That’s when my mother reacted, as the magnitude of what was at stake began to dawn on her, and she tried to chase the woman down and return the girl, but the woman was already blending into a crowd that parted like a sea and closed fast around her, swallowing her whole.
The child didn’t cry, only looked around with the seriousness of an adult, a kind of solemnity that left no room for tears, the stiff resignation of a little toy soldier.
There was something mysterious and sacred in that silent girl. Throughout the day, my mother stayed with her, the two fused in a kind of survival pact, or a complicity and support through this moment of great tension and uprooting. Who knows how many times my mother told me about how guarded the girl was, how shockingly whole and composed in the thick of the drama. Only her gaze betrayed her anguish as it lingered on each person, each object, with an intensity that bordered on X-ray vision. She wouldn’t eat, or say a word, or even respond when asked her name, and when offered toys, she took them politely and immediately put them aside, with the smooth and delicate manners seen only in those who are defenseless.
The woman had shouted that the child was sick. But with what illness? She had no fever, except in her gaze. The medical exam to which she was swiftly subjected revealed traces of malnutrition and a pallor rare in people of her coppery complexion. She seemed relatively healthy, though she did have a passive way about her, letting life go by without trying to change anything, as if she didn’t dare ask more of reality than it was willing to give, and my mother, despite her lack of training as a doctor or even nurse, immediately knew that if this child suffered from anything, it was the incurable ailment of sadness.
“I won’t say she looked at me with affection,” my mother confessed, “but with tolerance, a kind of acceptance, as if deep downshe trusted me and my ability to keep the commitment fate had thrust on us. And I let her down.”
They’d spent a long time facing each other, the child frozen like a deer in headlights, without protesting or begging, just there, rigid as a bird who’s flown into a window, sitting quietly as if she didn’t understand or, perhaps, as if she understood all too well. All of a sudden she reached out and brushed her fingertips along the blue silk foulard my mother wore around her neck, drawn by its intense colors, and finally let out a word, the only one she’d utter in the hours they spent together. “Azraq,” she murmured. Blue. Just that: blue. Then my mother took off her foulard, wrapped it around the girl’s shoulders, and said, “I’m going to call you Blue. For me, you’ll always be Blue.”
Meanwhile, the other people who were there made inquiries, sought a resolution to the impasse, searched fruitlessly for the girl’s mother. Nobody knew what to do.
Finally, exhausted, the girl closed her eyes from one moment to the next, and night had long fallen when representatives of a humanitarian organization arrived and offered to take charge. They took the girl, half asleep, still wrapped in blue silk, leaving my mother sick with attachment and guilt.
She never heard anything about the child again, and never forgave herself. I tried to calm her by pointing out the obvious: You can’t just take a kid like that, there are rules, laws for the protection of minors, they would have stopped you at the airport, you can’t fly off all of a sudden with a girl who isn’t yours...
My mother tried to justify her actions, but kept failing. To the point where she—that absent little girl—lived with us in her strange, nonexistent state through our searing living memory of her, which has become my inheritance. Although my mother always referred to her as Blue, I, true to my obsession, called her Little Sheba, imagining her as a tiny, delicate Queen of Sheba, fragile as a sigh, unreal as a memory, vague as old guilt. Blurred, like an echo of pain.
Goat Foot
Me? Not Queen of Sheba or queen of anything,” Zahra Bayda says, laughing. “But my very first grandmother may have been. Who knows. My grandmother’s grandmother’s grandmother’s grandmother, maybe that one; at least that’s what everybody says. Around here you can’t find a single person who doesn’t believe they’re descended from her.”
You could count them backward, one by one, the 120 grandmothers who’ve passed through the world between Zahra Bayda’s grandmother and that other ancestor lost in time. Only 120? That’s not too many, after all. Almost like yesterday.
Zahra Bayda is a trained midwife and also worked in Yemen as part of Doctors Without Borders. She doesn’t like the Queen of Sheba, and doesn’t even believe she really existed, she tells me to stop with the tall tales, she’s too busy with flesh and blood people to concern herself with ghosts. Though she confesses that she’s dreamed about her a couple of times.
“You see?” I say.
“What?”
“You dream of her too.”
“They weren’t dreams, they were nightmares.”
On the other hand, the old alaleishos revere their famous ancestor’s legacy as they cram into the kitchen and get high on khat. They chew and chomp on khat, and the ones without molars use their gums to crush the bright green leaves into a ball of paste they store in their cheeks like a lumpy tooth infection. The stories they tell have no endings and always start the same: “Once there was, or maybe there never was...”
After hours of chewing, at the edge of dawn, the old women feel a presence that prickles their skin and warms their souls. It ripples the air and brings glimmers of joy, or the sweep of great power, or a supernaturally beautiful light. Immediately they feel it: the queen’s kiss. The anthropophagous kiss, long and deep, fragrant or poisonous. It must be like Rimbaud’s venomous kiss in Hell, at least I think so; I tried khat once and all I sensed was its bitterness on my tongue. The grandmothers say the queen’s kiss spurs a fever, freezing you on the outside and burning you within. They warn me that for some, it’s a blessed kiss, for others it’s cursed, and you never know which way it’s going to go.
