A pack of devils spinning firecrackers came running toward us, followed by dragons spewing fire. As the devils lurked down the streets, their serrated red tails dragged along the pavement like snakes. I stood beneath the black sheet of the night sky and felt time increase its velocity, buckle under its own brute force, and come to a sudden halt. Time assumed the rigidity of death. Then, instantly, it was resurrected and pierced space with its triumphant speed once more. A sign of the apocalypse. I looked around. The city had taken on definite overtones of unreality: Opaque screens of smoke rose from the asphalt, then thinned out into the atmosphere. In the distance, beyond the shimmering veils, ordinary people dressed in plain street clothes ducked into the corridors of fire and then emerged unharmed at the other end, as if they were already dead.
We walked through the world’s ashes and ghosts, through curtains of smoke and tunnels of heat that extended like veins across the horizon. I felt a gust of wind. I turned around. A procession of papier-mâché kings and queens built to dizzying heights streamed past us, followed by mythical beasts and smaller statues with giant protruding heads. The human statues were holding pig bladders and knives in their rigid pink hands. Artificial rays of light, beamed from a mysterious source, danced on their broad, happy foreheads, on their disproportionate teeth, which were as large as the keys of a piano. The giants twirled down the street. They vanished into the urban horizon, and the lights searched the emptiness left in their wake.
I felt disoriented. Time itself had become warped, the atmosphere distorted. I wondered, who is the hunter? Where is the prey? The wind thickened. I could see feet covered in canvas shoes sticking out from beneath the extravagant costumes of the giants. People had crawled into their hollow shapes. Sacks of blood bounced in the wind, Catalan flags flapped and rolled, rising threads of smoke shrank into white commas, into gaseous bubbles, into incandescent spiders that crawled up the monolith of the black sky. Suddenly, a dull thud. Something slammed against the back of my head. I looked around. A solitary she-devil with a sly, impish smile waved her pitchfork at me. I stood motionless, gazing at her spindly legs, her great tufts of red hair, her pale eyebrows, her glittering eyes. I screamed, but my voice thinned out like smoke.
Ludo grabbed my hand and pulled me along. He kept leaning over to speak to me, but I heard nothing. The path curved, a sinister bend, and we were suddenly standing in front of the Casa Batlló. It was as if the city had folded over itself, cut out its unwanted parts, and left only its crown jewels standing together on a single reduced surface.
In the dim light of the night, the undulating surface of the House of Death glittered and swelled as if it were made of clipped waves, susceptible to the moods of the moon. Mercurial beads slid down the skeletal architecture. I felt exasperated, drained, confused. I thought of Taüt. I wondered how long I had been out of the house. I couldn’t remember. I had the sensation I was seeing the world through a convex glass and that on the other side of the distorted panel the crowds were marching on, going about their business, unaware of my displaced gaze. Police cars came and went.
Before I knew it, we were standing in the lobby of Quim Monzó’s building. Ludo was coming along with me. I warned him. “I live with a bird that has the aura of a death maker.” But there was no deterring him. Yet again, I felt ambushed by my thoughts. I wondered if by letting Ludo into the dark folds of my life, he, too, would die like everyone else. The lobby turned red and then white with the passing light of a police car. I turned around to look at him. He was staring vacantly at the stairs, and as the unflattering light slid over his face, he looked ghostly pale.
In the foyer of the apartment, I felt Ludo take a step toward me. It was dark enough that I couldn’t see him, but I could feel his moist breath on my neck. My limbs, my hips, my waist—they all felt heavy. He continued to stand there, mute, immobile, breathing on my face.
He was a force to be reckoned with, detached and rigid, a rational man who clings to realism one moment and is gleefully attentive, his words tinged with absurdity, the next. Who knows what goes on in other people’s heads? There was an enigmatic quality to Ludo that drew me in, an attraction I couldn’t negate.
