When Fonsi’s essential “Despacito” played, Zahra Bayda danced it with Pau in a frankly sensual way. Sensual, at least, on her part: There she was, happy and beautiful, in a tight dress now, hair loose, lips red, striking black eyes lined with kohl; she had a natural gift for rhythm, an easy sway that struck me as very African and not Yemeni at all. Cor d’Or was at her side, freshly bathed, ironed, and perfumed, in a white shirt, flaunting his great athletic physique but executing salsa moves with the stiffness of a robot or a Red Cross ex-soldier, perhaps thinking of Africa with his eyes on Zahra Bayda.
And? What did it matter to me? I, who hate parties, what was I doing at this one, a guest made of stone? I didn’t know anyone, nobody knew me. I sat there like a lump, sulking and letting disquiet creep in. A doubt assailed me. Could those two be lovers? Zahra Bayda and Pau? And that doctor from Denmark, the Mads Mikkelsen of humanitarian medicine, the one who never let scones burn inthe oven, Zahra Bayda’s lover, him too? The rancorous Chinese wine was turning me into the jealous type.
At some point in the night Zahra Bayda approached me, tipsy herself, and took my face in her large mystic hands.
“For a bolero, Ravel’s,” she whispered in my ear.
Dances with Hyenas
Isee a very beautiful woman emerge from the sea. She’s survived a shipwreck; many of those who were on the boat with her have drowned, how many we still don’t know. The woman is tall and strong and has managed to swim to shore. The waves pulled off her clothes and tangled seaweed into her hair. She’s exhausted. She stumbles away from the water and collapses on the sand.
I see her emerge from the sea,phantasmata splendida, life wrested from death. She takes the bottle of water I hand her, and takes small sips. She wraps herself in the thermal blanket I give her. Little by little I’ve been learning to carry out these tasks, since they brought me to Aden in the far south of Yemen to join the MSF team that oversees the support network aiding boat people along this coast.
We put the woman who survived the waters on a cot and carry her to the tent where my fellow workers have set up a mobile clinic. They hydrate her and attend to burns left by sun and salt. They let her rest. She sleeps for several hours and I approach her when she wakes. I bring her some dates, which she immediately devours. I ask her name, and she doesn’t tell me. On the second day, again, “What’s your name?” No response.
I try to follow the usual protocol for cases like hers, hoping she’llrecover strength, waiting to see whether she’d like us to transport her to the refugee camp in Kharaz run by the UN Refugee Agency, or UNHCR, and whether we can send word to relatives that she’s alive and made it to safety. She’s completely silent, and I wonder whether she might be mute, but the nurses remark that sometimes they hear her murmur prayers in Amharic. I don’t know her name, and I call her the Abyssinian lady, like in Coleridge’s poem.
Her lived tragedy may not reach her dreams, for she sleeps serenely and her body moves gently with the rise and fall of her breath. She doesn’t curl up as if protecting herself, but rather rests on her back, weary, trusting, and exposed, her right forearm raised and draped along her head like the marble sculpture of Ariadne reclined.
On the third day, I find her seated on her bunk, untangling her hair, which is long, curly, and dyed an intense henna red. She’s finally speaking. She says that at sea, in the dark of night, it was impossible to see the shore.
“Some people sank, others of us swam in a daze. When I saw the light, I found the shore and was able to swim here,” she says.
She means the headlights of our rescue jeep. When there are night landings, we turn them on and aim them toward the sea. The smugglers who traffic people throw the refugees into the water before reaching the shore, so they can leave at full speed, escaping the coast guard. At night, the Yemeni coast is plunged in darkness, and only the jeep’s headlights guide those trying to swim. The jeep headlights, the only visible beams, their star of Bethlehem.
The Abyssinian lady. Her fellow survivors from the boat are scared of her, won’t go near her.
“She killed the smuggler with her bare hands after he whipped her,” they tell me. “Then she threw herself into the sea, which was all black, and the rest of us followed her lead. We don’t know her, she traveled alone, without family. We don’t know who she is or where she’s from. She’s not human,” they insist. “Be careful, she’s not human.”
One day, at dawn, I’m told that during the night the Abyssinian lady left the tent and wandered off into the desert. We never hear word of her again.
The port of Aden, where I am, is at the farthest southern tip of Yemen. Built in the crater of an extinct volcano and jutting out into the surrounding gulf, Aden dominates the gulf that separates the Horn of Africa from the Arabian Peninsula. It’s strategically positioned at the necessary passage for all ships heading from the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean through the Red Sea and the Suez Canal. At its widest point, the Gulf of Aden spans 237 nautical miles: 440 kilometers of fiery waters crossed by tankships laden with oil from the Persian Gulf; the fast speedboats of Somali pirates; coast guard boats; US warships... and the boats in which migrants flee Africa for the Middle East, as well as the opposite, boats carrying those fleeing Yemen to reach the coasts of Djibouti and Somalia. Where to find salvation, in this land or that? Wherever they might be, salvation glimmers on the other side.
