You lose your head and your avatars multiply, Jack the Ripper, Hannibal Lecter, the Terminator. You love so desperately that, in the end, you massacre your poor objects of affection in the most lurid fantasies, slaughters that enthrone the Queen of Sheba as a sovereign of holocausts, with devouring eyes, long hair loose in the wind, and a spiked wheel spinning under her feet, perhaps the same wheel of martyrdom that crushes witches or saints. You kneel and pray before those walls, Gérard, adoring that ancient queen, the carnivorous goddess and long-suffering mother, all of them fused into one, whom you raise as a supreme idol: cursed virgin, resurrected death, impossible beloved. You confess that sometimes you shape her immense body out of clay, that each morning you resume the task because the other madmen, jealous of your joy, gleefully destroy it. You’re the demonically possessed lover who licks his own wounds and inflicts them on his beloved, who sacrifices himself and her in the fire of his passion. Schopenhauer would have said, of you: In the Hell of the world, you’re both the tormenting demon and the tormented soul.
Then comes remorse. The fit gives way to calm, you’re horrified by what you’ve done, and you feel guilty, impotent, submerged in freezing water, you say, as even colder drops stream down your forehead. After the massacre, the queen disappears, dead and mutilatedalong with the others. You’ve done something wrong, Gérard, and you know it, something terribly wrong, and you’re dammed, and you dissolve into tears and surrender to the altar of the goddess you’ve offended, kneeling, begging forgiveness. She, proud and merciless, is no angel of forgiveness, and she damns you, even when you burn your most treasured possessions to try to make amends. Nothing can be done. The beloved has escaped, and you seek her in vain, sniffing around cemeteries and chasing the funeral retinues of strangers. Thinking you’ll find her in death rather than in life, you go to the alley.
I shouldn’t judge you harshly, docile and tormented Gérard, blushing like a damsel, the side of you whose voice is warm, as your buddies from literary social circles have said. In the end, the violent scenes on those walls were just pictures, the truth is that your crimes were as unreal as your loves; you were only pursuing an image. Your kingdom for an image. Extreme phantasmagoria, sublime and suicidal. For an image, you gave your life.
And now, Gérard, we’re really getting to the heart of things, let’s put the rest aside so you can talk to me about what—or who—really matters here: the Queen of Sheba. Tell me how it happened, how on earth you found her in the gentle nation of Yemen, or in a certain state of mind that might be symbolized by the gentle nation of Yemen, where in fact you’d never set foot. Describe her dwelling to me, you who visited her palace in dreams and came back amazed, rambling endlessly about a tower of unsettling symmetry that reached as deep below the ground as it did from the ground up, where she reigned in infinite peace while her worshippers wore themselves out climbing up and down endless stairs. But there is no such palace, Gérard, nor any symmetrical tower, the queen only exists in the depths of your spellbound soul, living in you constantly as if you were satanically possessed.
You say she appeared to you glimmering, that her image pulsed like a living thing. You could only lay eyes on her for an instant.Her hair gleamed with ever-shifting reflections, and she wore a long tunic with ancient folds, tied at the waist with a braided wool-and-silver cord. Her glowing presence transcended language and, for lack of better words, you called it the queen’s kiss.
The queen’s kiss is a gift that burns. It leaves a red scar on the foreheads of initiates, the ones who survive, unforgetting. The queen’s kiss is a desired wound—a stigma—and is linked to some people’s tendency toward sadness and sacrifice. It gives, but also demands, it’s an irrefutable call to fulfill your destiny, Oedipus is under its influence when he kills his father and weds his mother; Dostoyevsky is driven to write and compulsively gamble; Joan of Arc is persuaded to lead a holy war; you receive the two-faced mask of lucidity and madness. The ancient queen’s kiss is the abrasive mark of Cain, of a noble yet wretched race.
I believe you oversee the power of all the kisses in history, private or public: the kiss of Judas, betraying the Messiah; a kiss between two strangers who meet at random and celebrate the end of World War II; the last kiss Juliet gives Romeo, sealing the lovers’ deaths. And before all that, the Queen of Sheba’s kiss, ardent and scorching, the stamp of genius, fame, talent, madness, or death, which could be redemptive or lethal but, in either case, is a kiss of being in love.
How does the queen choose her followers? Impossible to know. She prefers religious devotees, but sometimes she favors unlikely choices, like those who beg for it with heart and soul, for doesn’t the Song of Songs say,Let him kiss me with the kiss of his mouth, for thy love is better than wine? The kiss of your mouth, drunken, as red as the furious sun. Inner rays that burn and dazzle; for Teresa of Ávila, a kiss from the void.
