Call Me Zebra

by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi

  “You shouldn’t walk around naked. There are other people living in this apartment, you know.”

  I could see his penis rising in his pants.

  “Don’t be so resentful,” I said, kneeling on his bed. I examined his head of precise curls. I reached over and removed his glasses. His pupils dilated as his eyes adjusted to seeing without them. He looked lost and helpless.

  “Is it easier if you can’t see me clearly?” I teased, gently placing my hand on his bulging organ.

  “You’ve worn me down,” he said. “I can’t make sense of your moods; they exhaust me.” He removed my hand as he said it.

  My moods? I thought. I was appalled, but I didn’t want to get into it. Instead, I said, “According to Scheler, resentment is an autointoxication—the evil secretion, in a sealed vessel, of prolonged impotence.”

  “Who is Scheler?” he said with an air of desperation.

  “Who is Roquentin! Who is Scheler!” I said mockingly.

  “Do you think this is seductive?” he said, reaching for his glasses and putting them back on his face. He looked at me through the lenses. His bulge had, in fact, deflated.

  “Who cares!” I said. “How can you talk to me about moods when your own are abysmal and likely designed to distract me from the fact that you have a dirty conscience?”

  “A dirty conscience?” he inquired, offended, as if he had never interfered with my notebook.

  “Yes, a dirty conscience,” I repeated. Then I got up and I left. Hours later, I slipped a note with the word inquietare under his bedroom door. That was as much of a clue as I was willing to give him.

  We didn’t speak for days. During that time, I swung between feeling sullen, dispossessed and angry, betrayed. But then, somehow, we got back to business as usual. He came home one night, pushed me up against the wall, and stuck his tongue in my mouth. He grabbed my arm and pulled me into his bedroom. “Leave Taüt with the ghost of Bernadette,” he said breathlessly, when I tried to retrieve the bird. It didn’t occur to me then that he sounded like me. I left the door to my room open. Taüt was perched on the edge of the wooden desk chair. He will likely stay put, I thought, following Ludo. We fucked like animals.

  “Why does your pussy feel so good to me?” he cried out.

  His mouth smelled like another woman. The Tentacle of Ice, I thought, as I finished. My suspicions were finally confirmed: During the weeks we hadn’t seen each other, she, a member of the unthinking masses, had returned to his life to provide him with uncomplicated pleasure. He had sought solace in a woman—the Tentacle of Ice—who was, relative to me, in less pain and whose desires had nothing to do with art or literature or the total problem of life. As I went over these thoughts, I often felt a cold draft blow through my void. It stung the flattened sheet of my heart that had begun to thicken, to gather dimensions, to warm up—an entirely disorienting sensation.

  The next morning, confused and hurt, I went back to my room looking for Taüt. I needed to take solace in his company, but he was nowhere to be found. The bird had disappeared. It was one thing when the bird had vanished in Quim Monzó’s apartment, but another thing entirely in Ludo Bembo’s. I organized a search. I put Agatha in charge of looking through all the nooks and crannies of our respective bedrooms.

  “Don’t hesitate to search inside pillowcases,” I ordered, “even if they are stuffed with pillows; that bird knows how to shape-shift. And make sure you look under mattresses, behind wool sweaters piled in our closets, and inside drawers with handles he could have hooked his beak onto and drawn open.” She proceeded with her usual convivial manner, spreading her soothing scent through the apartment as she conducted her search.

  I put Ludo, who was grumpier than ever, in charge of the kitchen. “Open all the cabinets and look under the kitchen sink, inspect the pots and pans, especially the large ones you reserve for boiling your noodles.”

  “You mean pasta,” he rudely interrupted.

  “And make sure you don’t forget to look inside the fridge and the washing machine; Taüt may have needed to tumble around a bit or sit privately for a moment in the chilly air of the refrigerator.”

  Ludo stood there, staring at the dining-room wall, which was blue and bare. He would make a terrible soldier, Ludo Bembo, with the protracted firing of his neurons.

  “Can you go about your business in a more committed fashion?” I asked, pushing him through the kitchen door.

