Call Me Zebra

by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi

  Does your father have a mustache? I was tempted to ask, but I kept my mouth sealed. I am no fool. I could see that Ludo was lying. My duty to my dead father, whom I had absorbed through metempsychosis and whose presence I had carried within my void, had eclipsed my relationship with Ludo, limiting the attention I was able to bestow upon him. Now this literary heretic, uninventive descendent of the Bembos, was using my narrative to justify his own. He was pelting his father at me. He was taking revenge.

  I remembered, as lucidly as a déjà vu, when Ludo had asked me after a terrible fight, his voice exasperated, guttural: “What are you hoping to find? It’s not a treasure box,” he had said, referring to the void.

  With great theatricality, I had responded: “My friend, my dear, dear friend, I am searching for a flame in my void that will shine so brightly, brighter than the brightest dawn, that it will roll back the shadow of death!”

  But that wasn’t true. It was just something I had said. What I had wanted to confess to him was this: My wound is inside me. It is the wound of a lack of love. But I couldn’t bring myself to expose my weaknesses, my vulnerabilities. Too much had come to pass. All I could see was history’s chain of frauds. The world had turned into a reckless mirror image of itself and cut off my oxygen. Who was I to trust? The world had no solidity.

  Petita let out a cry of anxiety. I opened my mouth. I said: “This is love, when death’s involved.”

  Ludo stared at me. I couldn’t tell if he was bemused or disturbed. I stared back at him. I rolled his name on my tongue: Ludo, a living being among other living beings, who was standing at the threshold, suitcase in hand, about to depart forever; Ludo, who had turned a blind eye to all signs of turbulence when I needed him most, to the generalized disturbance being alive engenders, to the nothingness that is inherent in everything we do.

  Ludo reached for his pipe and then swiftly slipped it back into his pocket and patted his chest. For a moment, I thought he might change his mind, that he would step over the threshold and cross the boundary he had drawn to protect himself from—as he had so crudely intoned in the past—the death-slapped and warped nature of my mind. I pictured him dropping his leather suitcase, detaching himself from his umbrella to embrace me. I imagined our bodies collapsing into each other. I imagined him pushing me backward into his room, furiously unbuttoning my shirt, caressing my breasts, lowering his head to lick my hardened nipples; Ludo, salivating, impish, ready to take on the task of mending the disrepair our relationship had fallen into. Sex has a way of doing that, of raising our courage.

  But instead, he stood in the doorway scratching his beard. He had let it grow. Until now, Ludo had always been clean-shaven, tiresomely groomed. I interpreted the stubble on his face as a sign of his grief. I looked into Ludo’s eyes and saw myself there, a shadow in the glassy pond of his irises looking back at me. I saw the love and the hate that had bonded and repelled us, the sexual appetite we had untethered in each other. The black surfaces of his pupils shrank; my image vanished. I was exiled. He was sweating. His nostrils flared again. I didn’t know what to expect. Sexual attack? Sudden departure? The odds were even. Then, poof, the moment vanished. He was steady and severe.

  I examined his face. I told him he had a lovely Roman nose.

  “It gives you the look of a man capable of building things—aqueducts, roads,” I said. Ludo lifted his upper lip and bared his teeth.

  “You,” he said, lifting his leather suitcase with one hand and whipping the shaft of his umbrella against the door frame with the other. “Have come into my life to torture me.”

  Ludo clutched his departure paraphernalia the way a man lost at sea clutches a raft. He left abruptly, vanished before I could respond, before I could remind him that he was the one who had pursued me, muttering the word love all along and confessing that my vagina was like a tunnel of light he could swim into the way a fish swims into a channel to protect itself while the world is being lacerated by a deathly wind.

  I walked to the living room and—spent, shocked, bruised—pressed my face against the latticed panes of the terrace doors. I watched him march down the street. He was soldiering his way to the train station. I peeled the shutters open and stepped onto the terrace between our dying plants. I was as empty as the wind-beaten sky. I didn’t know what to do. Against my will, against my better judgment, I yelled: “We all wake up to realize we are stuffing the wrong holes with the wrong things!”

