The ghost globe, I concluded, was a sign of my unbecoming. I grabbed the globe and carried it with me into the bathroom. I contemplated its pure surface. I again felt as though I were standing on the event horizon of a black hole. I thought of the black band my father had placed over my eyes. I looked at myself in the mirror one last time. My hair was long and knotted. I could see lines beginning to form on my forehead. My skin was pale. My eyes looked bruised. I was exhausted.
The ghost globe, I realized, had been my cue to begin the process of unbuilding, of becoming residue, the nothingness that is everything. The bathroom was inviting me to be a patient, to take some pills, to draw a bath. It was inviting me to reenter the womb, blast past the singularity of my birth, to unbecome, to undo the pain of the losses I had endured so that, like the phoenix, I could be reborn ad infinitum in humanity’s pile of ruins.
I remembered telling the funeral director that my father had gone back to the beginning, to a space before his birth.
I opened the medicine cabinet. The top row was lined with bottles of pills. One of the bottles was unlabeled. I unscrewed the cap; inside, there were tiny star-shaped pills. “Star is only one letter away from scar,” I exclaimed, letting out an incredulous gasp. There it was: the past in the future, Nietzsche’s eternal return.
I dug one of the stars out with my finger. I swallowed it. I swallowed my past. I said out loud to no one, “I am a cannibal.” I turned the tap and listened to the sound of water run through the faucet into the tub. I swallowed a few more pills. I felt time begin to dissolve. I leaned over the tub and looked again at my face; it appeared deformed in the rising water. I scooped up the water and swallowed it. I drank my face. The water had a thick metallic taste; it was like swallowing milk mixed with blood. I sat on the edge of the bath until I heard a buzzing in the margins of the universe. Matter was disintegrating. Time was going limp. I peeled off my clothes. I got into the tub.
I was ready to die in order to begin again. “The sole objective and purpose of Zebra,” I said out loud to no one as I immersed myself in the water, “is to reemerge from the womb as a constantly regenerating residue of the collective data of the infinite archive of literature, to spread across the web of the Old World, which forbids the accumulation of a center, is complex, stratified, simultaneous, a continent as ungraspable as totality itself . . . unreal, Irrational-Pragmatic, multiple . . .” I was becoming formless.
The room began to disappear. The tiles began to drift apart from one another. Time was breaking down. I sank farther into the water. I thought of Dante. I thought of the ice at the core of the universe. I thought of the frozen lake of our hearts. I was approaching expulsion. I laughed. It was the laugh of the darkness of birth. I felt time buckle and go limp. The water turned cold and dense. I saw myself become compressed. I saw myself become other. I saw myself become more Zebra. I faded into the ethereal distance. I felt myself become nothingness.
Sometime later, hours, days, minutes, Ludo came bursting into the bathroom.
It was morning.
“What are you doing in there?” he asked.
I heard everything he said twice. I leaned over to look at him. There were two of him. Two Ludo Bembos, like I had thought there were. I felt a sense of hysteria bubbling up inside me. Who was Ludo Bembo? Where were my father, my mother, my homeland? Who was I?
I heard Ludo say, “You look feverish.”
He kneeled on the floor and put his hand on my forehead. He looked at me with concerned eyes.
I heard myself answer. “I’m not an idiot. You don’t need to repeat everything!”
He looked hurt, confused, angry, and despairing all at once. “I don’t know why I even bother,” he muttered. I felt stabbed by those words twice.
I saw both Ludo Bembos rub their eyes. The pair looked far away, as if I were looking at them from the wrong end of a telescope. They were both as white as milk. They looked like long boiled noodles. I wanted to stab him back.
I said, “You pair of linguini need to get out of my hair!”
The pair raised their heads and looked at me with an inscrutable expression. Severity, repulsion, pain—I couldn’t tell.
“Fine. I’m leaving,” he said matter-of-factly, washing his hands and drying them on the towel. He was doing his utmost to resist getting dragged into the vortex of my wounds. His whole body went rigid, cold. “I can’t skip any more classes,” he said without looking at me. “I’m teaching in the afternoon.”
