“What about Layal’s father?”
“What does it matter who he is? Only you would think of asking such a question.”
“It’s the missing piece.”
Zahra Bayda tilts her head and stares at me, amazed, the way dogs stare at small moving things.
“This is life, Bos Mutas,” she lectures. “Not stories for you to write in your notebook.”
I like Zahra Bayda, I really do, I recognize the warmth I feel for her. But sometimes I find her frankly unpleasant. Maybe that’s not the right adjective; perhaps, instead, barely pleasant. Between one term and another, something, some description, escapes me. So what I write is just stories? I keep quiet.
Maybe I deserve the snide remark; while others live and struggle, risk their necks, cure people, and make history, I’m the one straggling behind them, making notes on paper. Me, Bos Mutas, the mute ox. I remember when my parents gave me my first puppy, a mutt they found on the street. I became wildly attached to that dog and poured all the affection of my sad childhood into him. I named him Mazinger Z, like the cartoon monkey superhero, the most inappropriate of names for a tiny, weak, woolly dog. I was a lonely kid, Mazinger was a ball of joy, and we became inseparable friends. One day I heard someone ask my father about me, and I was stunned by his response.
“The boy?” he said. “The boy spends all his time with that dog, like a moron with a stuffed animal.”
A moron with a stuffed animal. I, the poor moron, and Mazinger, a poor stuffed animal, that’s what my dog and I were to my father.
At times I love Zahra Bayda, and at other times I don’t. I’m exhausted by the roller coaster of my uncertain passion. A gesture, a word, a silence is enough to propel me to the skies; a word, a silence, a gesture is enough to smack me down to the ground. I love her a lot, a little, not at all, that’s how it’s been for me lately, like petals pulled from a daisy. I’ve burned too many neurons on this improbable math. Luckily there are no daisies in this desert.
I seek out Zahra Bayda and stand in front of her. Although she’s very tall, I’m a head taller and can look her up and down.
“Listen,” I say, “you should know something: I’m no moron with a stuffed animal.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Hanani’s son is growing up, soon he won’t be a boy at all but a man, he’ll want to know who his father is, and he’ll investigate. He’ll demand to be told that story. And I’m not some moron with a notebook.”
“You?” she says, and laughs. “You’re a good man, Bos, that’s why I love you.”
She’s just said that she loved me because I’m good. Kindness, that undervalued virtue.Goodhas become a sterile, asexual word. Me, a good man? Her comment makes me feel winged and dopey, like a rosy-cheeked cherub.
“You’re very good and you look good too,” she says, flirtatiously, coming up close to smooth my wrinkled shirt collar. Then she turns and leaves, singing to herself, “Yay le-le-le, yay le-le-le.”
“Yay le-le-le,” how sharp she is, that Zahra Bayda.
The Pédauque Dynasty
Lavish hair on a female body, the defect that led to Goat Foot’s disownment and exile. But is it really such a monstrous defect? Zahra Bayda knows an ancestral technique for getting rid of it that consists of spreading a mix of arsenic sulfide, honey, and quicklime along the body. Careful: This salve can be dangerous. It can inflame and burn the skin if not removed immediately, but when it’s used right it can pull up hair by the root... as long as themuzayyin, or shaver, is highly skilled with the mussel shell, whose razor’s edge is sharper than hunger itself.
“People fear the muzayyin,” says Zahra Bayda. “They marginalize them, avoid looking at them, believing their job to be profane and somehow perverse. That’s why the work is almost always done by foreign women, who already carry stigma and so have less to lose. The muzayyin know how to remove that caustic salve from the body fast enough to prevent burning, and they have the needed expertise to avoid cutting the skin with the sharpened shell.”
So if the remedy was known, why didn’t Goat Foot solve her hypertrichosis problem from the get-go? According to one version, she was impeded by the Maiden, who declared that any muzayyin who shaved Goat Foot would have her throat slit with one swift cut bythe same mussel shell she’d dared to use. Another version tells that Goat Foot herself had rebelled outright, embracing her hairy condition and refusing to allow any shaving.