Suddenly, I wanted nothing more than for him to come closer, press his palms against my pelvis, push me back against the wall, lift me onto a table, unbutton my jeans. I wanted him to slide his hands under my shirt, cup my breasts, and say something lyrical consistent with the fact that our ancestors had led their lives according to the laws of literature, under the sign of poetry. I wanted him to say: “Ah, a pair of perfect pomegranates. The fruit of the earth!”
I was about to take his hands to my breasts and say “Repeat after me” when he leaned in and kissed me with a surge of passion I hadn’t expected. I felt utterly dispersed and fully embodied at once. I felt as if parts of me had been scattered on different surfaces of the globe and, at the same time, as if Ludo Bembo had siphoned lead into my body, pinning me to the ground. When he pulled away at the end of the kiss, I was stunned. I was afraid of being drawn into the hot vortex of sexual passion, of being wrenched away from the Matrix of Literature. I felt the doubts that had cycled through my head rise to the surface, a doleful loop that played on repeat. So I turned on the lights, and said, for no reason, “Do you know what Silenus replied to King Midas?”
“I have no idea,” he said, slightly vexed, waving his hand impatiently.
I could tell he wanted to keep kissing. Reel in, push away, I thought; it’s the only way to protect myself and simultaneously protect him, by keeping his death from advancing due to contact with my ill-omened fate. He was looking around to see which way the bedroom was so he could lead me to it smoothly. I carried on with my lecture.
“It will serve you to know that Silenus replied: What is the best of all is utterly beyond your reach: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second best for you is—to die soon.”
His mind stopped in its tracks.
“Are you telling me I’m unworthy of life right before we have sex?”
He removed his glasses and rubbed his face. His eyes, which were deeply set, seemed to have sunk farther into his head. He looked tired. Now, standing apart from me, his stubborn reserve, which had gone up in flames when we kissed, had returned.
“I implied no such thing,” I said. My thoughts were colliding into and contradicting one another. I felt them cross-pollinating in my head and added a little white lie, a cliché to smooth things over. “Besides,” I said, “sex is a way of dying; so if you think about it, I am giving you the opportunity to walk through the double gates of sex and death.”
“No small thing,” he said stiffly, making an effort.
“Exactly, Mr. Bembo. You are on the right path,” I exclaimed, to reward him. Then, in a lower register, I offered a more adequate closing statement: “So put that in your pipe and smoke it. The double gates of sex and death!”
But he was so hard by then that he couldn’t hear me. I could see his penis bulging through his pants. There was no use in trying to discuss literature under those circumstances. I let myself go. I walked up to him and unbuttoned his vest. One button at a time, I felt him soften under my fingers.
“Careful,” he said. “My pipe.”
Ludo Bembo, I concluded, was the kind of man who regularly polishes his shoes, who irons his shirts. I reached up and pulled his pipe out from his breast pocket. He moaned. He was already losing himself. I bit his lip. It tasted like strawberries dipped in honey and had the aroma of dry herbs and tobacco. And then there was that gap between his teeth, that gap that signaled the void. I could have sucked on his lips for hours, but instead I gently inserted his pipe into his mouth, and said, “C’est ne pas une pipe!”
He tilted his head back and smiled before removing the pipe from his mouth and setting it down on the armchair behind us.
When he came back, I moved my hands down to his pants. He swung his head around and kissed my neck, bit my shoulder, nibbled on my ear.
/> I noticed something strange. A sensation I had never experienced before during any other erotic encounter: The tips of my fingers were hurting. I had no idea what this meant. Electricity coursing through my sick hand?
He pushed me down the corridor. He kept grabbing my hips from behind and pressing himself against me.
“Here,” I said. “This door.” And we went in.
We lay down on the bed and undressed each other. Ludo looked up at the bedposts. There was a glimmer of light in his gaze.
“Do you want me to tie you to the bed?” I offered.
“No, no,” he whined. “Please, don’t. You’ll just start preaching about death.”
I told him he had understood more than he let on, that now I had solid proof that he was a descendent of the Bembos.
“What’s all this about my being a descendent of the Bembos? Of course I’m a descendent of the Bembos.”
“Exactly,” I said, before offering to nibble on his penis.
