The air bristles with anticipation. Time becomes a square thing, the sky spins in slow spirals. Light blazes, the sun shines with its archetypal black crown. This proliferation of signs, what does itmean? Could they be new signals? The alaleishos discuss the matter and can’t agree. Is this meeting coincidental, or no? (Borges might ask himself that question.) Or does it happen, just because? The way, on a chessboard, the queen and the bishop meet face-to-face. An improbable thing: The bishop is a minor piece, and the great queen moves through squares he can’t access. Even so, the two face each other and graze each other with their breath. The beggar arrogant in his stinking rags, the princess modest in her black tunic and straw hat. He haughty, she serene.
A curious exchange takes place. She gives him a handout and he offers her a small object, yellow and heavy. She takes it, puts it away without looking at it, and later will forget it; she won’t remember she’s carrying that object in her pocket, like a captive bird.
A deep sound escapes the beggar’s throat, leaving everyone with their hair standing on end. It’s the wail of a deer, or the darkest tone of a cello. Then he says, in a booming voice, like Edward Norton inKingdom of Heaven: “I am Jerusalem.”
Is that what the beggar said? Goat Foot does something completely unexpected, removing her mask to let him look at her for an instant of true confrontation, or recognition, that could have gone longer if his convulsions hadn’t returned and changed him, changed the scene. Goat Foot gathers her abaya and continues on her path, leaving that place far behind to get free of the spell.
She stops to catch her breath at the doors of the Red Palace, her mother’s bustling home. This is where Goat Foot was born, in this unpleasant place that holds more resentments than it does memories. Her chest is heavy with an old knowledge: Nothing good can come from the Maiden. In the distance, a rooster sings and wild dogs howl. From the battlements, the queen’s archers aim their arrows at her, but they can’t intimidate her. Without windows or rooftop terraces, the building is turned inward, invaded by echoes, while on the outside it projects the solidity of a mountain. Biting the bullet, she crosses the drawbridge; down in the moat shesees packs of scavenging shadows that move restlessly, because it’s almost time to be fed by the guards.
Goat Foot reaches the great door, enters the palace, and advances carefully: She’s crossed the threshold. She walks through halls of illusion that reproduce false skies and simulate green landscapes. Her image is reflected on those walls, which slaves scrub daily until they’re as smooth and clean as mirrors. All is perfection and cleanliness: Her mother has a phobia of anything dirty. The air bears an aseptic stench of vinegar, steam from great cauldrons, smoke from branches burning in censers, fragrance-infused clouds. A rose-colored passage stretches out with soft, breathing walls, made of living material. A light flutter of helixes spinning in gelatin. There’s a cellular gurgle of nourishing substance, a maternal presence impregnates the whole dwelling and controls each atom. Goat Foot stumbles a little, recovers, keeps going.
At the end of that hall awaits the queen mother, in person. Goat Foot feels the same desolation she did the first time. She knows the protocol: She must not get close to the Maiden. She stays fifty paces away, facing once again the perfect and completely shaved oval of her mother’s head, her impassive and eternally beautiful face, her floating mantle of extremely white foam. She wears a necklace of tears and holds a green palm frond in her right hand, and a cup of forgetting in her left. She stands over pools of fire and, at her feet, a salamander lies like a lapdog.
“Peace be with you,mater amantissima.” Goat Foot grits her teeth and offers the required salutation.
Once again, life has placed her before her elusive mother, who holds her in a spell of love and hate. Before the vision of that extremely white mantle, Goat Foot recalls that when she was little she wanted to wrap herself in it—that cloud of foam, ethereal shelter—but her mother wouldn’t let her, shouting, “Don’t touch it, I don’t want you to infect my clothes with your smell!” Goat Foot closes her eyes, trying to block out the memory.
The Maiden cuts to the chase. Without bothering with courtesies, she relays the official message the emissary brought on his albino camel: From a remote land, a king formally requested Goat Foot’s hand, some royal singer and poet by the name of Suleiman, or Solomon, owner of huge flocks of sheep, a palace under construction, seven prior wives, and thirty concubines.
The ladies of the court emerge from the back of the royal hall, a troupe of sycophants and charmers who line up behind the Maiden. They memorized false praise to Solomon beforehand, and now they sing it sweetly, delighting in the details, above all the references to the suitor’s handsome physique and wealth, oh his black eyes deep as the sea, oh his long, curved lashes, his silky beard, his lavish retinue, his admirable wisdom. Goat Foot is wary of so much flattery. Her guard goes up. What mocking intentions hide behind her mother’s expressionless face? The Maiden, who’s never cared about her firstborn, suddenly set on arranging her marriage?
“When I was born, you sent me off to die. Now you want to marry me off to deport me even farther away?” Goat Foot protests, then immediately regrets it and goes quiet.
She’s forgotten her commitment not to let her feelings show in front of her mother. She contains herself so as not to reveal her complaints and grievances, withdraws discreetly the way she came, and seeks the exit through the rose-colored passage and the hall of mirrors. After the long voyage, back in her own encampment in Hadhramaut, she lets loose a string of insults, hurls her spit, kicks furniture, and swears she’ll never marry anyone, much less wed that worthless so-called king, that con man from nowhere.
