Call Me Zebra

by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi

  The church bells let out a single stroke. I waited until the peal faded into the distance, then set off on the Architectural Pilgrimage of Fragmentation.

  I walked across Avinguda Diagonal toward Park Güell. Tourists flocked past me on the boisterous, broad street. A man in an old blue Volvo honked at a woman on a scooter; she cut him off and whizzed on. Her head was enclosed in a red helmet. She looked like a giant beating heart moving unprotected through the street.

  Rather suddenly, my thoughts came together like the angled points of a star. It occurred to me that a book is only a good counselor if it calls up the wounded zones of our consciousness—in other words, if the act of reading it wounds us. I thought about how the word star is only one letter different from the word scar, and this thought reinforced my conclusion that Baudelaire, that beloved dandy, had not taken his rebellion against the bourgeoisie, those who cling to security at the expense of the vulnerable, far enough. No. Because in order for a book to be a good counselor, I persevered, it must be negotiating a danger zone; there must be a transgression, a leap, a move beyond a prohibition. I went underground, got on the metro. “A good book,” I said to myself, “is cannibalistic. An object that calls up the ghosts of our past in order to reflect the haunting instability of our future world.”

  The metro doors closed. The train moved along the tracks. Immediately, a woman’s amplified voice emanated from somewhere in the crowd. “Who is the enemy?” she asked. Someone answered, “The adversaries are everywhere.” Another voice said, “We are confronted with a case of leaderless resistance.” I looked around. A group of wiry teenagers were leaning against the doors gloomily. Everything else was just a sea of heads. I couldn’t tell where the voices were coming from.

  There, in that nonplace, in the city’s gutters and underground corridors, the dark rooms of grief I carried within me were suddenly called up, the insurmountable loss, the irreparable wound that had led me to retrace my life’s journey in punctuated movements from West to East. I was there revisiting the dark events or, rather, the senseless phenomena that had conspired to destroy me. I was trying to recover a fraction of what had been lost from my memory. I closed my eyes. I felt like a ghost. I felt as if, with my presence alone, I were sounding out a warning of doom and gloom.

  “Who am I?” I asked aloud.

  I heard: “Another corpse in the ill-fated pile.”

  An hour later, slightly nauseated, I was standing beneath an ashen sky in the Metaphysical Garden of Exile. A storm was gathering. Another hour and the rain would be pouring down. The sensation I had in the metro lingered as I walked through the park. I slipped through a hedge and lumbered around the aloe and palms. I walked through the Portico of the Washerwoman; I could feel the wind moving through the gaps between the columns of the arcade, sifting through the branches of the trees, rushing through the coastal brush. It sounded like the park was sighing.

  “What am I doing in Barcelona?” I asked myself. There was no one else around.

  I answered, “I am leaping into the void of exile in order to stain my notebook with the inky residue of the past.

  “And who will read your notebook?” I asked.

  “Nobody,” I answered despairingly, and carried on beneath the parade of clouds.

  I walked through the park as a shadow, a ghost, already dead and yet still alive. I stood on the terrace with serpentine benches, looking out over Barcelona, and from that vantage point, I could sense a slight shift in the air, in the landscape of my mind. For a second, I considered leaping off the overlook. I considered killing myself, going, like a good book, toward my own disappearance. I looked out at the sea, slack and purple in the distance; at the cranes hovering over the spires of La Sagrada Familia; at the domes and turrets of the city; the slick blue glass and reddish hues of the Torre Agbar; the clay tower of the warden’s house in the park; and the fronds of palm trees in between. I thought to myself, yes, indeed, I will leap off the terrace and, as Borges said, my tomb will be the unfathomable air.

  I looked backward and forward at the fundamental fatality of my life, its senselessness and lack of reason, the swamp air of my childhood, and remembered that right before his death my father had raised his hand and grazed the yellow tips of his mustache with his leathery fingers. Then he’d tapped his temple with his index finger, and weakly said: “This, up here, is the only liberty you will ever have. Guard it with your life, your death.”