“Nibble?”
“To begin with.”
And so I nibbled, and he swelled in my mouth. I pulled away and told him that his penis had a very well-defined head.
“That’s nice,” he said.
Then he slipped his fingers inside me, went down on me, reemerged, stroked his penis, and then took my hand to it so I would stroke it for him. He slipped inside me and let out little noises as if he were in pain, and I thought I heard him say, “There is something about you, a darkness that scares me,” but by the time he had pulled away from me—leaving me wanting more because I had not yet come—he had switched his tune. “Your vagina,” he said, “is like a tunnel of light. It feels so good.” He kissed me gently on the edge of my mouth. “Did you come?” he asked, pleased with himself.
“No,” I said dryly. “You’ll have to carry on.”
His face, which had become flush, went pale again.
Just then, Taüt, that impish bird, walked in. His sulfur crest was raised. He looked disheveled. The plumes on his wings were sticking up. He crossed the tiled floor with a pigeon-toed walk he had not displayed until now. I wondered where he had been. Maybe there was a hole in the ground he had dug with his beak, some place he liked to hide at random.
“This,” I lied with stale breath, “is my bird.”
My mouth was bitter and hot from all the alcohol we’d had. I needed water. I went into the kitchen and came back with two glasses filled to the brim. I spilled the water on Ludo when I got back on the bed. He let out a screech. The cold liquid was running down his loins.
“That takes care of that,” I said. “Now you don’t have to take a shower.”
“Right,” he said. His voice was uncertain.
The bird was still there, scrutinizing the situation on the bed, the steamy entanglement that he may or may not have witnessed.
“Was that bird in your suitcase?” Ludo asked mechanically.
I had forgotten he had picked me up at the airport. It’s a good thing lies are naturally elastic, I thought.
“Yes,” I said. “This bird is one portion of the corpse of my past. He was lodged in there with everything else.”
As I spoke these words, Taüt raised his right talon and saluted Ludo. Then he turned around and shimmied back out the door.
“Una-muno, una-mano,” I ululated nonchalantly, as I watched the bird retreat. Ludo leaned over and his hair brushed against my cheek.
“Shouldn’t we get back on track?” he asked, sitting with his back against one of the bedposts and his ankles crossed. His penis, having completed its business, had shrunk back and was lying limply on his balls.
I made a face at him. I parted my lips and turned the corners of my mouth down and squinted sadly. I said, “If your penis were a person, this is what it would look like.” I held that face for a while. I could see Ludo’s eyes moving from side to side, metabolizing the information he had just received. “And if my vagina were a person?” I asked, extending an invitation for him to dramatize my reproductive organ in return.
“I suppose your vagina would be running down the sidewalk throwing its arms up in the air, helplessly distressed,” he offered.
“You think I have a stressed vagina?”
“And the pubic hairs would be sticking out, particularly at the top, above your clitoris.”
“That’s not how I see it at all.”
My vagina, I explained to him, would be gliding down the sidewalk, saying blup-blup blup-blup, like a fish in an aquarium.
Taüt came running back down the corridor. He went past the bedroom door at top speed, squawking as if he were being assassinated.
“What is that bird doing?” Ludo asked, running his fingers along my back, trying to pull me into his arms.
I swatted his hand away because just then I’d received a signal of magnificent proportions from the Matrix of Literature. Words by Unamuno, the man himself. It was as if he were standing next to the bed with his hatted head and pointy bearded chin, commanding me through his thin dry lips to inform Ludo Bembo, who at that very moment was asking me what he could do to help me come, to give it up because it is a known fact that love is a battle and that as a result he and I will only experience a simultaneous orgasm when the heavy pestle of sorrow has ground down our hearts by crushing them in a mortar of mutual suffering.
“According to whom?” he challenged.
The bird crossed in front of the door again. He was rushing to and fro. He had tucked his crest back to render himself more aerodynamic.
“The lofty Unamuno,” I said, smiling widely. That bird, with his aura of death, was transmitting signals to me from the Matrix of Literature. It couldn’t be more obvious. I watched him go. From the end of the corridor, I heard the bird echo, “Una-muno, una-mano.”
