It could be, Zahra Bayda must be right, and yet at the same time, no. It can’t only be that. All those myths about the Queen of Sheba must be a sign to these women, an epic dimension, a reason to exist, to be rooted in a glorious past that gives them strength to confront their bleak future. Compensation for the sadness and fatigue of a life and struggle that otherwise would have no reason or purpose.
Half suspicious, half hopeful, the migrants approach and hand me pieces of paper with handwriting on them. There’s something solemn and ritualistic in the gesture. Zahra Bayda explains that this is a common practice among the displaced, to pass out pieces of paper asking for help. They copy them several times and hang them around their necks in plastic bags to protect them from the elements.
One of them shows me a small object in her hand. She wants me to touch it; I sense that she’d like to sell it to me. “Malikat Sheba,” she says to me, “Malikat Sheba.” It’s a small, simple figurine made from near-black clay. It’s wearing some sort of headdress, a tiara perhaps, and it has no arms or legs. Still the face’s features are well defined, especially the eyes—two small holes in the middle of white circles lined in black—that seem to meet your gaze. “Malikat Sheba,” the woman insists, more urgently.
“Queen of Sheba?” I ask. “This one? Is the Queen of Sheba?”
The statue could be a thousand-year-old relic or a trinket someonejust made. It could be the Queen of Sheba or any old doll; it’s not even clear whether it’s male or female, as it hints at no gender. I imagine Zahra Bayda will scold me if she sees me buy it, so I start haggling with the woman on the sly. I feel guilty, as if I were scoring cocaine in Washington Square. I think of Malraux stealing artifacts from the temples of Angkor and grow hot with shame. Even so, I take a few euros from my pocket and give them to the woman in exchange for the figurine, which, after all, has its mystery and charms. But Zahra Bayda has seen me; I should have foreseen it, nothing escapes her.
“Throw that away,” she says. “Those idols are bad luck.”
I pay her no mind and put it in my pocket. We’ll see whether it brings me bad fortune, or good. For now, I have another possible reading: The Queen of Sheba is just one more tourist attraction, a hook for exploiting naive travelers like me. Who knows. Maybe the little doll I’m carrying in my pocket is a valuable treasure.
It saddens me to think that these women come to me seeking help—me or anyone who seems to be from or connected to the world abroad; I have no way to tell them what a fallacy it is, that world abroad from which they want a salvation that won’t come.
Even so, they’ll arrive. Where, how, or when, there’s no way to know, even they don’t know, but I can tell that nobody can stop them. Many will fall, others will press on. They’ll cross barbed wire borders and defy armies, raids, customs. There are thousands of them, and they’ll make it.
Little by little, the cloud of women vanishes into the desert, the way they came. Having emerged out of the void, they return to it like a mirage or trick of the imagination.
As proof that they were here, they’ve left my hands full of pieces of paper, as must happen to all foreigners who come through this barren land. I go over them one by one as the SUV drives on. They’re written in several dialects and translated into English, French, or Italian, languages of colonizers that the colonized knew to absorb.Each of these messages is addressed to everyone, or to no one, or to anyone: whoever will listen, a hypothetical person who can help.
Some are brief biographies, a couple of paragraphs long. Others describe what the writer is looking for: I’m looking for a son lost in war, I’m looking for a husband who emigrated and shows no signs of life. There are requests, for a medicine for a brother with liver trouble, or for a grandmother who suffers from anxiety. Others report a rape in such-and-such neighborhood, or a murder in such-and-such town. The shortest ones are barely a vague reference, a date or place: I’m so-and-so’s daughter, I was born in such-and-such place, and today I’m here.
They’re hope-filled declarations of life, like the message a shipwreck survivor throws to the sea in a bottle. Smoke signals sent up at midnight, an imperceptible call, an improbable act of faith, like theSomebody was herethat a disappeared person might scratch with his bare fingernails into the wall of a secret cell.
