Call Me Zebra

by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi

  “How does one become what one is?” I suddenly asked, trying to lift the pilgrims’ spirits. I stood behind the miniature museum, which we had prepared for transcribing, and preached at them in an oratorical tone as if I were standing on a pulpit.

  Gheorghe put his arms around his lady to keep her warm. Remedios’s face was so red from the chill that her rash blended in seamlessly with the rest of her wounded flesh. In Ludo’s absence, Mercè had removed her mask. Agatha sat in Fernando’s lap, smiling at her encouragingly. Fernando was examining Agatha’s face, memorizing her expression, I assumed, for the next bust.

  “After reading Nietzsche,” I continued, “Dalí decided he would be the one to outdo the inventor of the overman, otherwise known as Zarathustra, Nietzsche’s most transcendent, mystical, and lofty creation, by developing a Dalínian cosmogony, a cosmogony littered with anuses. In other words, Dalí flipped Zarathustra on his head by ascending to sublime heights through the grotesque.”

  Mercè turned as red as Remedios. Paola smiled coquettishly at Gheorghe. Aha, I thought, she has enjoyed it in the rear.

  “Paola,” I said, “would you care to transcribe?”

  She leapt at the opportunity.

  “We will be weaving together the voices of Nietzsche and Dalí, and sprinkling in some Lorca, who made several amorous advances at Dalí, all of which he solemnly refused—an incomprehensible decision, but let us not digress from the task at hand. Now, Paola, transcribe the following twice.”

  Gheorghe clapped to cheer her along. At the word twice, Fernando smiled wryly. He had understood. This exercise was not unlike his obsession with forging Agatha’s face.

  “I am a doppelgänger,” I declared, reading from my notebook.

  “I am a doppelgänger,” Paola repeated into the typewriter.

  I picked up the phone and listened to the devastating silence, to the signal of literature, the residue and ruins of the universe. I heard: Much have I suffered, labored long and hard by now in the waves and wars. I kept Ulysses’s words to myself.

  “I have a ‘second’ face in addition to the first,” I said to Paola, my voice breaking, my heart heavy with grief, “and perhaps also a third.” I was citing Nietzsche.

  I have a “second” face in addition to the first, she wrote, and perhaps also a third.

  “Now, on the same page, transcribe what Dalí said about his obsession with Nietzsche.”

  She paused and looked at me, an intelligent creature.

  “Nietzsche is a weakling who had been feckless enough to go mad, when it is essential, in this world, not to go mad.”

  When it is essential in this world not to go mad, Paola typed.

  “These reflections furnished the elements of my motto, which was to become the theme of my life: The only difference between a madman and myself is that I am not mad! It took me three days to assimilate and digest Nietzsche. After this lion’s banquet, only one detail of the philosopher’s personality was left for me, only one bone to gnaw: his mustache!”

  I scratched at my false mustache as I recited the lines to her.

  “Don’t write this down. Did you know that Federico García Lorca, fascinated by Hitler’s mustache, said—be sure to write this down—The mustache is the tragic constant in the face of man?”

  Paola typed the sentence twice.

  I continued to read Dalí’s words from my notebook: “Even in the matter of mustaches, I was going to surpass Nietzsche! Mine would not be depressing, catastrophic, burdened by Wagnerian music and mist. No! It would be line-thin, imperialistic, ultra-rationalistic, and pointing towards heaven, like the vertical mysticism, like the vertical Spanish syndicates.”

  I surveyed the pilgrims. In their faces, I saw the cowardice of the world. We are all victims of its fecklessness and lies, I thought, thinking of the variations of Dalí’s mustache: limp, two pronged, figure eight (infinity), lopsided (one side hanging over his mouth, the other reaching for his cheeks).

  “A counsel of prudence and self-defense,” I said, quoting Nietzsche and ordering Paola to continue transcribing, “is to react as rarely as possible, and to avoid situations and relationships that would condemn one to suspend, as it were, one’s ‘freedom’ and initiative and to become a mere reagent.”

  The pilgrims all nodded their heads. Their faces were flushed again. An inky life had drifted back into their veins.

