The pédauque legend endures and recurs throughout the centuries, reappearing in our times in magnificent figures such as Frida Kahlo, the great Mexican Goat Foot marked from childhood with its unmistakable sign. When she was six, polio attacked her right leg, leaving it thinner and shorter than the left, so that she had to wear orthopedic socks and shoes to hide the scrawniness of the affected calf. Later, her pédauque condition would mark her in a brutal way. Child of Sorrows, Madonna of Suffering, Virgin of the Ten Spades, at the age of seventeen, Frida is on a bus that crashes into a moving tram. She emerges from the accident destroyed by an iron bar that tore through her, stabbing into her left side, shattering her hip and spine to come out through her pelvis, damaging several internal organs along the way. Years later, her right leg succumbs to gangrene and is amputated.A few little peckslike those of a bird, that’s what she’d call—with a very Mexican sense of humor—her endless wounds, fractures, and punctures that never fully heal and that torment her for life, forcing her to permanently wear a plaster corset, move with crutches or a wheelchair, and spend long periods of time immobile in bed.
Beautiful, hairy Frida, long-suffering, rebellious, and brilliant: a majestic pédauque who deserves the title not only because of her great talent and her foot, but also because of her hirsute condition, which she bears with pride and records in her self-portraits, in which she appears fine and very thin, in plaster corsets and traditional Mexican dress, with obvious fuzz darkening her upper lip. When she marries Diego Rivera, a very large, fat painter, their friends say it’sthe union of an elephant and a dove, and that Frida envies Diego’s boobs while Diego envies Frida her mustache.
In the lineage of pédauques, we can’t forget Patti Smith, included as a distinguished member ever since a concert she gave one certain January 23, in a sports arena in Tampa. From the start, things get out of control and the show goes off the rails. Patti seems determined to put everything into giving the six thousand people in the audience an unforgettable experience, a chance to make up for the limited success of her last album. On this night, her band plays with a demonic spirit and her performance crosses the line. She wants to surrender to it; she wants to captivate. She moves as if possessed, murmuring spells and screaming like an animal. She improvises a frenetic choreography. She crosses the stage, spinning like a whirling dervish, head flung back, eyes half shut. The music explodes with intensity and Patti Smith hurls out one of her famous defiant phrases:C’mon, God, make a move!1 At that very moment her feet tangle with a black speaker camouflaged in shadows. Patti Smith falls headfirst into the void like a wingless angel and smashes into the cement floor fifteen feet below. Daugherty, her drummer, would later say that as he watched her fall, he thought, My god, she’s either dead or going to leap right back onstage. Patti Smith isn’t dead, but she’s almost there. She took the impact on her back and head and lies in a pool of blood. She’s shattered vertebrae in her neck and several bones in her face. She’ll need twenty-two stitches, her vison will be fogged, she’s temporarily lost the use of her legs.
All this demonstrates that a limp is no hateful defect, as the Maiden sees it, no source of shame. Just the opposite: It’s a rarified gift, a mark of extraordinary lineage, of great culture, energy, beauty, and sexual powers. Not for nothing does the astute Suleiman, or Solomon, set his sights on finding Goat Foot and send her a marriage proposal as soon as he learns that she’s the pédauque heroineof Hadhramaut. She, for her part, resigns herself to the hardships and pain of that broken foot, that twisted goose foot or clubfoot, though at the same time, as an unmistakable sign of divinity, it strengthens the myth of the Queen of Sheba through the centuries of centuries.
III
Nocturnes
The peaceful night
as with the winds of dawn,
quiet music, the sound of solitude,
a dinner that stirs delight and love.
—Juan de la Cruz
Burning Red Moon
Somalia, burning red moon. Zahra Bayda was born in the capital, Mogadishu, called Moga by its residents, an enigmatic, bristling, dangerous city, its electric air awash with dust, its buildings in ruins, its lives at the knife’s edge of revenge. Snipers’ mecca. Soccer matches that devolve into stabbings. Machetes drawn at the slightest provocation. Madness brought on by the sun’s fury, night panics, bloody initiation rites. If you ask the children where they’re from, they respond by imitating a gunshot into the air: Moga! Boom, boom, boom!
Killing as tribal duty. Countryside destroyed by invasions and civil wars. Clans who burn crops and rape their enemies’ women. There’s no way to live, no work to be found, nothing left but hunger, sand, stones... and weapons. Alarming numbers of weapons. Traffickers, pirates, and foreign armies have left a trail of them, enough for the local population to exterminate each other completely.
It’s hard for me to understand Somali pride, the devotion to those desolate and blood-drenched deserts that to them are a Garden of Eden. How can you fall in love with hell? Despite the cruel environment, Mogadishu inspires, in those who leave it, nostalgia and an eagerness to return.
“You too, Zahra Bayda?” I ask her. “Do you suffer from longing too?”
“Somalia pains me, I carry it inside me like a wound, and I dream of going back. But nationalist pride isn’t my thing, the world is big and round and in my reach.”
Untamable Somalia defeats everyone, but above all it defeats, punishes, and bleeds itself. Zahra Bayda quotes an old Somali saying to me: With my brother against the rest of my family; with my family against my clan; with my clan against the other clans; all the clans together against the rest of the world.
Zahra Bayda comes from one of the so-called weak tribes of Baidoa, the Rahanweyn, farmers who have no weapons and are therefore attacked and massacred by strong tribes, such as the Marehan and the Ogaden. Fleeing Baidoa, city of the living dead, her family sought refuge in Mogadishu, which, along with Baidoa and Kismayo, forms a triangle of horror.
“So much death infused me with passion for life,” Zahra Bayda tells me. “You learn to be strong even when you’re not. You find a balance between the fear of dying and the euphoria of continuing to live in spite of everything.”
She’s the daughter of a poor man’s third wife. She had twenty-four siblings, seventeen of them dead: seven by hunger or sickness, and ten by violence. Once a month she calls her mother and asks: How are things, do you think I could return? Her mother always replies, Not yet, my daughter, things are bad here, wait a little longer. Zahra Bayda lives in wait for the day and hour when her mother says: Come home now.
As an adult, she’s started to understand her long-suffering, submissive mother, even to appreciate her, recognizing her quiet way of protecting her daughters from hunger, their father’s fury, the lust of men, and general violence.
“Do you want to tell me?” I ask.
“Tell you what?”
“Your life.”
“In your dreams.” She rebuffs me every time.
Until today. She has to call her mother at an agreed-upon time, but her phone isn’t charged, so I lend her mine. A while later, when she comes back to return it, she seems worried. She tilts her head and lowers her gaze in a way I haven’t seen before, you could say she strikes me as vulnerable, or defenseless. She’s unrecognizable, she who’s always throwing her self-confidence and colossal self-esteem in your face, now suddenly here, like a punished child. Evening falls coolly, and I propose a walk to some nearby ruins where the sunsets are gorgeous.
We climb a mound of enormous stones, sit high atop it with our legs dangling into the void, and there, unexpectedly, she breaks her secrecy and lets her memories escape.
“My daughter is called Iftiin, which in Somali means ‘light,’” she says. “Iftiin Ferrer. She’s completing a degree in social anthropology at the University of Barcelona.”
“Do you realize,” I say, “that I don’t know you? I didn’t even know you had a daughter...”