This is where Rimbaud set down roots after leaving France to wander seas and deserts. He said that Aden was no more than an awful rock—with no blade of grass, no drop of drinkable water—besieged by pirates and bandits, populated by bad news, risky business, and minds scorched by sun. Here Rimbaud stopped being a poet and turned into a merchant, or turned into a merchant to stop being a poet, who knows. In this corner of the world, the masses swarm and gather from everywhere in search of ways to one day reach Europe, while Rimbaud, ever the contrarian, flees Europe seeking his grail in these distant lands.
On a day when my colleagues are busy negotiating with local teams, I escape to see the place where Rimbaud lived: the Grand Hôtel de l’Univers, or what remains of it.
It’s a colonial building corroded by time and forgetting, once painted a mint green that’s now peeled and sickly. The Grand Hôtel de l’Univers is no longergrand, but ruined, and it’s not a hotel anymore,but a boardinghouse, and it’s certainly no longer universal: It was abandoned by the last Europeans decades ago. The front terrace, with its arches and railings, lets out onto a congested main road that in other times served as a promenade bustling with camels, horses, and the loading and unloading of wares.
I close my eyes, and see it. It’s him, Arthur Rimbaud. He doesn’t look like himself anymore, he no longer has that golden sheen from another time. But it’s still him, or at least his ghost, as seen in daguerreotypes. He’s an adult now, leaning on the railing of that terrace I visit whenever I can, because Rimbaud appears to me here. He has the lost air of an unimportant person. He’s thin, his cotton suit is a tent on him. His famous crystal-blue gaze is muted, like a movie theater where the curtains have fallen after the show. And that gift of grace that made him a young god? No one is serious at seventeen, he said at that age, when he was a genius and angel and poet and scoundrel, and hislife was a feast where all hearts opened, where the wines overflowed.1 No one is serious at seventeen. Now he’s an adult, and finally serious, or at least frowning.
A shabby little sign with an arrow indicates that he lived upstairs, on the second floor of this Grand Hôtel de l’Univers. There’s no one to charge me an entrance fee or keep me from going up. The stairs creak beneath my steps. Children’s wails and the smell of food emanate through closed doors; clothes hang out to dry on the handrail. On the second floor, another arrow guides me to the end of a dark corridor where scraps of light slink between the planks along the walls. In a room where a balcony opens to the street, receiving plentiful noise and wisps of sea breeze, a photograph of him presides on the wall, cut from a magazine, protected by clear plastic, and held in place by thumbtacks. Beneath it stands a vase of fake flowers and beside it a locked glass cabinet containing three worn objects that supposedly belonged to him: a notebook, a pen, a shirt. Nothing more. As a sanctuary, it’s disappointing.
Even so, I’m shaken by vertigo: This is where he lived, the poet,right here, he slept in this room, or suffered his insomnia here, and wrote, or stopped writing. This is where it happened, it doesn’t matter that the flowers are plastic, the notebook false, the pen an impostor, the shirt a trick, it doesn’t matter, I don’t care, each of those sad objects moves me, as does his photograph, his cruel and gorgeous adolescent face and his glassy gaze, it doesn’t matter that it’s just a cutout from a magazine, who cares, at the end of the day this is precisely the same photograph that made an adolescent Patti Smith fall in love:His haughty gaze met mine from the cover ofIlluminations.2
I’ve seen. On the coasts of Aden, I have seen.
I’ve seen ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion, says the resonantI’ve seeninBlade Runner, which draws on theI’ve seens uttered by Rimbaud himself, who knew how to see ember skies exploding with lightning, coagulated suns, and drunken boats in floods and currents. He saw the sea turned into an eternity of tears, and heard the pale thoughts of the drowned.
As for me, Bos Mutas, I too have seen. I’ve seen hordes of crabs at dawn, biting the bodies of those the sea hurled to shore overnight.
I’ve made friends with Nader, a young Yemeni man who works as an interpreter for MSF. In addition to his native Arabic, he speaks English, Amharic, and Somali, and he’s proud of the flashy title he’s been given, humanitarian affairs assistant. At five in the morning, Nader and I head out to patrol a stretch of coast by jeep. It takes us three hours to go from one end to the other and back. We’re flanked on one side by desert, on the other by sea. Nothing more.
We wait for refugees to land. We take turns with other teams; the people who reach the shore arrive so battered that any delay can be fatal. We rush to help those who are still alive. Alive, but zombielike, naked, pale, blank-faced. The medical staff takes charge of offering first aid; almost all the refugees have second- or third-degree burns. We give them water, dates, protein-rich biscuits, towels, dry clothes, and rubber sandals. We transport those who want to go to the closestrefugee camp, where they can stay as they recover, at least physically, because nobody can cure them of the horror, despair, or loss of loved ones they’ve suffered.
In the poorest areas, the Yemeni people distrust refugees, considering them an invasion and competition for jobs. They distrust us too, for helping with the landings. Occasionally, we receive threats or hear people shout at us,Kafir, infidel. We neutralize the local population’s hostility through pacts. MSF contracts some sheiks as drivers and makes agreements with the fishing tribes that they’ll inform us of any new emergencies.
“It’s nice to work this way, with international people like you,” Nader says to me. “We come from different cultures, but we are a team. We speak a common language, we laugh together, we keep each other company. Grappling with this tragedy can be crushing, but when despondency hits, we turn to others. Without that emotional support, our work would be unbearable.”