For a brief moment, I felt myself resurface: the two Ludo Bembos consolidated. There was only one of him. I didn’t want him to leave, but I couldn’t bring myself to tell him as much. Instead, I asked him for his address. He said he would leave it for me on the dining-room table on his way out. I lifted my arm out of the tub and waved it.
“Good-bye,” I said. “When we see each other again, it will be under different terms. Love is a two-way street, but until now I didn’t have your address.” I heard my words echo.
“Okay,” he said. “Very well.” His tone was exasperated, conflicted, both final and full of yearning.
I waved my arm again, hoping he would reach for my hand and drag me out of the tub. Instead, he caressed my hair as if I were a scrawny dog he had tried to save from drowning in a dreary lake, a dog that would soon return to the frothy, putrid waters, incapable of learning a lesson. After that, he left. I sat in the bath, soaking, consoling myself with the fact that he had no idea that I had used the word love instead of the word interference. He had interfered with my notebook, my life. Now I would interfere with his.
I fell asleep in the tub. The next day, I awoke to the sound of footsteps in the stairway. My fingernails were blue. My hands were pruned. I looked like a newborn: shriveled, slimy, reduced. I was shivering. My temperature had dropped dramatically. The water level had gone down, as though my body had absorbed the liquid or it had begun to evaporate. I looked at the rectangular cross section of the world beyond the window. Daylight was beginning to wane. I listened to the echo of the footsteps. Whoever was outside the front door was walking indecisively up and down the stairway.
My mind and body were slowly reconnecting. I stood up. The water slid off me like a wave in the ocean. I felt the sudden onset of vertigo. I managed to step out of the tub, to bend down and drain the water. My fingers were unstable, and it was hard to work the stopper. I couldn’t feel my hands. I wrapped a towel around myself and walked down the corridor. When I got to the door, I looked through the keyhole. There was no one there. No Ludo Bembo. I looked again through the keyhole. No sign of life.
“Taüt,” I called out, as if we had been lifelong friends. I retreated to the bedroom. The bird, that chimeric little monster, appeared immediately, like a starving dog. He didn’t fly. He walked across the floor to the edge of the bed. The bird climbed the sheets using his beak and talons. He hopped from the mattress onto the headboard. He remained perched there, staring ahead with glazed eyes. I looked at him. I said to that wretched bird: “Undoing oneself involves unweaving the delicate web of time.”
The bird opened his dark beak. I peered into that Beak of Darkness and remembered being at the cemetery watching the undertakers lower my father’s casket into the ground. I remembered looking at my mother’s blue hand, swollen and bruised. Then the image resolved itself. The devastation vanished.
In a wild impulse, I got up. I opened my suitcase and turned its contents over onto the bed. The pungent scent of my father’s death spread through the room and contaminated the air. The Hung Mallard rolled underneath the bed. The books, thrust out of my portable library, piled up like Roman bricks at various intervals across the surface of the mattress. I took a step back to observe the design from a distance. I rocked back and forth on my feet. I held my breath. The obelisk-like posts, combined with the books, created the distinct impression that the bed was an abandoned city, timeless, a literary ruin. I walked around the bed as wild as an animal. A horseshoe emerged: a big capital U, the U of Ulysses.
I cupped my chin with the palm of my hand. If I had a mustache, I would have stroked it. I imagined Dalí’s mustache standing on its ends like the blades of an open pair of scissors. I gaped at the design. U, the U of Ulysses. I sucked in little patches of air. I oxygenated my mind in portions. A secret was being revealed to me about the genealogy and fate of literature: Literature was not dead despite what some have claimed, nor was it on its way to being dead. No, far from being dead, literature is the site of death itself. I looked at the archipelago of books on the bed. Literature is where the ruins of humanity are piled. And if literature is a retainer for death, how can it die? I asked. “Because death,” I cried, “is immortal.” I tossed the empty suitcase on the floor. I threw myself on my back onto the bed. I felt a sense of bliss wash over me. I felt myself begin to fade. I was on the verge of radiating back out of the matrix. I was everywhere and nowhere at once: lying in the shade of an umbrella pine in Pompeii, curled up in the navel of civilization, on a literary vessel, in a submarine about to plunge into the past.
