I’d never imagined such a thing could exist; I’d never been struck so deeply by anything except perhaps the boa constrictor a snake charmer had circled around my neck a couple of years before, or the boiling volcano we’d visited in Nicaragua. Even those didn’t move me like this. The Queen of Sheba’s stunning stage presence left me pale, gripping the couch. Her female nakedness seemed a sacred discovery. She was of another world, this person revealingamazing, unfathomable body parts in a whir of tulle and sequins. A circus costume, I suppose, but to me it seemed sumptuous, finery from the East. To the beat of the drum, she shook those mounds of vibrant, tempting flesh and moved her curves with a sensual ease that marked me to this day.
I remember the moment when she raised her arm and I glimpsed a bit of hair in her armpit; that armpit wasn’t like my mother’s, smooth and pink, but raw and hairy, more like my father’s. I even caught its scent.
She emitted a dense, salty scent, a blend of used underwear, Catholic Mass, and paella. I took it as a call. Or, better yet, a command. I immediately knew she was a powerful being who possessed the intensity of an earthquake, a blaze, or an action film. I knew that, if she wished, she could destroy the universe. I was frightened, and captivated—those are the precise words: I, captivated by her; I, her terrified captive; I, defenseless before her, all the more so when she began to wail, moving her tongue like a snake and making a sharp rejoicing sound that landed in my ears like the call of desire: the fearsome, irresistible song of the sirens in the ears of Odysseus.
The woman shimmied her flesh, gleaming with oil and sweat. Her breasts had a life of their own, and her undulating belly transfixed me. I felt I was in the presence of a goddess or a madwoman, and I stayed put between my mom and dad, sinking into the couch and drinking that desert beauty with my eyes. There she was, filling my life with her presence, while I faced her in a state of either ecstasy or panic, I don’t know which. I was possessed by that big, tantalizing yet terrifying woman, so exposed yet so forbidden. I felt an inner heat akin to hunger, or rage, or burning anxiety, something that suddenly boiled in me and that I didn’t recognize, couldn’t name, or perhaps you could say thatQueen of Shebawas the first name I could give this sexual, cannibalistic rapture, this religious fervor, this ferocious passion.
I didn’t see the moment when she fixed her gaze on me, the boy paralyzed with wonder and fear. But what happened is this: Stilldancing, this towering figure came right to me, reached for me with her red-nailed, bejeweled hand, staring right at me as if with compassion, with irony, and with a maternal kindness in her eyes that offended my masculinity and made me feel impotent and tiny before her. But she immediately thrust her black-and-red mane of hair over me, the way Medusa might have assaulted poor Perseus.
My heart hammered in my ears, and yet I managed to hear my father say, “Go on, son, dance with her, be a gentleman, can’t you see she wants to dance with you?” Yes, I did see it, of course I saw it and of course she wanted to, she was insistent, pulling me by the hand, and I couldn’t find a way to escape. I wanted only to flee, to get out of it, to protect myself from the onslaught. I didn’t want to be a gentleman and I hated my father for many things he’d done in the past, like when he made me mount a horse bareback or beat me in every game or called me weak and incompetent or mocked my grades in school. But I hated him with all my soul above all for betraying me by turning me over to the dancer of the veils while the rest of the audience exploded in laughter. I sought my mother’s protection and couldn’t understand why she didn’t come to my defense. My only recourse was the couch; I hid between its cushions and grabbed its legs as if to save myself from drowning. I closed my eyes and surrendered to God:Sweet God of mine, I pleaded,help, forgive me, help me!But sweet God did not reply and I heard only my father’s traitorous laugh, and, humoring him, the dancer’s laugh, harsh, defiant, mystical, mythical, irresistibly feminine. Until she turned away and continued her show, drawing in another tourist more eager to join her dance, who made a spectacle of himself, a disjointed puppet trying to imitate her body’s undulations. Meanwhile, I cowered on the couch, trying to make myself invisible so she wouldn’t think to press me again.
Then her voice and scent faded as she moved away, forgetting me already, ending her performance with full-bodied shimmies and a swirl of many-colored tulle, until she vanished forever behind a red curtain. An apparition, gone.
I’ve lost all my other memories of that trip to Egypt; I think I moved among mummies, temples, and pyramids like a zombie, without registering much and possessed by a single presence: hers. So that was the Queen of Sheba?
A couple of years later, once my father had abandoned us, leaving my mother and me in poverty, I saw the Queen of Sheba again. This second unveiling took place in a tiled plaza, as my mother and I were about to get into a horse-drawn cart that would take us around the old parts of that city. Suddenly I felt an unsettling presence and recognized her immediately: It was her, without a doubt, though she looked different this time, more sinister. It’s always been the same, in this second apparition, the first one, and all the ones to follow too—every time. Obsessively, though with slight variation, the Queen of Sheba has always manifested to me as both a threat and a temptation.