How can someone know whether they’ve received the kiss? What are the symptoms? Redness and hives along the forehead, a feeling of vast gratitude, a sudden sense of happiness or fear without apparent cause, a constant state of daydream, sharp sensitivity to light?
Did you ever kiss Jenny, Gérard? I mean Jenny Colon, the actressand opera singer with whom you crossed paths, not very seasoned in bel canto, this Jenny, but she had a slim waist, tailored clothes, exotic hats, and hair parted in the middle that framed her doll’s face in luxurious ringlets. You fell hard in love, though you didn’t know her, Gérard, that wasn’t what mattered to you, you didn’t shrink at such a trivial obstacle. You were drawn to the theater world, with its unfurling feathers, lace, wigs, and plumes, and night after night you quivered as you watched Jenny from your seat in the audience. Afterward, you’d write her torrential letters you didn’t always send, so many they’d accumulate in your pockets among the lint and coins. They held such ardent messages that this vaudeville diva must have been horrified, she’d have the fright of her life after the show on finding such letters in her changing room, signed by a stranger who described otherworldly dreams that she’d inspired, in which, for example, they’d embrace in the house of death. Come to my arms, my beautiful Jenny, I don’t offer pleasure but eternal peace... and so on, in that vein. Today you’d be called an abuser, Gérard, and your mystical, romantic fits would be termed harassment.
You worked yourself up to a fever pitch by merging real perceptions with fantasy. You insisted on trying to see the Queen of Sheba with your own earthly eyes, and went out looking for her in the concrete spaces of theater, fairs, brothels, even slave markets. That’s when you suffered your worst failures, on discovering that love out in the world was more unreal, that nothing was more real than disappointment. There are rumors of a monumental bed you acquired, a story that could be funny, Gérard, if it weren’t for the fact that with you all humor ends in terror. It seems you moved a bed into the home you shared with friends, without their permission, a flamboyant canopy affair in the Renaissance style, on which you dreamed of consummating your passion with your adored Jenny. You hadn’t even said hello to her and already assumed you’d get her into your bed, you were as out of control as that nobleman on the green horse, Gérard, you don’t know that story and I won’t recountit here, I’ll just give you the spoiler: In matters of seduction, haste is a bad counselor. The way Gautier tells it, that giant bed stayed in the middle of the house like a dead cow, and the supposed lover never showed up. The monstrosity gathered dust and went forgotten while you fell further into gloom.
There were others after that, all one and the same. The configuration changes with each fold or unfolding. A woman transfixes you at the fair in Maux, where she’s exhibited in a cage. They call her the Sheep, and she’s beautiful; merino sheep’s wool springs from her scalp instead of hair, covering her entirely and spilling all the way to her feet in silky blond waves, like golden fleece. In her you see the Abrahamic sheep, escaped from the sacrificial altar, an unlikely allusion to the Old Testament. She stares fiercely at you from behind bars and defeats you: She’s really a wolf in sheep’s clothing. She has cleft hooves (a goat foot?) and very white hands. She has a woman’s breasts and the beard of a male goat. She talks, sings, and weeps like a human being, growls and pants in a goatish way. Do you see the Sphinx in her, Gérard? In this merino woman, have you found Cyrene, the nymph who commanded flocks of sheep?
Later your heart is stolen by one Sophie Dawes, the Amazon. The banished bastard daughter of the Duke of Bourbon, prostitute of noble birth, Sophie has a knack for taking princes and many counts as lovers. She passes before you on horseback, the one time you see her—a tall, aloof apparition—and you’re forever under her spell.
One night in Naples, the Queen of Sheba appears to you without warning. The blow strikes you in two. A certain quiver in the air tells you it’s her: She’s with you again. She moves strangely, it’s more than a walk, she moves with a spider’s weightlessness thanks to the many feet hidden under her skirts. She’s regally adorned, as befits a sovereign of Yemen or a sorceress from Thessaly. You follow her, get lost in squalid neighborhoods in hot pursuit, and finally manage to talk to her and offer your soul. She replies in a language you’ve neverheard before, and her incomprehensible words make you turn and flee. You leave that phantom that so compels and scares you, and wander the deserted city until the first bells ring. You carry all the world’s sadness on your back.
