So, under the sign of contradiction, subject to the push and pull of the rational and the erratic, Ludo Bembo and I continued our amorous routine. I became accustomed to his habits. He stirred sugar into his coffee for a standard five minutes until all the granules had dissolved. He chased his meals with fine liquor. Grappa. Ratafia. Limoncello. Cognac if he was in a nostalgic mood. He shaved daily. He set his hair, one curl at a time. He ironed his clothes. He scrubbed behind his ears. He smoked his pipe after sex, like a gentleman of the Old World. He knew how to light and stoke a fire. He knew how to make refined pastries. And on top of all this, he had a habit of moving his penis from one thigh to the other after sex. This balancing act lasted for a few minutes. One night, while we were lying in bed, I asked him to explain his motivations. Unlike Ludo, who believed we could ride the currents of our affair without obstacle into the future, I felt sporadically suffocated by his presence. If I didn’t have the necessary room for my thoughts to roam around in the Matrix of Literature (something I could not exercise in his presence), those very thoughts, which were wretched and soaked through and through with the fumes of death that plagued my void, threatened to poison me from the inside out. I needed to open a valve and let the stench out. So one night I confronted him. I provoked him into giving me space.
“Why do you shift your penis from thigh to thigh?” I asked.
“Because I believe in the Renaissance ideal,” he retorted. He went on to tell me that the body should always be in equilibrium, the right side a mirror image of the left—the head, shoulders, waist, and hips always in proportion. “If I tucked my penis only to the left, like most ignorant men do,” he said in a whimsical tone, “my right side would be deprived of its presence.”
I listened attentively. It was clear he was mocking me. I wouldn’t stand for it.
“I have good news and bad news,” I said, after a loaded pause. “Which do you want to hear first?”
“Good news?” he said with an uncertain air. He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose and sniffled.
“You have a benevolent and tender mouth”—at this, he licked his lips and smiled—“and, to a certain extent, an unruffled spirit.”
He leaned in and kissed me. His mouth was definitely tender.
“And the bad?”
“The bad news,” I delivered nonchalantly, “is that you lack imagination; your mind is as stiff as a stick. There is no need to make up anecdotes with cerebral undertones just to please me. I would prefer it if you were forthcoming about your motives regarding the placement of your penis, which are surely more limited than the explanation you offered implies, an explanation I refuse to fall for because, as you very well know, Dr. Bembo”—I had never referred to him as Dr. Bembo before, so I had no choice but to raise my voice a notch—“people don’t acquire a sense of the absurd overnight. If they did, you and I would experience more harmony.”
I could hear his anxious breathing. He sounded like a dog hyperventilating.
“Unless they are tortured and you, Dr. Bembo, have spent the night having sex, not suffering!”
He pulled away from me, crossed his arms, and looked up at the ceiling. He was sulking. There it was, that long muzzle, his signature pout. His posture was ungainly, droopy headed, sheepish. He refused to look at me.
“Silence is a weapon of mass destruction,” I said.
“Mass? There’s only one of you,” he spewed angrily.
“Only one of me!” I huffed, sitting upright. It was clear he didn’t know me at all. “What about my father, and the residue of my mother contained by my father, all of which I carry within me?”
His face dropped. It was longer than ever. It looked as elastic as dough. His eyes were tearing up.
“Nothing I say will ever please you!” he whined childishly.
I let out a dismissive grunt and almost immediately his face contracted; it hardened again. He clenched his jaw. He looked as stiff as a mummy. I took in a deep breath. I told myself to stay as fresh as lettuce, as calm as a sailboat on a smooth lake. In this way, I found my composure.
I coaxed: “Ludo Bembo, allow me to explain.” I could no longer remember what the original trigger of our argument had been, but I proceeded nonetheless. “Your realism and cold logic, your pedantry, need reinventing.” The mummy turned its neck and looked at me with the fixed round pupils of an assassin. “But even more urgently,” I continued, despite his horrifying gaze, “I suggest you edit your approach to matters of love because it’s becoming difficult to understand how, despite my gentle reminders that love is a deadly poison, you remain stubbornly prone to sentimentality and clinginess.” I suddenly remembered the origin of our conflict, his false mimicry, which greatly facilitated the delivery of a final blow: “To pretending we are like-minded!”