This second time, the queen had curly gray hair and wore too much eye makeup. She struck me as unattractive, though at some angles she looked better. She was wearing red, and in my shock she reminded me of Dana inGhostbusters, or rather, Dana draped in red veils, who was really Sigourney Weaver playing the role of Dana, that phantom nymphomaniac who in an erotic, cannibalistic frenzy pushes Bill Murray onto a bed and declares, “I want you inside me,” and Bill Murray, more brazen than me, replies, “I can’t. It sounds like you’ve got at least two or three people in there already.”
I immediately connected the dots: Dana was one of the Queen of Sheba’s many faces, Dana was one of her many names, Sheba was resurrected in this Dana approaching me in that tiled plaza, all properness and pretentions, to offer me a sprig of rosemary when my mother and I were about to climb into a horse-drawn cart.
“Take it,” this witchlike Queen of Sheba said to me, grabbing my arm so hard I couldn’t get away. “It’s for you, handsome, a gift I’m giving you.”
I liked the “handsome” part; in those days I was tall and gangly andhad serious doubts about my physical appearance. Handsome? Me? Wow, thank you. Susceptible as I was to flattery—all the more so when it came from Dana/Sheba—I took it as a command and accepted the rosemary sprig, though deep down I knew she was laying some sort of trap; nobody calls a skinny, acne-riddled preadolescent with zero sex appeal “handsome” unless they’ve got something up their sleeve.
“No gift for me?” the queen asked, pinching my arm.
“What do you want?” My voice came out in a whisper.
“Give me your watch.”
I felt obligated to obey, and was loosening the wristband when my mother intervened. She’d been watching, and now she pulled me back and accused Dana of abusing a young boy. I, the young, abused boy, yanked at my mother’s sleeve in an attempt to stop her from insulting the woman.
Careful, she’s the Queen of Sheba! I wanted to warn her, but my mother wouldn’t have understood what I meant.
“Get out of here, you hag, you thief!” she shouted at Dana, pulling out a coin and throwing it at her with contempt.
Queen Dana spat on the coin, threw it far, and glared at me, pointing her finger my way and uttering a curse that fell upon me like a bucket of dirty water.
“You’re a stupid boy,” she shouted at me, already walking away. “I curse you: Nobody will ever love you.”
I figured my mother and I had won the battle when our enemy left humiliated, but in the end it was only a partial triumph. The harshness of her prophecy stayed with me, this notion that no one would ever love me. My mother had to embrace and console me.
“I’ll love you forever,” she assured me, believing this could neutralize the spell.
But apparently it couldn’t, because three or four years later, before I turned fifteen, sorrow and misfortune swallowed me whole when a cancer that had long tormented my mother, and that she’d tenaciously battled to keep at bay, finally got the best of her and killed her.
My mother never cried, not even during the worst of her illness, when she suffered unbearable pain. She was tough, and wouldn’t soften, except at the thought of one memory that tormented her: that of a certain small girl in a country far away.
“She was lovely,” she told me, “a slip of a thing...”
And yet she had enormous eyes, too big for her face, dark eyes that knew too much, eyes of black fire that widened in fear, as if she knew what was happening, or perhaps because she didn’t understand. She couldn’t have been older than four, maybe five, with brown features so fine they seemed painted with a delicate brush, but with a rich tangle of hair that seemed to store up all her energies.
That’s how my mother described her, between hiccups and tears. My sweet, brave mother, who in her youth had been something of a missionary, a volunteer, always traveling to troubled, impoverished places, devoted to acts of charity and redemption. My mother wept as she talked about this child. She said that despite the passage of time, she couldn’t forget her; if anything, the girl only became more real with time, as if my mother carried her inside. The guilt had plagued her ever since that day in some desolate corner of the world, I don’t know where, when a mother approached her with a small daughter clinging to her hand. The mother delivered an order to her daughter in their language, an order understood by no one except the girl herself, who immediately attacked her with a valor unimaginable in someone so small. “With the force of a new recruit headed to war, she released her mother’s hand and grabbed mine,” said my mother, who was not yet my mother in the story but who would become her one day.
“Take her, keep the girl, I’m giving her to you,” the woman said, breaking into a run as my mother, shocked and confused, held on to the child’s hand.
The woman made a quick getaway, and once she was out of reach she turned back toward my mother and yelled, “Take her, I can’t feed her, she’ll starve to death here. Take her, she’s sick,” she begged.“You can cure her, you live far away, where there’s food, you can feed her, you can educate her, she’s a good girl, she’s ill, take her and heal her.”
