So some shabby monarch wants to marry Goat Foot? An insignificant king from some remote shepherds’ land? All the better. The more awful the suitor, the humbler his origins, the better and better it is. Marry Goat Foot? Why not. That poor devil trying to court her could be the right husband for her savage daughter; they’d be made for each other. If he were to take her far away... the Maiden daydreams, already seeing herself getting her hands on the rich goods and businesses Goat Foot would have to leave behind.
The queen’s informers appear to her again, with new information to shore up her plan. It’s been learned that Solomon, the king ofJerusalem, already has seven wives and a harem of thirty beautiful concubines.
“All the better,” the Maiden repeats, licking her lips. “Goat Foot will occupy the unfavorable place of eighth wife. She’ll have to share power with the other seven, and share the man’s bed with the other thirty, a thankless and exhausting job, enough to take her down a notch, drain her strength, and keep her far away forever.
“Call Goat Foot!” she orders. “Have that scruffy woman come to me immediately.”
In the sewer, down in the detritus, lies the chest with its rejected gifts: priceless rolls of prophetic wisdom, immensely rare texts, treasures of future codicology. Which prove once again that the devil is in the details: The Maiden wasn’t one to appreciate such a present, but if it had arrived in Goat Foot’s hands, this would have been a much shorter story, because she, in her wonder, would have wanted to immediately meet the generous sender of such manuscripts, so he could initiate her in their meanings.
Solomon, king of the Jews, is a seasoned reader and owns a magnificent library from which he chose these incredibly special rolls to please a young lion like Goat Foot. He’s more interested in her than others because he’s heard of her fame for having a good mind, reading avidly in several languages, and descending from the erudite female dynasty known as the pédauques.
“Can’t you hear me?” the Maiden’s icy voice rings out. “I’ve told you to call Goat Foot! Have her appear before me right now!”
The Nur Ul Ain Tiara
No man knows what the women talked about that afternoon during the bachelorette party for one of them, a child psychologist called Hanani. No man, but me. I know because Zahra Bayda told me. She was at the party.
Men can’t show their faces when the women gather to celebrate attafritas, or female celebrations for births, deaths, weddings, and other rites of passage like this bachelorette party for Hanani, which, according to custom, took place in the evening when the males had already left the house.
We’ve returned to Sanaa, and Zahra Bayda tells me certain things she doesn’t share with anyone else. She trusts me as a confidant, I suppose, or perhaps as a confessor, or at least as some sort of pet. I like all her stories, but none as much as this one. The first time I heard it, the facts were still fresh from the day before. She and I were at Oasis, a French-owned café, no more than a back patio where an awning gives shade to four brass tables and several little benches, plus a faded, ingenuous mural of a camel walking in front of another half camel: The artist didn’t measure the wall, so the hind parts of the second animal didn’t fit. That’s the whole of Oasis, but it’s the only café in the neighborhood where women aren’t frowned on.
As always, Zahra Bayda had ordered a coffee, and I a milk tea, which came with clove, cinnamon, mint, and sugar. The sun was already setting, the evening breeze was refreshing the patio, and we let time flow as it would. Sometimes it unsettles me to think that Zahra Bayda makes these same kinds of confessions to Pau too, that she sits at Oasis with him to watch time pass. Pau. Pau Cor d’Or, so brawny and so Catalan, so capable, careful, and athletic, a veteran of the Red Cross now responsible for the MSF mission in Yemen, and our boss. I say “our” because they’ve now made me part of the team, I’m officially contracted to work in communications and logistical support. The articles I’ve written here on the humanitarian crisis have run in a few European news outlets, Pau liked them, and he’s asked me to also work on editing our reports to the main office in Barcelona.
The tafrita to say goodbye to Hanani, the single woman, took place in one of the lovely, tall, narrow adobe towers that press against the walled perimeter of Sanaa’s Old Town. They’re imitations of the palaces built by sages in the eleventh century and can be up to twelve stories high, though most often they’re six or seven. The ground floor used to be a stable, and you can still find sheep or donkeys sheltered there. The first floor above the ground floor is used for storage, and from the second floor up several generations of a single family make their homes.
If you go to the last floor, you find the most extraordinary part of the house, a kind of attic or eagle’s nest the Yemenis call amafraj.This place, which seems to float in the air’s most transparent folds, opens a splendid vision before you: a city of wonders, surrendering at your feet. The mafraj is usually furnished with carpets, small coffee tables, and pillows where you can recline to smoke a water pipe, chew khat, or enjoy tea with honey pastries while you await the golden hour, that evening instant when light turns into bright dust and makes everything below let loose its simple radiance. A fresh scent emanates from gardens, the noise of the bazaars dies down,and the last rays of sun draw sparks from cupolas. The overlapping voices of many muezzins call for prayer. The wail of ambulances rises softly, and the detonation of missiles tips toward the surreal. In the distance, in slow motion, the smoke and fire of war project as if on a movie theater screen.
Hours later, when all the windows have gone dark, a vast night wraps the city, and that absolute silence spreads out, the one of which Maeterlinck spoke, similar to that of the bedroom in which you go quiet forever. It occurs to me that if I have to die, I’d like it to be while drunk on honey and khat in one of these mafrajs of Sanaa, hopefully listening to Fauré’s “Requiem,” that sweet lullaby for death.
