pajama suit, flailed about as she stomped around trying to seal us in.
Down below, the drunks emitted a long, steady howl. That howl was echoed by a weaker, whinier voice that seemed to emanate from whomever was lying at the center, supine on the ground, beneath their greasy heads.
I took advantage of the chaos to spy inside Bernadette’s room. It was narrow, windowless, gray; it resembled the room portrayed by my great-great-grandfather, Shams Abbas Hosseini, in The Hung Mallard. All I needed to restage the painting in three dimensions was some rope and a dead duck. I took this as evidence that Bernadette’s room was my room. Nothing could have been clearer. I inspected the space carefully. The closet was empty, the desk bare. Bernadette had packed her things in neatly stacked boxes. She was moving out. The only personal object left in view was a magazine cutout of Ratzinger, which she had pinned to the wall above a narrow bed with white sheets neatly tucked around a thin mattress. The bed looked like a gurney.
I returned to the living room, and announced, “Ludo, I can take Bernadette’s room. You won’t even know I’m here.”
Fernando suddenly appeared, screaming at Bernadette.
“Ma che fai? Ma che fai?” He approached from the opposite side of the room and tackled Bernadette, who was drawing the shutters closed.
“Lasciala stare!” Agatha announced from the sofa.
“What’s happening?” I asked Ludo.
“Fernando is telling Bernadette to stop closing the shutters, and Agatha is telling Fernando to let her be,” he said resentfully. I was about to remind him that I didn’t need a translator because both my father and Morales had dutifully taught me Italian, that what I needed was context, when he added: “Fernando needs all the light he can get to work on his sculptures and Bernadette likes to nap in total darkness.”
“It’s morning,” I said.
He frowned. “It’s all beyond the scope of my comprehension.”
I could tell he was softening up again. The surrounding chaos had made of us a pair of adoring insects on a floating leaf. Even Taüt seemed more tender. Bernadette freed herself from Fernando’s grip. She was going for it. She was closing the house down.
“Would you say she is perennially hopeless?” I asked Ludo.
“I would say she is.”
It was a rare moment of agreement.
“What were you pointing at?” I asked.
“Didn’t you see? One of the drunks slid off the wall,” he said. “I think he’s dead.”
At that, his roommates all froze in place.
“Un morto? Ma che dici?” the three of them asked in unison, a traveling Italian chorus. It seemed Fernando understood the word dead regardless of any language barrier. I was beginning to like him as much as I liked Agatha. I was surprised to feel this way. I was surprised to like anyone at all. Perhaps I had found my tribe of exiles. I imagined stitching my life—which is, of course, a living death—to theirs.
Agatha rushed to the terrace. She pushed the shutters open. We all leaned out to see. It was true. One of the drunks had slid off the wall and fallen face-first onto the concrete of the parking lot. His carton of Don Simon had exploded from the impact. There was red wine running in serpentine paths down the cracks in the parking lot. His friends had vanished.
“Is he really dead?” I asked, remembering the way my father’s skin had turned pale and his muscles had gone stiff after his death. I felt my face slacken again, become blank and expressionless once more.
“I think so,” Agatha said somewhat desperately.
I had a vague feeling that the man, like my father, would find another way to go on. Even while lying there dead, he seemed as stubborn as wood.
“We shouldn’t all be standing here,” Agatha said. “This terrace isn’t trustworthy. A view like this comes at a price,” she said, looking in my direction and then past me at the man lying face down on the ground and then farther out at the Pyrenees, bald and exposed without the dense morning fog.
“Which drunk is it?” I asked.
“The one who showed us his asshole,” Ludo said with some hesitation.
A dog scuttled onto the terrace.
“Petita!” Agatha said, and leaned down to kiss the dog on the forehead. It was a miserable little thing. Taüt guffawed at the sight of her. Next to that mangy dog, he looked like a finely groomed prince.
Just then, the neighbors burst out onto their respective patios and terraces, each of them holding their phones to their ears with one hand and gesticulating at us, the only ones with an aerial view, with the other.
“What’s going on?” The question resounded in Catalan from every corner of the quarter. It lingered in the air. “Is he dead?”
Ludo hurried down the hallway. He returned a moment later, cell phone in hand.
“No, officer,” he shouted into the phone. “He is not asleep. He is D-E-A-D!”
His face was red. His ears were crimson. I had never seen him annunciate a word with so much fierce passion. He removed his glasses and threw them on the sofa.
“You tell him!” I said.
There was a helpless look in Ludo’s eyes. Without his glasses, his vision was strained. He searched the room indecisively, bleary eyed, as if he couldn’t tell which figure was mine.
“I’m right here,” I said, once he had located me.
He almost smiled. He hung up the phone and dragged his hands over the sofa to recover his glasses.
“Madonna santa!” Fernando said impulsively. The neighbors across the parking lot leaned over their terraces, and the family who lived adjacent to the lot dragged their chairs to the edge of their patio and stood on them so they could see over the wall.