  I stared out at the city’s skyline. Barcelona was emitting a low hum. I looked at the Sea of Sunken Hopes, at its infinite horizons and mists. Even from that impossible distance, I could hear the waves breaking against the shore—the sea swelling and retreating—and for a moment, I had the impression that Barcelona was free of thresholds, as if its perimeters were melting into the sea, the Old and the New Worlds blending together. In my mind’s eye, I could see the statue of Christopher Columbus standing by the shore at the end of that long promenade, La Rambla: his face proud, his finger pointing at the myth of the new.

  There it was again, that terrible word: new. New! Scoffing at the word immediately made me feel better. I had survived my duel with the unthinking masses dining on the artifice of the so-called New World. I thought of its companion term: now. I denounced them both. “I would sooner believe in nothing, sooner in the devil, than in the now,” I said out loud to no one, echoing Nietzsche’s words. The ill-fateds’ now had been and would continue to be leveled by history’s remorseless blows; it had been beaten out of our repertoire of tenses.

  Just then, I noticed a girl with a broad forehead and a sharp chin standing next to me. She was wearing a blue dress with a passenger pigeon printed on the skirt. She had the most unexceptional face. She was American.

  She turned to me, and asked: “Were you speaking to me? I didn’t hear what you said.”

  “No,” I said abruptly.

  I examined her dress. I hated its whimsical flair. Then I thought: Why shouldn’t I speak to her? Why should I keep my thoughts to myself when the world perpetuates itself by torturing exiles, immigrants, refugees? It is my duty as a lucky-unlucky to take revenge on the world by contaminating it with my thoughts and my suffering, which are one and the same thing. She was looking at the sprawling view of Barcelona, at the blue surface of the sea, which looked like hammered leather with the wind pressing into the water, causing depressions, waves, foamy peaks and valleys.

  “Actually, I was speaking to you,” I said.

  She turned to face me again with that plain, broad forehead of hers.

  “You,” I said, “are at liberty to turn your nose away from the cadavers of history, to protect your stupidity and your innocence”—her smooth cheeks flushed and her blue eyes went round—“but I could never do the same.”

  She took a step back.

  “Even if I wanted to turn away from the miasma of death,” I added, stepping toward her, “I couldn’t because I have been ghettoed in the Pyramid of Exile for the benefit of people like you.”

  “You don’t know anything about me,” she said. She was on the verge of tears.

  “I know what I know,” I said. “And I also know when I see what I know.”

  I stopped paying attention to her. I reviewed my words: I know what I know and I also know when I see what I know. It was the most brilliant declaration I had made all day. More brilliant than the educational intervention I had offered the grocer.

  I watched her walk away; her skirt billowed in the wind. After that, I walked to a remote corner of the park, found a moist patch of earth, and dug a hole in the ground. I scribbled that wretched word—new—on a piece of paper and buried it in the hole. I sniffed my fingers. I remembered the smell of the earth where my father and I had dug my mother’s grave. It was acidic, poisonous, dry. Then I remembered the moist, grassy smell of the hole into which the undertakers had lowered my father’s casket. The Hosseinis—all dead except me—were scattered across the world. The next time I looked up, I saw the Angel of History hovering ab
ove the city, mouth agape, batting its wings. There it was: history appearing before my eyes as a single catastrophe. I thought, the Matrix of Literature is a centerless swarm of interconnected books that tirelessly mirror back to us the pile of ruins that is humanity.

  I kept on walking. I walked past a performer wearing a leopard-print shirt and a pair of purple leotards. He had long brown hair, a terrible wide mouth, and his eyes were hidden behind white-rimmed sunglasses. He was playing an electric guitar. A few people were gathered around, looking at him with begrudging grimaces.

  I carried on. I walked away from the park through the Nature Square and the Austria Gardens with its non-native plants. I weaved my way through the Doric-inspired columns of the hypostyle room, past the famous statue of the dragon spewing water, walked down a flight of stairs that looked like the long train of a bride’s dress in the dusk air, past the famous shimmering salamander. Before I left, I looked back at the Metaphysical Garden of Exile and realized that the architecture of the park was a mirror image of the infrastructure of my life: everything a bit off, disorienting, misshapen. I spotted a group of tourists near the park gates, heads down in their laminated maps. It occurred to me that in opposition to them I, whose ancestors are buried here, there, and everywhere, our dust scattered across the Four Corners of the World, am destined to remain lost. Their Achilles’ heel—an aversion to gaps and fissures—is my greatest strength.