It occurs to me that each missive is a small fragment of what I’m so urgently pursuing. Some include a scrawled map, or a date, or a signature I can’t decipher and that could say Abisinia or Asmara, Fatima or Fantomas, Magala or Marimorena, Mereke or Mekele, Bilkis or Beatrice, Nikaule or Nicolasa, Sheba or Saba: names, all of them female and unsettling, that I say one after the other, surrendering to the spell of repetition. Each of those messages is intimate and personal, each different from the others, but every single one of them could be headed by the same line: “I’m a widow facing misfortune, wandering without end.”
I’m seized by the thought of putting these letters together like a puzzle, as if deciphering an enigma. One more enigma, like everything related to her, the Queen of Sheba, or better said, tothem, the woman who is one and many, she of many faces and no name, or many names and no face. De Quincey would say that, to find her, I should put my ear to the earth and listen for her footsteps, merged into the countless footsteps of the great exodus.
Farther on, we reach a small group of women who’ve gotten lost and separated from the rest. They hit the SUV’s roof with their palms, begging for water. Zahra Bayda gives them a full, large bottle and asks where they’ll sleep. They say in Arabiyah as-Sudiyah, Saudi Arabia. They don’t know that’s hostile territory, and far away, past deserts and mountains, thousands of days’ travel from here. They have no compass nor guide, their strength is flagging, they don’t realize they’ve been walking in the wrong direction.
Prayer to the Dark One
I am the dark one, the widower, the unconsoled.
—Gérard de Nerval
Gautier says the last pages ofAuréliawere found in your pocket—Aurélia, that most pessimistic of your novels, in which you declared your purpose. My god, Gérard, what storms and tempests roiled inside you. It’s strange how your hat stayed on. For that last rite you chose a gloomy alley, the dirtiest and saddest one. Your patent leather boots balanced on a black water pipe. You’d worn everyone out with declarations of disaster, this one, that one, the eternal night that had already begun, that before death each person would see their own image dressed in mourning. Everyone knew about your fixations and let you talk without paying you much mind. Did you look in the mirror, see yourself in black, and take it as an omen? The sign that made you shout, “Today’s the day!” and go out to the street in a gray coat, olive-green trousers, and a hat, that top hat that despite everything stayed on your head. Before you closed the door, you left your aunt, bless her, a note telling her not to expect you back that night. I suppose that on reading it she immediately suspected whatyou carried in your hands, at the end of the day it was clear: In the thick of your usual strangeness, she’d seen you be even stranger lately. Maybe for days, or months, you’d irrevocably entered the spiral of that uncontrollable force Alvarez has called the savage god.
You’d returned from your trip to the East as mad as a goat. “With deteriorated mental health,” the literary critics say, as they flatter you euphemistically. I’d call it more of a furious madness. Mad and furious. “Why is there so much rage in my heart?” you’d ask, as you dreamed of white roses falling from the sky into flames. You wrote,possessed by a fury and a darkening. Lost in yourself, you reached an intensity and a strength that were almost desperate.1 In the opium dens, you spoke of a black sun. The black sun of sadness, an aching star you worshipped: You were its priest. You entertained the bohemian sect with verbal juggling acts involving dark toys, crows, graves, horns, books, stuffed birds, depetaled flowers, broken cups. Outrageous tales they found inspired, poetic madness was in style in those days, everybody took pride in being like the Nizaris, getting high, hooked on laudanum. They played at going mad and you were the croupier. They stopped at play, you bled out at the game. Nobody noticed. In the middle of so much romantic elation, all excess had a place. They didn’t understand, didn’t want to understand, that real anguish was what let you dive into the psyche’s unreachable depths. They cheered at your ingenuity and nonsense without understanding how far you’d gone: Your death rang the warning bell. And it was Gautier who realized, days later, that you’d been a glass cup with an invisible crack through which you’d lost your reason and soul.
Melancholy was your cradle and grave, your amniotic fluid and your shroud. Pizarnik, who also lives in the realm of shadows, believes that melancholy is ultimately a musical problem,a dissonance,2 that causes the dizzying rhythm of the world to disrupt the lifeless cadence of your soul, Pizarnik knows what she’s talking about. Perhaps it consoles you, Gérard, to know you’re not walking alone in that alley, there are others like you, brilliant, sad, and suicidal.