  The earth was finally beginning to warm up. A hot wind whistled through the crooked cobblestone streets of the medieval quarter; it moved in broad strokes, polishing the sky. A vermillion band of light was beginning to form over the mountains in the distance. I heard the wind pick up; it cartwheeled its way through the streets of Girona. The Catalan flags of independence, hung here and there on poles, the buildings, the terraces—they all clapped as if in response. In the midst of the narrow alleys, flanked by their dense stone walls, I spotted Ludo.

  He emerged through the arch at the end of the stairs that hug the convent. The wind knocked over empty bottles of wine that had been left at the door of a wine bar the night before. They rolled, trailing behind Ludo, chiming against the cobblestone street. The wind cast aside anything that hadn’t been bolted to the ground. I watched Ludo duck menus and plastic patio furniture. He was walking down La Rambla now, the city’s main promenade. He crossed the bridge, the Pont de Pedra, rushed over the river, then disappeared into a flood of light. A white sheet Mercè had hung out to dry on her rooftop tore away and floated upward, softly at first, and then in a panic, the way a dove released at a funeral jets into the sky, eager to get away from all the grief-stricken people left on earth.

  Once Ludo crossed the Pont de Pedra, I lost sight of him. I knew him well enough to know he would take the road we always took. I also knew that those streets operated as corridors for the wind, that the wind would have to narrow its scope in order to push through them, and that in doing so it would pick up pressure and speed. An unusually strong xaloc was blowing up from the Sahara. Ludo would have a hell of a time getting to the train station. He would have to throw all his weight into the wind to avoid falling backward. He would have to lift his legs one by one with tremendous focus, as if he were walking across the moon, and even then, he would still arrive at the station panting, out of breath.

  The bells tolled again. I stepped back in and sealed the shutters. I looked around the apartment. Where were Agatha and Fernando? It seemed they had been gone forever. I had been deserted in an outdated apartment, left to rot among the broken telephones and VCRs, the old vacuum parts, those bits of technology the three of them—Ludo, Agatha, Fernando—had kept in the event that the ones in regular use ever broke. They had been taught to do so by their parents and grandparents who had survived the world wars. Those shattered bits of technology were proof that the ravenous events of the twentieth century were still hungry for fresh blood. They may deny that proof, but I saw it clearly: the rupture in communications, the feelings of uncertainty activated by the world wars, had barreled on from generation to generation with an increasingly greedy appetite. I felt the blood, which had only just begun to course through the fleshy corridors of my heart, halt and retreat.

  I walked past Agatha’s busts to Ludo’s room and sat down on the edge of his bed, numb. I was as empty as the sky. I felt as though someone had wiped my chest clean. I felt a harrowing, ancient terror begin to rise. The yellow walls of Ludo’s room closed in on me. I wondered if I was suffering from a nervous disorder. I thought, this must be what it’s like to be born. This must be why infants scream when they first exit their mothers’ wombs. Their scream is a scream of confusion. I calmed myself. I reminded myself that this is what I had asked for in retracing the path of my exile: to die in order to begin again. Only I hadn’t expected to feel so increasingly disoriented. I felt like I was trapped in a maddening replicative mirror that kept projecting the dark and stormy event at the center of my life: the void of exile. Was this life? I won
dered. A web with no center? An eternally repetitive sequence of events without origin?

  Hours swept by. I walked onto the terrace a few times, as though it were a landing with a vantage point from which I could see Ludo regardless of where he might be. What else did I have now that Ludo was gone? The goldfish was circling its tank, pumping the slimy green waters with its extraordinary gills. Taüt was walking the corridor. Petita was trailing behind him. I had only the company of these animals.

  I returned to Ludo’s room and threw myself on his bed. I stared at the ceiling. I listened to the calm susurrus of Girona through the walls. I sank into the swampy Matrix of Literature. In my mind’s eye, I navigated its dark waters until I felt time collapse into a single surface, indicating that everything had both already happened and was about to happen. So, I said to myself as I drifted off, neither here nor there: Ludo has left me before; Ludo will leave me again.

  Sometime later I awoke. Was it yesterday, today, tomorrow? I couldn’t tell. The first thing I saw when I opened my eyes was Taüt. A cyclone of thoughts unreeled in my mind. How am I supposed to reconcile being an exile with loving someone? Where is my mother? My father? Where is the archive of my nation? What nation? Which one? Which one could I claim to call my own? Taüt was sitting at the end of the bed. He lifted his talon and saluted me. He was completely calm.

