“So now you won’t speak to me?” Ludo huffed from the dusty cul-de-sac. He reached up and yanked a tree branch. He had a wool scarf tied around his neck and a red cardigan under his tweed jacket. He looked like a fussy Englishman.
“Are you going to fan yourself?” I posed.
It wasn’t as cold as his stuffy outfit suggested. Winter was finally giving way to spring.
“Fan!” Taüt squawked, raising his sulfur crest. Ludo released the branch. I had never seen the bird so animated. I secretly rejoiced that my mother was getting to see other parts of this woolly world.
We were lost in the hilly folds separating Palafrugell from the sea. I could hear the noise of those waters batting against the earth from across a vast distance. A roar at the margins of the universe that reminded me of the deep roar of the Caspian. I looked at Gheorghe. What a vulnerable being! He looked exhausted. He and Remedios—the corpse and the devotee—had been in charge of either dragging or lifting the Mobile Art Gallery over their heads as if it were a casket. Fernando, who had been groggy that morning, even more introverted than usual, had refused to join the pilgrimage. His loss! I thought, and ordered Gheorghe and Remedios to put the miniature museum down because I had decided that this dead end offered the perfect conditions for delivering my lecture on the dim forests of Josep Pla’s interior exile.
I told the pilgrims to gather around, that it was time to edify them on the nuances of our collective mission. Ludo, in a petulant mood, lingered at the edges. I refused to care.
“Soon we will find our way,” I said to them, as they gathered before me. “But even if we don’t, nothing is lost.”
Gheorghe nodded along. He had caught on rather quickly; a sharpness lay hidden beneath all that flesh. Remedios, on the other hand, looked more leaky eyed than ever.
“My rash is burning,” she interrupted shyly. “From all the sweat.”
“My dear Remedios, discomfort is a literary experience you have to learn to bear. Imagine how you will feel once you are standing in the center of the void. Terrible! That’s how! You have to build your endurance.”
She was quick to retreat, her saving grace.
Mercè, having caught her breath, brought her hands over her face and, with a stutter more appropriate to Gheorghe, asked, “Ex-cuse me, b-but who is Josep Pla?”
Who is Josep Pla? What kind of Catalan was she?
I heard Agatha let out a gasp. “Everyone knows who Josep Pla is,” she said sweetly.
Mercè shook her head of hair, a sign of distress.
“Mercè,” I said, with rehearsed patience. “Josep Pla, alias the Memory Man, is”—“was,” I corrected—“the most prolific and controversial Catalan writer of the long and cruel twentieth century, which concluded just a few years ago, though the brutality it unleashed is still showering down on our heads. And the life of Josep Pla,” I said, suddenly—decisively—connecting the dots, “registers the trauma of that century; one just has to look at his comings and goings to see the irrevocable damage of the times on his person. The man, a provincial boy turned cosmopolitan dandy, was forced into interior exile in Palafrugell several times throughout his life. That is why we are gathered here today.”
Mercè’s blood pressure leveled. She was peeking at me through her hands, listening intently.
“We should keep moving. It’s getting cold,” Ludo rudely piped from the end of the path, an army of trees behind him.
“The voice of reason!” I yelled back. “The march of progress!”
He kicked the pebbled ground.
“Care to join our lecture?” I asked.
“Care to join our lecture?” he mocked. He had lost his mind.
Taüt, dignified creature and charitable host to my mother, didn’t perpetuate the thread.
“To each his own,” I said, turning back to the crowd.
“Now, Pilgrims of the Void, memorize the facts of the life of Josep Pla.” I saw their ears fan open like flowers in the sun.
“ONE,” I declared, employing a pedantic tone. “Josep Pla, born in Palafrugell on March 8, 1897, a shy and suspicious soul and a terrible student, studied law in Barcelona until he was forced to retreat to his hometown in October of 1918 during the second and deadliest wave of the Spanish flu. This retreat led to his first literary adventures, adventures cultivated in an atmosphere of mass illness and death. He read and wrote under conditions of interior exile. It was in this cruel atmosphere that Josep Pla, the writer, was brought into existence, overtaking Josep Pla, the imminent lawyer.”