I drifted off to sleep. In the dream, I was floating across the inky waters of the Atlantic Ocean on a mattress filled with books. I was bobbing along the waves, approaching a woolly black storm on the horizon. I didn’t feel fear. The only thing that gnawed at me were pangs of hunger. I was starving. The horizon was fixed in space; it wouldn’t recede and the swell was growing. I was approaching the storm at a perpetually increasing speed. I looked at my city of books and resolved to eat them. I opened them one by one. I ripped out page after page. There were too many pages. There wasn’t enough time. I realized I would drown before I could stuff all that language into my mouth. I had to be more discerning. It occurred to me that the best thing to do, given the circumstances, would be to eat only the sentences I loved and loathed the most, and chuck the neutral ones into the sea. I leafed through my books. I tore out individual sentences. With a steady hand, I dropped them into my mouth. They slipped down my throat as easily as fresh oysters. I felt an intense pleasure. I was ready to glide toward my death. I opened Benjamin’s Illuminations and quickly worked my way to “Unpacking My Library.” It seemed appropriate. I ate Only in extinction is the collector comprehended. I was ready to devour the next sentence, to eat Benjamin quoting Hegel, to consume an infinitely receding sequence of quotes. My plan kept evolving. I envisioned building an epic book of light and dark passions from the sentences I had ingested. I was sure that my archived language would survive my bodily death, be absorbed by a kindred channel of consciousness—just as I had absorbed my father and the part of my mother my father had absorbed upon her untimely death—and fan back out into the world. I began to eat Only when it is dark does the owl of Minerva, but I was interrupted—Taüt, gentler than usual but steady in his ways, was peering into my mouth, grazing my lips with his feathers.
When I woke up, my head was pounding. My head, it seemed, was wrapped in cloth or plastic. My vision was shrouded, slightly muddled. I could see the contours of things, the angles of the room, the sharp spearlike ends of the bedposts, the sagging ceiling that was hanging there like a sack of yogurt. The books I had thrown onto the bed were still there. Some of them had been opened. Certain verses had been underlined. The edges of the covers had been chewed. It was clear: I had been feeding on literature.
There were other objects on the bed: a typewriter with a fresh spool of ribbon and paper that had been fed into the platen. In big bold letters, at the top of the page, I had typed the word DICTéE. I had been transcribing. I had been cloning texts, creating fake doubles like a monk, like a scribe in a monastery. I removed the paper from the typewriter. It read:
IN THE WORDS OF JOSEP PLA, WRITER OF DEATH, PERMANENT INHABITANT OF INTERNAL EXILE:
I’ve asked for nothing and dominated nobody, but I have defended myself with every noble and ignoble weapon there is when people have tried to dominate me or force me to take a step in their direction. I only ever wanted to get on with my life. The laws of the state increasingly encroach on us and the day may come when we have to fill in a form in order to grow a mustache.
Then again:
IN THE WORDS OF JOSEP PLA, WRITER OF DEATH, PERMANENT INHABITANT OF INTERNAL EXILE:
I’ve asked for nothing and dominated nobody, but I have defended myself with every noble and ignoble weapon there is when people have tried to dominate me or force me to take a step in their direction. I only ever wanted to get on with my life. The laws of the state increasingly encroach on us and the day may come when we have to fill in a form in order to grow a mustache.
I leaned over the Remington. There were bullet holes in it. It was bruised and beaten. It was from the war. Its consciousness had been violated in the trenches. It suddenly occurred to me: I had tried to kill myself.
I was returning to consciousness in portions, in shards; I was seeing things in segments. I slowly realized that there was a hose hanging from the center of my face. I tried to utter the word—hose—but the sound of my voice was muffled by whatever contraption I had wrapped around my head. The edges of matter, like the contours of reality, had frayed. I concentrated on the hose. I followed that plastic pipe with my eyes. It wasn’t easy. My senses were obstructed; I couldn’t see clearly. Space had turned into a collage, something I could experience only in discrete sections. And I, with all that industrial wreckage hanging off my face, was like a figure in a painting. I had fused with the apartment. I was completely Dada.