The mummy flew into a rage. He broke out of his cast, regained mobility, got up, dressed. “Not this again!” he yelled. With a defiant gaze, he marched out of the bedroom. Ribbons of unraveled linen dragged on the floor. I followed him out to the foyer.
“I’ll be back!” he threatened, before slamming the front door.
I considered the closed door solemnly. I was alone again and could devote myself to the miserly progression of my thoughts. I called out for the bird. Nothing happened. Taüt had disappeared again and with him my only hope of sharing a convivial moment. I was alone among Quim Monzó’s mute objects. I looked around. Each time I did this, it was as if I were seeing the apartment anew. I noticed a bronze statue of a bull that was tucked behind a stack of dusty books in a neglected corner of the foyer. The bull was preparing to charge: nostrils flared, head nobly bowed, horns alerting the heavens to the sacrifice ahead. Man, animal, insect, I concluded: We all know the ecstasy and perturbation involved in gorging and being gorged.
I scanned the room in the opposite direction. On the book shelves lining the corridor, I caught sight of three miniature reproductions of a toilet bowl. A quick inspection revealed that one of the bowls was filled with small turds of poop, the other with urine, the last with vomit. Together, I thought, the bowls and the bull indicated that life is hardly worth enduring on the one hand, and on the other, that Quim Monzó’s apartment was asking for an inspection. I made a note to take inventory of his disparate collection of Dadaist objects in order to extract once and for all from this humble abode everything I was destined to extract. I had come to believe that each of Quim Monzó’s objects was triggering an insight I was meant to record, calling up something old and stale within me that I, in loving memory of my mother and father and their mothers and fathers, whose asses were gorged by the horns of history and who were left with no sustenance but their own bodily fluids, had to transcribe in my notebook.
I walked over to the recamier and lay down. I caressed the three cigarette burns. I thought of myself, of the parts of me that are dead, like my mother long dead and my father, newly so. I cried a little. A few meager tears pooled in my eyes. There was a pressure in my chest, as if a paperweight had been laid on my heart, pinning it down against the elements. I filled each crevasse in the recamier with a little water. This is how lakes are formed, with the tears of the world. I thought of Lake Urmia and its dead waterfowl. I thought of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, self-proclaimed King of Kings, of his wife draped over a velvet fainting chair, wrapped in a silk robe, clad in jewels. I said: “Decadence, the fraternal twin of decay.” I heard my father clapping in my void. But just as quickly as he appeared, he was gone.
With an air of despondency, I thought on. Not even Ludo Bembo, I considered inwardly, who thrusts his member into me with fiery passion, who drinks from my vagina as if it were a well of water, and from whose lips the word love leaps as easily as frogs from a pond, can endure the consequences of my company. An ill-fated who laughs with the hysteria of unresolved pain. I felt a chill go through the negative space where my father had been. I felt my energy drain. I thought: I am ugly, unlovable, worthless, inadequate. No one has ears large enough or patient enough t
o listen to an ill-omened person tell the story of their survival, of what it means to be crushed at the bottom of the Pyramid of Exile. I would have to bear the weight of my past alone.
This earth, stuffed to the brim with blood and corpses and hay, is like a self-cleaning oven. The buried don’t remain buried for long. They turn into flowers, fertilize our food. They nurture us even as we are haunted by them. In other words, what goes up must come down, and what goes down will eventually reemerge and begin its upward climb once more.
It wasn’t long before I was wishing Ludo Bembo would return or that Taüt would reappear. There was no use waiting for them draped on the recamier. As the deaf masses of the supposed New World say, I was feeling blue.
I tried to get over it. I thought to myself, it’s time for another Pilgrimage of Exile. If you’re feeling blue in Barcelona, what could be better than to go to the Picasso Museum and witness the gradual reduction of the chromatic range of that genius’s paintings, from vivid yellows, greens, and reds to the saddest of blues in his aptly named Blue Period? With the resolve of a bull, I got dressed, washed my face, and charged through the door. I received a signal from the Matrix of Literature: He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging. Ah, Walter Benjamin, again reminding me of my mission. I walked through the city with a singular intention: to investigate the pain of my past by metabolizing art and architecture. To gaze at the city would not take matters far enough; I had to drill into its most symbolic elements. I had to digest its parts. I named the walk the Pilgrimage of Remorseless Excavation and went on my way.