  “As a parable,” I recited, holding my notebook in one hand and the phone against my ear with the other so I could hear the sour winds of my childhood blowing through it, “I choose association with books. Scholars do little nowadays but thumb books. Philologists”—I thought of Ludo Bembo and the murderer Eugene Aram—“at a moderate estimate manhandle about two hundred books a day and ultimately lose their capacity to think for themselves entirely. When they thumb, they don’t think!

  “Transcribe my words,” I said to Paola.

  She nodded.

  We are approaching the event horizon, I thought to myself smugly; a ring of light had been generated around our swirling void and it was warming up our hearts, illuminating our faces.

  “The scholar is a decadent and an amateur,” I said with a feverish energy, riffing off of Nietzsche’s words, stitching my lines to his. “How is it possible for one to be a decadent and an amateur at the same time? Let me tell you: I am a dangerous thinker, a literary terrorist.

  “Scholars,” I declared, thinking of Ludo, my sick hand hurting from the sting of betrayal, “would make better use of themselves raking fields. They are people who cannot think for themselves, who spend their lives thinking about other people’s thoughts. They are uninventive, square, insecure. They don’t possess a single authorial thought; all they have is the ability to say yes and no. In a world that is predominantly gray, they raise their finger and say yes and no.”

  After a brief silence, I released a razor-sharp “Ha!” into the air.

  “Did you get that?” I asked Paola.

  “Ha!” she said.

  “Ha, ha, ha,” I said.

  “Ha, ha, ha,” she repeated, and we all fell back into the abyss with our false laughter; it resounded against the walls of our void. Our laughter was as loud and dark as that roaring sea, that Sea of Sunken Hopes at the bottom of which so many bodies lay dead.

  We signed the paper: Manifesto of the Pilgrims of the Void.

  Then we each transcribed that sheet. We took our transcriptions and taped them to Dalí’s front door. We abandoned the boat. We hiked down to Roses through the dark folds of night. At dawn, we caught the first bus back to Girona.

  The following night, I dreamt I was standing on the Cap de Creus. Cap de Creus, I kept saying to myself in my dream. The words echoed back. I heard Head of Christ. I was standing on Christ’s head. It was charred, black, burned to a crisp, full of craters and holes. From that humble bowed head of his, I could see the savage coast below. The chilled water of the Mediterranean was scrubbing his cheeks with salt and foam. The sea to the east was deep, blue, brilliant; to the west, silver like aluminum foil.

  Blades of rock jutted out of the water. They looked like razors. If you lean over the edge, I heard, you might be able to get a glimpse of the Cova de s’Infern. It was Ludo’s voice. I leaned over and looked at the Cave of Hell. I was so terrified of being attached to him, of losing him, that I almost slipped off the edge of the cliff.

  Moments later, I woke up confused, thirsty, my mind a tangled mess. Why hadn’t I been able to say that word—love—the only word Ludo had wanted to hear? Because, I reasoned, in order to love properly, one must also be predisposed to feelings of hope; one must believe that the object of one’s love is capable of remaining alive long enough to feel loved. But could you expect that of anyone given the conditions of our sorry world? In the feeble light of morning, I reminded myself that I am an atheist relegated to a lifetime of sublime doubt, not easily inclined toward the winged pair, love and hope.

  My thoughts spun dizzily. For a moment, I saw freedom close
at hand. No witness, however wise, however ancient, however many times their mind had circulated this trifling earth, would dissolve my pain. Even if their eyes were as sharp as my nose. I had to gnaw on my pain alone, breaking it apart and digesting it as if it were a bone. I had to know its taste intimately. And as if that were not enough, it was my good fortune that I would have to live with its aftertaste lingering in my mouth: bitter, acerbic, sharp.

  I sat up in bed. I looked around. Taüt was sleeping on a pile of clothes. Petita was curled up next to him. Had they figured out how to love each other? I pushed that word—love—down into the deepest recesses of myself. I lit it on fire. I watched it burn to ash. I extinguished it from my repertoire of emotions so that it, too, could be reborn like a phoenix in all the scattered ash of this sooty globe.

  A few weeks later, Ludo came to me asking for forgiveness. He kneeled on the floor, put his head in my lap, and wept. He was sobbing over the twists and turns of our mangled fate. He kept saying, “No matter how hard I try, you keep pushing me away. What’s the point of living as if you were already dead?” I didn’t know what to say. I cupped his head in my hands. I brushed his hair out of his face.