  But to my dismay, he began brewing coffee. He was determined to be idle. I watched his nimble fingers unscrew the moka. Outside, the tramontana was thundering down the streets, rattling doors and windows, banging shutters. All the noise of a firing squad, I thought, looking at the composition of colors beyond the window, the mustard lichen covering the neighbor’s terra-cotta roof. The colors reminded me of the Catalan flag, that blazing gold overlaid with four stripes of blood.

  “Well?” I said, pressing Ludo with a businesslike dryness.

  He cast me a defiant gaze, lit the stove, put the moka on the grills. Then he removed his glasses and calmly wiped the lenses with the edges of his pajama shirt.

  “This is the best I can do given the absurdity of the task,” he stoically answered, putting his spectacles back on.

  I looked out the window at a misty-eyed pigeon, hoping it would turn into Taüt. Its pink feathers gleamed in the cold winter sun. It was February. I listened to that reckless wind howl furiously as it swept through Girona. What am I doing here? I silently wondered. What am I ever doing anywhere? The coffee brewed, filling the kitchen with a light steam that carried the scent of chocolate and lemon peel, with a hint of cow dung. Love. What is love? Was it the bird-shaped hole in my heart? I looked at Ludo.

  “I don’t want to hear the word love come out of your mouth ever again,” I said bitterly. “It is as clear as the sky, crystal clear, that you have understood nothing.”

  “Nothing?” he posed with an implacable inquisitorial expression.

  “Nothing.”

  I walked away, nearly in tears. I felt myself to be the unhappiest person in the world. I could feel my hands and lips trembling. Where was Taüt? Had someone left the door ajar? Thrown the windows open? He couldn’t fly. He was a bird whose wings had been clipped so often, they had refused to grow back. But he could have scaled the walls. Did he suffer from phantom-feather syndrome? I shut myself inside the bathroom and silently cried. I cursed the disastrous calamity of my life. I looked in the mirror. “Is this me?” I asked. I watched my lips form the words in the mirror. The coarse hairs of my father’s mustache floated across the black sea of my void. There was hardly anything left of him. “Does everything I touch have to disappear?” I mumbled. I looked down at my sick hand. Then I cupped it over my mouth and shoved the screams of pain that were on the cusp of emerging back inside.

  Hours later, I’d finally calmed myself down. And who did I think of? Fernando. Where was Fernando? I burst out of the bathroom looking for him. He was hovering over another one of Agatha’s false faces in the living room. Time had swept past; it was midafternoon. The glass doors leading out to the terrace were open. I closed them immediately, then I stood there and looked at the prune-colored sky through the window. It was radiant, breathtaking. The crystalline blue of the morning had bloomed into a metallic violet that shone with the cool light of the winter sun. In the distance, the Pyrenees looked like silver needles lined up to sew the regal fabric of that purple sky. I turned to Fernando.

  “Fernando,” I said with rehearsed calm. “Taüt has disappeared.”

  “Sparito?” he asked rhetorically.

  Where had he been this whole time? Where were Ludo and Agatha? No one had come knocking on the bathroom door; they hadn’t even told me they were leaving.

  “Sparito,” I answered with a funereal gravity.

  He put his chisel down. I told him I needed him to sit at the dining table, close his eyes, and retrace Taüt’s footsteps in one of his grave visions. I told him, “That bird walks everywhere
like a dog.” Then I looked at Petita, who was curled on the couch; her ears perked up immediately. Had she eaten the bird? I walked over to her and lifted her flews. I smelled her mouth. Her saliva smelled like metal. I forced her mouth open. She was innocent: no feathers, no blood. I let her go back to sleep again.

  Fernando did as he was told. He sat at the table with his eyes closed. When he opened them, he said, “Taüt will be back in his own time.”

  “Where is he now?” I asked, leaning across the dining-room table. The wood felt cold against my palms.

  “I have no idea,” he said. “All I see is darkness. Everything is black.”

  I wanted to bang my head against the wall. I wanted to slap him in the face.

  “Taüt?” I called out in a shrill voice, hoping the bird would appear at my heels. He did not.

