“Even if it causes others pain. Try to wrap your mind around that,” he said.
I looked up at the sky. A thick fog had begun to roll in. Suddenly, it was evident: I had caused Ludo Bembo pain. I felt as if someone were drilling holes in my heart. I imagined those holes, and an image of Dalínian proportions appeared to me. I tried to push the image away.
“We have to get going,” I said. “A rational man would understand that.”
The weather was shifting. We had a long way to the Pic del Canigó. I had been there with my father in June, on the night before Saint John’s Day when a fire is lit near the cross at the summit, which is covered in the Catalan flag. We had kept vigil with strangers through the night and lit torches on the fire. Not in the spirit of Catholicism but in the spirit of Catalan identity. I remembered watching the torches light up, one after the other, down the flank of the mountain. I remembered seeing the chain of people, their silhouettes against the orange flames that licked the dark night air. Now, a gelid breeze was barreling down the mountain pass. It didn’t matter what time of year it was. The weather turned quickly in the Pyrenees.
“Save your sandwiches for later,” I said to the pilgrims. They all got up. One injured soul after another. A sour mood hung over them.
We hiked up the plateau for several hours in silence. I could hear the pilgrims panting behind me. Ludo, that shortsighted amateur, hung his head and stared at the ground. I gazed into the distance, into the future of my past, which we were fast approaching. What lay before us were abrupt cliffs, ravines, slender cascades rippling into small pools, twisted strata of crystalline rocks. Up ahead, there was an elongated terrace of creased and pleated rock marked by depressions where the mountain seemed to suddenly drop off. I took in that crisscrossing labyrinth of sierras, massifs separated by bright valleys and shallow glaciers. To lift the mood, I turned around and recited verses from “Canigó,” Verdaguer’s epic poem. My mustached father had recited those same verses to me.
“The Canigó is an immense magnolia,” I declared, “that blooms in an offshoot of the Pyrenees.”
“The fog is thickening,” Agatha gently observed.
“What does that have to do with anything?” I asked.
“There’s no one else walking these trails. We don’t even have a map,” Mercè protested through the black cloth that continued to hang from her face. She was walking arm in arm with Remedios.
“The blind leading the blind,” I said.
“No one is blind here,” Ludo interjected. “This is a bad sign—a sign of dangerous weather.”
“Dr. Bembo, fog is the state of the world, nothing more, nothing less,” I retorted. “It is our job as pilgrims to stand at the brink of the void. You cannot be a pilgrim and be invertebrate!”
An argument ensued. Here and there, I heard sighs of despair. I heard Paola complain to Gheorghe about her hip. The pair of them were in a grave mood.
“We’re lost,” Mercè cried out through that cloth of death. “We’re lost! We won’t be able to find our way back again.”
“And the light is already waning,” Remedios added.
“Isn’t that what God is for?” I asked her. “To fill your spirit with light when you most need it?”
She fell back silent. But it was true. The light was waning. It was also true that we had all overexerted ourselves. We had pushed our bodies up the wide pedestal of the mountain. We had hiked through forests and past streams, up steep green slopes, and crossed paths flanked by sharp sheets of silver rock.
“Mercè,” I said. “I suggest you remove that cloth from your face. What is wrong with you?”
“There’s nothing wrong with me. I’m just shy,” she said.
I couldn’t take it anymore. I grabbed a stick and whipped it at their ankles. “Onward!” I barked like a shepherd’s dog. I herded them up the mountain. We pushed our way up the steep slopes in fits and bursts. I could see their arms and legs pumping through the thickening fog. Vertical walls of rock were closing in on us. Gusts of wind were barreling down. It sounded like a million knives were being sharpened at once. The wind was burning our skin. I scooped Taüt off my shoulder and held him in my arms. Agatha put Petita on a leash. I could hear the dog chattering in the cold wind. Finally, I admitted that we were lost. There were no signs anywhere. We had gone off the trail. I no longer had the faintest notion where we were in this maze of peaks and knolls.
“Let’s take five,” I said, and we sat down against a wall of rock. I opened my notebook to a random page.
