Girona
The Story of How I Traveled Across the Corridors of Exile in the Company of the Pilgrims of the Void
My plans were yet again stymied by a strange unfolding of events. The following morning, I returned to Ludo Bembo’s apartment, and immediately upon opening the door, I heard whispers in Farsi float up through the corridor. It had been so long since I had heard those melodic sounds that my ears grew hot, my knees buckled, my mind spun dizzily. I exited the building and stood dumbfounded on the cobblestone pathway. I observed the recessed door with its hand-shaped knocker. I was at the right door. I climbed back up the dusty steps.
I walked across the threshold cautiously and proceeded down the hallway. There they were: Ludo and Agatha, sitting cross-legged on the tile floor, reproducing the sounds of my mother tongue. They were passing a book between them: Persian for Italian-Speaking People: A Guide for a Journey into the Unknown.
They were so entrenched in the book, they’d taken no notice when I walked in. I stood there like a ghost and watched the spectacle unfold. Ludo was wearing a striped silk robe over his pajamas and his hair was uncombed. His curls, usually so precise, had an electric frizz that made it look like he had a halo. He was holding the book.
“Is there a dining car?” he asked in Farsi, returning the book to Agatha.
“What time does the train leave to Isfahan?” Agatha posed. She, too, was in her house clothes: thick sweats and a purple cotton shirt with a green wool sweater over it. She gently passed the book back to Ludo.
“Does this train make a stop in Herat?” Ludo asked.
Their accents were terrible. They might as well have stuffed their mouths with stones. I wanted to stop them from butchering my mother tongue. My mother tongue, I thought, and imagined my mother turning in her makeshift grave. My eyes welled up.
“Can you direct me to the bridge, please?” Agatha asked.
What if a strong wind had blown? What if her body lay there exposed next to the ruins of that demolished house? I stood there unable to speak or move. I had calcified. I had turned to stone.
Ludo took the book from Agatha and then brought it down to his knees.
“What’s the matter?” he asked in Italian.
“She’s here!” Agatha cried out, nodding in my direction.
“Who?” Ludo shuddered.
“Zebra! She is standing there like a statue.”
Those words delivered me from my sorry childhood. Me? A statue? What about her and her many busts? Ludo turned around, wide-eyed and bushy-tailed.
“You’re back,” he said cheerily, as though we had parted on a good note. Then he spoke to me in Farsi. He opened the book at random and asked the first question that stood out to him on the page. “Do you have a light?” he asked, retrieving his pipe from his robe and placing it rather seductively between his lips.
“I understand nothing!”
“Isn’t Farsi your mother tongue?” he asked, perplexed.
His eyes had drifted apart. His face always looked so distended when he was confused. I enumerated Ludo’s missed opportunities for demonstrating compassion: He had grown silent at the mention of my dead mother during our first meal; he had abandoned me in a lukewarm tub; he had neglected to search for Taüt. What right did he have to ask me about my mother tongue, to utter those words—mother tongue—before I was prepared to speak them, let alone hear them spoken by a pair of expatriated Italians? That pair of words was reserved for me to contemplate on my own time, in solitude.
“That language—Persian, Farsi, Pars—whatever you want to call it,” I lectured him (my voice was unleashed), “is reserved for my mustached father. To what end are you, Ludo Bembo, an Italian subject expatriated to Spain—to Catalonia, to be precise—employing it?”
He looked as though I had slapped him across the face. I went on to tell him that where I come from there is an inner and an outer form, and that the rules governing my internal state don’t have to correspond with those dictating the terms of my behavior in the world. “Do you understand?” I screamed. “Farsi is relegated to the latter so as far as you are concerned,” I warned, “I have no idea what you are saying!”
Agatha retreated from the living room. She gently squeezed my arm on the way out and cast me a pleading look, as if to say I swear he made me; it was all him.
“Give me that book,” I demanded, once we were alone. I looked at the title, and yelled: “What does the unknown have to do with Iran? The unknown is not a nation no matter how like a chameleon that nation is, no matter how many times it shifts its shape!”
