Goat Foot consults with a trusted man, her main advisor, the Great Perfumer.
“Explain to me, Great Master Perfumer, how men can see God each time they inhale our incense. I can’t understand it.”
“Your question is not without basis,” the Perfumer responds. “The smell of this resin awakens an urge to believe in something purifying, something that can save us.”
Not used to sacred expressions, faithless when it comes to the kindness of gods, and cynical about humans’ attempts to please them, Goat Foot focuses on down-to-earth professions. There’s no effort she won’t take on, organize, and direct; no labor is too strange. Farmer, soldier, shepherd. Head of the powerful network of caravans that trade olibanum throughout the known world; builder of caravansaries for the care and feeding of camels and camel drivers alike; navigator through the nocturnal desert with the stars for guides; rider of her black colt with suns in its haunches and a flash in its eyes, according to Aurelio Arturo. Student of the languages spoken in the lands where she sells her wares. Engineer of wells and irrigation systems. Expert in the art of numbers, with which she keeps accounts for her growing business. Founder of a perfume industry for which she soaks and smokes resins and fragrant plants, yielding fragrances that beautify, seduce, cure, and embalm. To round off her merchandise, she adds exotic goods imported from other lands,such as gold dust, marble, myrrh, cinnamon, benzoin, gray amber, essential oils, fragrant wood, small pouches filled with gemstones, purple from the South and muslin from Azur, all a roaming bazaar of luxurious, coveted things.
Goat Foot, the powerful Sheba, all-terrain woman of the open air, a woman of her people, round-trip traveler to the horizon and back. She has no scepter, no crown, but rather lives fully embodied in a visual, sensuous, sapid, aromatic world, not shielded by the curtains of power. Compass of her nomadic people, builder of an empire without walls or rules, a nation of a thousand paths that’s become more sumptuous than her lady mother’s walled-in country.
The rivalry with her daughter torments the pale Maiden, who rages with envy along the high walls of her Red Palace, from which she reigns through middle management: deputies, foremen, judges, guards, generals, tax collectors, and others who drown the kingdom in corruption, repression, incompetence, and apathy.
“Punishment and shame to the woman who gets involved with business and with strange people, who embarrasses herself by eating with her lowly subjects and fighting with her soldiers, side by side! Punishment! Shame!” Curses rain from the queen mother’s scornful mouth against the unloved daughter, the celebrated Goat Foot.
Celebrated? Goat Foot? Yes, because it’s not the most famous leaders who are celebrated, but the ones who give their people reasons to celebrate.
How many times must Goat Foot have longed for revenge, longed to destroy her mother once and for all and vanquish her hate? How many times? Often while asleep, often while awake. But not by burning the Red Palace, nor by wielding a machete to slit the throats of the hyenas trained to kill and eat the dead, experts in mating as both male and female. No. Goat Foot wants to do away with the Maiden, but without hurting her little sister, Joy. Without harming a hair on the girl’s head. For little Joy, only caresses and gifts, childish games, ripe fruit, gentle winds, and sweet dreams. Goat Footwants to overthrow the fortress of Mamlakat Aldam without catapults or arrows, without wounding or killing, just by circling the city seven times: seven times, around and around. Then standing to watch from a distance as the bellow of the ram’s horn and the din of trumpets topple those blood-painted walls without the sound of a single scream or wail. How she’d like to see, from afar, those stones fall, slow as feathers in air!
“Pacifist dreams in violent times.” The alaleishos shake their heads in disapproval. “A princess’s yearnings in times of war? Fairy tales in hours like these? It’s a mistake, Goat Foot, wise up! You know it’s impossible. You can’t defeat your mother without her taking your sister down with her.”
But don’t the two sisters hate each other, Alfarah and Sheba, the beloved and the condemned, the heiress and the one who’s been disowned? Don’t they repel each other like night and day? The alaleishos know the answer is no. Just the opposite. Though they rarely see each other, given the vast distance, they love each other, respect each other, and look out for each other. Joy slips out from under her mother’s watchful eye to take Goat Foot dry figs, pomegranates, and fattah, that sweet dish made with bananas, honey, and cinnamon that she so enjoys. Goat Foot’s heart melts when she sees young Joy, a small figure lost in the immense silver litter in which she’s transported by the faithful nannies who arrange her visits, there she is all wrapped in veils except for her intensely black, burning eyes. Come, Alfarah, your older sister welcomes you with kisses and embraces, come, I have something for you, she tells her, giving her curious little stones, fossils, charms, amulets. On one special occasion, she gives her one of those unique jewels that distill fate inside them: a scarab made from amethyst, gold, and marble, very old, with an inscription on its abdomen:DO NOT FEAR THE UNIVERSE.
Only once does a quarrel arise between the sisters. Though it shouldn’t really even be called a quarrel; given the love and care with which they treat each other, it would be more accurate to callit a moment of tension, or a fleeting disagreement. It takes place when Alfarah is already adolescent and has become an experienced Amazon who wants nothing else in life but to cross vast expanses at a full gallop on her mother’s thoroughbreds. On one of her visits to Goat Foot, she begs to be allowed to ride her sister’s stunning black colt, the one with suns in its haunches and a flash in its eyes. Her older sister refuses sharply, without giving a good reason, and sweet Alfarah bursts into tears, not because she was told no, but because of the unexpected harshness of the person she most admires and loves. Goat Foot immediately backs down, saddles the black colt for Alfarah and a spirited mare for herself, and the two sisters gallop together toward the sunset through a desert that stretches out for them like a sumptuous silk carpet. A night falls rich with perfumes and murmurs, as José Asunción Silva would say, and the moon’s shadows glow white against the black landscape.