“Who said the princess was pining for male company, what does she need it for?” chide the alaleishos, all of them stubborn spinsters or satisfied widows, women without men. “Does Goat Foot succumb to the spell of a man? No way. Not her! She’s not willing. She doesn’t want to submit to his control.”
Goat Foot has her own opinion and vocation. Does she reallyneed a man, she of the independent spirit, she of the strong character and ambiguous sexuality? She, the general of Sheba, she of the muscular back, well-toned arms, and troublemaker’s ways, she who eats with her hands and, when she’s done, wipes them on her blue kaffiyeh instead of washing them. She’s learned since childhood to slit ox’s throats and bleed them in the ancient way to purify their meat; she rides in the dizzying dromedary race, every year without fail, and although she doesn’t win, she makes it to the finish line and leaves alive, besting many riders and beasts who die in the attempt.
All right, all right. So does Goat Foot dislike men? Not necessarily, it could even be said that she’s attracted to them, above all if they’re young and dark-skinned, tall, silent, and prominent of nose. Even so, she doesn’t lower herself, she neither falls in love nor yields to them. She learned from the Maiden to keep distances as a way of imposing authority and strength of command, that’s how she gained the respect of the rugged people of the desert.
Gained respect?The alaleishos don’t approve of the phrase. It’s something harder, more radical. Like the Abyssinian lion, Goat Foot wants to inspire fascination and panic, and she imposes submission at the sharp end of a whip.Whip?That’s what the alaleishos say, but they’re known to exaggerate. They insist that the princess is so precise with the whip that a single lash can kill a fly on a horse’s ear, without the horse noticing. A warrior virgin, intact and splendid? That’s what some grandmothers believe, and they say that, in the matter of coitus, Goat Foot is as austere as her royal mother.
Others dissent. They say that, unlike the Maiden, Goat Foot indulges her desires and doesn’t deprive herself of the pleasures found in bed. She has a destiny like that of Patti Smith, who picks up the most striking and talented skinny guys in the East Village: Robert Mapplethorpe, Sam Shepard, Fred “Sonic” Smith, Tom Verlaine, Richard Hell, all of them artists, geniuses of the bohemian scene, introverted and melancholic. Patti likes them that way: divers of dark waters. Tall as posts; emaciated as beautiful corpses; classy butintentionally unkempt, as if they’d rolled out of a hipster party to sleep in their car; given to addiction to controlled substances, or not so controlled; hetero or bisexual; pretty-faced and long-haired and intensely eroticized. All of Patti’s lovers are cut from the same cloth.
As for the Princess of Sheba, she also can’t complain for lack of options. Among the shepherds, scribes, priests, animal trainers, sculptors, and riders in her own domain, there are many young men who are fantastic, cheerful, and handsome who’d eagerly accept a night with her or, in a stroke of luck, the chance to take her to the altar. And that’s without counting the wagon drivers, mathematicians, fighters, language teachers, astronomers, doctors, and bakers. So if she has the prettiest young men of the desert at her disposal, why should she accept something from outside that she doesn’t need? Why become the wife of a faraway monarch when, by defeating the Maiden, she could be crowned by her own right and in her own realm?
She puts it out of her mind, to the devil with that Solomon or Suleiman, with all his gold tributes, his poems, his concubines and wives, his silky beard and black eyes. “To hell with him,” she says, asking to be brought a wineskin. That night she drinks heavily, and the wine stirs in her a rare longing for true love. As if she were no longer herself but someone else, someone different and enthralled, she lets herself be lulled by a very old song she must have heard centuries before, during her subterranean seclusion. It’s a primitive music, sweet yet fierce at the same time, ceremonial and pagan, that sometimes lifts into lyric flights and at other times sounds like a muleteer’s simple tune. It’s a song that nested in the depths of her memory and now returns little by little, in disjointed fragments, as if drawn by a thread of nostalgia.... After a while, Goat Foot gets bored of daydreams, forgets all that lyricism, and goes back to overseeing her horses, camels, merchandise, and caravans.
While she was passing the time yearning for improbable loves, news of the marriage proposal spread through the kingdom of Shebaand its subjects entertained themselves with talk and speculation. Which throne is more splendid, Solomon’s or Goat Foot’s? His is marble, with ten stairs flanked by lions leading to the cushion where he rests his feet, which wear Roman sandals. And her throne? She boasts of having none apart from her horse’s saddle. Goat Foot, the richest woman in the land, dresses like a peasant, while Solomon uses elegance to compensate for what he lacks in wealth, and wears the finest mantles the textile industry of that era can produce, so exclusive that they even have their own name: The daytime one is called Birth and is hyacinth blue in color; the nighttime one is called Agony, and its color, Tyrian purple, is created from the secretions of nine thousand snails ground with a mortar. If anyone mentions, to Goat Foot, the white-domed palaces and temples that king is building in his city, she shoots back that her only home is the open road, her only roof the immensity of the sky. If they tell her that people refer to Solomon as Red-Hot Heart, that he doesn’t fear fire and that his face is aflame, she says, scornfully: Let him burn, I’ll scatter his ashes.