Before that there was your father, the doctor. Your stern, distant father, who wanted you to inherit his profession, and you studied medicine to please him and followed him through the sewers of smallpox and disease until you finally said, Enough, and defied him to become a poet and pariah. But some part of that inheritance stayed with you, and when you got sick you became your own therapist, and your writing was a madness that looks inside to reveal something outward, you the lunatic, you the analyst, you the cure and the pain, a burning conversation with yourself. Your friends, did they know? Maybe they believed—or still believe—that some part of it was for show: You’d learned to get something out of your mental illness because it brought a dark shine to your poetry and your persona, and you were part authentic phenomenon and part impostor, as perhaps they all were, in fact, perhaps that particular blend was how things were, in those times. You were one man with them—trickster, partier—and another on the street, scared and pursued, afraid of furious shadows that screamed like birds.
“What’s the matter with you?” people would ask, seeing you slap and fight the wind.
“I don’t know,” you’d reply. “I’m lost.”
Each stone you gathered was thrown at some victim. You picked up stones and hurled them at yourself. Before your eyes, apparitions took the shape of sacrifice. It was enough for you to fix your gaze somewhere to quickly see some tragic vision unfold. It happened over and over, with this and that woman, one wretched love after another. That’s where the Queen of Sheba comes in, as the dark object of your desire—the lost thing, Kristeva says, or the archaic thing—that starts growing and multiplying, taking shape in a thousand faces and as many names.
All your beloveds were one.
The first one, and perhaps also the last: your own mother. You invoked her under various ancient, divine names. But she was called Marie Antoinette. No surprise that she bore the name of a queen:a beheaded queen. They say names mark our destinies, and in your mother’s case it could be true, because she too would lose her head, though to a brutal meninges infection that took her life. It happened far away from you. She’d abandoned you when you were a baby, just a few months old, leaving you with a nanny whom you didn’t love and who didn’t love you. You could say that from then on you carried inside you the noble cadaver of that mother who was doubly absent from you, through abandonment and death.You carried the murderous dead thing within you,3 Alvarez had said to you.
Inside you grew a two-faced monster, the irritation of loss on one side, the fear of reunion on the other. Some, in keeping with psychology texts, have called that inner monster the cause of your tendency toward idolatrous passion, that TNT of love and bitterness that bound you to all the women you adored, who did not adore you. And you blamed yourself—you were a fierce self-flagellant—for not being able to forgive them, for going around cursing them and wishing the worst on them and yourself too. I think of the neurotic child you must have been and kept on being, and I let my imagination loose: At around midnight, Marie Antoinette appears to you—Queen of Sheba and eternal mother—wearing a dirty rag as blindfold, and right there before you she uncovers her marble breasts, and in her hands she holds her own head, cut off by the guillotine or swollen with meningitis. It’s enough, Gérard, to drive anyone mad.
The matter of the wall happened for the first time—it would be repeated later—at one of the many mental institutions in which you were locked up. You’d been seized by wild ideas and had gone around declaring that humanity was on the brink of bloody destruction. Your deliriums were melodramatic, Gérard, historical, cosmic, always apocalyptic. It’s known that you’d grab a piece of coal or brick and mar the walls with morbid drawings. Some swore they saw, in Montmartre, in the clinic of a certain Dr. Blanche, the traces of a half-erased scene you’d scrawled on the wall. In it appears an enormous dismembered body, that of the Queen of Sheba, surroundedby a chaos of limbs and many women of many races, all wounded and mutilated by someone (who, if not you?) who’d knifed them in the cruelest way. You spared nobody, Gérard, not empresses nor country peasants, nor daughters, nor mothers, all of them fell prey to your zeal to kill. When I read you at night, I take the book out of my room before turning off the light; something pulses in what you write, a pain and horror that terrify me, your verses are spells, I don’t want them near me while I sleep. Some people can’t tell, you’re such a fine poet that the poison can go unnoticed, but I’ve always seen the beast that makes its home behind your gracious words, knowing that under your gentle modesty lurks a serial killer’s soul.