Possessed, the alaleishos declare: It’s her.
It’s her, she lives among us, she’s back. It’s the Queen of Sheba. And sinceShebameans “morning,” she’s the Lady of the Dawn, the Morning Star, Owner of Nothingness. The grandmothers recite their holy ancestor’s many titles and smile beatifically. “It’s her, she’s here,” they say, basking in the splendor of her visit.
The mythical Queen of Sheba: What was she like when she was alive, walking the earth? Vibrant, powerful, virile, and seductive, the way Citati describes the protagonists ofOne Thousand and One Nights.Also volatile, rude, stubborn, raised in a rough and bloody world. A formidable woman, violent and violated: provoked. As beautiful as Jerusalem and as terrible as troops in combat. And with an ever-gaping wound: her mother’s rejection and her expulsion from the realm.
Neither feminine nor masculine. Some ancient texts describeher as an idol to both sexes, with breasts and a beard, penis and vagina. Might the Queen of Sheba have been a great double being, blessed with a vague magnetism and explosive release? Maybe, who knows. Perhaps she possessed the whole sexual spectrum’s powers.
Could she have been as beautiful as they say? Horribly beautiful, like all mythological creatures. According to the Song of Songs—where she goes by the name of Shulamite—her eyes are like doves; her belly like a sheaf of wheat or valley of lilies; hair like flocks of goats leaping on the mountain; a forehead like a pomegranate; breasts like grapes on the vine or twin gazelles. This game of metaphors gains meaning in the context of the Song, but it’s hard to imagine if you approach it as a faithful portrait of a woman who undulates like wheat and lilies, leaps like goats and gazelles, and offers herself like pomegranates and grapes. Can it be? Yes, it can, at least for me, Bos Mutas, who in my ridiculous love for her associates her with a mad and happy flock of goats, or nymphs, as they climb a steep, foggy slope. I believe the Queen of Sheba resembles a goat or nymph more than she does Gina Lollobrigida, who plays her inSolomon and Sheba, the 1959 Technicolor movie. Imagine a Lollobrigida free and mad as a nymph or goat.
Princess of the Morning, Lady of the Southern Wind, Balkis, Aurora Consurgens, Makeda, Black Lion Whose Mane Entangles Centuries, Regina Sabae, and on and on... Despite her many titles, she had no name; according to the alaleishos, it’s because you don’t need a name if you don’t have anyone to call it with affection. Though they also say she did have a name, but that it was so secret that not even her own mother knew it, a gesture of indifference and neglect, painful as a thorn in the daughter’s heart, but that in the end it turned out to her advantage, because you can’t be vanquished by someone who doesn’t know the letters of your name.
Around here, the old women believe that if the Queen of Sheba had no name, it wasn’t a loss but an abundance, that instead of one,she had many, as happens to beings who transform and have many faces. She is all and none and at the same time she is herself, the legendary limping queen, and she is also Shulamite, the obsessed and sensual lover in the Song.
Hidden behind many names, she’s been muse to poets, to sleepwalkers, to mystics and punks; the goddess of drug addicts, of the dying, of geniuses and illuminati; a prophetess among lunatics and sages; the stormy moods of artists and depressives. Woman among women, but not pure, nor virgin, nor blessed, but rather boundto eros, to demons, to ghosts and secret tongues.1 Conceived in a time of giants and monsters,she grew unrestrained at her terrible games2 and was marked by a defect that, according to some grandmothers, was a simple limp, and according to others, a more severe symptom, such as a webbed left foot like that of a goose, or a cleft hoof. Goat foot: There’s duality in the might of that woman who’s both a walker and someone who limps, nomadic and impaired. The story of her foot might be imaginary: a physical expression of the irreparable harm or ever-open wound of loves interrupted. Though her most devoted followers play it down, saying it was simply a matter of too much hair on her limbs. A furry queen, blessed with natural hybridity between human and animal realms, a living incarnation of the black-maned lion kept in a cage at the Addis Ababa Zoo.
A woman covered in hair: divine gift or shame? Sign of excellence or of unworthiness demanding punishment? The Princess of Sheba spurs conflicting emotions.
At the opposite extreme stands her mother, the titular queen, called the Maiden because she’s captivating in her pure, eternal youth. In the Maiden there is no depth, no abyss, her whole being visible at the surface. Every day, she spends long hours gazing at her face in the mirror, ecstatic before the glow of her skin, as smooth and pure and hairless as an eggshell, which could be a secret sexual frustration, becauseno one has a keener thirst for ferocious sexuality than those who inhabit the cold mirrors3... with her unhinged mind,and her wild narcissism, her body at once rigid and tormented with lust... she was always searching, looking for she knew not what.4
