Goat Foot didn’t live long enough to learn that her secret recipe would be revealed, at least in part, and that today it’s imitated by some perfumes on the market. Among them are two, referred to as Oriental, that might resemble—however timidly—the fragrance Goat Foot achieved by mixing olibanum’s white blood, the stag’s golden musk, and black rose extract, plus that scrap of death that crouches inside all that lives.
One of those two modern perfumes is Gold, by Amouage, whose origin seems drawn fromOne Thousand and One Nights.The royal family of Oman, wanting to capture jasmine, musk, frankincense, and other legendary scents of Muscat nights, reached out to the Frenchman Guy Robert and gave him the job of all perfumers’ dreams: Use whatever you want, no matter the cost, and make the most sumptuous essence in existence. Guy Robert was up to the task, and created Gold.
The other inheritor of this legacy is L’Air du Désert Marocain, byAndy Tauer, the discreet Swiss who personally oversees a boutique perfumery where he managed to harmonize musk with extracts of a semiprecious stone, amber; a spice from the precolonial Americas, vanilla; a bisexual flower, styrax; and a ritual resin, frankincense, to produce his potent essence, at once ancestral and intimate.
When certain nearly extinct big cats, like the clouded leopard or the Iberian lynx, seem indifferent or unwilling at the time for copulation, it is said that it’s enough to douse them in Obsession, the Orientalist formula by Calvin Klein, to unleash their sexual frenzy. So. The jasmines of Oman, lovestruck leopards, extracts of bisexual flowers, all that is the stuff of dreams, and worthy are the perfumes that pursue, in our times, the excellence of mythic Hadhramaut. But as for any equals to it, naturally, there are none.
The Eyes of a Child
In this country everything is white.
—Marcel Schwob
The convoy of wounded children is already on its way over. There are seventeen of them, some with their mothers. They’re coming from Taizz. Described as a majestic city by Ibn Battuta, the great fourteenth-century Arab traveler, today Taizz is in ruins, blockaded, bereft of food and supplies, turned into a battlefield, its only hospital bombed and its medical workers under threat. People die for lack of health care: birthing women, newborns, starving children, the elderly. The few health clinics still remaining are targets of war, so people are afraid to go near them. The population is sick with terror, a contagious illness with no cure.
They sent us the most gravely hurt children in an effort to save their lives. Here the situation is less critical than there, though who knows for how long; war invades everywhere, like fog. For the moment, our headquarters can still operate, though with only half the team. Zahra Bayda and two others had to leave to serve as reinforcements in another zone, and their absence weighs heavily here, doubling the workfor those of us who stayed. Even so, we managed to build a temporary house for the wounded children of Taizz. They’re being transported in five vans, and after a week on the road they still haven’t arrived; the six estimated hours of travel have become six days, and who knows how much is left. They can’t advance in single file, as planned, because of missiles, long waits during intense assaults, checkpoints run by tribes, barricades, and the troops of various factions.
Occasionally, Zahra Bayda calls, and I race to answer; we only speak a few minutes, there’s so much work there’s no time for anything more, but those minutes are intense, her voice crosses all those lines of fire and reaches me from afar.
We’re told over the radio that three of the children have died; the precarious care in the ambulance wasn’t enough to keep them alive. We receive, in advance, the list of the others, among them a boy of nine who lost his eyes to shards of cluster bombs. The list tells us his name is Fahed. His family was fleeing from the bombing when an air attack hit their bus. The boy was by the window and suffered the impact right in his face. His wounds kept bleeding and leaking out splinters of glass.
Fahed embedded himself in my soul before I met him. In my mind, I connect him to Eustache, the young blind boy in Marcel Schwob’sThe Children’s Crusade, that gorgeous and terrible little book:
There is a child here called Eustache who was born with his eyes sealed. He holds his arms stretched out, and he smiles.... Sometimes we pass into long shadows. Sometimes we walk until evening in bright meadows.... I do not know where we are going. We have been gone so long.... In this country everything is white, even their houses and their raiment are white, and the women’s faces are covered with veils.1
Finally Fahed has arrived, along with the other children. The explosion ruptured his eyeballs, leaving him with two hollows and amap of damage on his face. Mirza Hussain is around here, and I’ve seen him cry at the sight of the boy.
“Idolatrous nations that vomit their rage and fire onto the Yemeni people!” he shouts to the sky, beating his chest. “What punishment could ever be enough for those who launch their death rays at us and empty the sockets of a child’s eyes?”
