The scones were in the oven, awaiting their moment, and the laughter between Zahra Bayda and me had run dry. A sad silence now enveloped us. She carried pain and secrets that I could not and did not wish to imagine; we dwelled on different planets, mine light and cottony, hers serious and dense. I felt a sudden pang in my chest, that Dane who’d made scones with her sprang to mind like an ache and I saw myself as a substitute. All at once I was no more than the shadow of that other guy, and everything that had happened in that kitchen seemed surreal.
Zahra Bayda’s mind was already elsewhere, and she returned to Google and Consuelito as if nothing had happened. She learned that “Bésame Mucho” had been banned by the Legion of Decency in Franco’s Spain for alleged immorality. Even so, it became so fashionable that it was recorded in fifty languages by more than a hundred vocalists including Elvis, Plácido Domingo, Mina, Nat King Cole—
“And the Beatles.”
“Women used ‘Bésame Mucho’ to say goodbye to their men as they left for war.”
“That must have been during World War II,” I mused.
“Any war, I suppose. ‘Kiss me right now, Mambru, or Paul, or whatever your name is, and go off to your war.’”
“What was your Dane’s name?”
“The scones one? What do you want to know that for?”
“He was Nordic and breathtaking, like Mads Mikkelsen, admit it.”
“Kiss me, Mads Mikkelsen,” Zahra Bayda crooned on. “But if you’re going to kiss me, you’d better kiss me a lot, a lot, a lot, because over in Denmark you’ll die of cold, or maybe you’ll die in the war, or end up with another woman—dirtbag!—and you’ll never come around here again.”
Consuelito Velázquez didn’t succeed in writing another memorable bolero; she was the sibyl genius at sixteen and by the following year the gift was gone.
“The Beatles version doesn’t work,” I said.
“It’s fun, though.”
“That’s why it doesn’t work. A bolero has to ache, it has to be full of tears and psychologically twisted.”
“Is there no comic bolero?”
“The Beatles one. That’s why it’s not a bolero.”
I told Zahra Bayda that the best kiss in all literature is that of Stephen Dedalus, the Joyce character, when he says that as a young boy he felt his mother’s soft lips dampen his cheek and heard them make a small noise, deducing that this must be a kiss.
I also told her that there is a sweet and terrible kiss: the queen’s kiss, to which Gérard de Nerval alludes with letters penned in blood, when he confesses that it leaves a red mark on his forehead.
“Like a bite, or a burn?” Zahra Bayda asked, her interest piqued.
“The kiss that hurts Nerval could well be the same one featured in the Song of Songs; neither of them is a Western kiss, portrayed as soft, savored, labial, full of feeling. The other one, in contrast, is the rough, ardent kiss of the desert.
“In Hebrew, the songs’ original language, the wordnashaqhas a double meaning: ‘to love,’ and ‘to bite’; and with a slight phonetic variance it can also mean ‘to catch fire, to burn.’Kissandweaponshare an almost identical word, and ‘to kiss’ also means ‘to bite, burn, or wound’: love and violence, hand in hand. Kiss as cannibalism: nota muted kiss, [but] a circle of flames and weapons unsheathed.”1
My explanations rambled on and lost the attention of Zahra Bayda, who left me talking to myself.
“How did you manage to recover?” I dared ask out of the blue.
“What?”
“‘Recover,’ that’s what you said.”
“Recover?”
“That’s the word you used.”
“The scones! Get them out of the oven, Bos, they’ll burn!” she ordered, avoiding my question. It seemed not all women were given to schoolgirl confidences. Zahra Bayda certainly wasn’t.
We saw each other again at dinner, when the ten or twelve members of the greater MSF team gathered to celebrate her birthday. The food Leyla had prepared was fantastic, the scones slightly burned, and the Chinese wine undrinkable, but literally intoxicating. We were tipsy by the second bottle, or at least I was.
Half the people chatted, the other half danced, and I sat alone and watched. The CDs played at a low volume, the curtains were closed, and the lights were dimmed, which I at first took as a failed attempt at creating a certain disco ambiance, but I was told it was in fact to avoid the surveillance of that ghostly Taliban, the Black Turban, which forbids music and dance and enforces its rules through a hundred spies and a thousand eyes.
