“When I saw my sister Alfarah screaming in pain, unable to pee, and with terrible swelling,” Zahra Bayda says, “I wanted to know why. And I started to suspect something. I started to investigate. I knew our grandmother had donethatto her. I also knew that one of my married sisters had become barren because of that, and that another had died because of sepsis caused by that. At that time, I was ten, and I understood the cruel myths of feminine blood: Menstrual blood was disgusting and a source of shame, while the blood of lost virginity was precious, more valuable than rubies. I also understood another thing. I knew well that I’d be next.”
From that day on, Zahra Bayda stays as far away from her mother as she can. She has a good pretext, namely, her duty to take the four black-headed sheep out to graze in nearby valleys. She’s home less and less, only for the essentials, grabbing something to eat and running back out; in such a large family, her absence goes almost unnoticed. She takes the precaution of showing up only when her brothers are present, as they protect her; they are against that, they believe it’s bad, they don’t want to marry mutilated women because they’re cold and indifferent in bed. They’re more modern: They want warm, passionate wives.
“At that time I was so thin that one day, at school, no one recognized me. I was eating so little, I’d become my own shadow. I stayed hidden, and that’s how I saved myself from that,” Zahra Bayda says, “but that doesn’t mean I was completely saved.”
“What happened? The rape, what happened?” I sensed the moment had arrived to ask the question.
“I rarely think about it. I carry it inside, but don’t often think of it,” she says. “I’ve tried to separate it from me. I’ve also tried to see it through those men’s eyes. It was brutal, what they did to me, and yet there was so much camaraderie among them, or, better put, complicity. A group of adults playing adolescents’ dirty games, as if thesexual urge were more of a matter between them than with me. I’m telling you all this after years of reconstructing, deciphering, daring to remember, though all I retain is blurry pieces. The details escape me, or maybe I never fully registered them, not even in the moment. There are things I’m definitely clear on, for example, that my annihilation was their victory. A dirty ceremony, you understand? An act of war, or revenge. But I’m giving you my old burden of pain! Can you bear it? Then I’ll go on. After that happened, all that was left of me was a blur of agony, a semiconsciousness between helplessness and rage, and then only weariness, an infinite weariness, and a river of fog that carried me, carried me. A river that was my own death. I don’t know how long I spent lying on the ground, which was soft and damp, wet with my blood. Light left the sky and filled it again, one or two more times, and I remained there, still and far away, surrendered to darkness like the dead.
“One of my paternal uncles, Tammam, was a merchant who often traveled and brought presents back for us children, small amulets he’d gather along the road. I loved him and always looked forward to his return, because he was good at telling stories about the faraway places he’d seen. He spoke of mountains that moved, crystal palaces, and other wonders, but I most liked to hear him talk about Barhout, the Well of Hell in the middle of the Al-Mahra Desert, in the east of Yemen. It was an enormous hole, almost four hundred feet deep and a hundred wide, and had been there forever, millions and millions of years without anything entering, not even the rays of the sun. Nor did anything come out of there except noxious vapors, as if the planet were farting. Uncle Tammam would draw a great circle in the sand, and say: Look, that’s what it’s like, but a thousand times bigger, and round as the moon at its fullest, and deep as the tallest tower is high. It’s horribly empty and reaches the center of the earth, it’s the navel of the world,umbilicus orbis. According to locals, the depths used to hold people in chains, because the great hole of Barhout was a demons’ prison. Uncle Tammam believed thisto be ignorant talk. And he’d turn to me, place his hand on my head, and ask: Tell me, Zahra Bayda, you’re such a smart girl, what do you think is in the great hole of Barhout? I knew beforehand what he wanted to hear, and said: There’s nothing in the great hole, esteemed Uncle Tammam. Then he’d say: Well said, Zahra Bayda, that’s almost right, but not completely, in Barhout there isn’t simply nothing, what’s there is Nothingness, which makes it even more disturbing. You see, Bos Mutas. I’m telling you this story about my Uncle Tammam so you’ll understand me: After the day I was raped, I sank, I kept sinking deeper and deeper into a Nothingness like the great hole of Barhout. You understand? I lived in that deep hole. I turned into nobody, or merged with that Nothingness. Even today, I still occasionally end up there, in the depths, and when that happens it’s hard for me to get back out. If you see it happening, don’t try to help me, Bos, you’ll only be frustrated. I’ll eventually rise back out of there on my own.”