  Afternoon turned to evening. It was unclear when Ludo and Agatha would be back. Perhaps, I wistfully thought, they were searching the streets. I hadn’t wanted to leave the apartment. I wanted to be there in case Taüt returned. The sky turned a velvet black. I felt despondent, foolish. I thought to myself: Being with others only leads to more loss, more pain. I was humiliated. I reached for my notebook. I looked around, searching for a hole or a crevasse to sink into, to be alone with my endless wretched thoughts.

  Albanyà

  The Story of How I Oxygenated My Multiple Minds in the Verdant Valley of the Pyrenees and Engaged in a Socratic Dialogue with Nature

  By the next morning, I was harboring a terrible resentment toward Ludo. I considered pelting hot coals of anger at him, but if I did, my sick hand would burn. I wasn’t sure how much more pain it could hold. I decided that the best course of action was to take a temporary leave of absence. Besides, Bernadette’s room, despite being a dark and damp hole, was too close to Ludo; it was no place to think. I needed to bathe in forests, to breathe oxygenated air.

  That afternoon, while nursing a violent headache, I boarded a bus to Figueres, the stomping grounds of Dalí, that mustached genius. There, I changed buses. I headed northeast to Albanyà, a tiny village in the valley of the eastern Pyrenees situated along the Muga, a river that passes through Boadella i les Escaules and Castelló d’Empúries, and that proceeds to deposit its chilled waters into the Sea of Sunken Hopes at the Gulf of Roses.

  As the battered bus pitifully made its way north, I realized that my very ability to think had been corrupted by Ludo’s destructive pattern of advances and retreats, the constant making and unmaking of our relationship, not to mention his remorseless indifference toward Taüt’s tragic fate. Ludo’s moods, I hypothesized, had several origins. Primary among them was the fact that, due to his unresolved issues with literature and death, and therefore with his ancestors, the Bembos, he was simultaneously attracted to and repulsed by me, final descendent of the Hosseinis. By keeping me in close proximity, he was both working out his issues, which he longed to do—hence his confessions of love—and, concomitantly, was perplexed by the disturbance such processing required of him—hence his sudden withdrawals and subsequent numbness. So what lesson had I taught him regarding love’s false and intrusive nature? None. I had been a fool. My defenses had been blown. I had walked straight into the trap of love. I felt as though someone had gutted my organs.

  We reached the lofty peaks of Mare de Déu del Mont and Puig de Bassegoda. As the steep cliffs and deep ravines of Albanyà came into view, I was reminded of the mountainous terrain of that no-man’s-land my father and I had traversed, our harrowing exodus. Neither love nor home, I thought despairingly, apprehending the high mountain crests that sliced away at the sky, are capable of keeping anyone alive.

  I got off the bus. Albanyà was deserted. There wasn’t a soul in sight. A stray dog was lying lazily at the end of a gravel path. A few pigs were sniffing at the muddied grounds behind him. There was a lonely horse standing by the edge of a corral, whipping her tail. I imagined Ludo’s voice coming at me from afar.

  “Where in the world are you going?” he asked, swiftly exposing his annoyance.

  “I found a room for rent on the World Wide Web!” I told him.

  “In Albanyà, on the Internet?” I heard him ask, bewildered.

  “World Wide Web, World Wide War!” I declared, though I had no clue why.

  He said nothing after that.

  I walked to the end of the gravel path. The dog, a white mutt, raised his head and let out a halfhearted growl. I knocked on the door of the farmhouse, which was tucked behind a row of cedars out of view from the road. A clean-shaven man with a round pale face opened the door. He grunted something; it was barely audible. He was either very timid or very drunk, round at the waist, and his eyes looked bruised. Widower rents room in quiet Albanyà farmhouse, the ad had read. He let me into the living room. He kept his eyes on the rug that ran across the floor, as if he had lost a few coins and was searching the ground, hopeful but demure. There was a grandfather clock in the back of the room. It ticked and tocked. I watched the golden pendulum swing inside the glass case, then I looked at the walls, which were covered with a vivid floral wallpaper that featured peonies, chrysanthemums, roses, pinecones, and cinnamon ferns on a green background. It was a tasteless hodgepodge affair.