“Not this again,” Ludo said.
“How many times do I have to tell you that these sentences are our roadmap to the future?”
There was a strong gale, after which Remedios finally broke.
“What does the book say?” she asked, on the verge of tears.
“Thank you for asking, Remedios,” I said, rather joylessly.
“According to the book, this book that is the book of books, its sentences highways that allow readers to travel in multiple temporalities simultaneously”—I took in a breath against the wind that was blowing everywhere—“according to this book, terrorists are those who desire absolute freedom and who behave during their lifetimes not like people living among other living people”—I paused to swallow the soot spreading through the atmosphere—“but like beings deprived of being, like universal thoughts, pure abstractions beyond history, judging and deciding in the name of all of history.”
Ah, the prophetic Blanchot.
“We are literary terrorists,” I said to my companions. I heard that word—terrorists—echo back from the mess of rocks. I looked up. There was no one there. Everyone had dispersed. One minute they were sitting against the chiseled facade of the mountain, and the next they were nowhere to be seen. I was alone with Taüt, sitting in a dusty bowl. I felt abandoned, alone once again with the heavy burden of my ill-fated past.
Time folded over itself. The gates of memory opened. I leaned over the edge of the mountain and took in the dizzying expanse beneath me. Memories emerged like troops from the dark recesses of my consciousness. I tried to push them away from my face with my sick hand. I felt the present distend into the past, contract toward the future. I heard my father’s muffled voice pour out through the gaps in his waning mustache. I was standing next to him at the top of Mount Sahand.
“I spit on you,” he said, “you bunch of patriarchal nepotists!”
Our hands were sore from burying my mother.
Then, suddenly, without warning, the sky cleared. It was limpid again. I was standing on the bald summit of the mountain. I had, despite all the obstacles, ascended the Canigó. I could see Casteil, Taurinya, Valmanya, Vernet-les-Bains. I looked beyond France at Italy. I turned and looked in the direction of Spain. Then I looked beyond it at the New World.
“Pitiless persecutors!” I said, thinking of Franco, Mussolini, Hitler, the King of Kings, Bush. “This is not the end of them. The fascists will keep reconstituting themselves!” I declared, and tried to get up, but I couldn’t. I felt as though I had been fused to that delirium of rocks. Had I made it back to Iran? I wondered. To that mercurial country of my youth? My mind was unreeling. My thoughts were spooling, spilling over. And what, according to my father, was so vile about Iran? How, I wondered, could he have considered it worse than Spain with its rampant colonialism, its inquisitions, a country with centuries’ worth of blood on its hands? And what about the so-called New World? How had we ended up there, caught up in its lies and dissociations? The New World, I thought, a direct extension of the Spanish and the British imperialists? We, whose lives had been shaped by the interests of the British, had returned to live among their descendents in the New World, to be pulverized again and again by them.
“What is wrong with us?” I said. “What is wrong with us all?”
“Who are you speaking to?” It was Ludo. I turned around. He looked crestfallen, wind battered. He said, “We lost each other. I came looking for you.” Petita w
as at his heels.
I wanted to go toward him, but I couldn’t. The storm picked up again. It sprayed the dirt of the world into our faces. We were both squinting in the wind. Ludo asked, “How can someone who hates love love literature?” His voice was shattered, spent, consumed.
“Literature is risk free,” I lied. “Each book is a perfect boat you ride into the darkness, but you are guaranteed to emerge unscathed.”
“Are you sure about that?”
Petita scurried over and sniffed Taüt’s tail. The bird bowed in response.
Sure? Sure about what? I wondered.
“So you are advocating a categorical absence of risk?”
There was a strong wind. My life, I thought quietly, has been subject to one putrid gale after another.
“Listen to me,” Ludo said desperately. “Do I have to bear the risks of loving you alone?”
His voice was being carried across the mountains on the wind.
“Look at me!” he demanded pleadingly. “Look at me!”