“Let’s go back to the moment when the men left you lying in a pool of blood,” I ask.
“I was there for some time—I don’t know how long—wishing the sand would swallow me, I think that’s the state I was in, just like that, nothing else, with no urgency, no fear. Until I remembered the sheep; where were my sheep? I looked up, didn’t see them, and anguish buzzed at me like a wasp and wouldn’t go away, it kept humming at me and shaking me, keeping me from sliding away on the river of sleep. Where were my four sheep? Could they have gotten lost? Had they been stolen? I got up as best I could. I had to find my sheep. I walked for a long time, calling to them, but they were nowhere to be found. I didn’t want to go home without them, for fear of punishment. How could I explain that I’d lost them? I think I cried more over the sheep than myself. I have no clear memory of the days or months that followed. Something in me had closed, like a door slammed shut by a gust of wind. What those men had torn and broken was sealed under lock and key, and that tumult stayedenclosed inside me, like a corralled horse that won’t stop kicking until it destroys everything from within.”
At some point her abusers returned and picked her up, took her to their own village, and kept her there for some time. They used her however they wanted and only let her go when she became pregnant. At that point the girl Zahra Bayda really did have a reason not to return to her family.
“I was scared of my own people. The loss of the sheep ended up being the least of my concerns. The worst part was that my rapists belonged to an enemy clan. I couldn’t go home pregnant, no family wants its enemies’ offspring, and of course my family didn’t either. In Somalia, rape isn’t only an act of aggression against a woman, but also an act of war against that woman’s clan. Men rape to offend, to harm, to dishonor. That’s why a child born of rape is considered so unwanted, so dangerous; the baby will have enemy blood and must not be allowed to live. I had no choice but to leave. I walked and walked, for days and days. I joined other people who were fleeing too. I walked at the edge of a wandering crowd, a vast million-footed animal that pushes forward without knowing where it’s going, only knows it has to go. I fell behind when the pregnancy kept me from being able to continue, and when my strength failed me, I stopped. I gave birth to my daughter in the rain, on the side of a muddy road, with no one to help me. But my daughter was born far away and that was good, far enough away, that was all that mattered to me. Luckily I was able to raise her even farther away, where my people could never find her. They don’t even know she exists; if they had known, she wouldn’t be alive.”
“Why don’t you ever talk about her?”
“My daughter is my joy and my secret.”
You’ve Really Got to Think About It
The Maiden, enthused by the offer of some king in Jerusalem and determined to marry off her lame daughter, orders that she appear immediately. Reluctantly, Goat Foot complies. Even though she’s become more powerful than her devious mother, she still doesn’t dare openly defy her. Deep down, she hasn’t lost hope of receiving a maternal embrace, and she heeds the call despite an inner voice that warns nothing good can come of this.
She decides to travel to Mamlakat Aldam by foot, not horseback, to give her time alone and tame the chaos of her thoughts. She prepares for the road by wrapping her body in strips of black cloth, like a shroud, leaving no inch of skin exposed. Over that, a long abaya. Face covered with a crude leather mask in the style of Hannibal Lecter. On her head, a tall, wide-brimmed straw hat; on her neck, all her amulets. Dressed this way, she looks like the witch Goya painted during one of his murky states of consciousness. But things are simpler than that, she’s just dressed in the manner of local shepherdesses, the ones whose armpits exude a dense, smoky scent, who have to bear long journeys in the stifling heat, who can’t find shade as they guide their flocks in search of grass in those eerie valleysfull of ruined fortresses and bloody temples, where only this witchy clothing can protect them from the fury of the sun.
With a defiant gleam in her right eye and a cloud of distrust in her left, the princess undertakes the journey across Hadhramaut, its yellow desert littered with black stones, where death awaitslike a leopard lying in the sun.1Locus eremus: mystical barren place. Valley as sacred as an ancient temple, where—Nerval would say—the god hides under the skin of stones.
Although the trip will be long and risky, Goat Foot won’t flaunt any caravans or armed warriors. She’ll only call for the simoom, the young red wind that holds the qualities of all that spins, that flips and unfurls, and that’s always been her accomplice and protector. When simoom whips up, its strength is equivalent to an army’s. The Bedouins fear its onslaught. They call it Is-Tifl, thief of children, and they make their small children wear backpacks full of stones so the weight will stop gusts from whisking them away. They also call it Malandro, because at night it tears the wool coverings off awnings, makes them fly, and sends people running to get their roofs back. There are times during which the simoom blows gently and stealthily into tents without waking a soul, refreshing men, caressing women, and chasing flies from children’s eyes. Then the Bedouins bless it and call it Rakhim, the melodious.