  A week later, having barely recovered from our bitter wars, we went on a solo pilgrimage to Portbou, the burial ground of Walter Benjamin. We ate macarons, walked along the oxidized rocks lacerated by the sea, and took turns listing the names the Mediterranean has been called throughout history: liquid continent, bitter sea, the great green, sea of refugees, Sea of Sunken Hopes. At the end of the day, holding hands, we walked to the Walter Benjamin memorial. We entered the steep narrow passageway carved into the seawall as if we were entering a tunnel to the afterlife. We descended the stairs toward the aquamarine waters, stood on the last step, and watched through the protective glass panel that seals the memorial from the sea as the Mediterranean knocked its head against the limits of the land.

  We stood there in quiet contemplation for a long time. It was I who broke the silence. I couldn’t help myself. I had toned down the literary activities of the pilgrimage as much as possible. I had left behind Taüt and the Mobile Art Gallery. I couldn’t restrain myself any further. I pointed at the engraved panel of glass, and said, “This is symbolic of the potential escape the philosopher hoped for but never achieved. Walter Benjamin was forced to take his own life. Where does that leave the rest of us? Our destiny is no brighter.”

  Ludo let out a generic grunt. I moved on. I took a picture of the glass panel, which is to say I took a picture of the future that had been forbidden to the philosopher by way of that dark and stormy event at the center of modern history, that old persistent wreckage of the world wars, the human carnage, the unutterable scale of that mass genocide from which I doubt we will ever recover. In the picture, my shadow was superimposed both on the glass surface, which is inscribed with a German verse I couldn’t read, and on the sapphire waves churning in the background: my death, my ghostly pewter-colored double, my shadow, superimposed on that impossible future.

  “Let me see,” Ludo demanded. The camera fell out of my hands. Ludo swatted at it like an impetuous child. Now he was holding the camera, looking at the photograph. “Try again,” he said, with a dismissive wave of his hand. “This time without the shadow.” He acted as if my shadow, my negative—and I, by extension—were a problem, an interference that needed to be eradicated. I didn’t say a word after that. I emerged from the Benjamin memorial and stood under a struggling olive tree near the cemetery. Ludo sat on a rock like Rodin’s The Thinker, head in hand. I ignored him. At some point, he lit his pipe. He leaned back on a rock to stargaze. I watched that same sky in silence. The dark silky folds of evening descended through the retreating light. Ludo’s trail of smoke rose against it, a ghostly thread eclipsing, like a secondary ethereal world, the falling darkness.

  We started to drift even further apart after that. Ludo started coming home late. A few times, unbeknownst to him, I followed him to work and saw him leaning in the door frame of this or that colleague’s office, casually drawing smoke through his pipe. Once I saw him sitting at his desk, leaning back, enlarging his chest. The Tentacle of Ice was standing over him. I stayed away. I kept to my bed. I convalesced from the fresh punches of life. The apartment took on a morose atmosphere. Ludo and I started to take bigger stabs at each other, to punish each other with silence. Even Agatha seemed disconsolate. I could hardly stand to see her that way. One night I walked in on Ludo while he was working at his desk. He was leaning over a stack of books. He turned to look at me. He had a weary expression on his face. I proposed we go on another pilgrimage.

  “Pilgrimages heal the heart,” I suggested, picking up his umbrella and pointing it at his chest. He pulled on the end of the umbrella and reeled me in.

  “Straddle me,” he said.

  We undressed. I got on top of him. When we were done, he leaned his sweaty head against my chest. He panted like a traveler spent from a long journey around the world. Our boundless magnetic lust helped us to recover. Sex had become the only thread holding us together. I felt limited, empty in a different way than I usually did, sick of my own story.

  A week later, on the first day of spring, we set off to hike the Canigó with the other pilgrims. We embarked on the Pilgrimage of the Catalan Resuscitator.

  It was June when we crossed the Spanish-French border in Ludo’s car. We were headed to Saint Michel de Cuxa, in the Conflent region of France. Agatha, Mercè, and Remedios slept in the back seat. Gheorghe and Paola followed close behind on her scooter. I watched the stars shine through the black sky with their dead light. I watched spongy patches of fog drift over the plump moon. When the sun finally rose, it released a peach-colored light. The moon looked thin, transparent. I looked in the rearview mirror. Gheorghe had his arms wrapped tightly around Paola’s slim figure; he had a highly unpleasant expression, likely the result of hardly being able to breathe against the wind. He had forgotten to bring a helmet.