I paused briefly to catch my breath.
“TWO,” I spat. “In the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, which lasted from 1936 until 1939, after traveling across Europe and North Africa conducting acts of reportage, the Memory Man, who was both Catholic and Catalanist—a contradiction during the inflexible trials of war, which reduce the world and all its citizens to good versus evil—was banished by both factions. The Catalans accused him of being a fascist and a betrayer, and the Francoists dismissed him for being a Catalanist and therefore also thought of him as a betrayer. So he again retreated to Palafrugell.”
At this, I lunged forward and took in a deep breath, and said, “THREE. Last but not least, at the end of his life, Josep Pla, suspicious of his fellow man and aware that monotony is the only counterweight to our perpetual fear of death—a little factoid that I, one of the unlucky, learned early on—returned again to the nauseating boredom of Palafrugell and there he rewrote—no, he falsified—his diary, which he had originally composed during his first exile when he was just a failed young law student. He thereby plagiarized and regurgitated his younger self, and then published his fabricated ‘diary’ as the work we now know of as The Gray Notebook, thereby also,” I said, faint with vertigo, “proving Nietzsche’s theory of the cyclical nature of time as well as Borges’s philosophy of the eternal return, notions likely borrowed from other sources, Eastern sources,” I said, nearly out of breath, “which I shall later consult!”
I almost fainted. Who was I lecturing? I suddenly wondered. Everything was a blur: the trees, the pebbled road, my hands. But I couldn’t stop; a final message was pushing its way up.
“In 1918,” I mumbled into the misty air, “while the Memory Man walked the streets of Palafrugell under the gauzy light of a gunmetal sky not unlike the sky we have above us today and thought of Montaigne, Proust, Stendhal, Mallarmé, and Nietzsche, death was making its rounds in the form of the plague. In other words, Pla’s literature dawned in the dark and drafty abysmal void of death.”
My thoughts were doubling over themselves. I thought of the pile of ill-fated corpses. That image, I realized, had a prophetic quality to it: It was a kind of afterimage, reoccurring both as memory and premonition. I remembered my father and me, paper-thin as we had traveled across that ashen no-man’s-land, repeating: The world is a savage place; we are crossing not death itself but the death of life; we are becoming literature. He would have been proud that I had found others—the marginalized of the world—to join me. I saw the pilgrims sitting before me, listening with their inner ears. I felt my heart turn to flesh, blood pumping through its corridors. I was overcome with gratitude. This cluster of humans, I thought, who had appeared in the most ordinary way, were helping me move along my path toward nothingness. We were going to cross the event horizon of the black hole we each harbored at the center of our lives and kick up the dust, rove the depths, until the information the void had swallowed—our multiple selves from which we had been severed—would rise out of it as residue, transformed, ready to sound out the alarm of truth: that death will send the Four Corners of the World collapsing and that no one, no matter how astute, wealthy, or robust, will be spared. Our bodies will be reduced to ash. But, I comforted myself, our minds will barrel through this cosmos again and again, a continuum that would exist everywhere and nowhere at once. And how long would this cycle perpetuate itself, this mirage? There was no way of knowing. This, too, was a certainty, a terrifying, m
alodorous truth.
By the time we reached the summit of San Sebastià, the lighthouse situated at the top of the cape had taken on a mythical quality. Its beaming light, enclosed in a crowned glass dome, roved the sparkling silver waters of the Mediterranean. The shrubs and trees—the bushes of lavender and thyme, the juniper and olive trees, the maritime pine, the broom plants and palmetto scrubs—all woven into the rocky shelves, formed an avalanche of granite and foliage that led to the Calella de Palafrugell, where wooden fishing boats had been pulled out of the water and left strewn across the sandy coast. Behind the lighthouse and El Far Hotel, abandoned in winter, was an archaeological site with ruins of an Iberian settlement.
“Look around,” I said to the breathless pilgrims. “This stunning view is what Josep Pla observed daily during the plague. He hiked up here and sat for hours with his notebook, searching for well-endowed adjectives to describe the landscape.”
I could tell they were impressed, but they also seemed exhausted from the laborious journey of digressions it had taken to get there.