Fahed has already undergone the two basic operations that can be offered here, given the limitations of a makeshift hospital. For now he’s still in intensive care, and I can’t go see him. My mind is a jumble. There’s a flamenco song running obsessively through my head, “Son Tus Ojos Dos Estrellas,” (“Your Eyes Are Two Stars”), as performed by Camarón de la Isla, until his voice is drowned out by echoes of disaster. I’m invaded by that word:disaster. It comes from astronomy and meansdis-aster, “the loss of stars.” A sky loses its stars, a boy loses his eyes, and who responds, who cares about the magnitude of such disasters?
His mother shows me a photo of Fahed before the tragedy, a lovely child, very serious, a couple of years younger than now, with round ears that poke out like teacup handles, and bangs, and big black almond-shaped eyes just like his mother’s, but sparkling with life.
Fahed has been released from intensive care. He’s recovering strength, he can talk now, and I finally have the chance to meet him. He wants to know what happened to his siblings. I tell him we’ve received good news; his siblings are okay. I try to calm him but he demands specifics, he’s not content with ambiguities. “Did the roof of my house collapse? Did my grandfather’s sheep die? When will they take the bandages off my eyes? If my eyes got hurt, will they put in new ones?”
As I listen to him, I gradually enter the abysmal vision of a blind boy in Yemen. Fahed is an expert on war geography and the broad range of weaponry in the world. He still hasn’t learned his multiplication tables, but he knows everything about aerial attacks. He can recognize a Eurofighter Typhoon and says it’s the lightest warplanebecause it’s made from carbon fibers and glass (his exact words). He knows that Eurofighter Typhoon engines are made in a country called Spain, and that they fly out of Saudi Arabia to come bomb Yemen. He knows that Saudi Arabia is part of an alliance with other nations, that one of those nations is called the United States and the other is called England. He doesn’t know why they’re attacking Yemen; he doesn’t know why and doesn’t wonder why, he knows no other reality and accepts this one as natural or inevitable.
He starts recovering from his wounds, and the incredible flexibility of his mind allows him to adapt to a world now cast in shadows. I keep him company while Olivia, the pediatrician, carries out painful procedures on him. Fahed grips my hand hard. Olivia tries to simplify what she calls his condition. “The boy has a condition.” What could Olivia mean by that? Can you call it a condition, the brutal sanctity of this trial imposed on a child? Olivia is an excellent doctor, delicate and warm, but too young; she still trusts the relevance of her professional jargon, and terms liketrauma,hemorrhage,suture,palpebralleave her mouth and reach Fahed like mysterious prayers or incomprehensible formulas he has to accept without question, absorbing them as terms for the unfathomable nature of his suffering.
Olivia may be very young, but she’s not indifferent. I believe she feels as much fondness for Fahed as I do, and the two of us take turns by his side so he’s not alone.
“We look like this kid’s godmother and godfather,” we say, and it’s true.
I tell her about Schwob’sThe Children’s Crusadeand about how I’ve been recalling entire passages. She knows the book, it’s one of her favorites, she thinks it’s as if Schwob had written Fahed’s story. I’m amused by this young woman, I like her eyebrow piercing, her slender body, her pretty nose and violet hair. She tells me she’ll be leaving here soon, at least for a while, two or three weeks or so. She’s longing to go home to see her nieces and nephews, she missesthem, and she wants to take refuge in the tiny apartment she left in Belfast, she can’t take this war anymore, it’s got her nerves on edge.
“I might leave too,” I say. “MSF is offering me work in my own country, where they need someone to oversee outreach and media relations. The offer took me by surprise, and completely disoriented me. But I’m considering it, it might not be such a bad idea, I could keep going with MSF but in a way that draws on my strength, Olivia, which is writing. I don’t know, I don’t know, there’s a tumult in my head, how can I leave this place when I haven’t found what I came looking for?”
“What were you looking for?”
“I won’t know until I find it.”
“Maybe in your country you’ll find what you were looking for here.”
“Could be. I go to sleep sure that I’m going, then wake up convinced that I’m not.”
Olivia has already been here two long years, she’s reaching her limit and believes she might have a breakdown if she stays much longer. “I just need to take a break,” she says. She wants to sleep in late and have breakfast in bed in front of the TV, and walk the streets of her neighborhood, and meet up with friends at the usual bar. Seek comfort in the familiar, recover the taste of normalcy, find ease, gather her strength so she can start again. But the same thing happens every time: She gets home, and after four or five days she already feels strange, everything seems slightly artificial, she can’t wait to be here again.
I tell her that I, who am no Batman, appreciate that she isn’t Wonder Woman. She tells me that she doesn’t know whether, after a leave of absence, Doctors Without Borders would bring her back to Yemen or send her elsewhere.