What cannot be, should not be. It’s no good trying to unite water and oil, white and black, what’s on this side and what’s on the other. Life, like a coin, maintains its two opposite sides, the head and tail never see each other, the obverse and reverse don’t meet, it’s even possible that neither side knows the other exists right behind them. So it is with the nomadic princess and the sedentary king, because he who sits feels mistrust and fear toward the person who’s in motion. And vice versa.
Goat Foot refuses to participate in the preparations her lady mother has begun for the future wedding, she will not share in the hopes or revelry. She won’t marry, she’s made up her mind. But doubts start circling her when she hears intriguing reports of that king’s furious beauty, his reputation as a passionate and despotic lover, the kind that suffers and makes others suffer too. He’s a prophet and poet, owner of horses and flocks, wheat fields and olive groves,and something nobody else possesses: a crop of Black Baccara, the black rose, the one that only sprouts in caverns, the rose that bleeds. Goat Foot knows about them, and understands that all the other roses, in their overcultivation, have gained in size and beauty, but have lost their scent. The black rose, meanwhile, has kept its wild fragrance. What she wouldn’t give to possess that fierce, untamed rose, which opens at night, alone, enclosed in its own circle and concealed from human eyes... Goat Foot’s mouth waters; she’d do anything to touch the Black Baccara, rose of anarchy!
But no. Calm down, calm down, no need to rush into anything or let yourself be seduced by passing whims, that king has too many names and that worries Goat Foot, who has heard him called Solomon, Logos, and Judah, also Temple and Jedediah, as well as Messiah, Lord, Israel, and Suleiman. “So many titles for a single man!” the princess grumbles, but even so, she runs them through her mind, trying to remember them, Messiah, Israel, Judah, Suleiman...
She too has her own rosary of names and nicknames, which Solomon utters on the other side of the world in his tallest tower: Goat Foot, Mekeda, Shekhina, Church, Torah, Bilkis, and Sophia. Wisdom, Soul, María, Aurora, Ennoia, and Anna-Livia. The faraway king savors those names, finds them exotic and sonorous, repeats them in a different order: Aurora, Shekhina, Pédauque, Torah, Anna-Livia, Ennoia, Sophia, Regina Sabae, Goat Foot, until the recitation makes the profane sacred and turns the spoken into a commitment and a promise.
Solomon and Sheba: Future spouses? For now, everything separates them—distance, habits, language. They worship rival deities and come from incompatible traditions. Nevertheless, there’s something in the very distance itself that connects them, something in their differences that equalizes them, and, in their foreignness, something that intrigues and attracts them both: We could say they wouldn’t seek each other if they hadn’t in some way found each other already.
But everything in love is a seesaw of tiring highs and lows, a vacillation between doubts and certainties, outbursts and abandon. Now the reference to that king’s wealth turns out to be more of a fable. In reality, Solomon’s nation is smaller and poorer than the one she could recover, if she wanted, when the Maiden dies, or abdicates, or gets bored of her role. Sheba’s kingdom is millennial and rooted in the dawn of time, while Jerusalem is a younger realm of warrior shepherds, flourishing because it inflicts military destruction on all its neighbors and forces them to pay taxes. That’s it! Finally, Goat Foot is clear on her lady mother’s ruse. What the Maiden really wants to do is strip away her daughter’s control of incense, perfumes, and caravans, hence the send-off to some lost land and the wedding to a pirate, an extortionist, a warring tyrant who would trap her forever. Curse you, Maiden, you malicious woman!
This whole affair must be thought through carefully, Goat Foot tells herself. She should calculate her next move, be cautious, turn the tortilla this way and that so the queen mother’s plan backfires against her. Even if that Solomon isn’t as rich as people claim, it’s known that he dominates a strategic position on the commercial routes that connect East with West. That is, in mercantile terms, he could well become a decisive partner in Goat Foot’s expansion of her commerce into new terrains. If he were to allow her free passage through his territories, she’d have access to the rich markets of Damascus, Sidon, and Tyre, as well as the port of Gaza, key to the Mediterranean.
And would it make her happy, a bond of convenience, a practical commercial alliance, even if it has nothing to do with that ancient music that on a recent night made her dream and weep? Also, not all the news is good: Now she’s hearing that he’s a somewhat sinister person, insatiably emotive, who has seven wives and is angling for another; he has wealth of his own yet harbors ambitions of taking more from others; he’s conquered nearby peoples and now wants to do the same to the people of Sheba; he’s mastered many wisdoms,yet they’re not enough; he owns treasures, but isn’t satisfied; he knows the earth’s secrets and aims to equally unravel the secrets of the sky.
Goat Foot is undecided, weighing pros and cons, shifting the scales this way and that. She thinks about this ambitious suitor who has everything, yet has nothing. She thinks of him and dares write him a message on a sheet of white flax, in a South Arabian tongue, in the Musnad script:
