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September 1 - September 6, 2020
Not to mention history’s victors, those boisterous few who ignite the flames without considering who will be broiled, who will be braised, what the gravitational pull of the leftover negative space, the nothingness, will be; a black hole that will draw more death to itself, a bottomless pit that survivors will want to leap into in order to join the dead members of their family and resuscitate the past.
Mad I cannot be, sane I do not deign to be, neurotic I am.
Sounds a lot like our heroine.
As a remedy, I whispered the great poet Pitarra’s words, which were later repeated by the novelist Roig, both of whom my father had translated and transcribed. I said: “Al fossar de les moreres no s’hi enterra cap traïdor!” There are no traitors buried in the Grave of the Mulberries! On September 11, 1989, the year we had arrived in Barcelona, Pitarra’s quote had been inscribed into a concave metal memorial in an empty square in La Ribera. At the top of the slender, curved memorial, a single flame burns night and day in honor of the Catalan heroes who fell on September 11, 1714, when Barcelona
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Such a significant date!
Every year on September 11, so many parts of the world are in mourning, proof of the interconnected fabric of being, which, as the Hosseinis well know, is fast brought into relief through the violence that plagues our pitiful species.
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.
!
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.
A nice rationale for stealing!
To distract myself, I opened my eyes and looked at the Mobile Art Gallery. I took inventory: the typewriter, the telephone, the gas mask, the bronze statue of the bull, the miniature plastic reproductions of the toilets, the ghost globe. To my view, I hadn’t stolen any of Quim Monzó’s objects. I had merely reappropriated them. I had given them new life by turning them into art objects. Quim Monzó, Dadaist though he is, hadn’t taken things far enough. It was I, to whom the world had offered nothing, who, by creating a box in a valise in the Duchampian spirit, had taken the literary critic’s
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I'm more worthy of these objects than you are. Therefore, I am providing them with a much better home!
“What is the nature of my predicament?” I asked Taüt. “I am from nowhere. Homeless, adrift, bewildered, crippled with endless estrangement.”
Stop feeling sorry for yourself!
“Fine, let’s change the subject. How have you been?” Ludo asked with the somber precision of a psychiatrist.
I decided to quote Nietzsche, the best armor in the world. “As summa summarum,” I said, “I was healthy; as an angle, as a specialty, I was a decadent!”
“Can’t you ever produce an answer that’s yours?” Ludo scowled, letting go of the banister and crossing his arms. He looked me straight in the eyes.
Touche.
His mouth smelled like another woman. The Tentacle of Ice, I thought, as I finished. My suspicions were finally confirmed: During the weeks we hadn’t seen each other, she, a member of the unthinking masses, had returned to his life to provide him with uncomplicated pleasure. He had sought solace in a woman—the Tentacle of Ice—who was, relative to me, in less pain and whose desires had nothing to do with art or literature or the total problem of life.
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.
He was looming over the bed, peering down at me. He looked huge to me then and rooted into the ground, as if there were a whole other Ludo branching from his feet into the earth, pinning him to this trifling circumference. I, in contradistinction, had been blown hither and thither by the whims of time. I had been gored to death by the bull of history. I would have needed so much more tenderness than what could be offered in a plate of food and a ten-minute display of affection. I needed to be held. I needed fresh layers of skin to wrap around my raw wounds. I needed someone who didn’t retreat
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Why couldn't she verbalize this???
I dug deep and grabbed hold of my voice. “Because I can smell character. I can smell bad blood,” I said, without looking at him. “I can smell the shit that’s gathered at the center of any given person.”
Useless and TOTALLY inadequate.
“I have good news for you,” Ludo said.
“National borders are an artificial construct,” he said.
“An artificial construct that has controlled the terms of my life,” I finally answered. “There is nothing abstract there.”
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.
Approach-avoidance.