  “Taüt,” I said. “Who can bear a pointless torment?”

  The bird opened his beak.

  “The heart of the future is ancient,” he said.

  “Indeed,” I said. “Indeed it is.”

  Then I thought, what am I going to do with the abyss—incalculably large—I have found myself in? This abyss into which I have leapt only to come out the other end more mired in shit than I had been in to begin with? I stared at the ceiling until I drifted off to sleep again.

  Hours later, in the silence of the night, I sat bolt upright in bed. Camus’s words were swimming around the labyrinthine corridors of my mind: Everything is strange to me, everything, without a single person who belongs to me, with no place to heal this wound . . . I am not from here—not from anywhere else either. And the world has become merely an unknown landscape where my heart can lean on nothing. I got up and paced the corridor. Taüt, loyal companion, hopped off the bed and walked at my heels.

  A week passed during which I could not sleep. Each night, I paced the corridor. My emotions surged and retreated. I was walking through the shallows and profundities of my mind. One moment I was downtrodden, grief-stricken; the next, restless, enraged. But, irrespective of the highs and lows of my mood, one question looped through my mind, a question with roots: What had the pilgrimages exposed? Finally, one day, in the feeble light of dawn, while Agatha and Fernando were asleep in their room, I heard: my total inadequacy in the face of life. I felt struck by the lacerating precision of those words. Who had written them? Benjamin, Levi, Unamuno? That’s when it hit me: I couldn’t believe Ludo was gone.

  I walked into his room. I dragged my sick hand across the yellow walls, the surface of his desk, the rug on his floor. I opened his closet and smelled his clothes. I went through his drawers and his books. I found a note in his handwriting, which was timeless, elegant, floral. I recognized the words.

  The note contained a transcription of the sentence the elder Nietzsche had used to criticize the work of his youth: badly written, ponderous, embarrassing . . . uneven in tempo, without the will to logical cleanliness, very convinced and therefore disdainful of proof.

  Had Ludo been keeping a philological commentary on the record of my suffering? I wondered. For a moment, I felt indignant, inflamed. I rolled those words off my tongue: badly written, ponderous, embarrassing! In that bitter heat, I remembered Nietzsche’s other words: equality before the enemy: the first supposition of an honest duel.

  But as soon as I retreated to the corridor, I felt confused. Who was the enemy? And where did the enemy lay hiding? Was the enemy manifest, like death, within me? There was no way of knowing. I sat on the floor next to the busts of Agatha and wept uncontrollably. I was in the hollows again. No one was home. Taüt ambled down the corridor and nudged my sick hand. I lifted it to pet him. He had picked up new habits from the dog. He cooed and cawed in response to my touch, and I heard that bass voice of his come at me as if from across a great distance. I was exhausted. I felt as though I was outside this world looking in—already dead and yet still slogging through, dragging my ignorance behind me. What parts of my mind had I fed? I wondered, as I stroked the bird’s wings. What parts had I starved? I had been faithfully devoted to the person who had set off on the Grand Tour of Exile, but that person no longer existed. I had been reborn in the pile of ruins like a phoenix, that pile to which I had added my own cold cruelty, my own wretchedness.

  After that, I slept for days. In the limpid light of sleep, the questions metamorphosed; they blended together and took on dramatic proportions. One afternoon, while I was aimlessly walking through the verdant hills and valleys of Sant Daniel, I thought: What does equality consist of in a case where it remains unclear who the enemy is? I flipped through the possible candidates—Ludo Bembo, the knotted and knobby paths of my ill-fated life, the world’s leading dictators who have acted upon it ruthlessly—and again felt my sadness give way to rage. My anger became focused. I felt irate at this bloodthirsty, disordered universe, disgusted for being a part of it. My thoughts spooled and spun. I wondered: What would the greatest revenge be? I scanned the limpid, wind-polished sky. I saw the answer, which had presented itself to me in so many forms and facets throughout the Grand Tour of Exile and against which I, fearful and uncertain, had repeatedly thrown myself only to be repelled, as if it had been written across that sky in ink. The greatest revenge, I saw, lay in the simplest revenge of all: to love against all odds, to prevail, to persist in a world that fought tooth and nail to eliminate me. That’s all there was. That’s all there ever had been. I stood there utterly dumbfounded. How stupid, I thought, how utterly simple. I felt a fool. I picked up a rock as if I were picking up that word: love. I put that rock in my mouth and sucked on it. It was unyielding, hard, an object I could not metabolize or break into parts. I returned home terrified, confused, and yet somehow resolved, determined to pursue Ludo, to draw a new path of exile across the map of my ill-fated life. I sucked on that rock the whole way back to his apartment. It left a mineral taste in my mouth.