  Ahead of us, the Canigó was in full view. A gorgeous beast.

  I turned to look at the pilgrims in the back seat. Agatha’s face looked pudgy in the morning light. Remedios’s cheeks had acquired a purple hue; she looked as wounded as ever. Mercè had hung a black cloth over her head. She looked like a corpse mourning her own death.

  “Get that bird away from me,” Ludo briskly ordered. Taüt, who was perched on my shoulder, had extended his neck across the divide to nibble on Ludo’s ear. The bird had a knack for provoking him. Ludo turned to look at me with a troubled visage. I didn’t appreciate his rejection of the fumes of my mother. “Stay in your own zone,” he reproached. His breath smelled like garlic.

  “In case you’d forgotten,” I observed, “as exiles, Taüt and I lead a zoneless existence.”

  “Jesus Christ!” Ludo exclaimed. He was extremely agitated.

  ̷̷̷̷̷̷̷̷̷̷̷̷̷

  A few hours later, we were standing in the verdant valley surrounding Saint Michel de Cuxa, looking at the Benedictine abbey’s cloister and crypt, parts of which had been dismantled and transferred to New York City. I remembered standing with my back to the Cloisters in Fort Tryon Park. Time folded over itself, an unconscionable map. Behind me were the Cuxa, the Bonnefont, the Saint-Guilhem, the Trie. Below me, the Hudson, green, serpentine, slithered lazily by. More than a year had passed since my father had been swallowed by this soggy earth.

  I stepped back and searched the steely summits of that wide mountain. There was something violent about the Canigó: the mass of elongated rocks, the snowcapped summit, the alpine forests that grew out of its flanks and passes. I looked at the pilgrims. There was nothing lithe or nimble about any of us. The only athletic being among us was Petita, whom Agatha had brought along for the day. She was sniffing at my heels.

  We began our climb. Two hours later, we were barely one-third of the way up the mountain. Already, we needed rest. The pilgrims sat on a pile of rocks near a brook. They ate their sandwiches, caught their breath.


  “Sensitive being of the world,” I said to the dog. “What can I do for you?”

  “You’re enabling that dog’s anxiety,” Ludo interfered righteously, fixed to his station under a row of trees.

  “How do you know that her anxiety isn’t a direct consequence of her awareness of the deep and irresolvable contradictions of the world?”

  A crow landed near Ludo’s feet and busied itself pecking at the gravel. I approached him. Petita followed at my heels.

  “How is she supposed to reconcile being beaten and abandoned with the grace bestowed upon her by Agatha and, except you, the rest of the household?”

  I had never had a home in my life, and yet that word—household—rolled right off my tongue, leaving behind a saccharine taste in my mouth. Ludo broke off a piece of his sandwich and threw it at the crow.

  “And what you are doing to Taüt?” he said. “You think that’s normal?”

  Doing? I wasn’t doing anything to the bird that hadn’t already been done. I told Ludo that the abusive machinations driving Taüt’s domestication had been set into motion long before I came into the picture. I had stolen the bird, but only because I had detected that the bird carried the fumes of my mother. Still, I somberly wondered, what was the effect of this transition on Taüt? I reflected quietly. Had I further distorted the bird through my actions? Had I intoxicated him with and then squeezed the fumes of my mother out of him? I felt a gnawing ache in my gut.

  “We are all in the mud,” I finally said to Ludo. “Thinking beings and feeling beings and trees and the wind and the objects we surround ourselves with. We are all in the mud together.”

  “But you,” he said, “spend most of your time ignoring reality!”

  “Reality? Whose reality am I ignoring? Because I’m sweating bullets trying to untangle the great knot of my past.”

  “At the expense of the present?” he retorted sarcastically.

  “Yes,” I said, with the cool detachment of an investigator. “I plan to salvage my integrity even if it causes me pain. And besides, time isn’t linear. Minutes don’t stack in an orderly fashion. They aren’t soldiers.”