It’s no surprise. Hair is still hair, in mythic times and in our own, and as with Sheba, another great woman has defended the right to flaunt improper hair, and that is Patti Smith, my beloved punk singer, my absolute favorite, a potent kind of contemporary Queen of Sheba, irreverent and untamed, who has been called the Punk Queen of Sheba for good reason. For one of her album covers, Patti Smith chose a photo of herself in a tight undershirt, gaze turned inward, arms high, armpits exposed and unshaven. The record label shouted to high heaven. Hair in underarms! Repugnant, completely unfeminine, a real affront to public decency! The album stirred up irrational fury. Stores refused to display it in their front windows.
Shame. But not for Goat Foot, nor for Patti Smith: Both of them conveyed their respective pilosity with admirable aplomb.
Hair, hair, hair. Why abhor a few poor strands growing in armpits and groins, well-oiled with pheromones, whose noble purpose is to make us sexually attractive? Why are matters of hair so complicated, those hairs in particular and all of them writ large?
I’ve lived that drama in the flesh, because I, Bos Mutas, also came to the world almost as hairy as a bear cub, or perhaps as a half-shorn bear cub. But my mother didn’t reject me for that. Since I was a baby with chest hair, my mother would say to people: My child was born wearing a little vest, my boy will never be cold. But not everyone responds so cheerfully. I’ve also had onerous requirements put on me because of it. The very first girlfriend I more or less had, just before I joined the monastery, told me she’d kiss me if I got hair removed, so I let her take me to a place called Rabbit’s, where they pulled the hair from my chest and shoulders with hot wax while I screamed. A medieval torture, physically speaking; the emotional damage immediately followed, when I felt myself a stranger in my own poor scalded skin, and saw myself as bald and white as a guava’s worm.
On the other hand, there’s the matter of the clubfoot, or goat foot, the second reason for her queen mother’s spurning and punishment. The thing is, the Maiden, uncultured and arbitrary as she is, knows nothing about the powerful legion of pédauque queens, among whom her firstborn is a main figure.
Pédauque, from the Occitan wordpé d’auca, or “goose foot,” and by extension “goat foot,” “eagle foot,” “fox foot,” and in general the foot of any animal, is a mark of higher wisdom and talent that characterizes a series of women, Bigfoot women, recognizable through their limp. Their dynasty begins with prehistoric creatures such as Yetis with their long hair, deadly claws, and difficulty walking on slopes because of their defective feet. Herders of the yaks that populate Yeti territory, knowing their weakness, advise fleeing them by running downhill.
The pédauques also include the Sasquatch, another branch of the Bigfoot family. These are giant females whose existence is questioned, despite the footprints they’ve left on five continents. In the Middle East, pédauques arrive on the scene with Goat Foot, princess and heiress to Sheba, and later they arrive in Europe with the Queen Pédauque, of Visigoth origins, from the Toulouse region. And with the Scandinavian goddess Freya, a warrior with a falcon foot and a feathered cloak that makes her fly. Or the German goddess Berchta, with one foot bigger than the other, predecessor to the long line of Berthas who over the centuries would inherit the same condition. Among them the historic Bertrada of Prüm, also called Bertrada the Old, mother of Bertrada the Young and grandmother to Charlemagne. Then there’s Berthe au Grand Pied, or Bertha Broadfoot, a princess who was replaced by an impostor until her mother, seeing she had webbed toes, recognized her as her unique and legitimate daughter.
The feminine myth of pédauques has its masculine equivalent in the royal family of Labdacus, a name that means “one who limps.”The Labdacus family ruled the city of Thebes, and its most renowned member was Oedipus. The shepherd who was supposed to kill the newborn Oedipus changed his plans, left him alive, pierced his heel, and ran a cord through it to carry him on his back, as was done with small prey from the hunt; this caused the legendary defect his descendants would inherit.
