I looked the woman up and down. She looked arrogant. She held her chin up and cast him a glacial gaze. She was wearing black heels, tight jeans, and a red button-down shirt that signaled a punitive character, a rigid kind of sexuality. Her outfit was a warning. That shirt, in conjunction with her scrupulous, cold gaze, seemed to say: I will draw your blood. I felt sorry for Ludo Bembo. What was he—a man with a poetic past and predisposed to a lyrical future—doing with that Tentacle of Ice?
The situation was pitiful. It was clear that Ludo was in the process of dismissing her; or, rather, given her demanding demeanor, he was in the process of gently removing himself from her presence. She was the woman he had slept with the night before. I was sure of it. I imagined her spreading her long legs to receive him. I imagined him climbing on top of her. I briefly wondered if he had yanked her hair before climaxing, and then I ambled into the market, confident that from now on Ludo Bembo would be entangled with me.
To kill time until Ludo was freed, I walked between the stalls. Only a few vendors remained open. I paused here and there to inspect the food on display: squid (black, glossy, covered in ink), minuscule sand dabs, red shrimp, rock lobsters (their claws limp), eels (displayed on piles of shaved ice), salted cod (whole, diced, cut into strips), sardines, monkfish (cross-eyed, with flat, stupid heads), barnacles, anchovies, trout, crayfish, oysters, clams, mussels, prawns, wine and cava, piles of almonds, walnuts, cashews, bins full of candy, rows of gummies designed like fruit (watermelons, cherries, slices of melon). I hadn’t eaten anything substantial in days. I felt weak, drained, worthless. And then I heard my name.
It was Ludo Bembo. He had come into the market to look for me. He arrived panting, breathless. His curls were bouncing on his head. He said, “I saw you walk in.”
“Are you returning from the March on Rome?” I posed, with a brute manner.
His eyes went blank.
“I wasn’t alive back then,” he said a bit stiffly, once he had recovered from his shock. He paused for a second to catch his breath. “And besides, I’m not a fascist; that’s a very offensive thing for you to be implying,” he intoned, drawing his shoulders back. He was carrying a messenger bag. It looked heavy. He swapped the bag to his opposite shoulder. His muscles tensed, and I realized that, despite his thin frame, he was robust, firm in his manners, developed in the right places. A man who knew how to desire and be desired.
A pigeon fluttered down from the rafters and landed between our feet. I thought it looked like Mussolini—it was pink and black, and had nervous little eyes—but I didn’t say a thing. I bit my tongue. Ludo was looking down at the bird affectionately. I made a mental note: Ludo Bembo refuses to discuss fascism but is willing to smile at the Mussolini bird. Then I remembered his indifference toward the dead swallow that had dropped out of the sky at the airport and concluded that he wasn’t so much apathetic toward birds but rather uneasy around the subject of death. Perhaps, I reflected, when it came to death, he would always look like a tide had dragged him out of the shallows; he would always struggle to keep his head above water. His inadequacy in the face of the abyss, I deduced, must have subconsciously contributed to his attraction to me, Dame of the Void. A dark chuckle squeezed out from between my lips, and Ludo looked at me, simultaneously captivated and perturbed. He had no idea what was headed his way.
“What’s in there?” I asked, pointing at his bag, smiling, offering him an olive branch.
“In here? Notebooks, documents. I was in the archives.” He gave a sigh. “It’s so poorly organized. It’s exhausting being in there.”
I imagined the Tentacle of Ice wrapping herself around him. I couldn’t contain myself any longer.
“Are you referring to your friend’s vaginal archives?”
“What?” I watched his eyebrows float to the center of his face, then drift apart again. The words had just poured out of my mouth. To my surprise, he caught on rather quickly. “Oh,” he said. “No, don’t worry about her.”
“I don’t worry about anyone,” I said curtly, cutting him off.
We made our way to one of the food stalls and sat at the counter. Ludo ordered for the both of us while I looked through the glass display case at a row of tourists sitting at the opposite counter. I felt a palpable hatred toward them, those stupid tourists with their white-gloved inspection of the most marketable qualities of another nation, another culture, their experience purified of the painful clutter of the past, of the horrifying traces of the accretion of history. While I pasted onto my face the same vacuous grin I witnessed on theirs, Ludo ordered wine, squid, poached eggs.