  I made my way to the Block of Discordance. Certain names were coming back to me, certain facts about the city. L’Eixample, that political project, I remembered again, was designed by the utopist Ildefons Cerdà. It occurred to me that Cerdà must have organized information in his mind as sterilely as he’d designed the neighborhood’s square clinical blocks, by archiving thoughts and memories into specific containers in order to avoid any risk of cross-contamination. The same way corpses are buried in times of so-called health: in individual caskets rather than piles. A middle-aged woman with a bell-shaped haircut was standing at the corner searching through her purse; she looked distraught, as if she were peering into an abyss. She kept plunging her hand deeper and deeper into her purse. Her face looked as if it were about to fall off. I walked up to her, and said, adopting an ironic tone: “It seems to me you stand to benefit from the legacy of Ildefons Cerdà: enemy of the old, anticannibal, a man eager to purify the world from the clutter of the past. Anyone who walks the streets of L’Eixample will immediately experience linear thought patterns because Cerdà has modernized the city by flattening it into a singular surface. Go on!” I encouraged. “Walk through L’Eixample! Simplicity awaits you! It is a field of answers!” I looked at her purse. It was brown and shiny. It looked like a clam. She sealed that clam and scurried off with great haste.

  At the intersection with Carrer de Girona, it suddenly occurred to me that in contraposition to Ildefons Cerdà, Quim Monzó lived on the plane of antiquity, accumulating rubbish from the past that he had to grapple with day and night. I concluded that his apartment, littered with objects, represented a sustained rebellion against the rigidity of the built environment in which he lived. I felt a surge of affection for that retired literary critic.

  The Architectural Pilgrimage of Fragmentation had oxygenated my mind. I walked down Passeig de Gràcia. There it was: Casa Milà, that vertiginous building designed by the very same Antoni Gaudí who had designed Park Güell. I stood on the street gawking at its undulating facade, at the spiraling figures of rock that emerge from its curved roof, which resemble medieval knights and soldiers wearing gas masks. I thought to myself: According to Benjamin, martyr of thought, we must always be prepared to confront the adversities of outer life which sometimes come from all sides, like wolves, the brutal winds of the future through which the dust of the past will come blowing back. My solitary walks, I reiterated to myself, are designed to resurrect the past. In other words, I am a Flâneur of Death, walking through the city, examining the palimpsest of time.

  Farther down the Block of Discordance is the Casa Amatller, designed by the hairy-chinned Josep Puig i Cadafalch. I inspected the floral and neo-Gothic motifs, the stained glass windows, the intricate tile work, the ochre shutters, the peach and white and red tones, the Arab- and Sephardic-inspired asymmetrical wooden doors engraved with a star-shaped design, and again I thought of that word—star—and how it is only one letter different from the word scar, and I cried a little. An old banner, faint, weather-beaten, barely legible, hung from the terrace of the building: BUSH NO GUERRA NO SADDAM NO. The banner looked abandoned, a relic of the past. After briefly protesting the war in Iraq, the rest of the world had moved on while hundreds of lives continued to be eviscerated every day. Those who survive the long war, I thought, will carry on with their hearts extinguished. Like me, they will spend the rest of their days gawking at the world as if they were already dead.

  I stood there, alone, reflecting. My father, who had been quiet for some time, sounded out his old warning: Child, there is nothing worse than dying a stranger. It occurred to me that my father’s maxim will remain true as long as the world is full of Cerdàs and that the Casa Amatller, which had belonged to a chocolatier, a man who knew how to find pleasure in life, is a rare disruption in the pragmatic and utilitarian project of a global society that is always lying to itself, trying to outrun the past. I felt a deep calm wash over me as I continued to meditate on the building because, despite containing a plethora of decorative elements, despite drawing on so many architectural styles at once—Romanesque, Gothic, Flemish, Nordic, Catalan, Arabic, Sephardic—the Casa Amatller exudes an air of serenity. Then I thought, no, not despite but because. Because, by virtue of containing various architectural traditions, the Casa Amatller offers us a view of the infinite dizzying pluralism of life; it is a material manifestation of both the interconnected fabric of being and also of the nothingness that contains everything. Not unlike my father’s transcriptions. Satisfied, I moved down to Casa Batlló—Gaudí’s House of Bones,which is to say his House of Death—weeping and laughing in turns.