I walked into the bathroom and looked in the mirror. I was wearing a gas mask. My hair was sticking out between the clasps that buckled at the back of my head. I stared at the filter cartridge over my mouth through the two oval glass windows of the mask. I thought of the bestiality of war, of the machinations of history. “Who is spared?” I asked. “No one,” I heard myself mutter in response.
I unclasped the gas mask. It smelled musty, old; it was caked with dirt. I looked like a warrior. The mask left red marks on my cheeks and forehead. I looked at the replication of the bathroom in the mirror: the blue tiles, the edges of the tub, all those mute surfaces were doubled, their silence amplified just as I had been doubled, had died and been resurrected in literature’s echo chamber, had been regurgitated from the Matrix of Literature as residue.
I washed my face. I groomed myself. The mind, I thought inwardly, is a complex energy field capable of receiving information; it is subtle, porous. A sponge designed to soak up the dark waters of literature, all that spilled blood. I brushed my hair, then I set the brush down on the sink. I looked at myself. I had become more Zebra than ever before, as troubling as literature, as disquieting as language itself.
Girona
The Story of the Creation of the Miniature Museum and My Cohabitation with Ludo Bembo
Weeks later, on a wet January afternoon, I left Quim Monzó’s apartment for the last time.
It had been raining the whole day, and Barcelona was covered in a thick purple haze. The trees planted along the boulevards swayed as the wind plucked their leaves and carried them out of view into the dark veil of water coming down through the sky and rising from the ground in clouds of vapor. I was on my way to the train station when a strong flash of lightning forced me to hide underneath a doorway. Taüt was sitting on my shoulder. I had stolen the bird. I had left Quim Monzó with a false replica I had purchased, a wooden cockatoo I fastened to the swivel wall lamp where Taüt regularly perched. The real-life Taüt was breathing hard. His beak was ajar, and he kept blinking or anxiously nibbling on my ear, and his feathers were upright. He had a ghastly look. He looked objectionable. I told him as much. He seemed to take offense; he immediately grasped onto my ear with his right talon, carving his nails into my skin. In my mind’s eye, I saw my ear peeling off the side of my face and blowing into the distance, like the leaves being scattered here and there.
“If you don’t stop”—I cast Taüt a scornful look—“I’m going to have to shove you into the Mobile Art Gallery.” The bird squinted, aware that he might drown in the putrid o
dor of my father’s death.
Before leaving, I had converted my chest-shaped suitcase into a miniature museum. In order to fill the space of my father’s absence, I had turned the fumes of our past into art, stuffed that sarcophagus with objects. In addition to my books, and my father’s, the miniature museum contained objects from the Room of Broken Heirlooms and from the apartment of Quim Monzó, objects that, like my mother and father and me, had been violently severed from their context.
I said in vain to Taüt, “I have been stripped of home and hearth. If I was deprived of these objects, which conjure for me the many origins and stages of my ill-fatedness, what else would I have left in the world?” The bird said nothing. He merely clawed at my ear.
There was no one around. The city looked like it had been abandoned. I felt as though I were standing outside the world looking in. The events of the last few weeks had left me feeling stranger than ever before: as raw as a newborn and, simultaneously, ancient, decrepit, weatherworn. I looked around. Lined shoulder to shoulder on the sidewalk, the facades of L’Eixample’s buildings reminded me of soldiers at the end of a long, hard war. I scanned the empty street. I had the vague impression that the city’s potential had been violently truncated, as if I were looking at an afterimage of a distant and brutalized Barcelona, a ghostly projection of the city’s composite past: Franco’s Barcelona, the Barcelona of the Civil War, the Barcelona of the Tragic Week, the Barcelona of the War of Spanish Succession, of the Reapers’ War. How many times had this city reinvented herself? How many times had she died and been resurrected? How many times had she been exiled from herself? The city seemed haunted by the ghosts of her own past. And yet, like the Hosseinis, she had persevered.
Call Me Zebra Page 20