I looked at him. His face looked ancient, familiar. His shirt was torn. His hands were scarred. I plodded through my mind. I came across roadblock after roadblock. Love is the enemy. Love is a thought. Love needs reinventing. Hate I shall if I can; if I can’t, I shall love, though not willingly. There were no words. I had run out of lines of defense. I said nothing.
“Enough,” he said. “Enough. I’m here, aren’t I? Through all this absurdity?”
My voice released in weak bands. “Absurdity? There is nothing absurd about any of this. I am simply living by the laws that have governed my life.”
“And these poor impressionable nitwits you’ve dragged into this mess with you?” he asked.
Nitwits, I thought. As if those people had no willpower, no agency of their own. How could I explain that to a man like Ludo? I would have to destroy him in order to reconstruct him from the ground up. And how could I know that I wouldn’t get shattered in the process?
“Where is everyone anyway?” I asked.
“They headed back down the mountain,” he said. “And I suggest you do the same. There is a terrible storm on the way,” he warned. “This is the calm, the calm before the storm. I can’t take care of you. You have to decide to do this on your own.”
Is that the best you can do? I wanted to ask, but I didn’t know who I was addressing the question to. Ludo? My dead parents? The wretched leaders of my lost nations?
I started walking. My legs were trembling beneath me. Petita led the way, sniffing the ground. An hour later, we had come to a valley that sliced the mountain in half. I felt as though we were walking up and down the craggy plateaus of hell. I thought of Dante the Pilgrim. I heard Virgil’s voice: Ruthless striving overcomes everything. I heard the anxious neighing of horses. I heard the creaking sound of trees folding at the waist in the wind.
I stopped in my tracks. I turned around to face Ludo.
“I have been pushed by the world into a state of psychic feudalism. And you want me to make myself vulnerable to you. How much vulnerability do you think one person can take? Do you want me to rip my skin off and stand in the wind, bleeding and raw?”
“What do you want me to say to that?” he answered, pushing me along.
We walked another hour against the wind. I could barely breathe. I sat down on a chopped log that had mushrooms bursting out of its wet peeling bark. Then I got up again. Through the alpine forests, I had spotted a house in ruins. I thought of my mother searching for food. Before I knew it, I was standing in that ruined house and Ludo was standing on the other side of it, begging me to come out, to keep going.
“You’re taking this too far,” he cried. “You’re putting our lives in danger.”
It was true. I had taken things further than anyone had before.
“It’s going to come down on your head,” Ludo protested.
“Let it,” I said.
The wind was howling and wheezing; it was dragging everything down. I crouched on the ground.
“I’ll relive that, too,” I said.
“Relive what?” he asked. His voice was breaking. Petita was pacing anxiously. Taüt let out a shrill scream.
“My mother’s death!” I declared.
Ludo’s eyes widened in horror.
Rain started pouring down. It was the hardest rain we had seen that year. I was standing at the epicenter of my life. I could see toxic fumes radiating outward. The drops were the size of my hands. We were drenched within seconds. Torrential cascades of water were pouring down the mountain. I started looking under the rocks for food. What was the first thing my mother would have laid her eyes on when she walked into that house of ruin? The last thing before she died? Did she swallow the dirt of the world? I grabbed a chunk of mud and ate it.
“You are a lunatic,” Ludo said. “You are acting like a savage.”
I wiped my mouth. I swallowed the clumps of wet dirt.
“I have been made an enemy,” I said. “I have endured the world with grace for long enough.”
Then I remembered my mother leaning over me, whispering into my ear: Somewhere, deep inside you, hidden by all sorts of fears and worries and petty little thoughts, is a clean pure being made of radiant colors.
So I had remembered her words all along. I recognized the quote. It was by Shirley Jackson. My mother, too, had embedded sentences into my body; the words of literature, like my mother and father, were everywhere and nowhere at once. She had appeared to me in the most ordinary way. This, I decided, implied that she had been there all along and that dead or alive the minds of the sensitive beings of the world were slogging through the cosmos even if I could not perceive them with my eyes.
