“My god.”
“Let’s bet on whether the Beatles ever sang ‘Bésame Mucho.’ The loser beats the eggs for the scones.”
“You’ll lose,” I warned. “I hope you know how to beat eggs.”
She searched YouTube and found the Beatles singing... what? “Bésame Mucho.” She was right, this version did exist and it was fun to watch too, with Paul McCartney still young and acting the clown as he shows off his vibrant baritone.
I fulfilled my penance, beat the eggs in a bowl, and mixed them with the milk.
“Oh, Paul McCartney!” Zahra Bayda said to the image on the laptop screen. “You were so charming, with your little beard, I like the way you singbáaaasame musho.I wouldbaaasaryou, Paul, I would kiss you andbaaasaryoumuushoif you asked me for it like that, with those calf eyes and that sweet little mouth.”
We put the scones in the oven. It was the quiet hours of dull heat and no further tasks awaited us before dinner, so we sat on the patio and killed time googling gossip about “Bésame Mucho” and the art of bolero music.
“It’s by a Mexican woman, did you know that, Bos? Her name is Consuelito Velázquez and she was sixteen when she wrote it. Sweet sixteen. The Wikipedia people say she hadn’t yet kissed anyone.”
“How do they know that?”
“It seems she herself confessed to it. But I don’t believe it. Nobody understands kisses like that, out of nowhere.” Zahra Bayda laughed, relaxed and charming. “I like this Consuelito, who declares ‘bésame mucho’ as if giving orders, kiss me or I’ll kill you!”
“Kiss me, or I’ll kill myself.”
“Incredible, at sixteen years old, Consuelito already knew the way to kiss is with your whole soul.”
“The way to kiss is like biting, or burning, or killing.”
“The way to kiss is with your life hanging by a thread, Consuelito says it herself: as if this were the last time. As if you were going to die, or something like that.”
“As if there were no tomorrow,” I said.
“There is no tomorrow.”
“There’s no tomorrow, Consuelito predicted it at the age of sixteen.”
“Another virgin prophet, like the Sybil of Cumae.”
“Nobody kissed the Sybil of Cumae?”
“Maybe Apollo.”
“‘She kisses like a machine,’ says a Pink Floyd song.”
“How many women have you kissed?” Zahra Bayda asked me.
“Me? A few.”
“Have you slept with many?”
“Nothing out of this world... What about you? Do you hold any sexual Guinness records?”
“It took me years to recover from a really brutal rape, but you know, I get along. You do what you can.”
I should have said something to her, asked something, expressed my... condolences, horror, regrets? I didn’t know what to say, I think I didn’t even want to know. I was still as a stone. I should have asked the most basic question, what happened to you? But I didn’t do it, perhaps because I feared the response.
I’ve always been amazed by the ease with which women talk to each other, without shame or modesty, face-to-face, exchanging confidences in a gently, naturally flowing purr, with laughter or tears, with an immediate sense of connection, without forethought, like schoolgirls, as if as adults they were still wearing those same uniforms, the same tight socks and unlaced shoes, the same scrapes on their knees and book-filled backpacks slung on their shoulders. That’s how my mother’s conversations with her friends always were, and as a boy I’d listen in, captivated not so much by what they said as by the way they said it.
Facing Zahra Bayda, I stayed quiet, unable to meet her gaze and shamed by the cowardice of my silence, though I had no idea how to break it. I suspect that a deep feeling of guilt kept my mouth closed, though guilt over what I don’t know, I’ve never raped anyone, nothing was more foreign to me. Guilt over being a man, guilt over the harm other men had done her, guilt that I hadn’t suffered as she had, guilt that I hadn’t gone through hell, guilt, guilt, guilt. I would have liked to have been able to speak openly with her, but no, I couldn’t.
Something fails me when it comes to striking up close connections with people. I can’t make it happen. I’m wary of what might be under other people’s skin or, worse, under their clothes. For me,attempting intimacy is like leaping into water when you don’t know how to swim; how did I land in Yemen of all places, this lone, pressing, living sea of humanity?
