“Plutarch?” I said to Ludo, removing my finger from my mouth. “I’ll give you some Plutarch: There is no point in getting angry against events: They are indifferent to our wrath!”
“You should tell that to yourself,” he said, and rushed past me.
I managed to grab hold of his arm before he could storm out the door. He turned to look at me. His face had collapsed.
“Do you ever consider taking off your mask?” he pressed.
“What mask?” I asked reproachfully.
“The mask of literature!”
“You’re the one speaking in platitudes,” I insisted.
“Me? Me? Me? No, no, no,” he said. He was shaking his head with a violent passion. I thought he was going to get stuck reproducing those two words forever. But then he steadied himself. “This is our problem: We have become entangled with each other!”
“With each other and the whole world,” I said. “The self is a porous thing.”
“Not my self.”
He was facing the door again.
“You’re an exception to the rule?”
He opened the door.
“You should get ahold of your self,” he murmured into the threshold of the apartment. “You’re the one dragging a bunch of lost souls up and down hills as if they were your indentured servants. You should try examining your thoughts before you decide to act on them!”
“Are you suggesting that I don’t deserve to make friends? That I should suffer indefinitely from this ancient loneliness I carry within me?”
“By dragging those miserable wretches into our lives?”
“I am a miserable wretch!” I said, my eyes damp with tears.
His eyes welled up, but he just stood there in silence, as stubborn and impassive as a bull.
Beyond the door, the staircase was darker and dirtier than ever. I watched him walk down the stairs, turn the corner, and disappear. I was alone again. Alone with Taüt, Petita, with that slimy, stubborn fish. I stared into the darkness of the staircase and remembered looking down at the ruins of Van, my eyes sore from having been wrapped in the rough cloth of that black band. Do we ever see anything at all? I wondered. Everything in my life had turned into an afterimage; the past had transcribed itself onto the future, annihilating the present. I closed the door behind him. I put Taüt down. I let him roam at his will.
After that, I went to the bathroom and stood in front of the mirror. I saw my eyes, my nose, my lips, but I couldn’t see my face. My features refused to come together; they seemed to either be drifting away from one another, an exploded view, or were stacked together, an overlapping mess of organs.
I retreated to my room to plan the next pilgrimage: a pilgrimage of Dalínian proportions: the Pilgrimage of the Wide-Eyed Genius. It wasn’t easy. I felt both drained and panicked. But there was no turning back. I had gone too far. I had to carry on. Faced with the failure of the Pilgrimage of the Memory Man, I had decided that I would try again, persist until my nerves were raw—a wisdom born of all my mutilated parts blended together. That failure had made my desire to hurl my pain at the world even more assiduous. I experienced a rapid cycling of moods: a sense of exhilaration followed by sudden defeat during which my mind felt consumed, charred, burned to a crisp. I churned my mind. I forced it to produce more routes, to recall the quotes and maxims that my father had stuffed into it, that I had been feeding on through his old age, his macular degeneration, his death, his resurrection within my void, his return to the mind of the universe. But something was off. A tangible sense of estrangement.
I stared for hours at the surfaces of my life, my death: the high cracked walls of the living room, the shuttered panes of the terrace window overlooking the city—elegant, resolved, draped in gray stone. Hours later, deep into the night, I went on a long walk along the Onyar River. It was slipping silently past the houses lined up along its banks. I stared at their reflection in the water, at the bridges that arched across the divide, the seagulls that plunged into the water from the roofs and railings, remorselessly attacking the fish in the night—ugly, whiskered, lazy, sucking on the mud and waste of the riverbed—and then, finally, at myself. My own dumb, round face in the water, and next to it, Taüt’s beaked countenance. I looked swollen. My eyes were puffy, my hair uncombed. Who am I? I wondered. How is it that I have ended up here, adrift and alone in the world with no money? For one brief, fugitive moment, I longed for Ludo’s embrace, but were he to offer it to me, I couldn’t be sure that I wouldn’t refuse it. No one had ever been in a position to protect me. How could I trust someone who was offering to protect me now? I was bereft. My life was small and narrow. I didn’t know what to do, how to generate love.
