Back in my little rented room of writing, my room of ghosts, I surveyed the countryside through the window. I heard dogs howl, horses neigh, pigs snort hefty doses of muddied earth. I caressed the soiled pages of my notebook. The trees looked like wrinkled silk amid the folds of the night sky. The moon, pocked and slung low, looked like a wheel of cheese. A chilly draft came through the seams in the door and the window. It was time. Suddenly, impulsively, I opened my notebook. The following oracle emerged: Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and place, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.
“Ah, Benjamin, martyr of thought, sublime member of the Matrix of Literature!” I said to no one. A man much like Barthes, Borges, Blanchot, and Beckett—the writers of the B who had emerged in Quim Monzó’s corridor on the eve of one of Ludo’s first departures. Taüt, fellow steward of death, had spent that evening walking at my heels. “Where is he now?” I cried. I could feel the tightly woven tissue of my heart being pulled and stretched to make room for yet another absence. It was excruciatingly painful. I let myself weep. Then I redirected my attention to Benjamin, who, unlike Ludo Bembo, was a man unafraid of holding a candle to the night in order to measure the immensity of the darkness that surrounds us.
I reflected on Benjamin’s words. What message lay hidden in their nimble sound? I experienced a torrential sequence of digressive thoughts: like me, Benjamin was hyperconscious of his poorly designed fate. Stuck in Portbou, he had killed himself at the edge of the Catalan territories a day before Spain opened up its borders to those who were fleeing from Hitler, that evil despot, man of grotesque afflictions whose presence on this soggy earth we might never recover from. This, in turn, led me to think of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, self-proclaimed King of Kings, walking around the ruins of Persepolis in his bejeweled clothes looking like a torero. The smell of putrefaction arose from the ashen corpse-strewn landscapes of my childhood and tickled my nose. Before I knew it, my father’s ghostly voice was trumpeting through my void, that echo chamber of literature that I carried within me and that I had funneled an infinite number of words into.
“The Catalans are against bullfighting,” my father solemnly relayed. “A sign of their dignity, which was arrived at through excessive suffering at the hands of Franco.” He sighed deeply, then continued: “That fraudulent man with his Hitlerian mustache, against whom I rebel by growing a mustache of Nietzschean proportions . . .”
His voice faded as suddenly as it had appeared.
“Father?” I called, projecting my voice like a searchlight into the depths of my void.
But my father did not answer. He had been reduced to dust. He had been absorbed back into the mind of the universe, where he ultimately belonged. He was gone. Had the trace of my mother left along with him? I wondered. I felt my throat clog with tears.
I lay down on the bed, unsure of what to do. I closed my eyes. I pictured Walter Benjamin sitting with his head in his hands in Portbou, then I, too, sat that way. Hours later, I got myself together and read his mystical sentence several times in the bleak light of the lamp. Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and place, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be. The more I lingered on the phrase and its community of ideas, the more I felt as though I had encountered a loose thread from my own multiple minds, smeared and flattened onto the page.
In my father’s absence, my thoughts began to congeal like the night air. They became focused and took on gargantuan proportions. I, too, am a reproduction. My consciousness, battered by multiple exiles, is a constellation of distorted reproductions of my childhood self; in other words, just like a reproduced work of art, I had been detached from the domain of tradition, expelled from my home, banished from my origins; like an uprooted tree, I had been cut off from fertile soils and light, drained of my verdant aura, tossed into the shadowy pile of ruins. I wished Morales was around so I could share my revelation with him. But how was I going to push Benjamin’s thought further? How was I going to borrow his thinking to do what I intended: to hurl my void—that palimpsest of literature and my multiple stratified selves—at life in order to simultaneously expose its infinite multiplicity and its fundamental nothingness? Surely, Benjamin had gone far enough for his time. But years had passed since his life and death, decades. It was a whole new century, the twenty-first, a century with fangs, habituated by its predecessor, the twentieth, to drawing huge amounts of blood from us sorry little rodents.