Ludo reached for his underwear—a pair of white briefs—and wiped the remaining come off his penis.
“I can do better than Unamuno,” he said, folding his underwear and placing it near the edge of the bed.
“Of course you can. It seems that when it comes to sex the man knows his literature.” I chortled.
I could see his mind was spinning. His penis was starting to raise its tired head again. It was bouncing up and down. “You don’t believe me?” he said. My heart skipped a beat. I felt both an intense urge to get rid of him, as if the fumes of my void were rising to my throat to choke me, and, strangely, a fear of him being gone. But regardless of how I felt, it seemed he had come to stay. I was both wary of and comforted by his stubborn resolve. He was a buttery, sentimental man hiding behind a severe mask. A romantic, I thought, when Ludo Bembo suddenly ordered me to lie back and spread my legs.
“Very well,” I said.
I don’t know what he did next, but I came again and again. That sensation of pain in the tips of my fingers returned. I felt as if my life were slipping away, colliding with his and then dissolving. It was, to my surprise, a little bit like dying and being resurrected. It was like bursting into a thousand fragments, each part of myself a plane of perception, a plateau with a view. As he worked on me, massaging my labia, licking my clitoris, images of the ruins of my past, as flat as photographs, reeled through my mind. I saw the black waters of the Caspian crashing against the calcified walls of the houses it had swallowed over the years; abandoned watermelon rinds sticking out of the sand on the shore like grotesque white smiles; men in camouflage patrolling the coast in tiny boats; sickly palms; rows and rows of dusty tomes; my father’s tea-stained mustache; the blue domes of Istanbul backlit by a copper sun; the Mediterranean, slack and purple at dawn, hemmed in by cliffs and coves of pink granite against which the Sea of Sunken Hopes was railing; and then, finally, the Room of Broken Heirlooms. These images belonged to selves I had once known intimately but whose identities, dispersed by the violent onslaughts of exile, had grown unfamiliar to me. In my mind’s eye, I saw a lineup of those other selves. They looked wanting, distressed, lost. They fixed their gaze on me, and I felt the parched sheet of my heart roll shu
t, a scroll I couldn’t read. I had nothing to give. “The second best is to die soon,” I murmured, as I came one last time, right before Ludo pulled his face away from my vagina. The images faded. They sank into oblivion.
“We are sorry little heaps of flesh and bone,” I said, catching my breath.
He wiped my hair out of my face, and said, “Look, here’s your bird again.”
Indeed, there was Taüt, staring at us through the frame of the door.
“And that corridor out there,” I added, “is the corridor of exile.”
At that, silence resumed its show.
It’s a well-known fact that sex ends in emptiness. When we are done climaxing, the void yawns wider than ever and allows us to peer for a moment into the silky black depths of the abyss. Arthur Schopenhauer knew this. So did Pascal. And I, Zebra, a privileged member of the ill-fated community of intellectuals that inhabits the Matrix of Literature, cling to this truth as a spider to its web and, therefore, much like the above-mentioned figures, am not only a defender of committing one’s life to aesthetic contemplation in lieu of dumbly searching for love but am also repulsed by the notion of perpetuating the human species, which is decisively worthless.
I wrote my thoughts on this subject down in my notebook and recited them aloud each morning to remind myself not to become disarmed by Ludo’s presence. Even so, following that first encounter, we spent a lovers’ weekend at the apartment. And then Monday came and Ludo stayed. He remained at the apartment with me all week, going out only for brief excursions to buy bread, cheese, coffee. But one night, Ludo let loose the word love in relation to me while he was orgasming—whether he was aware of his speech act or not I cannot say. The next morning, after consulting my notebook, I warned him never to use that word in my presence again. He fell silent, looked away, collapsed into himself. He dipped a croissant rather halfheartedly into his coffee, stuffed it into his mouth, and, with a muffled voice, said, “Who said anything about love?”
Call Me Zebra Page 15