“Come here, Red!” Goat Foot calls the simoom by its familiar name. “Come, Red, come!”
The simoom crosses the desert to heed the call. It comes obediently, sweetly, whistling symphonies, spinning clockwise. Goat Foot strokes its neck as if it were a colt and dives into its turbulence as if into a stream. If she tires, he breathes encouragement.
They say goodbye on arriving at Mamlakat Aldam. The simoom gets lost on the horizon and Goat Foot enters the labyrinthine alleys that curve between the thousand shops of the bazaar. Washhouses, silversmiths, inns, jewelry shops, vendors of fabric and spice. An overexcited hive of merchants, vendors, orphans, outsiders, goats, chickens,stray dogs. Alone, limping laboriously on the long walk, Goat Foot moves through the great market’s effervescence. In her dominions in Hadhramaut she spends more time with the silence of the dead than the noise of the living; here she’s bewildered by music and loud announcements, smoke clouds, the sting of spices, the glow of colors, the bittersweet steam of meat exposed at the butchers’ bazaar. The crowd recognizes her despite her witchy clothing and yields a path for her. “Move aside,” they whisper to each other, “move over, it’s the lame daughter of the Maiden, let her pass, it’s her, is it her? Yes, it’s her!”
The princess limps on through air infested by a court of miracles, a carnival of crutches or dance of the ragged and the gaunt. Lepers, cripples, trash eaters, garbage pickers who beat the palace doors in hopes of a handout. They display their sores, their mutilated arms, their legs as twisted as gnarled branches, their pain that has no mouth or scream, their red moles. The dying unbandage their rotted hands and stretch them toward the princess, hoping she’ll deign to look at them and throw them the coins of contempt.
Within this smelly, sorrowful throng, Goat Foot, the Black-Maned Lioness, thinks she detects something familiar lurking, a figure she’s felt very close before, though she doesn’t know when, someone who’s following her, or hounding her? There it is, in that pile of spurned people, there’s that presence, not as a sensation so much as a certainty, it’s there, no doubt about it. She distinguishes him in the mob, standing out, isolated in his own storm, dandy of the slums, remover of illnesses, lord of misery. It’s him, him again, that young man with a feverish fire in his eyes.
“What’s going on with that man, why is he writhing so grotesquely?” ask the alaleishos.
He suffers from a condition called the mercury illness. Common to those who are bedeviled or possessed, the sickness lashes the body, distorts features into wild expressions, and spurs limbs into disjointed motion. With each toss of the head, the man’s face is whipped by his own curls.
Goat Foot hears the needy refer to him as the Puppet. The Puppet? Yes, it seems as if strings were pulling at his arms and legs from above, forcing jagged shakes and violent movement. They also call him the Restless One, or the Prince: His disease is the same one kings inherit in their blood. The same one that befalls hatmakers, saddlers, miners, and anyone who exposes himself by trade to quicksilver, or mercury.
Though he arrives in the district singing with hornpipes and castanets, his contortions scare the good neighbors, who chase him away with sticks. His name is Marcabrún.
Marcabrún, son of Marcabruna. The son succumbed to mercury poisoning, the mother a leper.
There is Marcabrún in this precise moment, in front of Goat Foot, who stares at him, perplexed. It’s him: a living spasm of tortured beauty. The air of a defeated king or starving lion. From his tall height, the beggar tilts his head. He’s all red eyes beneath the dense curve of his eyebrows, fixing his gaze on the princess and leaving her smitten, as if shot by an arrow: His gaze hits the mark, pierces it.
Goat Foot notices that the man’s fleshy—sensuous?—lips move as if uttering words that make no sound. Is he insulting her? Shouting mute obscenities? Is he revealing secrets she can’t hear?
The Puppet’s tremors ease, and he approaches, until he’s less than arm’s distance away. Goat Foot’s heart beats hard. The man walking toward her is not a sick beggar; he’s impoverished illness personified. Will he infect her, cover her with death? Instinct tells her to back away and flee contact, but she stays still. There’s something sacred in this man that paralyzes her. He’s so close now that he could push her or tear her jewels off, scratch her chest, lick her cheeks, kiss her mouth. But he doesn’t.