In Vienna, you’re struck with a new revelation. The ancient queen appears to you in the form of Marie Pleyel, a pianist of great renown. A virtuosa since she was eight years old, her concerts verge on perfection. You encounter her when she’s already the most famous pianist in Europe. You fall in love immediately, spend whole nights in tears, write ardent letters identical to the ones you wrote to Jenny; you do the whole number all over again. Pleyel condescendingly refers to you as Little Gérard, incapable as she is of taking pity on anyone. Anyone but you, I’d say, because you come out of that battle mortally wounded, in the heart and in your pride. You bleed from that wound while the pianist assures her fans that Little Gérard is harmless. You decide to run, falling back into the vicious cycle. To yourself and others, you justify your retreat by explaining that you were wrong, all you loved in Pleyel was the memory of an ancient passion, by mistake you saw in her the idolatrous object you’d been chasing forever.
It won’t be the last time you’re confused. Each of your girlfriends has the same qualities, they’ve all lived the same life. You say it, recognize it, repeat it. But in your feverish exaltation you always forget and start again, like a broken record. You emerge from one to fall into another. Let’s say you’re a Don Juan, but of a very confused, foolish kind. I wonder, Gérard, whether in the end you might have died a virgin. It wouldn’t be so strange.
And now, to the important things: the moment you fall into a triad that stirs horrors and drives you to write extraordinary books. I’m of course talking about Sylvie/Adrienne/Aurélia, an intricate Bermuda Triangle where even the bravest drown.
Sylvie appears in an idyllic, foggy landscape, tender and delicateSylvie, small nymph of the forest from childhood, innocent first love, a memory from when you were so small you played on the ground with crystals, shells, and little stones. Sylvie brings you nostalgia from happy days, there in Valois, that remote, rural place with its flowered celebrations, its ancient ruins, its bewitched wild places. Sylvie, the childhood girlfriend, excitement from another time. In your daydreams, you climb the stairs of your home with her and together you open the closet, take out old wedding clothes, dress up in them, hold each other’s hands, and play at a ceremony, chaste and sacred, a game of mutual surrender.
Sylvie, or possible happiness. But no, that’s not it, everything possible scares and disillusions you. Where is Sylvie, could she have left? You can’t see her anymore: You’re blind, or she’s invisible. Sylvie is no longer the childhood bride, she no longer sews rolls of lace nor wears wildflower crowns in her hair, so you forget her. You abandon her, dazzled now by Aurélia, the dead beloved who stirs in you the same worship you felt for Jenny the opera singer, and for Pleyel the pianist, and for the enigmatic woman in Naples, and for the sheep-woman, et cetera, et cetera.
This Aurélia really complicates things. She presents herself to you in the form of the Queen of Sheba, the Virgin Mary, and the ancient goddess Venus. I’m the same as your mother, she says. As if that weren’t enough, it turns out she’s now your mother too, Marie Antoinette. I’m the same one whom you’ve loved in all those forms—she assures you—in each trial I’ve dropped one of the masks that hide my face—she confesses—and now I want you to see me the way I am.
Aurélia, or the final reveal! At last, her true face. What else could you ask for? But it’s not so simple, because as I’ve already said, Aurélia is dead. Among them all, she’s the most ghostly and elusive. The most dangerous. She roams as La Llorona through the dim corners of your sick psyche, howling and dying, forever suffering,and you exhaust yourself prowling the beyond to find her. Better to look elsewhere, let Aurélia rest in peace, let the dead bury the dead. Don’t get embroiled with her, Gérard, that woman-corpse seriously triggers your mental issues. Aurélia, the untouchable, the incandescent pit of pain. Aurélia is the black hole where your reason breaks. All the others are innocuous compared to Aurélia, who tempts you by offering the vision of her face. Don’t do it, Gérard, don’t look at her directly, she’s a Gorgon, she is the void and vertigo. To me, Aurélia captures the quintessence of your schizophrenia; every time she appears, you fall into a terrifying depression and start to hallucinate. To love Aurélia is to desire death.
That’s what you’re going through—or was it earlier?—when Adrienne arrives, religious, blond, and noble, sexually unavailable, provocatively cloistered in a convent. Her pure perfection lights a fire of passion in you that, this time, could be called carnal and profane. What could be as appealing as scaling the stone walls that shelter Adrienne? But that would be a vile desecration, you’d never forgive yourself for such a disgrace, how you’d whip yourself!, better to forget the nun and move on.