Ludo got off the floor. He was disenchanted. His mouth was downturned; his eyes and eyebrows drooped.
“Any updates on Taüt?” I asked, forcing my mouth to form the words.
“No,” he said. “We’ve been home all weekend, but he didn’t show up.” He sounded remorseful. “You know,” he said, shaking his golden halo. “You make no room. No room for being understood.”
A terrible silence spread its wings between us.
I watched him trail out of the room. I sniffed him on the way out. He smelled like blood oranges, mint, eucalyptus, sand, rotten watermelon rinds, salt, and mist. He smelled like the Caspian Sea, like the Oasis of Books. I stood there simultaneously defiant and disoriented, aware and repulsed by the fact that the codes those who are less burdened with history live by would forever be illegible to me.
I looked out the window. The clouds were swollen. They were loaded with rain. I stood there for a long time, alone, holding the book of Persian phrases and idioms. I could hear Ludo and Agatha putting the dishes away in the kitchen. I heard Fernando come home. To sink, I thought to myself, to slide down the craggy walls of despair would be the easiest thing to do, to indulge in my misfortune, to stop kicking against the current of injustice and the rising tides of evil. Just then, the clouds burst open and released massive globular drops. The windows fogged. I heard Agatha say sweetly, “It’s a monsoon!” I sniffed the air. It, too, smelled like the Caspian of my lost childhood.
Shards of memories floated through the misty room. I saw my mother standing in the corner burying her face in her hands. Then I saw her standing in our kitchen on the Caspian. The village fisherman was on his knees on the terra-cotta floor. He was cleaning a sturgeon he had caught, and she was sweeping the blood into the drain. She looked spent, famished, sapped. I saw myself running through the topiaries looking for our three dogs only to find them lying dead under a date palm. They had been poisoned. I touched each one. Their bodies were still warm. I ran back to my mother, knees soiled from crouching next to our dogs, hands bloody from wiping their nostrils.
“Who would do such a terrible thing?” I asked.
“Ask your father,” she said sorrowfully, and his figure appeared in the room.
“Life is full of loss,” he said. “It’s the war. It’s always the war. The war has become a state of mind. Our brethren have turned on us. We should consider this a warning for what awaits us if we do not leave.”
After that, he walked me to the oval library and resumed my lessons. He asked, “Child, what does an Autodidact, Anarchist, and Atheist always have to do?”
“Compartmentalize,” I recited. “And carry on. It’s the valiant thing to do!”
There was a burst of thunder. I looked through the window. The image resolved itself. The memories diffused like smoke in the air. I heard a crowd run through the streets laughing hysterically as they went. I stood there in the living room in Girona staring into the distance for a long time. Petita came scurrying in. She sniffed the air. I reached down and patted her on the head; her eyes grew sleepy and full of mist. What now? I thought, looking at her with a troubled mind. I thought of the insurmountable loss, the irreparable wounds that had led me to retrace my footsteps halfway across the globe. And to what end?
I retreated to my room and reached for my notebook in the dark. My sick hand always knew how to find it. I turned on the table lamp. I cracked open the book i
n the exact same way I had been for decades, years, to soothe myself. Goethe’s lines swam up from the page: There are two souls within my breast, one clings to the earth in search of rough passion, while the other violently shakes off the dust and flies toward the kingdom of its sublime ancestors.
There was a knock on the door.
“Come in,” I said.
It was Agatha. She was standing there with our downstairs neighbor, the baker, and her daughter.
“We’re putting in our weekly order for bread,” she gently said.
I put in my order. I looked at the child. She floated down the hallway, moping, crestfallen. “Through love, life is reborn,” I heard. Who had said that? Life, I thought, as the child returned, horrifying to begin with and now it’s duplicating itself. The girl buried her face in her mother’s skirt.
An hour later, I knocked on Ludo’s door. I was prepared to extend an olive branch. What else was there left to do?
“Come in,” he said.