The situation had gone from bad to worse. One of the dead man’s friends had returned. He was pacing violently in front of our door.
“Dear god,” Agatha said with that melodious voice of hers. “The cocaine addict is back.”
The dog circled at my heels, looking up at the bird. “Don’t touch that dog. It’s a sack of fleas,” Ludo said menacingly. His eyesight was twenty-twenty again. “You see all these locks on my door? I put them in so this sack of fleas wouldn’t enter my room. But still I come home to find dog shit on my carpet, or a torn-up bag of rice on my bed.”
“And you still haven’t learned your lesson?” I said, opening the door. “How about an apartment without frontiers? A home without borders? That is what this dog is here to teach you. Why put up such harrowing barriers when the world is grossly impermanent? Think about it: Is there any guarantee that you
or I are not going to die today? The same thing goes for animals. Petita, Taüt—even that miserable goldfish!”
Ludo stood there measuring his thoughts, head down, lips pinched. Bernadette was standing behind Fernando, as mute and pink as a flamingo, as if he were her guardian and friend.
“So you’re sure?” Ludo asked. “You want to move in?”
“Yes,” I said. “I’m here to stay.”
“Fine,” he said curtly, and walked back into the living room. I saw a small smile wrinkle the edges of his lips. He had missed me, too.
I decided to stake my claim. I dragged my Mobile Art Gallery into Bernadette’s bedroom. I had to move her boxes aside to make space for the miniature museum. Once I was done with that, I looked at Ratzinger’s face—stern, secretive, resolved—until I felt Bernadette approach me from behind. I turned around and in my best Italian told her that I could take her down a lot faster than Fernando if I wanted to. I said, “Why should I be the only one without food and warmth?” She scurried away like a crab alongside the wall. Everything Ludo had said about her was true. I was astonished.
I went back to the terrace. The cops finally arrived. The cocaine addict slammed his hands down on the car hood. His hair, which already looked like the greasy end of a mop, stood up; he appeared to have been electrified.
“Everyone, please remain inside your homes,” the cops announced uselessly through their megaphone.
Across the parking lot, on the roof of a narrow stone building, a middle-aged woman was hanging white sheets on a line. They were as starched as the white sheet my father had been wrapped in before being slipped into the mud of the earth.
“Is she running a hotel?” I asked Ludo in Italian.
“No,” he replied. “The sheets are her alibi. She uses them to spy on the neighbors.” I wanted to swallow those elongated vowels of his.
Agatha came up to me, and said, “She has a bit of a crush on Ludo!”
Fernando cast her a punitive look.
“Well, it’s true!” she said.
The paramedics wrapped the dead man in foil, lifted him onto a gurney, strapped him down, then carried off the body. Soon, he too would be swallowed by the ground and, depending on the frequency of his brain waves, absorbed by the mind of the universe. The drunk’s friends, who had returned to the scene, lingered in the parking lot. One of them said something restless. Another let something slide out of his mouth that was of great offense to the third, a man with a head the size of a volleyball. He turned red with fury. The last man walked up to the wall where their dead friend had sat and delivered a long, eloquent aside. This show unfolded to the great indifference of the police officers who were busy pushing the cocaine addict into the back of their car. Once they drove off with him, all that was left was the puttering of feet, the chiming of the church bells, the ruffling of leaves in the cold wind of winter.
It was a stunning performance on the part of all involved. There it was, the theater of life rudely reminding us that we were still alive. The backdrop to all that death was tremendously beautiful. A raw light emerged over the mountains and came rushing through the windows. It was so bright that we all felt naked in it. No one said anything for the rest of the day.
By the next day, I had settled in, and Bernadette had moved out. No one knew where she went. No one cared. Ludo Bembo was in a good mood—a rarity—and he gave us all a laugh by imitating her by sliding down the corridor like a crab while pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose with his index finger. Agatha joked about how Bernadette was probably drinking her pale tea and eating a bland lunch—bread with mayonnaise or Nutella with a bread stick—under a tree at the Vatican, pulling her skirt down over her knees if it hiked up in the wind.
Over the course of the next few weeks, I began to get a sense of everyone’s lives. I learned the neighbors’ names, watched them all come and go, amble about, loiter, walk to the green hills of Sant Daniel to fill their empty jugs with stream water; they bought groceries; they laughed, cried, soothed, or shouted at one another depending on the day. I felt safe among them—safer than I had when I’d been alone in Quim Monzó’s apartment. There was Ester downstairs, a baker, whom we ordered our bread from every week. There was Mercè, who could almost always be found on her rooftop balcony spying on the neighborhood while removing dried sheets from the clothesline and pinning freshly washed items up in their place. Another, Agnès, appeared at dusk holding a fishnet with an extending pole handle, which she used to capture the neighborhood’s stray cats. She would then release them back into the parking lot a few days later, and they would disappear faster than comets in the night sky. Agatha informed me that Agnès believed this form of catch and release would warp the cats’ minds, effectively dampening their savage DNA, allowing them to lead happier lives; confused by the bewildering comings and goings of the other cats, they would be unable to engage in sustained fights or form enemy camps.