I observed Ludo from a distance. He stood on the hotel terrace taking in the view. Then he lit his pipe and sucked on it with his eyes closed, head tilted back, face pressed into the radiant metallic sky. He seemed at peace. I wondered if he had come to terms with our collective endeavor, if his wall of defenses had come crumbling down. But I couldn’t be sure, and I knew that even if he had opened up his heart to our objectives it wouldn’t last long. He had become shifty, a woeful, unpredictable man.
I busied myself with setting up the Mobile Art Gallery near the lighthouse. Against the mercurial waters of the sea, The Hung Mallard truly looked like a pirate’s flag. I set up the telephone and the typewriter. I unwrapped the gas mask. Then I went in search of the pilgrims who were prowling around, breathing through their mouths. It was time to transcribe.
“Pilgrims,” I announced. “Report to the miniature museum immediately!”
Everyone showed up. Mercè looked on anxiously, hands over her mouth, eyes peeking out. I offered her the gas mask.
“For your personal relief,” I said.
She turned her back to us and slipped it over her head, then turned around again and looked at us with her rubber face. I picked up the telephone and listened to the devastation coming through it, to the residue of silence left over from the worldwide wreckage, a portion of which had annihilated the Hosseinis. The world had slit its own throat with such reckless abandon! I ordered Gheorghe to stand at the typewriter. Agatha broke into a premature applause. She looked up at Ludo’s face, and boldly said, “What a show she is about to put on!” I thought Ludo might bolt, but he stayed put, firm in his spot. Mercè stood next to him. With the gas mask covering her face, she had no trouble gazing at him lovingly. He looked down at her a few times and forced a polite smile. The architecture of Ludo Bembo’s interior life is as knotty as an irregular home full of interlacing staircases, hallways, rooms. Who could read the tides of his emotions? He’s a man with a Byzantine character and a Roman nose!
“Gheorghe,” I said. “Lay your hands on the polished keys of the typewriter.”
He did.
“Your life has been evacuated of meaning; it is, therefore, a welcome campground where Josep Pla can pitch his tent. It is as if you were an empty house beckoning for a squatter. See Josep Pla walking around the labyrinthine corridors of your mind. He lifts his head to stare at the ghastly void of your existence. He presses his face against your void, and for a moment, you feel a reprieve from your loneliness. This is a sign that his words are being transmitted to you. See his beady eyes, his crooked nose, his square and narrow smile, his slick pink tongue sticking out between his teeth—the mouth of a misanthrope, of a person repulsed with life. It feels as though you were looking in the mirror, doesn’t it? Now transcribe in situ!”
Gheorghe began to type before I had a chance to dictate the transcription to him. I stood there staring at him in awe. Had he usurped the spirit of Josep Pla? He removed the paper from the platen and read what he had written to us. His beady little eyes glowed with the reflected light of the paper.
I was born in Palafrugell (Lower Ampurdan) on March 8, 1897. My family is entirely from the Ampurdan. The landscape of my life encompasses Puig Son Ric, in Begur, in the east; the Fitor mountains, in the west; the Formigues Islands, in the south; and the Montgrí in the north. I have always felt this a very old country. All sorts of wandering peoples have passed this way.
“Wonderful factoids,” I said. Gheorghe nodded, his eyes closed. I scanned the crowd of pilgrims. Remedios’s eyes were wide and dry. Her rash had calmed. It was no longer oozing. It was pink instead of a glistening red. And Mercè was wheezing happily next to the object of her longing, Ludo Bembo, who looked on with a gravity usually reserved for those men who diligently attend church but understand nothing. Agatha was standing with her arm wrapped around his, a saccharine smile spread across her lips.
“There’s more,” Gheorghe stammered. “Hardening of the heart isn’t congenital,” he said forcefully, between fits of coughing while everyone looked on, entranced. I recognized the words. He was reciting quotes from my notebook. “It’s an acquired condition. It depends on experience of life. What poets and novelists call narcissism is generally congenital and is symptomatic of genuine abnormality.”
Gheorghe snorted several times. I felt Ludo’s gaze on me. When I turned to look at him, he was mouthing the words genuine abnormality at me. I felt as though I had been punched in the gut. Gheorghe looked over at him nervously before carrying on. He coughed distinctly before speaking.