I walked through the gray maze of gas lamps, gnarled stone, and menacing gargoyles in the Gothic Quarter, and continued east. It was November. The sky was pale blue and garnished with patches of ashen clouds. In the distance, a tepid sun was shining, too weak to cut through the misty sea breeze sweeping the streets. There was a mild autumn storm brewing. The kind that would soon have the sea spitting rotten logs and purple jellyfish onto the city’s wet golden coast.
I passed the row of soot-covered buildings near the Jaume I metro stop on Via Laietana. I felt something moving around in my gut. My father. I remembered. During our stay in Barcelona, whenever we walked along Via Laietana, he would stop to lift the tips of his mustache and spit on the old police headquarters where General Franco had ordered one man after another to come in for interrogations, likely leaving my fellow ill-omened peers on the roof to wet themselves like leeches in the rain. I cursed that foolish mime of Hitler and their mutual thirst for blood. “Bah!” I declared to the building. “General Franco, even your mustache was a coward’s mustache! You couldn’t grow enough hair to reach the ends of your putrid mouth.” This was enough to settle my stomach, to please my father.
I turned onto a crooked arterial alley and immediately the light was sucked out of the street. I had reached the narrow cobbled streets of La Ribera, the old merchant quarter. Inside those labyrinthine streets, the world seemed to have been reduced to a miniature cardboard stage. I wanted to hold the neighborhood in the palm of my hand. I wanted to turn it around like a Rubik’s Cube.
I arrived at a small opening in the street. I could see the sky again. It looked wounded; it was tinged with purple and the clouds were the color of lead. I was standing in front of Santa Maria del Mar. I peeled open the church’s carved wooden doors and ventured into the darkness within.
There was something about the church that reminded me of Ludo. The exterior was ornamented with statues and floral motifs, tender, dignified, carefully groomed. But inside, a dark, cold, austere silence engulfed me. The interior, with the exception of a few stained glass windows, was spare and somber. Man and building, I decided—each had a second face: rigid one moment and poetic, even sentimental, the next.
I paced around the nave, breathing in the heavily incensed air. I avoided looking at the image of Christ pinned to the cross. If I did, my father would wage war from inside me. He would lash out against my bowels. He would say, addressing himself to the man’s pitifully hanging head, “Living is a sacrifice. Get over it!”
Instead, I proceeded systematically with my thoughts. I kept my eyes on the ground. The church and Ludo Bembo, I resolved as I admired the skulls carved into the tombs underfoot, were doppelgängers. Yes, indeed. There was no denying it: Ludo was the human equivalent of a medieval Catalan building—his external self freely gave out tender, lyrical gestures while inside he hid a severe, rational, withholding second self. In other words, Ludo Bembo, I concluded, digging my heels into the dirt and the dust, is a wounded person who keeps his wound a secret even from himself. The fastest way to become your own worst enemy. I made a mental note to tell him as much.
“A wound,” I recited in advance, “is meant to be looked at, examined. Otherwise, Ludo Bembo, it will fester, wreak havoc, strip the walls of your stomach as if it were acid. Ask any doctor, no matter how mediocre. He will tell you the same.”
There was a tour guide leaning against the cold, damp stone walls of the nave. He nodded along in agreement. He was watching over a group of pale, plump Russians who were whispering things to one another near the altar and taking pictures. I ignored him.
By the time I walked into the Picasso Museum’s ample courtyard, another fact had become clear: Unlike Ludo, I was a Gaudí—a disruptive, colorful mosaic composed of shattered bits of tile and glass. A whole that doesn’t correspond to the sum of its parts. If I wasn’t transcendent, I would be vain. With this thought in mind, I, a collage in my own right, entered the museum.
I went about my business. I stood before this or that painting. I walked into the galleries featuring Picasso’s Blue Period. I needed to look at something more blue than blue or else I would start crying. I could feel the water level rising in my lungs again. I looked at several paintings of Barcelona’s rooftops. But Barcelona’s rooftops, I reasoned, are beige, red, orange, ochre. Picasso, who was from Málaga, painted Barcelona’s mood at dusk in his studio in Paris, where he lived during his famous Blue Period; which is to say, he was painting Barcelona at a double remove. Even a fool knows that a place is not the same thing as its interpretation through the falsifying prisms of memory, but this alone, I concluded, does not explain Picasso’s so-called Blue Period. I was sure these rooftop paintings weren’t merely a rendition of Barcelona as he recalled it—apparently intimate, seductive, full of melancholia and longing, and yet confidently resolved—but rather a result of an emotional deficiency he later corrected. The sweetest of thoughts, I reflected, arrive like the wind on the heels of doves.