I released the Petita-proof locks and let myself in. But as soon as I saw him, I thought better of it. He was distant, cold, removed. He was lying on his bed with his head propped up on a stack of velvet pillows, his body still wrapped in that silk robe, a sight to behold. He was drawing contentedly on his pipe. I could no longer see his halo. A vaporous cloud filled the room; a soft dawn mist lightly veiled his features. An amateur dressed to approach literature, I thought, as I apprehended his figure. A dandy. Papers and a few dictionaries were scattered across his mattress.
“The only thing you are missing is a lighter on a pulley,” I informed him.
“That’s what you’ve come to say?” he asked reproachfully, not even bothering to lift his head. He sucked on the end of his pipe and held the smoke down in his chest.
“No,” I said, attempting to break our cycle of misunderstandings. How many senseless blows could we withstand to receive from each other? “I have come to make myself understood.”
He exhaled from his nose and the emerging smoke made me think of a bull breathing in the middle of a frost.
I spoke my truth. I shared the words I’d gathered from Goethe.
He reflected quietly for a moment. The dim light coming from his lamp illuminated the wall behind his bed and cast the others in shadow. I felt as though I were standing in the chiaroscuro of a Renaissance painting—an annunciation of sorts. He sat up and set his pipe on the wooden side table. It, too, lay supine in the light of the lamp. I looked at all the wood in his room, at the walls, which were painted a soft yellow. His face recomposed itself. He looked grave, a man on the cusp of delivering a verdict he has been patiently waiting for. He licked his lips.
“To do two things at once,” he said somberly, “is to do neither.”
Ah, Publilius Syrus: the Iraqi thinker who had been enslaved by the Romans, my estranged brethren. I pushed my way deeper into his room and sat on the edge of his bed. I crossed my legs.
He leaned back and slipped his pipe between his lips again. In the back of my mind, I saw soldiers in camouflage marching single file behind a wall of sandbags on the shore of the Caspian. A leftover memory shard emerging from the ruins of the first, I reasoned, and suppressed the image.
“You look tired,” Ludo said, exposing the thread of tenderness that ran beneath his stoicism like a subterranean river. “You should get some sleep.”
I turned to look at him. He was holding his pipe away from that seductive mouth of his. The vaporous cloud had diffused, or else my eyes had adjusted to the smoky veneer of the room.
“Everyone has the face they deserve by the time they approach thirty,” I said, looking at myself in his eyes. Orwell. He, too, had gone to Catalonia. He had fought alongside the Republicans. And what for? Injustice always reconstitutes itself. My reflection shrank from Ludo’s eyes. A second later, he blinked and I was gone. I sat there somber, silent, servile, until Ludo Bembo, unaccustomed to my sorrow even though it seemed to have been what he had wanted all along, finally spoke.
“You want platitudes, I’ll give you platitudes: Anyone who doesn’t take love as a starting point will never understand the nature of philosophy.”
There was Plato again. There was Ludo’s false rhetoric of love.
“Put your money where your mouth is,” I said, and left his room.
The corridor, as usual, was like a Greek temple. I paused for a moment and examined the clay busts. In that strange caesura, Nietzsche’s voice came rushing at me. The whole of European psychology is sick with Greek superficiality! Due to their excessive number, Agatha’s busts were both a reproduction and a dissolution of life. I stood there staring at them, lost in that dim corridor. My thoughts looped and spun. Love. What is love? Had I ever received it? I couldn’t be sure.
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After that, I treated the apartment as a hospital where I was convalescing. I sought refuge in my books. I needed to regain my strength. I needed to sharpen my wits, bolster my willpower. How else was I going to execute the plan that the poetic consciousness of nature had unveiled to my many minds in Albanyà?
One morning, as I continued honing my plan, I walked in circles around the dining-room table while the others ate their breakfast just as I had in the oval library of my childhood. I whispered Dante’s verses in ghostly tones while I went.
The three of them—Agatha, Ludo, and Fernando—whispered to one another. “She has turned into a goat,” Fernando dryly said.
“She is like a clove of garlic!” Agatha humorously agreed.
They were speaking in Italian but using Spanish idioms to agree with one another that I had lost my wits.