“What’s wrong with your face?” he asked.
“You mean their faces,” I said, pointing my fork at the tourists.
“Mimicry is the greatest form of flattery,” he offered. There it was again: that edifying tone of his. “If you don’t like them, I suggest you pretend they don’t exist.”
“Mimicry,” I corrected in breathy stabs, “is mockery.”
He reached for my hand. With his other, he lifted his wineglass.
“Cheers,” he said, trying to redirect my attention. He took a sip. Then he sat there looking pensive, thoughtfully gazing at the tourists I had pointed out.
I drank as rapidly as I could. I needed to move the image of those tourists, who roam freely in green pastures while the rest of us are enclosed in the Pyramid of Exile, into the pile of ruins that is the past. Never mind that I was sitting right next to them, shoveling the same food into my mouth, looking just like them. What distinguished me was invisible, abstract. It was the feeling of nothingness that I carried with me wherever I went, a void I was convinced they had never experienced and that I, in contradistinction to them, had carried for so long that it had consumed my life. The only way I knew I was alive was by watching the pile of ruin grow, the rubbish attract rubbish until the garbage of my life was insurmountable. I felt a sharp ache in my void. I was anxious it was going to burst. I didn’t say any of this to Ludo. I ate, nodded, thanked him, said how good everything was.
Encouraged, Ludo ordered more food and drinks. Beer-battered pork cheeks, black rice cooked in squid ink, crisp white wine. And when we were done with the meal, he ordered ratafia.
“Taste this,” he said. “It’s a delicacy.”
I tasted it.
“What do you think?” he asked with boyish charm.
I told him the ratafia smelled like wet soil, limestone, clay, volcanic rock, freshly cut grass, worms, a brackish wind coming down through a mountain pass, dusty herbs, heaps of licorice. He ran his hand up along my arm and tucked a strand of hair behind my ear. “You’re so beautiful,” he said.
“Don’t lie,” I said. “Besides, even if I were beautiful, it would not be by any merit of my own.”
“You have a great nose,” he said.
“It’s true. I have a great nose,” I said. Then, to avoid saying what I wanted to tell him, that my nose is so sublime it can smell spilled blood from as far away as the deep past, I asked: “Do you like living in Girona?”
“People around here like to say it’s the Florence of Catalonia. But I wouldn’t go so far. The Spaniards are known for exaggerating.”
“Where I come from,” I informed him, leaning in and whispering warmly in his ear, “we have a saying about people who exaggerate. We say: Those who haven’t seen see poorly.”
“Exactly. Brava. They are narrow, provincial, out of touch,” Ludo said sympathetically, sipping at the black liquor. “Where do you come from?”
“You saw my flight details. New York.”
“No, before that.”
“I hail from the land of Cyrus, King of Kings!” I announced.
“You mean Iran?” he asked, laughing.
The tourists paid and left. I watched them make their way to the door and disappear into the dark folds of the sky. Afternoon had given way to evening. In their absence, I felt I could breathe again. I started to speak in aphorisms, in riddles. I explained that it’s
not just when a country hasn’t seen much that there’s a problem; if a country has seen too much, it stops seeing clearly as well. I told him there is a delicate balance. Ludo, who hails from a fallen empire himself, nodded along knowingly, his face blooming like a daffodil in the sun.
“If the balance is disturbed—if one does not see enough, or one sees too much—then, according to your beloved compatriot Calvino, the eye does not see things but images of things that mean other things.”
“Do you mistake things for other things?” he posed.
“When I see a palm tree,” I said, feeling my void tighten in response, “what I see is my mother’s ashen face and her lifeless corpse.” I watched his features drift apart. I could see his tongue working that adorable gap between his front teeth.
“Aren’t corpses lifeless by definition?” he posed awkwardly, narrowing his eyes.