For days, I fell asleep and woke up at odd hours. At one point, I don’t know if it was in the middle of the day or night, I sat bolt upright in bed. I had woken up from a dream in which I had seen my parents. Or not my parents. Not exactly. I dreamt I was standing in front of a tableau vivant of Goya’s Two Old Men Eating Soup, but the two shriveled-up men in the painting, with their toothless jaws and hooded heads, had been replaced by my parents. My mother’s bruised hand reached out from the dark shadows of the painting. She held the spoon out to my mouth, inviting me to take the soup of death. Her skin was freckled and spotted with purplish hues; it was paper-thin, a trembling hand. I drank the soup. Then my father reached out and wiped my mouth with the edge of his sleeve. He was still wearing that outmoded suit, but he was bald: no mustache, no hair on his head. Had I ever seen his mouth? I barely recognized them. “Where are you? What realm do you live in?” I stepped forward to ask, but they immediately retreated into the canvas, and the painting was static again. I ran my hand across the surface of the portrait. I was hoping my hand would go through so I could join them on the other side. But there was nothing there. Nothing except air. Air full of the residue of the living and the dead.
Finally, Ludo slipped into my room one night. He got into bed next to me and drew me onto his chest. “I have no other way of getting through to you,” he confessed. “Your notebook is the only inroad, the only way in.”
I didn’t know what to say. I lay there and listened to the beating of his heart. It sounded like the deep roar of the sea, the white noise of the universe. Again, I thought, the parts don’t add up to a whole; there is always a residue. At least I, I reassured myself, am trying to account for that residue.
“I have good news for you,” Ludo said.
“Is that so?”
“National borders are an artificial construct,” he said.
A protracted silence ensued. I am an orphan, I thought, as he ran his hands through my hair. He was trying to untangle the knots, but he gave up halfway through.
“Madonna!” he said.
“An artificial construct that has controlled the terms of my life,” I finally answered. “There is nothing abstract there.”
He didn’t speak after that. I could tell he was sulking again.
“You know,” I said to him, “according to Nietzsche, wisest Autodidact, Anarchist, and Atheist of all time, those who remain silent are almost always lacking in delicacy and courtesy of the heart. Silence is an objection; swallowing things leads of necessity to a bad character—it even upsets the stomach. All who remain silent are dyspeptic.”
I thought he was going to push me off his body and leave. But he didn’t.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay.”
We drifted off to sleep.
Halfway through the night, I woke him up, and said, “You know, Ludo, there is nothing noble about my suffering. It is the result of an exhaustive investigation into the deepest recesses of human nature—its senselessness and propensity toward fakeness, its lack of honesty. We have made very little progress, Ludo Bembo. The march of progress is the biggest lie of the twentieth century.”
I could tell that he was out of his depth. It was as if a tide had dragged him out of the shallows. He was half-asleep. He was struggling to keep his head above water.
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He said: “I wish you would say you love me.”
I wanted to speak, but I felt as though my mouth had been taped shut. The pilgrimages were the only way I knew to dissolve life’s resistance toward me, my resistance toward it—but I had only just begun. I rolled away. I didn’t want him to see me weeping. Ludo moaned. He reached out and tried to pull me back into his embrace. I swatted his arm. He faced away from me and went to sleep. The tides of his mood had again turned. Tomorrow he would withdraw from me. He would be obstinate, cheerless, as ornery as a child. I got up and paced the hallway. How comfortable for him to escape into sleep, I thought, after returning to that word love. A love I was in no position to receive despite desperately needing it. No. Not I with my castaway, homeless body. Where would I store it? It would fall right through me, sink into the depths of my void. I would have needed so much love, more than any one person is capable of giving, to fill that gaping hole at the center of my life. And, besides, his love had been capricious, inconsistent, flighty.