“Me? I’ve turned to stone,” Ludo uttered resentfully. “This is beyond words.” He poured sugar into his espresso cup and stirred the granules until there were no uneven surfaces left. Is that what he had wanted to do to me? Grind me down, sculpt me until all my rough edges were gone?
“I can hear you loud and clear!” I said to them. “And if you want a Spanish idiom, I can give you a Spanish idiom: I am healthier than a pear!”
Immediately, I thought of Ortega y Gasset’s words: the gem like Spain that could have been were it not a country obsessed with foreign imitations. This, I thought, is where the Catalans distinguish themselves. “They are no imitators,” my father would have said. Just then, the words of one Ehsān Narāghi, a man whose work I had once encountered in my father’s library of unatheist books, cascaded down the walls of my void: What should be done to allow the Oriental countries, and Iran especially, to become conscious of their national and cultural existence and be “for-themselves,” without falling either into blind imitation of Western patterns or into extremist reactions to such patterns?
A torrential outpour followed. The floodgates had opened. I waited for everyone to leave the apartment, and then I walked up and down the corridor, sobbing for hours. In the wake of the Islamic Republic of Iran, these questions had been extinguished. There had been a near total physical and psychic massacre of the country’s leading thinkers, writers, intellectuals. Contemplation, musing, and doubt were no longer allowed; an extreme line of zero tolerance had taken root. I wept at the thought of the damages we had endured. When would Iran show its true colors? I wondered, sipping on my salty tears. Its radiant and stratified pluralism?
I felt as if I had either arrived too late or too early to my own life. I thought of my truncated voyage. It dawned on me: My plan to retrace the path of my exile was impossible. I could make it all the way to Van and salute the Iranian craggy border, but I could go no farther. I would be killed instantly for being a woman traveling alone or for being a Western spy. Me, a speculative border intellectual, a Western spy! My future self took offense at the potential insult. What good would it do for me to be buried in that no-man’s-land alongside my mother? What use would I be to the world?
I was caught off guard by my sudden impulse to remain alive, by the savage energy of survival. I realized that the Pilgrims of the Void would need
me, their dame, to be in tip-top shape. I needed to train my mind in the lucidity of death through the limpid territories of sleep. I returned to convalescing in that borrowed room of mine, which still smelled of Bernadette, of the unlikely pairing of frankincense and toilet-bowl cleaner. Sequestered in my bed, I slept for days.
Whenever I woke, I found I was totally lucid, consumed by hunger, and began furiously making plans. I mapped out various routes. I designed the Pilgrimages of the Corridor of Exile: Pilgrimage of the Memory Man (Josep Pla), Pilgrimage of the Wide-Eyed Genius (Salvador Dalí), Pilgrimage of the Catalan Resuscitator (Jacint Verdaguer), Pilgrimage of the Martyr of Thought (Walter Benjamin), Pilgrimage of the Perseverant (Mercè Rodoreda), Pilgrimage of the Tireless Excavator (Montserrat Roig). The list went on and on.
Afterward, I dusted off the Mobile Art Gallery. I tended to it. I made flyers calling on interested parties to attend the first meeting of the Pilgrims of the Void, scheduled to take place in March, at the site of the ruins of Josep Pla’s childhood school directly adjacent to the parking lot beneath Ludo Bembo’s apartment. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t noticed the plaque on the side of the wall until the day before: Here Josep Pla went to school. A formidable sign!
On a crisp morning, I left the apartment to distribute the flyers among the regulars at the soup kitchen, among students in the hallways of the university, among those going up and down the steps of the cathedral. I was looking for people who, despite searching, had been unable to fill their void and who were willing to dive into the depths of their doubt. In addition to other bits of useful information, I had included the following points of reflection on the flyers: “Are you willing to drown in inquiry? There is no point in rebelling alone!”
I was hopeful I’d get a good crop.
After several days of this, Ludo finally knocked on my door. He let himself in, holding a plate of rice stained black with squid ink and a salad of arugula and radishes. He put the food down on my desk.
Call Me Zebra Page 26