The Hyena,idol, black eyes and yellow mane,11 slave, prostitute, midwife, or healer, neither man nor woman but instead something else entirely, he or she,Queen, Enchantress who... will never want to tell us what she knows.12 When suffering overcomes him, he cries out for her, curses her if she doesn’t come, blesses her when she does. She sedates him with poppy tea. With khat leaves she keeps him ina permanent dream state. She takes him out in blackest nights and prays over him between graves. In a deep, slow voice she summons souls, hypnotizes hyenas: My sisters, she says to them, my sisters, come, I’m lost, I’m lost, save me, my love, come here, come here, if you don’t want to cry, come to me.
They say that then the hyenas approach and watch the whore and the poet whose round pupils spark with light. The hyenas bend down, retreat, watch them, with hate, hunger, sweetness?
“Cure me, my sisters,” murmurs Jean-Blaise, imitating the Hyena. “I entered the house of life through a false door and can’t escape.”
The Hyena enters the night and calls her sisters, the wild, eager-jawed pack, thick-haired, stinking of carrion, with their multivalent sexes and flesh-eating teeth. They approach, suspicious. The Hyena gives them scraps, entrails, organs, bones: She feeds them, maternally. She, prostitute and healer. They call her the Hyena of Harar, she knows ancient arts, techniques of ecstasy, cures. She offers herself for money under the curve of sycamores. In a limber voice she sometimes sings or bellows, sometimes spits. She teaches the sick poet how to rise up and leave himself through a practice of silent meditation. If his cheap cotton clothes tear, she sews them for him on an old pedaled machine. If the pain in his swollen knee is killing him, she dresses it with khat poultices.
It’s said of the Hyena that she casts spells on misfortune to tame it, and feeds hungry death to keep it from killing. She calls the hyenas to the fireside, Oxi, Calhumi, a name for each one, Tajura, Zeilah, Berbera, Oxi, Alalis, Alalai, that’s how she calls them and come, Calhumi, Undor, her warm voice strokes them and they arch their backs, Adatamur, Tibor, Ebi... they arrive one by one, suspicious but docile, baring their teeth but without a bite. She calms their hunger with goat entrails, camel scraps, organs, bones. “Calhumi, Oxi, Alalai, my sisters,” she tells them, “heal him, he is lost, listen to him, he’s sinned for love, he’s taken blood from his own blood, he entered the house of pain, comfort him, Adatamur, Ebi, Alalai.”Her voice soothes the beasts and relieves the poet’s pain. She comforts him over the loss and together they mourn in the Aden hospital when a British doctor diagnoses cancer and says it’s time for amputation. In her presence he wails and weeps,sings in torment.13 I’m lashed by suffering, he says, pain is crushing me, dragging me, wrapping me in a sea of flames. And she, the Hyena, accompanies his litanies, I’m lost, drunk, impure. I’ll heal your ills, put an end to the virus of your rage. I nestle you at my breast, you, sweet creature, just born into torment.
“Enough, enough.” I beg Jean-Blaise for a pause.
I’m unhinged by the French coffee, or maybe by this man’s mesmerizing chatter, the winding threads of story that snare and trap me. I give him his ten euros, well earned. He thanks me with a bow.
“You really made me work for these, huh?” he mutters. With his mission accomplished, he walks away with long strides in those fake crocodile shoes.
Back in Aden, I ask Zahra Bayda questions.
“You did this too? You also arrived from Somalia in a boat, like all of them?”
“But that was more than twenty years ago, when the trip wasn’t yet suicidal,” she replies. “I crossed the Gulf with fishermen. For a few coins, they took me in their boat, the kind the United Nations had donated to foster fishing in the region. You’ve probably seen that they still exist; today smugglers use them for human trafficking. Twenty years is a long time, Bos, Bosi, and yet at the same time, they’re nothing. And you? How was Harar, did you find what you’re looking for?”
“I invested ten euros in revelations and came back drunk.”
Yemen burns at midday. Near the shore, Rimbaud’s figure glimmers; he too is part of these devastated landscapes. We’re not surprised to find him aged and sick. He’s had countless sleepless nights. He’s on crutches, missing a leg. He’s joined the court of the mutilated, of goat feet, the web-footed legion who’d become knownas thepédauques. The tireless walker, rider of great distances, caravan driver, migrant, now in pain, afflicted, forced to stop moving. His voice blends with the pale thoughts of the drowned. Over his head vaults a very white sky, and at his feet the sea, which today seems calm, free of fish. On the other side of the Gulf, the intense heat reverberates in Bosaso and the hyenas laugh in Harar, Save me, my love, come for me, I’ve entered the house of pain and I can’t get out.