“Not initially. Life leaves the body over a long period of time, slowly, quietly, with grace. It lingers in the atmosphere until it is absorbed by the mind of the universe. In the case of my father, however, I intercepted the mind of the universe,” I said, smiling vaguely. I could see Ludo’s wheels spinning. “Did the Bembos pass down only a fraction of their knowledge to you?” I asked.
“The Bembos? What do you mean, a fraction?”
“All I’m saying is that your naiveté concerning death is incongruous with your literary past. But then again, I’ve learned that in life anything is possible!”
“My past?” Ludo asked tersely. He had taken offense.
“All I know is that you’re a Bembo,” I said, lifting an oyster off the plate and offering it to him. It worked. He took the ridged shell and delicately sucked the brackish muscle into his mouth.
Every once in a while, the cooks, who were wearing black uniforms that made them look like undertakers, wiped their brows with a piece of oil-soaked cloth. Then they fussed with the pans, turned up the flames, removed sardines from the oven, boiled crabs, threw calamari into the fire.
A vague memory of my mother, Bibi Khanoum, resurfaced. I felt weary again and noxious. I saw her standing in the kitchen of the Oasis of Books wearing a blue apron. There was a dead sturgeon at her feet. She kneeled on the floor and sliced into the fish in order to retrieve the eggs. Blood curdled around the drain; I watched it get absorbed into the pipes and gutters. My nose stung with the sharp smell. I tried to look at my mother’s face, but her head was bent over the sturgeon and I couldn’t see it. I felt a nudge. It was Ludo. He had a follow-up question.
“What do you mean, intercepted?” he asked.
I sniffed the liquor, and the herbal notes helped to resettle my stomach. Then I explained to him that instead of the universe absorbing my father upon his death I had absorbed him through metempsychosis. In other words, I beat the universe to it. Then I added: “I’ve recently discovered that I’ve also absorbed traces of my mother through my father, who had absorbed her previously.”
Ludo leaned back in his chair. He looked like a frustrated accountant who keeps adding the same numbers and getting different results.
“What brought on this realization?” he inquired.
I told him that after my mother’s untimely death, while living in Barcelona, my father had entered a period of heightened literary awareness. That, in addition to pursuing his usual work as a translator, he began to practice the Art of Transcription. My thoughts swam around the murky waters of my mind like fish in an aquarium. “Under the specter of grief,” I explained to Ludo, “my father, a very innovative man—a man with a fantastic mustache, I should add—devoted himself to the manual reproduction of texts, like a monk in a monastery.” I went on to tell him that recalling this apparently insignificant fact, which until now I had erased from memory, allowed me to connect the dots. I said, “I’ve entered a period of supreme literary activity since absorbing my father; so it’s only logical to conclude that my father’s heightened literary awareness in the years after my mother’s death is indicative of the fact that he had absorbed her. And thus it only follows that I’ve now absorbed traces of her through him.”
Ludo’s pupils had dilated. I leaned in. He smelled like orange blossoms, eucalyptus, figs sliced open and soaked in honey; the scents of my youth came back to me with a dizzying pull. I landed a kiss on his cheek. His worries melted away in an instant.
I slipped him a small piece of paper on which I had written a message expressly for him. I told him, “This formula, extracted from reading Blanchot, allowed my ancestors to survive their disastrous fate for generations. Literature holds the key to transcendence, to metaphysically surviving one’s death. Here it is.” I pushed the note along the counter. He leaned over to look.
Life + Death = Totality
Totality = Unreality of the Whole
The corners of his mouth curled up as he tucked the note in his pocket. He looked enchanted, and I wondered if a new space had opened in him, a dark room to which he could retreat to acknowledge his own wretchedness.
“You should come to Girona,” he said. “I live with some great people. You would like it there. You can see the Pyrenees from our apartment. In the evenings, the flanks of the mountains look purple. I’ve never seen anything like it. And then there’s Bernadette, Agatha, Fernando. Well, Bernadette will be leaving soon. At least I hope she will. She’s a nervous type, chaste, pulls the blinds down at sunset and slips into these fluffy pink pajamas, and then she seals herself in her room and prays to the pope or the Virgin Mary. If she leaves her room and I’m there, she walks along the walls like a crab. I’m surprised she doesn’t try to grab the wall to save herself from falling. You’ve got to see it with your own eyes!” He laughed, though his laugh wasn’t malicious. It was full of bewilderment at the mysteries of life.