Let’s clear things up a bit, come on, Gérard, you’re making me dizzy, your many loves seem like Russian dolls, each time you open one, another comes out. During your trip to the East, drunk on incense and legends, you let your lust entangle you in a chain of wild events. Starting with Zeynab, the Nubian slave you buy in the markets of Cairo, which ends up being a disaster, she oils her hair in a way you dislike and according to you she’s loud, irreverent, gluttonous. You see her as having too many defects, and return her to the Zeynab merchant who sold her to you. In Beirut you fall for a young woman who may have been called Salerna, whom you forget about in Syria when you get the notion to marry Attaké Siti-Salema, daughter of a Druze sheik, or was that Salerna from Beirut the same woman as Salema of Syria? I’m not sure, their names are so close.The dowry amount has been agreed to, everything is arranged, and your nuptials with the sheik’s daughter are close at hand when the memory of Jenny strikes with fresh intensity. Your heart, though not scarred, bleeds red tears again, and verses flow from your pen with blood as their ink. You end up marrying no one.
Too much falling in and out of love, driven by obsessive pathos. Inevitably, the day of the gray coat, olive-green trousers, and top hat arrives and you set out for the filthy alley, Rue de la Vieille Lanterne, that’s what it’s called, or what it was called then, because the city has since devoured it. I wonder whether you’re feeling defeated by the gallows or, rather, as Kristeva claims, imbued withthe placidness, serenity, and that kind of happiness that veils a number of suicidal people, once they have made the fatal decision.4 The voluptuousness of suicide, according to Dostoyevsky.
There’s ongoing debate about the type of rope you used to hang yourself. Some say it was the cord from a butcher’s apron, a sadly obvious hypothesis, an alley of butcher shops, ergo, a butcher’s cord; it’s too on the nose. Others assure me it was a corset’s cord, a bold absurdity made up by some consumer of cheap porn. Thank goodness we have the ingenuity of your friend Gautier, who pulls the boldest version out of his sleeve: He says you hung yourself with the wool-and-silver woven cord the Queen of Sheba ties around her tunic. It must be true.
You declared that the night would be white and black: a space of epiphanies, black sun whose light allows visions of other worlds, before which we’d go blind. But I belong to an era without rituals or sigils, what Giordano Bruno called sigils, meaning keys to the occult, doors or thresholds for crossing over. I’ve got to do something if I want to see your sacrifice. Should I find the saint and sign, perhaps pouring out a bit of red wine on a white tablecloth? While wearing a black tie. I’ll cut my wrist with a Gillette, or carve a sign of the cross onto my chest. I’ll enter your black mass by flashing MS-13 gang signs, I’ll paint a grisly scene on the wall, I’ll offer up a centuryof silence in your honor. The alley of the old lantern is holy ground: I’ll remove my shoes before I step there.
As with all timid killers, you killed yourself. At the last moment, you seemed grateful; death would finally look your way. That’s what Pavese would have said.
Goat Foot Versus the Butcher
Temples spring up throughout the desert, facing the sunset, so the Scorpion’s red light can pour in and bathe the altars. They’re round, like coliseums or bullfighting rings, some large enough to hold a crowd, others discreet, hidden chapels, dark and narrow as caves. Vulture heads adorn the outside, and predators etched in stone guard the entrance. Once inside, the supplicant finds themself beyond time and space: They have reached the dominion of the god, who is fickle and inscrutable. At the far end stands the altar, or the navel of the world. And at the center, in all the sanctuaries whether great or small, that core object hangs from the ceiling, an immense censer or thurible in which the offering burns: the incense of Hadhramaut.
Goat Foot doesn’t believe in any of this. She’s wary of relics and amulets and stays away from the temples. She seeks the advice and teachings of philosophers, scientists, and poets, and doesn’t fall for superstitions without question. No one taught her to pray or beg, and there’s been a suspicion circling inside her for a good while. Doubts pick at her brain like birds. What if the responsibility for the recent wave of religious fanaticism lies with the very olibanumshe herself cultivates and spreads? She scratches her head, trying to understand. She deduces that the smoke seeps into the far corners of people’s souls, turning them into mystics. That incense, with its earthy, salty scent, with its strong animal pulse, seems to hold trickery in its depths, as if flooding bodies with a feeling of holy lightness. Goat Foot thinks it must contain some sort of trance-inducing gas. But how can it alter people’s ears, to the point of making devotees believe they’ve heard the voice of God? How does it confuse the sense of touch, to make them feel as if they’re grazing the sky with bare hands?