  Without lifting his eyes from the floor, my chubby host, whose face turned crimson upon speaking, told me that coffee and a boiled egg would be served in the morning—breakfast was included in the price of lodging. If I insisted, he continued, turning as red as a plum, he could add a piece of toast and some peach jam he had preserved last year. But I insisted on no such thing.

  He promptly showed me to my room, a small rectangular enclosure perched atop a spiraling flight of wooden stairs, furnished with a single bed and a child’s desk and chair. I saw myself as a child, sitting at that desk, my father standing over me.

  “What are the major and minor cities of our sorry nation?” my father inquired.

  “Isfahan, Shiraz, Tehran, Qom, Tabriz, Ahvaz, Mashhad, Bandar Abbās, Kerman, Zāhedān, Yasuj, Hamadān, Izeh, Behbahan,” I heard myself answer.

  I felt something sweet and tender in my mouth. The taste of dates from our palm trees in the Caspian.

  “And who are we?” he inquired, his mustache still dark with youth.

  “Autodidacts, Anarchists, and Atheists,” I answered.

  “Good child!” he declared. And with that, the chair was empty again.

  The timid host had long retreated. We didn’t bother each other again until the next day at breakfast.

  That night, before going to bed, I said out loud to no one: “I have come to Albanyà to rake the floor of my void and think spontaneously far from the unforeseen interruptions of Ludo Bembo’s testicles.” I swallowed my saliva. I was hungry, but I refused to eat. Fasting clears the mind, I insisted, and persevered, retrieving my notebook whose inky pages were, by then, full of prophetic declarations made by the writers of exile; authors of death and discontinuity whose words implied a metaphysical rebellion, whose sentences communed together in the limitless expanse of the matrix. These writers’ sentences deposited me at the edge of the unknown, far from the repulsive banality of reality others refer to as life.

  I pushed my fingers into my notebook as if it were the oracle of Hāfez. My notebook, I considered, is currently bursting at the seams with transcriptions of my father’s Catalan oeuvre, which was itself a series of transcriptions of Rodoreda, Dalí, Pla, Verdaguer, Roig, and Maragall. “Ah, Maragall, that failed anarchist,” I muttered. After the bombings of the Tragic Week and the defilement of the corpses of nuns, the man had turned soft. He had become a protector of the bourgeoisie. Yet my notebook was spilling over with retranscriptions of my father’s transcriptions of Maragall’s translations of Nietzsche’s oeuvre from the French, since Maragall, known as the poet of “La Paraula Viva,” hadn’t learned a lick of German. La paraula viva, the live word, I thought, laughing hysterically and sitting bolt upright to bang my notebook against the mattress.

  “As if there are a
ny dead words!” I spoke into the smoky air of night. Somewhere in the house, a chimney had been lit, logs stoked, embers sent flying.

  I looked out the window at the verdant valley; the tops of the trees, shimmering with the reflected light of the moon, appeared as white as craniums against the black sky. I had no idea what time it was. Time, that remorseless thief. But, in the depths of my mind, I knew that whatever time it was, I wasn’t yet ready to open my notebook. I wasn’t hungry or lucid enough. To pass the time, I stood up and exited the room. In the absence of a corridor, I began to pace the stairs, muttering various incendiary phrases into the atmosphere as I ascended and descended the creaky wood.

  “I am going to use my sick hand to grab hold of the Matrix of Literature,” I cried out on my first downward flight.

  “I am going to leap headfirst into the senselessness of the world,” I added on my upward climb.

  Once I was at the top of the staircase again, I yelled: “I am going to hurl my void, which hosts literature’s spears and daggers and the pain of my multiple selves, at life. I, a literary terrorist, am going to force life to dissolve its resistance toward me.”

  I started back down again.

  “I, Zebra, Dame of the Void, am going to express my desires, enigmas, obsessions, and passions for everyone to see.”

  I paused and sniffed the fiery air.

  “Long live Zebra!” I projected, just as my host’s round face, red from the heat of the fire, appeared before my own.

  He had a disconcerted look in his eyes. You, whose wife is dead—what is a being? I wanted to ask him but held myself back. Instead, I bowed before him. He had been eating. He finished chomping the remains of his dinner and then asked me, rather irresolutely, if I could contain my activities to my bedroom. The man has suffered, I thought, and complied.