But neither of them forgets the bad moment that started things, perhaps because it was unique and never repeated, and if Alfarah were to ask Goat Foot the reason for her harsh no, she’d say a terrible image crossed her mind at that instant.
“I saw the future, sister, and it was criminal.”
The Great Perfumer is worried. Unconditionally devoted to Goat Foot, loyal to her in every way, he senses a threat; there’s something rotten in Hadhramaut. The main problem isn’t the queen mother, a known and foreseeable enemy. The real contender is rising from the shadows, heartless and fearsome. Goat Foot doesn’t notice. She’s so busy running her caravans that she’s blinded to the rest of things, and can’t see the danger that looms here at home.
“Listen, my great lady, hear what I have to say,” the Great Perfumer tries to warn her.
“Go ahead, Master Perfumer, cut to the chase.”
“Here is what I must say: All emptiness tends toward being filled.”
“Philosophy? When what’s needed is action?” she asks, disregarding his reply.
The next day, she sets out on a voyage at the helm of her long, winding caravan. She personally oversees every last detail; she’s responsible for keeping the risks of the road at bay, including detours, mutinies, and death by hunger, thirst, or ambush attacks. She calculates the distance between towns, customs checkpoints, watchtowers, and reservoirs. She makes lists and more lists of the tasks that have been fulfilled, are being fulfilled, and still need doing. She monitors the paraphernalia that will be indispensable during travel: saddlebags, packs, carpets, oil, food, mules, spurs, leather shields, clothing, pikes.
Many moons pass, and Goat Foot is returning. In the distance she glimpses Hadhramaut, the smoke of its fires, the noise of its life, the first awnings of its people, great skinned rocks as white as craniums, trees that weep incense tears. Her heart speeds up, she quickens her pace; her men shout with joy; the camels grow wild at the promise of water.
Suddenly, Goat Foot pauses and sniffs around her; a scent of rot spreads like fog over the familiar land.
The Great Perfumer comes out to meet her. He welcomes her and renews his vows of loyalty by washing his face and hands with ash.
“What is this nauseating smell coming out of Hadhramaut?” she asks him.
The Great Perfumer delivers the bad news. During her absence, the people have taken to religious festivals with great sacrificial slaughters, and the blood of hundreds of animals flows from the altars and out of the temples toward the sewers. A new belief has spread: that the incense offerings are insufficient and must be accompanied by the spilling of blood. The innocent blood of peaceful animals, an additional gift to gods who are hard to please. The radical form of this cult—the sacrificial form—has been formalized. It includes the circumcision of boys, the circumcision of girls, theslitting of bull and lamb throats en masse, and, blurring the lines of rite and punishment, the stoning of criminals, whipping of adulterers, and mutilation of thieves. Streams of blood run through the Bedouin streets.
“And the olibanum, my lady!” laments the Great Master Perfumer. “They’re using it to mask the stench. They burn our incense to cover the stink of slaughter.”
No one knows precisely when, during Goat Foot’s long absence, the change occurred. It happened because that’s what is required by the infinite guilt of men, that ambiguous debt to the unknown that can only be eased by sacrificing the most precious, sweet, and innocent of things: the suckling lamb. The people sing hymns and chants as they lead it to the knife, tied up and anointed with perfumes, wreathed with flowers. Francisco de Zurbarán captures the ebbing life of such a sacrificial creature in his most austere, sacred painting: Against a dark background, the little lamb seems illumined by the last rays of the sun, exposed as he lies on a gray surface, still alive, but with death already visible in his gaze. His feet are tied with cord; he senses the knife, and waits. Gently he awaits the instant in which he’ll be ritually killed.
In Hadhramaut, the sacrificial cult has already set its vicious cycle in motion, an endless fixation that begins with a killing to beg forgiveness, the forgiveness is denied, the guilt intensifies, the killing continues, and it all begins again, obsessive, repeating, interminable. We burn frankincense for the gods, slit the animal’s throat, and the gods, do they show gratitude, or at least satisfaction? No. Nothing pleases them. They get drunk on the blood we offer and want to guzzle more. Their disdain increases our blows to our own chests, our crushing anxiety, our compulsion to take new offerings to the altar.All ritual sacrifice ends in failure, and thus has to be ceaselessly repeated.1
Goat Foot can’t fully absorb the wicked process she herself unleashed the moment she first burned those olibanum branches withthe simple hope of getting warm. The whole situation disgusts her, and saddens her, and at the same time benefits her, because the incense business is growing in direct proportion to the spread of these new rites.
The Great Perfumer had already warned her, but she’d turned a deaf ear: All emptiness tends toward being filled. In her absence, a sedentary authority appeared on the scene, growing and gaining traction and eroding free alliance between peoples, the only form of coexistence Goat Foot finds just or necessary. But who has established themselves as the head of this nascent religious and state authority? Who has become its high pontiff? Who is the great executor of sacrifice? The black pope, Rasputin of the desert, prophet of immolation, granter of forgiveness, owner of people’s conscience, who now washes guilt with blood? Who? Who is the power behind the throne, or, better put, the power behind the altar? Who?