Taüt paced nervously between my shoulders. Then he paused and hissed in Ludo’s direction. Remedios began to scratch her rash again. It started to peel and form little patches of blood that caught the silver light of the sky here and there.
“The level of loathing reality brings,” Gheorghe stuttered, “clearly can increase in relation to one’s experience of life. But it would be pretentious”—at this, Ludo mouthed pretentious, confirming my suspicion that he had paid Gheorghe off—“however painful the experience has been, to act like someone who has overcome everything and is completely coldhearted.”
Gheorghe cast a pleading look in my direction. “I look on in horror,” he said, “as everything drives me into a state of callow indifference, but I’d be a clown to act as if I’ve touched rock bottom.”
The whole lot broke into nervous applause. Gheorghe bowed, pleased with himself. I felt humiliated, devastated, as if the very Matrix of Literature had turned against me, along with the Memory Man, for whom I had organized such a lavish homage. I walked off with Taüt and settled on one of the chairs on the terrace. That fleshy mole-covered face came running after me.
“Did he pay you?” I asked, pointing at Ludo Bembo.
“Pay me?” he repeated stupidly. “I spent everything I had on lunch. I don’t have a euro to my name!”
“I’ll forgive this trespass,” I said, breathing deeply in order to gather my wits again. “But you are not to trust him. I’m beginning to suspect he is not a Bembo at all. He may very likely be the reincarnated spirit of the murderer and philologist Eugene Aram, whose terrible actions and personality are referenced in the literary works of Hood, Wills, Orwell, and P. G. Wodehouse. Do you understand?”
He shook his fleshy chin and walked away with his head hanging over his body in shame. I sat there staring out at the vast sea below. I was dumbfounded. I understood nothing. I had tried to hurl my pain at the world, but it had been intercepted by Ludo’s scheming. And where were my witnesses, I thought, the pitiless and inhuman members of society, those who don’t hesitate to make the less fortunate pawns in their provisional game of chess? I thought again of Ludo.
We had come to Calella before, Ludo and I, in the autumn. At the end of a long day spent foraging the forests for mushrooms—bloody milk caps with their red and orange hues and green flecks; king’s testicles; yellow-footed chanterelles; and my favorite, bl
ack trumpets, the trumpet of death. We had eaten a feast of pig: foot cartilage, cheeks infused with beer, jamón cut from the flanks of hogs fed on acorns. At the end of the day, we lay on the sandy shore locked in an embrace to keep warm. We had fallen asleep like that on the beach.
What had happened now? Who is the victor? I thought, looking over at him. He was watching me in pain. Who is the victim? There was no way of knowing, I thought, no way of making head or tail of this condition of the world. The moon rose. Its round face shone in the sky. I felt low, down, lackluster. Another day had been ineffectually swept into the ruins of time.
Ludo and I didn’t speak for three days after the pilgrimage. If our eyes accidentally locked while passing each other in the hallway, he looked down at his feet. I counted the busts of Agatha’s face, which seemed to multiply like the miracle of the fish.
On the fourth day, I considered giving him a piece of my mind.
In the feeble light of evening, Ludo looked like a ghost of himself. I looked at Agatha’s busts planted in rows along the walls on either side of him. They resembled garden topiaries in the obscure light. I could hear Petita in another room scratching herself. Taüt was at my heels, his countenance majestic, resolute. He had the loving aura of Bibi Khanoum. Ludo pursed his lips. He looked down. A shadow fell over his face. Then, as if from the subterranean channels of the world, his voice emerged before mine. His words—each one a sword, a dagger—dangled in the air.
“According to Montaigne,” he said, “Plutarch says of those who dote over pet monkeys or little dogs that the faculty for loving which is in all of us, rather than remaining useless, forges a false and frivolous object for want of a legitimate one.”
I scooped Taüt up. The bird protested and bit my finger. He tore the skin. I remembered lying in Quim Monzó’s bed under that sagging ceiling, sucking on the blood Taüt had spilled. I put my finger in my mouth to stop the bleeding.
Call Me Zebra Page 29
