“Are you talking about the message you sent by email?”
“No, the note that . . .”
“I only got your email, that was a while ago. I knew you arrived today and I figured you’d be stuck here.”
II
Sacrifices
The Black Tree
The life the Maiden planned for her daughter was none other than death. But Goat Foot chose otherwise. I’m going to live, she told herself; I’m going to live, no matter the cost, and even if I’m already dead. She learned to stay afloat against the odds, and if she could do it the first time, she could do it the second, third, as many as necessary.
The Maiden hears rumors that rekindle her rage. Her daughter, the exiled Sheba, has survived and become a beautiful traitor of a woman. The mother orders her minions to follow her day and night, but Goat Foot manages to dodge maternal control by covering herself entirely with black cloth. Every centimeter of her lustrous skin disappears under strips of muslin that camouflage her presence like mist, feigning a nonbeing.
“Goat Foot, covered up and dressed for mourning?” the alaleishos wonder aloud. “Is she her own widow, wretched, gloomy, inconsolable? Still buried even though she’s reached the surface of the earth?
“Only for a short while,” they say in reply to their own questions. “Soon she’ll be able to shine her beauty in the full light of day. But not yet...”
Alone and anonymous, Goat Foot tries to blend back into the shadows. She can’t quite do it. Even shrouded in clothing, her perfect features and swan’s neck can be made out. Despite the imbalance between her two legs, her presence is striking and pure in an ancient way, long and svelte like the figures in Greco or Modigliani paintings.
She seeks refuge in the heart of the desert, limping through that vast, waterless sea. Despite her disability, she advances at a warrior’s pace until she reaches Hadhramaut, a clear lunar crater lined with pale bare stones the size and shape of skulls. A great mass grave or, as Nerval might say, a resting place for history’s bones.Hadhramaut,or death, has arrived. Death has arrived, it’s made this region its dwelling and refuses to leave.
Goat Foot’s entry into the stone desert marks a breaking point that at first goes unnoticed, especially by her, as she doesn’t see the way Antares, that ruby-colored star, shines out a welcome to her, its radiance more extraordinary than any in the night sky’s dome.
When it comes to brightness and intensity, only two stars can compete with Antares—Aldebaran and Leonis—and in redness it’s rivaled only by Mars. The Hadhrami call it Kalb al Akrab: Scorpion’s Heart.
Goat Foot arrives tired. She sits down to rest on the burning ground, looks about her, and recognizes herself as sister of this useless terrain. She feels good here, out of her mother’s reach and removed from the cities’ cruelties. No crown, no throne, no subjects: In Hadhramaut she will build her kingdom. This graveyard of bones will be her vast, barren garden. It will be her home. A great open home without a roof, made of pure light. It’s inhabited by Bedouins who own nothing but their own naked lives and the immensity of time. With them she will still be the girl from Sheba, shorn of name or history, reduced to nothing but Goat Foot, as common as anyone else, one more woman among these people whose skin is as dark as hers.
There’s disagreement between the alaleishos over the shade ofGoat Foot’s skin. Dark as night, as coal or jet? A golden brown, like the jujube’s honey? The Song of Songs offers a clue: It says she’s as brown as the tents of Kedar. So, those tents of Kedar, what are they like? Portable sunshades that nomads make waterproof by smearing them with tar, or covering them with the finely knitted, dark, and already waterproof wool of the karakul sheep. Unlike her very white mother, Goat Foot is decidedly brown. Or a mulatta, zamba, mestiza, with skin the color of copper, bronze, coffee with milk, olives, cinnamon, or macchiatos. It occurs to me to ask Zahra Bayda whether the Maiden’s rejection of her daughter at birth might have been because of her skin color more than anything else.
“Racial hatred sneaks in where we least expect it,” says Zahra Bayda.
Little else is known about Goat Foot’s arrival in that rocky, inhospitable place. There is evidence that, with time, she was well received by the native people and that, among them, she flourished as a silent and defiant woman,a combination of innocent arrogance, awkward grace, and daring.1 The desert, which only loves those who surrender to it, adopted her as its daughter and taught her to worship the glow of Scorpion’s Heart, the blue of skies, the dunes’ music, night fires, unrequited prayers, and obsessive wandering. It gave her desire for revenge, self-defense skills, and the power to command. It instilled her with courage and ferocity, and at the same time it left an Achilles’ heel on her clubfoot: It couldn’t cure the wound of unloving that she’d always bear, still open, because of which the Hadhrami people bestowed on her the name Nazif Alkalb, Bleeding Heart, Daughter of Antares. For those people, the exiled princess and the red star were one and the same: red princess, exiled star.
In that desolate terrain, in the midst of her impoverished people, Sheba, the foreigner from afar, the beautiful limping woman, learns to eat on a mat on the ground and doesn’t miss silver bowls or torches to illuminate her dinner; she finds pleasure in meager foods such as raw onions with gutta oil, which is known as Virgin’s tears,because the only thing more bitter than gutta is the wail of a mother before her child’s tomb.