When I walked back into my bedroom, I heard him murmur the word unhappiness. His eyes momentarily flooded open. He looked unplugged. An old wound seemed to have come loose and extinguished the light from his eyes. Later, much later, I would look back on this moment and realize that my hypothesis had been correct, that Ludo Bembo had come searching for me not only because our fates had been, as I had always known them to be, united in the poetic dimension but also because in my company, alongside the Dame of the Void, something Ludo had long suppressed could finally burst forth and arrange itself among his other memories—a certain darkness he secretly carried within that he, a utilitarian, an optimist, a linear-minded, rational man, would rebel against and use as an excuse to refuse me. Psychological morbidity is not for the weak.
Days turned to weeks. Time passed. Though the distance between Ludo and me began to calcify, we each held on to our relationship the only way we knew how: by yanking each other around. As a result, we both grew increasingly doleful, despondent, aggrieved.
Soon, March ended and April began. It was the anniversary of my father’s death. The sky was glowing with a bright spring sun that cast a straw-colored hue on the gray stones of Girona. There was an uncharacteristic chill to the air. I again stood with my fellow Pilgrims of the Void in the parking lot.
I was wearing a Wagnerian mustache—an ode to my father. I had fashioned it from hair deposited in garbage bags outside of one of the city’s hair salons. The pilgrims, with their sea of greasy heads, were looking at me with knitted eyebrows. They had multiplied.
Fernando had joined us. He was perched elegantly on the hood of Ludo’s car. A finely sculpted man. Gheorghe, having repossessed himself of his person, had found a companion: a short blond woman named Paola, who was graced with leathery skin and sagging breasts and a protruding belly that hung over her skinny legs. Based on her appearance, it was clear that the pair of them had shared an alcoholic past and that now they planned to leap hand in hand into sobriety; from the pits of the abysses they had been avoiding within themselves, they would pump temperance and restraint.
Aside from them, there was the usual crowd: Remedios, whose rash had spread, covering her right cheek—she looked as though she had been freshly slapped; Mercè, who arrived wearing the gas mask, looking the part of a shiny beetle; Agatha, who had ornamented her face with Venetian earrings for the occasion; and Ludo, who had tied a silk scarf around his neck and was lying obscenely on the hood of his car next to Fernando, as if to say: Here I am, Cleopatra’s male counterpart. He was up to something. What, I did not know. Only time would tell.
Taüt was nibbling on my mustache, smoothing the hairs the wind had ruffled.
“Why are you wearing a mustache?” Mercè’s muffled voice emerged from the mask, a childish whine. I pushed the bird’s head aside.
“Before disappearing altogether,” I said, adopting a grave tone, “the growth of my father’s Nietzschean mustache had miraculously increased. As you all know, we are about to embark on a Dalínian pilgrimage, and while Dalí commands all of my respect, his lifelong rebellion against Nietzsche’s Wagnerian mustache also drains my deference. Dalí’s fixation with Nietzsche’s mustache paradoxically represents Dalí’s lack of differentiation from him, making Dalí Nietzschean to the core”—I made a fist with my sick hand and vehemently punched the palm of my opposite hand—“Nietzschean in the depths of the depths of his heart.”
I paused thoughtfully and scanned the faces of the pilgrims. They looked pained. I took a softer approach.
“We are all the very thing we rebel against. Take this man as an example,” I said, pointing at Ludo Bembo. “In the depths of this man’s soul lies a labyrinthine network of abysses not unlike mine, which explains why, despite his conscious efforts to go toward the darkness of life, he is continually attracted to me, whose life is a prolonged meditation on the clear light of death.”
In the presence of that word, attracted, Gheorghe and Paola exchanged a magnetic glance. Mercè hung her rubber-wrapped head in defeat. Ludo drew his legs together and sat up. I fixed my gaze on him and continued with uncompromising conviction. “In the depths of this Bembo’s soul lies, like a madam cast in marble, the fear of his own mortality.”
Ludo opened his mouth to speak, but a group of giggling American tourists flocked past us just then. I could smell the swamplands of their psychology, their disturbed intestines. They smelled like mildew and mud. I watched those abusers of history disappear under the archway and down the stairs that hug the convent walls. I felt the residual toxins of my childhood clog my airways. It was extremely painful and difficult to breathe. I closed my eyes. When I opened them again, a different figure was advancing toward us unflaggingly. It was the Tentacle of Ice.