We sat there and got progressively drunker. I told him that, as a child, I once tied myself to a tree and pretended I was a cow. I exclaimed, “The most insipid hours of my life!”
“What made you want to do that?” he asked.
I thought of The Hung Mallard. I heard my father echo the voice of my great-great-grandfather, Shams Abbas Hosseini: We will remain as succulent as that duck. I shared this with Ludo. The Hung Mallard, I told him, was a symbolic portrait of our collective family destiny. I told him that by tying myself to a tree I had tapped into deep reservoirs of grief that allowed me to understand from an early age what it means to live in a state of captivity, the reason I am now able to exert my will to power from within the Pyramid of Exile.
Ludo smiled kindly. I saw his reflection on the glass counter. His eyes looked darker and his hair had a red sheen. He had an attentive look on his face. He was listening. I wondered if our ancestors in the poetic dimension had oiled the gears of our conversation. Then he leaned in and planted a soft kiss on my neck.
“What’s the strangest thing you did as a child?” I asked.
For a second, he looked remote, as if he were excavating the ruins of memory. Then he told me that when he was a child his parents had owned a house in the Tuscan countryside, that he used to go walking through the fields, writing out the alphabet on the rocks in chalk. “I felt as if I were inventing language!” he said with a nostalgic whisper.
“That’s the strangest thing you did?” I asked.
“Yes. Is there a problem with that?”
“It seems mild.”
He didn’t say a word. He just sat there with his muzzle in his plate like a sad dog, then he folded and unfolded his napkin. I considered slipping him another note, one that said: “In case you didn’t know, silence is a weapon!” But before I had a chance, he had paid and his mood seemed to have lightened a bit. He put his hand on my leg, and said, “Let’s go. They’re closing up here. We wouldn’t want to keep the cooks waiting. Besides, you need to get out of your head and have some fun.”
I should have known then and there. A fake philologist. A thought murderer. The din of those words echoed in my ear: “Get out of your head. Have some fun.”
We stepped into the evening. We were slogging through the world together, pushing through the crowds on La Rambla, heading into the narrow enclosures of the Gothic Quarter, pausing at the Plaça Reial. The world seemed smaller, darker. I felt my mood plunge. I looked up through the buildings on the perimeter of the plaça toward the rectangle of sky above; it looked like a wounded sheet of paper. The crowd was swelling. With each passing moment, there was less air. I was feeling my way through masses of thoughts, through various facets of mind. I thought I heard a donkey braying in the distance. I thought I heard a house collapse. I thought I smelled the rotting of corpses. I imagined the sky splitting open, ink spilling through it.
Ludo was keeping close. There were beads of sweat running down his neck, which was long and delicate, like a swan’s. My thoughts doubled over themselves. What, I wondered, am I doing with this man when I am bereft of everyone I have ever loved? When I can’t endure any more loss? I feared that the blanket of grief would lift momentarily in his company only to come crashing down with added force. After all, I had loved my mother and father, and what had that led to but pain? More people spilled into the plaça. Ludo put his arm around my shoulders, drawing me close. His lips grazed my hair. I searched the ground at my feet. The stone floor was silver, polished; it gleamed like the surface of the moon. My thoughts folded over themselves, yanked me this way and that. I thought, I have no one left to love, no firm foothold in the universe. I let him draw me into his embrace. The fronds of the palms flapped in the breeze. The lampposts had been decorated with ribbons, garlands, festoons, fake flowers. Fireworks spilled through the sky, and for a brief moment, it seemed like there was something beyond the darkness—a flicker of light.
Ludo leaned in, and said in a grave tone: “Brace yourself. Soon there will be fire everywhere.”
I noticed the crowd was emptying out of the plaça. Very few people were left, and those who remained lingered at the edges, standing under this or that door frame. Voices ricocheted off the stone walls of the buildings. I heard someone say, “Viva la Mercè!” Then came the deafening sound of drums, and the streets were lit up with flames.
Call Me Zebra Page 14