I sat on the edge of the bed, clueless and yet certain I was on the cusp of an earth-shattering idea. I reveled in the euphoria of that liminal zone, the blissful space of potential between the germination and the harvesting of an idea. The sheets were rough against my feet. The room was growing draftier by the minute. I was shivering. I looked out the window. I saw my reflection in the glass. I looked through it at the moon, which was wheeling its way across the sky. I fell asleep, thinking only of the capricious cascade of thoughts that awaited me the next day in the remote village of Albanyà, with its glacial river and backdrop of granite and slate.
The morning unfolded like a reel of paper. I took my coffee and boiled egg at the dining-room table while my host stood motionless, staring out the east window in silence. We had our backs to each other.
“Is this yesterday’s coffee?” I asked.
He turned around and nodded. His face looked marbled in the filmy light of morning. He looked even sadder than the night before.
“Did your wife die in the morning?” I asked.
He retreated into the kitchen rather unhurriedly, then returned with the pot of coffee and refilled my mug with the liquid tar.
“She died at dawn,” he confirmed. His face shrank as he said the words.
I offered him my condolences. Useless to ask if he had absorbed her through metempsychosis, I contemplated, as I observed his deflated demeanor. It was unlikely that his body or mind could accommodate two people.
“No wind or clouds today,” he said with a sinking voice, as he returned to the window and looked through the polished glass at the boulders and rocks hemming in the valley.
“Nothing like a clear sky,” I replied. “A personification of the void,” I murmured.
Then, thinking of Benjamin, I told him that I had to get going because I had my work cut out for me, that my life was composed of a series of appearances and disappearances (I said nothing of Taüt), that as a result of this profound disorientation, I had been retracing the crooked path of my exile in order to map on the page the uselessness of my suffering, and that I have been waiting for myself—my multiple selves, I corrected—to appear in my notebook legibly, which so far had been an inconclusive affair, derailed by an unforeseen enmeshment with a man so profoundly attached to rationality, a man with an inflexible mind, a mind as linear as the stick of a broom! A man ready to deny the evidence of his senses, I told the man angrily, echoing Dostoyevsky’s words. A literary amateur, who only has thoughts about the thoughts of others and not a single one of his own, like most scholars, who, on the whole, are thoughtless and witless heretics who approach literature with their rational mind as if it were a technical tool, purely mechanic. My timid host looked shocked and bored—perhaps slightly more bored than shocked. The good news, I barreled on, gurgling my saliva, is that I have come to Albanyà in order to get back on track; it is my conviction that I will be able to get to the bottom of things in this remote and verdant valley, and finally enter the red-hot center of this sinister journey I have come to refer to as the Grand Tour of Exile.
He looked at me with those wet eyes of his but said nothing. He peeked inside my cup to see if I had finished. I had. He removed the cup and the empty plate where the egg had been. Indifference, I concluded, is the driving force of his character; his wife may have killed herself out of boredom. I wiped my mouth and flew out the door with that shiny boiled egg bouncing around in my intesti
nes.
I walked over a bridge into the town cemetery. I stared at the remains of the dead. Small vases were affixed next to each headstone, and a variety of pink and white plastic flowers, their leaves weathered and paper thin, sat in sooty containers. I could smell the stench of the decomposing corpses through the wall, an overpowering bacterial smell that brought to mind fungi, rotten meat, bile, shit. When I’d had enough, I walked back and stood on the bridge that was suspended over a glacial sapphire brook that widened into a small crystalline pool. I spotted an opening in the hilly surroundings and made my way through a cluster of trees. Once there, I sat on the rocky shore and cast smooth stones into the emerald green waters, prepared to unleash my most fanciful and mercurial thoughts.
With each stone I sank into the water, I verbally reproduced Benjamin’s sentence. I duplicated and quadrupled the phrase until I’d worked myself into a frenzy. The seeds of my thoughts were sprouting. I arrived at a more nuanced edition of the revelation that had presented itself to me the night before: By hurling my void at life, I, Zebra, was putting all my many disparate selves, the seemingly distant “realities” they pertained to—modernity and tradition, the New and Old Worlds, life and literature—on a collision course.