Nestled in a circle in the smoky kitchen, the alaleishos chomp toothlessly on their khat leaves and delight in recounting that, in Hadhramaut, Goat Foot wanted to be a shepherdess, and had a lamb. A little lamb with long eyelashes and a sure gaze, innocent as the first dawn, whom she named Latif, or Soft One. “How warm he is!” she said, pressing him against her chest in surprise, for before then she’d never known affection. The old women imitate Goat Foot searching for her lamb: “Soooooft One! Come here, Sooooft Oooone!” and they cover their mouths to muffle their low laughs, gurgling like pigeons. They say that when its owner calls, the lamb arrives immediately, following her everywhere, nibbling on her clothes, licking her hands.
Goat Foot soon realizes her own strength. She gets rid of her black veils and other coverings and meets the world with a bare face. She decides to wear the clothes and weapons of a man: trousers under her fouta, long-sleeved zanna tunics, leather boots instead of sandals, a dagger in her stone-encrusted belt, a quiver, and a large kaffiyeh or intensely blue shawl with three black stripes, which she knows just how to drape over her shoulders as if in afterthought but with the precise desired effect, or how to curl it into a turban, using it to shield from cold or heat, or as a towel for drying the body, handkerchief for tears, rug for kneeling in prayer, battle flag, rag for blowing one’s nose, and blanket for sleeping under the open sky. According to the alaleishos, that multipurpose kaffiyeh is the very same cloth in which her mother wrapped her when she sent her off to die.
From her Red Palace, the Maiden learns of her daughter’s adventures, hates her more than ever, and scorns her with new curses and harsh words. Eternal shame to the woman who sleeps outdoors, rides horses, and dresses like a man! A woman who walks alone and goes out at night—shame!
Though she wears male clothing, Goat Foot keeps some femininetraces to her attire. She likes jewelry and wears rings, one on each finger. She dons earrings that jingle with copper coins; rings through her nose, eyebrows, and navel; a profusion of charms and pearls; many bangles on each wrist; and a necklace of ancient dragon’s teeth. She lines her eyes with kohl, draws henna arabesques on her hands, and keeps her nails long and sharp. She lets her black-and-red hair fly loose in the wind, like a flag calling for war.
And so it goes. Stroke by stroke, the image takes shape; the apparition becomes flesh and blood and reveals its in-between state: human, animal, or a mix of the two? And what about her passion for dressing as a man, doesn’t it suggest a blending of genders? You could say her magnetism lies in ambiguity. Masculinity lurks in her, just as a woman breathes in the depths of every male. Patti Smith herself toys with a phallic femininity, as seen in a photograph that shows her in a men’s bathroom, standing at a urinal, the fly of her jeans unzipped.2
But could it be that Goat Foot only wears trousers to ride horseback, or perhaps to hide her hairy legs? And those leather boots: What if she’s using them to hide a webbed foot or sheep’s hoof? Who knows. The only certainty is that Goat Foot does as she likes. The alaleishos warn: Be careful with her, she’s a maniac, fickle and fanatical, and when things don’t go her way or her desires aren’t fulfilled immediately, she loses it and goes into hysterics.
Another strange thing worth mentioning: how hard it is for her to make herself understood. When she first arrives in Hadhramaut, Goat Foot mumbles in a dialect all her own, guttural, prehistoric, even more hermetic than Phrygian or Aramaic, Chimu or Purépecha or Euskara, and incomprehensible to us, as it’s a dialect used in the confines of the human world and at the gates of the beyond.
Ancient texts assert that Goat Foot, banished princess of the kingdom of Sheba, lion of the desert, came to own tremendous treasures and riches without measure. But how did she go from the extreme poverty of her early days in Hadhramaut to the endless wealthand abundance that followed? There’s the heart of the matter. It unfolds by chance, without her seeking it. It takes place during one of those frigid insomnias during which the Scorpion bleeds from its wounds. A long series of droughts has robbed both people and animals of food, there’s endless lack and need, and the starved goats and camels can’t even produce the excrement the Bedouins burn to keep warm by the fire.
Crushed by cold and hunger, Goat Foot comes out of her tent, stares out at the great void, and scolds it.
“You give us nothing!” she shouts at the desert. “We bind ourselves to you and bring you our hope, but you don’t give us anything in return. We’re your children, but you won’t feed us. We’re cold, and you don’t clothe us. You don’t care if we die of thirst. You give us nothing but this wind that won’t cease, the brutal heat of day, and the hypothermia of our nights. Nothing, you give us. Nothing.”
The mirages of the infinite require a great deal of looking before you can see, and that night Goat Foot finally sees clearly. In the midst of darkness, and as the desert’s response to her words, there emerges, in the distance, the sad shape of a leafless tree. It rises from the sand and rocks, growing alone among the cliffs and ravines, withered, shorn, stony, branching in the shape of coral, black as if scorched by fire. The poet Bassam Hajjar would say it’s not a tree but a tree’s sorrow, and that it gives no shade because it is itself the shadow of a tree. Even so, it seems to hold human traces. Under its burned bark lies a tender, living red fiber: a bleeding muscle, yellow fat, white bone. As if you’d torn the skin from a man’s arm. That’s what the branches look like of this bush the botanists callBoswellia sacraand that oozes pus or weeps milk tears, depending on whom you ask. The Bedouins fear it and stay away. They call ital lubban, “weeper of milk.”