Goat Foot and the Faraway King
The alaleishos know the difference between what changes and what remains. They know the days flow one after another without great breaks in the rhythm, gentle as waves in the sand, but that sometimes, things happen. Surprises. Strange things, unexpected, that can disrupt the old story.
It might come to pass, for example, that an unforeseen proposal comes our way. This happens to Goat Foot one afternoon, when she wakes up from a nap and learns a messenger is approaching on an albino camel. Even from afar, she can tell the animal is like no other of its species, with a rabbit’s violet eyes and a stoat’s silky coat. Its hooves, wide and soft as slippers, raise great dust clouds along the path. The rider, worn by thirst and fatigue, is a messenger from a distant king. He leads a tied donkey bearing a chest full of gifts for the crowned sovereign of these lands and peoples, the queen known as the Black Lion of the Desert.
“Tell that messenger I’m neither a black lion nor a queen, nor anything like it. If that’s what he’s looking for, let him go to Mamlakat Aldam, my lady mother’s Red Palace, thirty-two days’ travel from here. She’s the true lion, escaped from the cage and everything.”
Goat Foot spurns gifts and promises. Let no one try to impress her with white camels and other rarities. She’s satisfied with what she has and doesn’t want anything more. Far from the pampering and cruelties of her own mother’s royal court, she’s not about to get entangled with delegations and offerings from kings in other lands.
Following these instructions, the messenger arrives in Mamlakat Aldam, knocks on the gloomy palace’s doors, and fulfills his mission of delivering the chest along with a message: The great Solomon, also known as Suleiman, Chief of the Hills and magnificent monarch of a wealthy faraway realm, asks for the hand of Princess Goat Foot.
The guards take the chest and make him wait outside. After traveling a vast labyrinth of halls and rooms, they kneel before the Maiden’s throne and give her both the present and the message.
“Who says he wants my daughter’s hand?” she asks suspiciously, or perhaps with jealousy.
“A king by the name of Solomon, or Suleiman.”
“Hmmm . . . and the messenger . . . is he impressive-looking?”
“To tell you the truth, no. He’s ragged and battered after such a long voyage across the deserts.”
“If he comes from such a rich kingdom, he should at least flaunt a golden shield and silver spear. Ragged and battered? I’m not convinced, not one bit. Let him return the way he came, and let him understand that here we distrust all foreigners, and, also, that around here there is no marriageable princess. Tell him he can leave the gift, it’s not worth his carrying such a heavy thing the whole way back.”
After confiscating the chest, the Maiden orders the locks broken and the lid opened in her presence. If it’s true that it comes from a great king, it must contain gold and precious jewels or some other kind of unimaginable riches, so unique they wouldn’t yet have a known name. Her disappointment is great when she sees the chest contains only old, moldy rolls of skins, entirely scratched up with scribbled lines.
“Pure trash,” says the Maiden, staring with disgust.
She won’t even touch it, and orders it thrown into the palace garbage. From such a stingy gift she infers that the sender, some guy called Solomon or Suleiman, must be a simple shepherd king, the kind that lives off rancid cheese, onions, and turnips, and whose whole army consists of a cluster of bellowing men armed with sticks, whose riches consist of a few flocks of placid sheep, and who wears a sad ring of laurels for a crown and a ram’s hide for a mantle. In fact, his own messenger refers to that Solomon as Chief of the Hills. Chief of which hills? It sounds pretty insignificant.
“Unlucky is the man who asks for my daughter’s hand,” she says scornfully, but after that first disappointment, an idea lights up her gaze. She suddenly sees that an opportunity presented itself on that albino camel’s back, not in the chest with its pathetic gifts, but in the messenger’s mouth and the proposal of which he spoke. “Curses haven’t managed to destroy Goat Foot for me,” she muses aloud, “but perhaps false blessings will.”
The Maiden puts out feelers through her spies. She learns that Jerusalem, the city where Solomon sits on his throne, is little more than a village without aqueducts, bridges, or great works of architecture, and that instead of public buildings it’s crammed with rickety houses with dirt floors. Its residents eat with their hands or, in the best of cases, with sticks for spoons.