I disclosed my thoughts to the trees and the sky and the birds in the bush.
A response emerged from the rugged surroundings, and I repeated it for the world to hear: “You are going to continue to reproduce yourself, thereby preserving the discontinuity of exile and confronting the self-satisfied ignorance of the unexiled, but you are also going to embed yourself again in the fabric of tradition, the depths of your childhood self.
“How?” I asked.
“By stitching your multiple brains to the landscapes that have produced them.
“And what will I use to thread the needle?
“The spooling lines of the literature of exile produced in the very places you will traverse!”
I was having a Socratic dialogue with the environment. I was speaking to the poetic consciousness of nature and nature was responding. The wind blew, the trees bowed, the birds chirped, the water rippled along its stony path. And as each thing moved, my conviction that I was on the right track was reinforced. I pressed on.
Finally, the hidden message in Benjamin’s prophetic line arrived. It sounded out from the smooth granite of the Eastern Pyrenees and inserted itself into the labyrinthine corridors of my mind. Once there, it scurried about like a rat in a maze: “Replace the word reproductions with the word retranscriptions,” the mountains seemed to say. I opened my notebook. I wrote: Retranscriptions lack one element: their presence in time and place.
Suddenly, all was clear. Displaced transcriptions would no longer do. I had to retranscribe Josep Pla’s literature in the places and spaces represented within its pages—namely Girona and Palafrugell—Joan Maragall’s in Barcelona, Walter Benjamin’s in Portbou, Jacint Verdaguer’s on a hike to the peak of the Canigó. I had to retrace the long walks my father and I had embarked on in the Corridor of Exile in order to transcribe literature in situ. And what did this exactness, this topographic precision, provide? The opportunity to impose the truth of my complex and many layered void on any nonexiles who would be walking along those same routes engaging in some banal form of literary tourism out of the delusion that there is such a thing as an original or a singular self, a coherent “I” conducting an apprehensible life—the delusion par excellence of the imperialists of the so-called New World, of the supposed march of progress. After all, where was Walter Benjamin or Unamuno or Mercè Rodoreda? These writers were everywhere and nowhere at once; their consciousnesses—the network of sentences into which they had breathed life—were being reproduced, plagiarized, lifted from this or that text to be infused back into the world. By transcribing those sentences in situ, I would be producing a thread, however meager, of hope that the willfully blind, the nonexiles who would be slogging along the same literary routes as I, would finally acquire the courage not just to see but look.
I smiled at the thought of it all. I had struck gold. The harvest was approaching. It was clear to me now, crystal clear, that it wouldn’t have been enough to drag the Mobile Art Gallery hither and thither at random. What a premature idea that had been! What an oversight! I remembered standing alongside my father staring at the landscapes Josep Pla had written about: the cork trees of Palafrugell, the cauliflower heads that burst out of the village’s moist red earth, the rusty masts of the fishing boats that rock hypnotically in the wind and the waves. I saw my future self returning to Palafrugell at a time when half of Europe was again collapsing like a battered building that’s subsided and falling apart, as it had been during Pla’s youth, when he’d written those words. I felt emboldened, powerful, buoyed by my many former selves. I thought, I am a person capable of simultaneously existing in multiple planes of time. What an exhilarating thought that was! I repeated it inwardly, and then I said it out loud to be absorbed by the trees and the sky and the birds moving through it like missiles.
The entire province of Girona was Pla’s territory. This was an undeniable fact. Just like Cadaqués, Port Lligat, and the Cap de Creus had been Dalí’s. And Portbou, at the end of the great calamity that was his life, had been Walter Benjamin’s.
I wrapped up my thoughts: It was clear I needed to resume my pilgrimages. I had to design literary routes for each of these writers—the primary authors of my father’s Catalan oeuvre—in order to merge the metaphysical experience of the Matrix of Literature and its network of archives with a physical experience in situ. I opened my notebook at random again to make sure I had pushed my thinking as far as it could go.