  The next day, I packed my things. I was done in no time. I didn’t have very much. I had Taüt, my notebook, the rock, the clothes on my back. I had lost everything. I had very little money left; the objects of my past were long lost. I had no identity and yet, I thought, I was infinite, multiple. Like a blank page, I can be whatever I want. I heard Agatha moving around in the living room. A copper light was filtering through the window. It cast the room in an amber glow. I watched her silently for a moment. She was hovering over the aquarium. She had combed her hair to one side; it was dangling over her shoulder. I could see the fish darting across the tank through the gaps between the thick strands of her hair.

  “I’m leaving,” I announced. “I can’t bear the thought of Ludo’s abandoning me like this, hanging by a thread like a piece of laundry.”

  “Where to?” she asked.

  She turned around. Her face caught the golden light. She looked serene, pale, tranquil. If there is anyone to whom I can speak the truth, it’s her, I thought to myself.

  “I’m going to pursue Ludo,” I said.

  “How?”

  “On the next ship,” I declared. “I am going to cross the waters of the Mediterranean, Sea of Sunken Hopes.”

  She looked at me, stunned. Her jaw had dropped slightly, enough for me to see that the corners of her mouth had grown wet. “Shouldn’t you give things a rest for a while?”

  Her tone was somber, as if a tide of worry had risen and drowned her voice. She regarded me with a look that betrayed feelings of pity, confusion, fear. It was as if by addressing me, her mind had come into contact w
ith something rough, incoherent, disturbed. That expression seemed to be everywhere lately, superimposed on the faces of people I knew and strangers. As soon as people looked at me, their faces would collapse. It was as if they could see through me to the shattered bits of my father and mother that had drifted in my void like tumbleweeds in a drafty desert. I, a perpetual stranger in every city. Was I subverting its norms from the inside? I had no idea. I had no idea about anything. It had been so long since I had looked in the mirror.

  That evening, I boarded the ship to Genoa with Taüt on my shoulder. I retreated to my cabin. It would take seventeen and a half hours to cross the Mediterranean to Italy. In Genoa, I would walk to Terminal Traghetti and board a train to Genova Brignole station. From there, I would transfer to a train headed for Florence. I was sure Ludo would be waiting for me in the geometric city that had produced him. I closed my eyes. I imagined knocking on his door. He would open it, and through the slit, I would see his father, defeated, old, frail, lying supine on a bed in front of the television in the living room. Ludo hadn’t lied after all. I imagined the blue glow of the television screen giving him a pasty, ghostly look. I imagined he would be tense at first. He would stand rigidly before me. He would try to forbid me from coming in. I would remind him that my father had died many deaths; I would tell him that I had watched my father’s face transform in life and in death and that each time I had to sever my attachment to him. I would tell him I know what it means to enter the uncharted waters of grief. I would tell him that I could be a mountain of wisdom for him to lean on, that our long macabre dance had whittled down to this moment, this simple gesture of making sure he would not be pacing alone in the shadow of his father’s imminent death. His lips would tremble. His father would turn his leathery face to look in our direction. His eyes would be puffy, small, and watery, but his gaze would be conclusive, determined, the gaze of a man aware that he is standing on the verge of his own death. He would say something, a quick protest about the draft we were letting in through the open door, and Ludo would let me in. He would shut the door behind me. We would stand in the foyer contemplating each other in silence, considering each other’s faces, the many selves we had either silenced or resurrected within each other. I would be the first to speak. After all, it was I who had come all this way after him. What choice did I have? My father had vanished from my void. So had my mother. They had joined the residue of the world. They were everywhere. They were in the very air I breathed. They existed in my inky veins as knowledge. What did it matter what streets I walked on? What did it matter where I sank my anchor when the whole world was a single surface, an infinitely unreeling roll of paper?