Why had Picasso’s affect flattened? Why had he suddenly become a monochromatic man? Because he wasn’t able, at first, to navigate the multiple selves he had acquired by retreating first from Málaga to Barcelona and then from Franco’s oppressive Spain to an electric Paris. Take one look at the bold, broad, colorful lines of Picasso’s reproductions of Velázquez’s Las Meninas, at his depiction of the Infanta Maria Theresa, with her disproportionately large and heavily distorted face—that dwarf forebear of the cold-blooded Bourbon, Philip V, who sacked the Catalans during the terrible War of Spanish Succession, paving the way for General Franco’s systematic suffocation of what was left of them—take one look at the series’ geometrical fragmentation, at the crooked forms that fold over themselves, at the cruel hooks that hang from the ceiling in the painting’s foreground, at the weblike rendition of Velázquez’s sober meditation on the vanishing point—which is just another word for the infinite nature of the space-time continuum famously referred to by Nietzsche as the eternal return—and my argument regarding Picasso’s progression as a man and an artist quickly gains ground: He had to learn to hold the wound of multiplicity, of fragmentation, the wobbly curvature that Gaudí had mastered so early due to his prolonged solitude, his misanthropy, and his understanding of the hostile beauty of nature. But! But! But! I rocked back and forth on my feet with excitement. Picasso wasn’t able to open himself up to the entropy of pluralism until
he was pushed over the edge by that childish monster General Franco. His reproductions of Las Meninas are from after the Civil War. His Blue Period from before. Case in point.
Suddenly, for reasons I couldn’t understand, I wasn’t feeling well. I had a mild but distinct vertigo. My father was whispering something from inside my cavernous void. His voice was thinner than ever. I stuck my fingers in my ears to block out the sound of the other museumgoers. I turned toward my inner ear. In a wispy voice, my father said: “Ecce Homo, Ecce Homo.” He was making a request. Ecce Homo, the most reproduced painting in history and the title of one of Nietzsche’s greatest works, not to mention the opening words of the first Hosseini Commandment! I worked my way back through the galleries to Picasso’s Ecce Homo. The bald, short, beer-bellied Picasso had portrayed himself at the center, in the place of Christ, and had surrounded his figure with people from the art world and several hairy, voluptuous, coquettish women who were parting their labia with their hands as if their folds were theater curtains. My father laughed. He beat his cane on the ground of my void several times. He caressed his mustache with affection. His eyes rolled in their sockets. I had to walk away just to calm him down.
I hadn’t made it far when I remembered something that stopped me in my tracks. My father had paused near a pile of stones in that ashen no-man’s-land to tell me: “Child, every event has a precedent. Look here at Picasso’s The Dream and Lie of Franco.” I remembered our country’s ashes were being scattered by the wind all around us. I remembered there was a frigid bite to the wind and the sky was black and low. I remembered how weak I felt, how much my feet hurt. My father had tried to carry me on his back through the most difficult passages, but he, too, was weary from our long march. He pulled out a miniature reproduction of Picasso’s paintings from our suitcase, which he had dragged along with us. His hands were cracked and his fingers were trembling. “Picasso’s famous Guernica has its origin in these postcard-size drawings. In order to understand the future, you must blow yourself backward into the past. Then you will finally come to know history’s evil nature: that the past and the future are a mirror image of each other and that the present is history itself.” He had spread the drawings across the jagged rocks. I leaned over to look at them under the feeble light of the moon. I saw an image of Franco being gored by a bull. Another of Franco with a large penis. Yet another of Franco on a pig and wielding a spear. Finally, Franco feeding on a rotting horse. I read Picasso’s words written beneath the images: evil-omened polyp. “Take these images in,” my father ordered, “so you will know the past of where we are headed.” It was almost dawn. We could barely carry on. We hadn’t eaten in days. We huddled together against the rocks in the brutal cold and waited for the approaching daylight to wane.
Call Me Zebra Page 17