Hours later, the storm subsided. Ludo, Taüt, Petita, and I made it down the mountain. We had no idea where the other pilgrims were. We stood in front of Saint Michel de Cuxa, dumbfounded, stunned by the strange unfolding of the day. The abbey’s cloister and crypt were stained by the rain. I again remembered standing with my back to the Cloisters in Fort Tryon Park. Behind me were the Cuxa, the Bonnefont, the Saint-Guilhem, the Trie. Should I leap into my death? I wondered. My memories were recycling themselves. Then all my thoughts were interrupted by the sound of Ludo’s scream.
“My car!” he exclaimed. “Where is my car?”
Rainwater was dripping off the trees, off the red-tile roofs of the abbey, off the stubborn granite of the mountain. We were standing knee-deep in the muddied waters of the earth. We trod through the waters until we found Ludo’s car. It had slid off the road. It was sinking in the river. We watched the hood disappear.
“No!” Ludo cried. “No!” He kicked the ground, then he stood there with his hands on his head, speechless.
I watched that car sink. We had left the miniature museum—my father’s casket—in the trunk. It was too awkward to carry up the steep mountain. It drowned with everything else. It disappeared. I felt a weight lift from my shoulders. I felt my life dissolve, as though the person who had set off on the Grand Tour of Exile no longer existed. I am from nowhere, I thought, as that car sank into the river; I was born in the nothingness that contains everything within it. I petted Taüt gently on the head. That, I said to my dead mother in the depths of my heart, is my only essence.
The Liquid Continent
The Story of How I Traveled Across the Sea of Sunken Hopes
Ludo was wearing a tweed jacket over his red wool cardigan even though it was summer, and he had a gray cashmere scarf tied around his neck. He was leaving but not before giving me one last admonishing look. He planted his umbrella into the floor of the landing and leaned into it, that umbrella he had begun to carry with him everywhere, using it to point at things as if it were an extension of his arm. His eyes betrayed no remorse. Anger, maybe. And pity. But remorse: none at all.
“At last,” he said with labored breath. “Finally.”
He stood in the shadowy landing, pipe tucked neatly into his breast pocket, copper curls perfectly conditioned. The la
nding was dark and dusty, full of residue from times past. The walls were perpetually damp; the Mediterranean humidity had gotten into the building’s bones. In that wet, ashen bleakness, Ludo lay bare his reasons for leaving: He was departing because of my self-prescribed cure for the long dark history of my past: my literary pilgrimages into the void of exile.
When I pressed him for more information, Ludo set his leather suitcase, which matched his shoes, squarely by his feet. Kindly but with a certain formal distance, he said, “Look, the way you choose to cope with your past is unbearable to me. The fact is there are toxic side effects to your writing behavior, effects I can’t stand.”
I looked at him, astonished. He proceeded, blasted past my bewilderment, to deliver the bullets one by one.
“ONE,” he let out, as stern as a drill sergeant. “Sudden disappearances.”
I told him I knew perfectly well where I was at all times.
“TWO,” he declared. There was no stopping him. “Pathological indifference toward the living. THREE. The worst transgression of all—”
“I hardly agree,” I said, somewhat helplessly.
“THREE,” he continued, deaf to me. “Consecutive days during which you remain in bed, stinking up the bedroom as if you were a corpse!”
I told him this was no way to say good-bye. I told him he had a lot to learn from Agatha on the art of politeness. I looked around. Where were Agatha and Fernando? Petita came rushing to the door. The clay busts of Agatha followed the dog with their eyes, an army of Agathas. The dog sat at my heels. I sucked in little patches of air between gasps of disbelief. I could feel shock spreading through my veins. I gathered myself.
A shaft of light shone through the skylight, burnishing the tip of Ludo’s umbrella, the silver buckles on his leather suitcase. He was returning home to Florence. He had stuffed his suitcase with English wool, tobacco, his collection of historical dictionaries, and left everything else. He told me his elderly father had fallen ill; his bones had grown brittle, his heart was weak, and as a natural consequence of that, his mind was engulfed in a fog through which he could no longer see clearly.
Call Me Zebra Page 32