Zahra Bayda and a dozen friends give Hanani her send-off in one of those mafrajs. It’s brightly lit and luxurious, and belongs to Abdel, a rich jeweler, father of the bride. Behind her back and against her will, the family accepted the marriage proposal of a rich landowner from the north, and dowry negotiations are underway.
“It’s customary for the groom to send his mother and sisters to see the candidate before taking the big step, to offer their opinion,” Zahra Bayda says, “but in the end, it’s up to him. The bride, on the other hand, gets no part in the decision; she’s considered immature and inexperienced, and is expected to obey to her parents’ judgment.”
But Hanani isn’t stupid, we’re talking about a full-grown woman, with a psychology degree. She knows the man courting her is an old volcano, dormant now but still irascible. A stubborn, intolerant, draconian, belligerent dinosaur.
At first Hanani bravely resists, raises the volume on her despair, pleads with Abdel, her father. She begs Hannah, her mother. She weeps rivers. At night she hears the glass-like crack of her breaking soul. But she’s subjected to a tradition that grinds and devours, and as she faces the severity of Abdel, the father, and the hopes of Hannah, the mother, Hanani gradually submits. Little by little she’spulled into the game, swallowed by what pours from the old volcano. She lets herself be dragged against her will and ends up engaged to that man she doesn’t even know. As if that weren’t enough, she has to participate in certain preparations with fake enthusiasm, like this bachelorette party being thrown in the heights of a paternal tower.
The guests include her neighbors, cousins, and friends, all of whom, like Hanani and with the exception of Zahra Bayda, are the privileged daughters of Sanaa. They’re the fortunate ones, the jewels of the wealthy class. They climb the steep tower stairs in groups or one by one, their faces and bodies completely covered in black clothes and veils: slender shapes like photographic negatives, furtive moving shadows. An invasion of blackbirds in a dovecote.
The revelation takes place on arriving in the mafraj, when the blackbirds unwrap their black coverings. They remove batuts, niqabs, and other accessories of their continuous mourning, and what lies beneath the blackout of all those layers meets the light of day. An unfurling of the coquettish batting of lashes around enormous almond eyes; a profusion of full lips, sensual smiles, and lustrous hair. Pearly skin, literally pristine, never brushed by the sun, wind, or gazes of strangers; colorful clothes, worn fitted to the body, finely made, shiny, embroidered with precious stones and silver thread. Leopard-print tights; low necklines; silk stockings held up with garters; tight jeans that hug the curve of thighs; very high stilettos; a profusion of necklaces and earrings, muslin and brocade; slim gold chains bearing charms around necks, waists, and ankles; diaphanous, half-open blouses that reveal the lace of sumptuous underwear. And nails and mouths painted bright red, but only on those who are menstruating.
Only those who are menstruating? What does that have to do with anything? The response is a perfect syllogism. Main premise: To pray, women should be clean of makeup or nail polish. Secondary premise: When they’re menstruating, they can’t pray, it’s forbidden. Therefore, the women take advantage of menstruation to wear lipstick and paint their nails.
When Zahra Bayda describes them to me this way, freed from their concealing garments, radiant as princesses from legend or disco girls, I put two and two together and understand why the bazaars of Sanaa include shops with women’s underwear of the kind you’d see in the boutiques of any major Western city, but that here seem out of place. Who wears all of this? I wondered in front of those store windows, when and for whom? Who pays for these luxuries only to hide them under the armor of a niqab? Well, now I had my answer: the upper- and middle-class Queens of Sheba whose public faces are demure, nunlike, almost invisible, and who in the privacy of their own homes unfurl themselves as lush, seductive odalisques.
In the back of the mafraj, a screen features silent episodes of the Colombian telenovelaCoffee with the Scent of a Womanwith Arabic subtitles; censorship has suppressed its kisses, embraces, and other supposedly obscene parts, and it’s very popular among Yemeni women.
Fifteen low little tables have been placed in a circle and note cards with handwritten names assign each person to their seat. The guests sit on the floor and recline onto the pillows with the calm sensuality of Turkish Angora cats. On the tables, each guest finds gifts offered by the owners of the house, party favors: small flasks of perfume—rose water, jasmine, lavender; a tiny plate of dates; silk handkerchiefs tied with ribbon; a censer filled with incense; khat leaves in a small bag.
“Women chew khat too?”
“As much as men do, but in private. They chew khat to forget their problems. In fact, some of them forget almost everything, to the point of neglecting their children,” Zahra Bayda says.
On the tables there’s also an assortment of cookies, pastries, and other delicate Yemeni baked goods, which, on occasions like this one, are prepared with a special, expensive honey whose name is spoken in English: “honeymoon honey.” It’s made by bees fed only from the ilb tree, also known as the caramel tree, which truly doeshave the scent, taste, texture, and color of caramel; since it’s considered an aphrodisiac, it’s used for wedding-related festivities and honeymoons.
I love hearing Zahra Bayda’s precise way of telling all this without missing a detail, lingering on each little pastry, each party favor, each ribbon or curl of lace. She, earthquake of the desert, general of battlefield hospitals, confronter of diseases and bombings, whom I’ve seen break a board with a karate chop and send an assailant running with a kick to the knees. She, Zahra Bayda, the doctor to be reckoned with, fascinated with these feminine baubles?
“You really seem to like them,” I say.