  A gaggle of tourists stood in front of the building, lifting their sunglasses to look up at the House of Bones. The fractured mosaics of the building’s facade were shimmering in the light of the afternoon. The scaled blue roof and the range of colors—aquamarine to gold—and the undulating facade, its smooth ribbed stone interrupted only by oval windows, gave the building the impression of being both fish and sea, animal and element. I felt my body turn inside out. The House of Bones looked like the ridged surface of a beach after the waves have receded and left their imprint on the sand and, simultaneously, like a brilliant undiscovered fish. The tourists moved on. The awe the vertiginous architecture had awakened in them sank below the surface so blithe indifference and automatism could rise again.

  “Procession of fakes!” I yelled after them. They were all the same person. It was as though they had read a manual on travel etiquette in order to blend in with one another, in order to form a Free-Floating Nation of Tourists: a thoughtless mass drifting along a grid.

  I felt a sudden urge to follow them like a detective. What they lent and denied their attention to, I decided, was a barometer for measuring universal levels of alienation from death, and therefore, I carried on, from literature.

  I pursued them all the way to La Rambla. People strutted between the rows of plane trees. They observed the living statues. I sounded out their gait: taa-taa, taa-taa. I sat down on a bench and kept an eye on my specimens. They congregated around a bloody heap. I got up to look. They were taking pictures.

  An overthrown trash can, with its contents spilled out—beer bottles, an old bouquet of flowers splattered with blood, food wrappers, pages of a torn and tarnished book—came into view. Gradually, a man, his limbs curled over the severed frame of a bicycle, materialized. His head was missing. He had been decapitated. The bloody stump had rolled away. The tourists I had followed were holding their phones at arm’s length. They were taking selfies. Like apparitions in a nightmare, the
ir nylon lips were spreading into synthetic smiles while in the background a living statue was miming death.

  The idea that the world had been duplicated in the virtual plane left me somber and repulsed; I hated that the virtual dimension had been linked to its physical counterpart to form a single continuum and that people had started to move between the two—the physical world and its hologram, the Internet—with the same ease they would exit a highway only to reenter it on the other side of the overpass. I watched the tourists post their photos online and marvel at their image, at their fake selves smiling back at them from the virtual plane. It was as if they needed to duplicate their image in order to affirm: I exist, I exist, I exist. I was bored to death with them.

  I drifted down La Rambla. Saplings had sprouted on the lower branches of the plane trees, but beneath the fresh leaves, the sycamores’ trunks looked sickly; a hairy white fungus had invaded the bark. I wondered if it was an infestation, if the bottom halves of the trees were diseased. I wanted to return to my cave, where I could descend beneath the world’s duplicitous facade, slip beneath its mask, its surface currents, and there, in quiet solitude, boldly look through literature into the eye of the lie of life. But instead I walked to the Boqueria.

  It was time to meet Ludo Bembo.

  When I arrived at the vegetable stalls near the Boqueria, Ludo Bembo was already there. He had his back to me, and he was kissing another woman. It was late enough in the day for the vegetable sellers to have abandoned their stalls, leaving behind a few wilted eggplants, some cardboard boxes, overripe bananas. I sat on one of the boxes and watched. As soon as Ludo moved his head, the woman’s face came into view. She was a few years older than I was, closer in age to Ludo, and her skin was in the pink of health. She had large bright eyes and long, curly chestnut-colored hair that fanned open behind her neck. Her lips were tightly sealed. Ludo had his arms up and he was pushing her back. He was exuding discomfort. He managed to detach himself. From this, I deduced that the kiss they’d exchanged wasn’t inviting or sensual; it was dry and apologetic and final.