“That’s what her skin tone is called around here.”
“Macchiato, like the coffee? The Italian word?”
Zahra Bayda explains something about the Italian army, which came here, colonized, and split, leaving behind a legacy of intensified hate, mountains of broken weapons, and a smattering of words likemacchiato.
And the bags under this girl’s eyes, her ostrich eyelashes, the scar on her forehead, do they have a name in Italian or any other tongue? What to call her devilish agility and her wild mass of hair? Or the biblical air about her, or the spell she casts over me? How to name any of that? Because she’s gorgeous, this girl, gorgeous and formidable, an unsettling, bony thing who’s ducked behind me and won’t let go, who’s using me as a shield to protect herself from the others as they shout their threats. She smells of smoke, and incense, and the sea.
It’s quite notable, her scent: strong, secret. A smell banished from the West by deodorants, detergents, and toothpaste. The smell of people who live and make their way in spite of everything, who sacrifice the last camel to roast its meat, or go hungry and walk great distances and burn little incense sticks, and urinate and shit and bleed, who groom with lavender oil, shiver in the cold, huddle by the fire, milk a goat and drink its milk and sacrifice the goat when there’s nothing else left to eat. Women who brush their hair until it shines and hide it so no one can see. And who steal apples and pomegranates from strangers’ orchards. And who copulate or sleep on mats that keep their bodies’ heat, and who endure the night however they can to reach the dawn. All of this is in the scent of this small queen of the resplendent mantle,how much better... the smell of thine ointments than all spices.2 All of this I think, perhaps not in the moment, but later I do, and in any case I don’t say it aloud.
Faced with her, I grapple with a range of feelings: pity, compassion, fascination, annoyance. Meanwhile, she takes to pestering me. I’m older than her, and taller, and have more dignity; I’m a Goliath next to her, and yet she’s got the upper hand. Zahra Bayda has already toldme about that common trait among victims, all survivors of tragedy: When the rest of us are getting started, they’re already rounding the finish. It’s probably because they possess what some call the courage of despair. Or, akin to that,nec spe, nec metu, a bit of Latin I like so much it’s tattooed on my forearm: neither hope nor fear. But enough, girl, go away, I can’t take it anymore. I can’t find a way to get her off me, and at the same time I shiver at the graze of her skin.
“Money? Is that what she wants?” I ask Zahra Bayda, who exchanges a few words with the girl.
“She says she was born in Erigabo,” Zahra Bayda translates.
“What else did she say?” I ask, because I watched the girl let loose a torrent of words.
Erigabo, across the gulf. I’ve read about it: an inhospitable, barren land from which everyone flees to escape slaughter and famine. In the mythical past, Erigabo was likely part of the prosperous realm of Sheba, but in these surreal times it’s sown with terrors.
“Ask her name,” I say to Zahra Bayda. “Ask how old she is. Fourteen? Fifteen?”
“I already did. She wouldn’t tell me. Too many questions make them wary, it makes them think you’re the enemy.”
It’s clear this reticent girl won’t respond, and I won’t know. To be expected. All the startling things that come into my life arrive this way, nameless and sudden. To appease her, I give her a coin. She grabs it and pulls away to examine it where nobody can take it. She inspects it with the thoroughness of a merchant calculating the day’s profits. She bites it to make sure it’s real.
There we go. Just what the doctor ordered. I think I’ve freed myself of the girl. But no. She throws herself at me with even more grit, pulling on the scarf tied around my neck.
“She wants you to give it to her,” Zahra Bayda tells me.
“This?” I ask, untying the bright blue Tuareg cloth with three black stripes that I take with me everywhere and that’s come to feel like part of me; they say I don’t even take it off to bathe. “You wantmy scarf, child? So much fuss over such a small thing? If I give it to you, can we make peace? Okay. You like this little gift? Take it. A souvenir from me.”
I let go of my old Tuareg wrap, regretfully, and the girl immediately uses it to tie her hair. She looks funny with that intensely blue cloth on her head. She seems to accept that she’s accomplished her mission on this hill, and losing all interest in me, she runs back the way she came, taking my scarf with her. An apparition, gone.
Against a darkening sky streaked with black, orange, and maroon, I watch the girl go without letting her legs’ asymmetry slow her down. The golden cape flashes like the blazing tail of a small comet.
Alumbrar: “to illumine.” A potent verb that comes fromab umbra: “to come out of the shadows.” It shares a root with the verbasombrar: “to astonish.” The girl from Erigabo illumines and astonishes, weaving in and out of shadows as she leaps her way down the slope, as svelte and fierce as those dorcas gazelles that populate the land she comes from.
“Hey!” I shout when she’s too far to hear me. “Any chance you might be the Queen of Sheba?”
The Call of Desire
As for me, Bos Mutas, I can’t really say why I’m so fixated on the Queen of Sheba. Gérard de Nerval believed that fascination with her belonged to a certain chosen few, exceptional people whom the queen chooses to mark with a kiss on the forehead that turns them into devotees. That’s not me, of course, I’m a nobody and I don’t have that kind of rank. I’m no genius nor idiot, no warrior nor saint, mine is more of a crushing normalcy; there’s nothing in me to warrant posing as chosen, or receiving some firebrand on my forehead, unless it’s from some loose screw in my mind—the queen’s been known to choose madmen too, maybe that’s why she stalks me and I’m constantly spellbound by her, riveted, enmeshed. Sometimes I wonder whether my fascination verges on a kind of religion. Why not? At the end of the day, religion means keeping your gaze obsessively on an image beyond your reach.
“You’re not the first to be enchanted by the Queen of Sheba,” Zahra Bayda tells me, “and you won’t be the last. It’s a form of insanity, you know? There’s no cure either. And it’s dangerous. It can lead to suicide.”
“Yes, yes, I’m aware. The alaleishos say—”
“The alaleishos are old gossips, they lie and spin tales,” interruptsZahra Bayda. “Keep your distance, there’s something murky in them. Don’t take what they say at face value.”
“Well, I believe them,” I dare contradict her. “Plato himself talked about the stories of nursemaids, how they keep memories of the past alive.”
“You can believe Plato, but not the nursemaids.” Zahra Bayda skillfully hews to logic.
I’ve told her I’m here to write my dissertation on the Queen of Sheba, but she doesn’t care, she mocks me by advising that I start my thesis like a fairy tale: “Once upon a time, oh! Once upon a time there was and there was not.”
I’ve been obsessed with the Queen of Sheba since I was eight or nine, when my parents took me on a cruise down the Nile, back when our family still had money and luxury boats weren’t yet laden with infected passengers who carry plagues from port to port.
It happened one night, in the second-class section of that cruise down the Nile. After dinner, the main stage featured a traditional full-cast show: zither music, drums, torches, acrobats. Suddenly the lights dimmed and the emcee called for applause to welcome the Queen of Sheba, who would grace us with her mystical seven veils as she belly danced. It was the first time I ever heard that name, Queen of Sheba, and I must have imagined some crowned grandma, a Queen Isabel draped in veils. So I was blown away when I saw a young woman, all curves and bare, abundant flesh that seemed to me an unknown continent. The music sped up and the woman started a strange, provocative dance, shaking like a big, obscene, possessed spider.