“What’s she doing here?” I asked Ludo.
“She is an interested party,” he said tonelessly.
She took her place next to him, tossed her long curly hair to one side.
“What is the object of her interest?” I posed.
“L-I-T-E-R-A-T-U-R-E.” He annunciated every letter. I could see each one float out from the gap between his teeth.
“Don’t fool yourself. The only thing that woman is interested in is your sex organ.”
Ludo smiled at me with false teeth. Who could trust a man with such incongruities? She leaned over and gave him a kiss on the cheek. She was twice my size: voluptuous, large breasted, with hips designed to procreate. Her hands were manicured. She had plucked her eyebrows, applied makeup to her face. Mercè, realizing she was third in line, had begun to cry. The glass panels over her eyes had fogged.
“Look what you’ve done,” I said to Ludo. “Mercè is sobbing. She is falling apart. She looks like a heap of moist flesh.
“Is that not so?” I asked Mercè.
“I’m crying,” Mercè lied squeakily, “because I spent the morning chopping onions.”
“Onions?”
“Onions!” she insisted.
“A great symbol of putrefaction and decay,” I said to Ludo Bembo, “of which you understand next to nothing!”
The Tentacle of Ice wrapped her frigid arms around him. She was reclaiming him. I stared at her smooth upper lip.
“Let’s go,” she said evenly. She whispered something hotly into his ear.
Ludo agonized for a moment, then swiftly assembled his thoughts and followed her. I felt my sick hand cramp in response to his absence. I felt as if the air were being squeezed out of my lungs. How could I have let a non-Hosseini into the craggy pits of my void? Ah, the redundant sting of betrayal, I thought, and forced myself to carry on without him.
I led the remaining pilgrims back to Calella de Palafrugell. We flipped one of the wooden fishing boats that had been abandoned on the shore and pushed it into the water. The sea was rough. We had to hug the coast. We sat around the Mobile Art Gallery, plunging our oars in the water.
Hours later, we rowed past the Medes Islands. They looked like the white teeth of a giant. The r
ocky plateaus of the coast changed textures along the way: the rock looked shaved one moment and as if it were peeling the next. The leathery water of the sea changed colors, too. It was black and laced with diamonds in the distance; aquamarine along the shore, revealing huge white rocks at the bottom of the sea; then icy fluorescent blue interrupted by shades of green farther out.
The tide almost pulled us out to sea a few times. We had to row fiercely to stay in line with the coast. No one spoke. When we were near land, we could hear the caves along the coast sucking in the sea then spitting it back out. Hours later, famished, exhausted, we arrived at the Cap de Creus, Dalí’s delirium of rocks. I took in that mass of savage stone: It was pleated, wrinkled, dimpled, rounded, conical, stratified. It looked like the Matrix of Literature with its coiled and complex pathways of interconnected sentences. In other words, it looked like my life.
We arrived at dusk. We set up the writing machine in front of Dalí and his wife and muse Gala’s house in Port Lligat. It was closed due to damages the building had sustained during a recent storm. Again, there were no witnesses. We, squalid misfits, were alone. What was I to deduce? I earmarked the thought and carried on. I had been inside that house before. Long ago. Or, perhaps, I thought, not so long ago. I couldn’t remember if I had been there with Ludo Bembo or with my father. Or with both. Dalí’s home was one of those houses with a complex network of interlocking rooms, each door leading to a window, each window showing a staircase beyond or an egg, white and smooth, sculpted in the terraced yard. It was opulent, magnificently irrational. I looked over at the pilgrims. They were sitting on the sandy coast, looking pale, overexerted from rowing, from the lack of food and water. They were at the brink of the void. Taüt, too, looked weaker than ever. The wind had sliced at his face, ruffling his feathers, as we had rowed. He was keeping to himself now, the way, it occurred to me, my mother had always kept to herself. He was on lockdown, wings tucked into his sides, neck turned, beak plunging like a dagger into his spine.
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