Inside the apartment, Fernando spent his mornings sitting quietly at the dining-room table, drinking tea and staring intently into the distance. He never said a word to anyone about what he was thinking. At noon, he would abruptly get up, march into the living room, and chisel away at a block of clay until another one of Agatha’s faces emerged. Petita slept on the sofa as Fernando worked. The fish came in and out of view with a regularity that depended on how long it had been since someone had last cleaned its tank. It was a fat goldfish with bulging eyes and tiny transparent fins; it was unclear how such disproportionate fins could propel its bulbous body through the water, which was usually thick with grime.
Fernando refused to speak while he was working, and often he refused to speak even after he was done, especially if the expression on Agatha’s bust didn’t correspond to the expression he had intended. The only time he spoke was when he had a grave vision; that’s how he referred to his dreams, as grave visions. One night, he dreamt that a balding, acned child with torn overalls and an ancient expression lived in their bedroom, a dark room at the back of the apartment with a small window that overlooked the courtyard next door.
“What’s the child’s name?” I asked, standing in the kitchen with Taüt on my shoulder. I had begun to feed him directly from my mouth. It was the only way the bird would eat. I chewed a piece of bread and then extended my tongue to the bird, who quickly retrieved the masticated clump.
“His name is Fernando,” Fernando said.
“Fernando?” I swabbed my mouth with my finger to get rid of the remaining bread. I hated it when it got stuck to my gums.
“Fernando,” he insisted.
That was it. From that day on, there were two Fernandos living in the house: the flesh-and-bone Fernando, the adult sculptor, and the child-ghost Fernando who, according to the first Fernando, had suffered a terrible and frightening death. To help the child heal, Agatha placed bowls of salt around their bedroom.
“Salt absorbs negative energy,” she said. “The bigger the crystals, the more they absorb.”
I told her there was no need to explain the obvious. Agatha worked in a health-food store selling macrobiotic products, incense, herbal infusions, salt lamps, teas. Later that day, she returned from work with a gift for me: a bag of Himalayan salts, which she insisted I put under my pillow in order to eliminate the residue of Bernadette. I told her I live for residue, though perhaps not Bernadette’s, a comment that caused Ludo to roll his eyes from across the living room, where he was seated, legs elegantly crossed, on the sofa.
Ludo’s mood, which had initially been generous, perhaps even exuberant, had soured over the last few weeks. He had become consistently petulant and unforgiving, stern and hard t0 read. I didn’t know how to approach him. I didn’t know what to think. I had no idea what he did with his days. Sure, he taught a few classes at the university, but he would often leave in the morning and come back at night, exhausted, shut down, gassy, and disgruntled, unwilling to have sex.
I had to work on him every evening, tune him up. This was his home, his
hearth. Instead of him coming and going in Quim Monzó’s apartment, being pushed out by the putrid fumes of my past that would rise at random to pay me a visit, demanding my attention, here it was I who was subjected to Ludo’s whims. Here, his manners seemed strange, mysterious, ethereal. If I approached him with questions, he would answer some but not others. Certain topics, I had come to observe, he avoided altogether: anything having to do with death, illness, the injustices the powerful minority assailed against the abject majority. There were days when his dismal temperament caused me to feel visible and invisible in rapid succession, as if I were constantly appearing and disappearing from the stage of life. This experience hooked a familiar sensation out of my past and replayed it until I felt obliterated: the awareness of finding myself in a dark wood, lost. I felt yanked around by his ups and downs. I felt dizzy. I couldn’t tell if I was ascending or descending humanity’s abysmal pits.
At times, I would think: What is my part in this? Whose hand had failed to remove the thorn from the other’s foot? But then I would remember that it was his job, as a privileged member of the Pyramid of Exile, to help me. After all, he was gulping down all the oxygen available from whatever small opening existed at the top. He could even squeeze his way out to interact with others or, I was sure, to have sex with the Tentacle of Ice. This was a pernicious thought that had wormed its way into my brain, and I couldn’t figure out how to exterminate it. After all, in addition to spending most of his time outside of the apartment, he seemed to have lost interest in having sex with me. What else was I to conclude? The Tentacle, a nonexile par excellence, likely offered him a much simpler exchange. I imagined her letting him off the hook, encouraging him to deny his pain, rewarding him for leading an unexamined life.
One night I left Taüt in my room, which resembled a prisoner’s cell, shut the door behind me, and walked over to Ludo’s. I was naked. I let myself in without knocking. He was reading a book in Occitan. I couldn’t make out the title. I saw my figure reflected in a mirror on his wall. I looked thin and brittle, but I was more resolved than ever. My eyes were shining with the fixed purpose of a rebel; I was preparing to express my whole fragmentary self in a wild deluge. Ludo lay his book down to rest on his chest.
Call Me Zebra Page 23