“Dante, vindictive and severe as any artist in exile,” I read, “used eternity as a place to settle old scores!”
Who had said that? I could not recall. I took my thoughts one step further. I was reaching the bottommost plateaus of my void, the icy, burning center at the core of my existence. What did I find there? A raw and savage pain: rejection, humiliation, despair. The world had planted within me the seeds of its own ruthlessness. Just like Dante, I was going to settle my old scores; only I was going to do so in Catalonia. I was going to stage a metaphysical insurrection and reclaim my place among the other beings of this trifling universe. Because how, I wondered, was I going to sound out the Hosseini alarm while living apart from others, barred from the good life, invisible? I couldn’t stand the way people looked through me as if I were transparent. Who would be able to ignore me, or literature, which is my life, if I, Dame of the Void, walked along literary routes dragging the Mobile Art Gallery behind me and transcribing literature as I went? The nonexiles and imperialists of the world, all those who had made of me a monster, a sublime and ghastly being, would have to stand in awe and fear of me. They would have to stop and look at my pain.
I understood, finally, that this was why I had invented the Mobile Art Gallery. I was going to use that miniature museum on every single pilgrimage; I would use all the decrepit writing machines I had embedded within it to contaminate life with literature, modernity with tradition, the New World with the Old. I walked through the herd of trees. I went back over the bridge, shoes in hand. Words, suggested by the scenery, started flowing freely from my mouth. “I am a wandering speculative border intellectual, surviving by my wits, roaming the land. Not unlike Ibn al-Arabi, Bashō, Omar Khayyám, and Badi’ al-Zaman, those solitary walkers, extemporaneous philosophers, literary tricksters, the wise and wicked ancestors of Cervantes, Rousseau, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Acker.” My void caught fire. I thought I was going to lift off like a balloon and fly into outer space. I pressed my feet into the ground. The asphalt was cold and pebbly. Like any good guru, I thought, all I need are pilgrims, a roving pack of the world’s marginalized and exiled, other .1 percenters, who, unlike Ludo, would understand my poverty, the sting of my uninterrupted loneliness.
“Why?” I heard the trees ask.
“Because rebellion means nothing when done alone,�
�� I answered, thinking of Camus. “But rebellion means everything when the wronged rise together against the toxic secretions of the world’s evildoers and despots.”
I skipped down the glum road, energized by this superabundance of thoughts. Halfway to the farmhouse, I sat on a chopped log on the side of the road and listened to nature. It was breathing all around me, and I was breathing alongside it. The sky was nourishing my mind. I sucked in little puffs of air. I held my breath. I absorbed the atmosphere into my cells. Instantly, my brain amped up its revolutions. I opened my notebook. I closed my eyes. I let my sick hand move across the page without thinking. I wrote: “I, Zebra, Dame of the Void, am convinced that the world will yield its mysteries to me so long as I embark on a series of pilgrimages, pilgrimages that would require me to travel physically through the Old World while simultaneously traversing through its mirage in literature, submerging myself in literature’s radical genealogy, yes, but also reproducing its pages, exhuming the corpse of the past.” My hand hurt, as if by writing I was spilling my own inky blood. “The landscape, as far as I am concerned,” I persevered, “has become my library, an archive that lays bare the subtexts of time, the tangled meanings I need to excavate in order to sound out the Hosseini alarm loud and clear.”
I sealed my notebook and opened my eyes. The air was full of mist. I could barely see the end of the road. How quickly the weather changes in these mountainous parts, I thought, as quickly as history itself. I got up and walked back to the farmhouse. “My next move,” I declared, as I walked past the horse, “has been decided.” The animal clapped its tail against the mist. The pigs made way. The dog bowed. Already I was more visible. I had thought my thoughts alongside the mind of the universe. The next day, whistling into the wind, I returned to Girona. There, I would forge my plan: I would map out my literary routes; I would find my fellow Pilgrims of the Void.
Call Me Zebra Page 25