“You’re in love with everyone and everything, with living on the edge, with the experience of being so close to people, the possibility of helping, the intense realities...”
“What Rilke called blood at its fastest spin.”
“That’s it. You get addicted to that climate, to that fastest spin, do you understand?”
“More or less. You’re sexually attracted to the climate and you fuck at the fastest spin.”
“Or you do it with someone who shares all that tumult with you, and lives it with the same intensity.”
“And what’s up with that painting, with the naked man . . . ?”
“Yes.”
“Yes what?”
“Yes, nothing. You’re joking around and I won’t answer anymore. Let’s change the subject.”
I didn’t insist, and we changed the subject. We were already near our house and about to go in when Zahra Bayda got the idea of going deeper into the sea. In the dark water, the cloth of her abaya hugged her body and made her seem more naked than if she’d actually been naked;draperie mouillée, draped veils that lend fluidity to forms, make them more mysterious and suggestive.
Once I overcame my surprise, I took off my clothes, ran to the water, and dove in too. Zahra Bayda found my naked run hilarious: a girl’s laugh in an incredible woman’s body.
“You’re so big, and so hairy!” she shouted. “You look like a bear, Bos Mutas.”
“Ursus mutas sum.... Ursus mutas et nudus in mare et in noctis medio sum!”
Zahra Bayda plunged her head forward into the water, emerging in a single thrust back that unfurled her long wet hair in the air like a fin. Her abaya floated around her like the body of a jellyfish. Under the water, to the sway of waves, her body parts rocked, formidable and free.
“The man’s like a bear, the uglier he is, the more handsome he gets,” she shouted at me.
“So you admit that I’m handsome to you.”
“I only said you’re like a bear.”
The water brings bodies together, spurs laws of touch unlike those on land. In the water, as in dance or in childhood, limits fall away, and humans touch each other without reservations or meanings. That night in the sea, Zahra Bayda and I were two marine monsters, playing and splashing. Pure delight, the sensuality of her back’s curve into her stunning bottom, which rose in the foam and shone in the moonlight. There is a word in Spanish for a bottom like that,calipigio, an essential adjective not found in any of our dictionaries. It comes from the Greekkallos, “beautiful,” andpyge, “butt,”and in that moment I thought it was the only adjective worthy of describing her glorious, round, firm rear end: Not for nothing did the Greeks use it to describe the marble statueVenus Callipyge, in which the goddess lifts her peplos to her waist and looks backward, as if inviting admiration of her Olympic behind.
“Your bottom isn’t in the dictionary,” I shouted at Zahra Bayda.
“What’s with you and my bottom?” she shouted back, and we kept throwing water at each other by the handful.
It was the most childlike fun, mere pool games, and yet the whole thing felt very erotic to me, like the frolic of horny dolphins. We were still at it when we were surprised to see, in the distance, in the water and in the middle of the night, great black birds nervously splashing around. Ghosts in the mist? We looked closer: They were women. Bathing in the sea with their clothes on, in accordance with the mandatory rules: Yemeni women swim in the dark, fully covered, when nobody can see them. They were so far away, they couldn’t have seen our features or recognized us, but close enough that the same waves moving across their bodies also broke against our own.
Zahra Bayda took this as a warning sign.
“Let’s go home!” She let loose one of her sergeant’s orders, turned her back to me, and started walking away along the shore with a lovely sway of her hips, quite striking on a sergeant.
“Well, well, ma’am,” I called out, “who would have known you were so gorgeous?”
The waves, which had been peaceful and playful, had grown into white walls of foam. Zahra Bayda went into the house and returned with a towel for me to dry off on my way out of the water. Was she having fun with confusing me, toying with my feelings? Sometimes she was authoritarian, like a general, and at other times as beneficent as a mother: an unsettling mix.
The time spent in the sea with her had eased the weight of recent pain and death. I closed my eyes, and thought, Tonight won’thappen ever again; the euphoria of moments just passed turns melancholic.
“I had a friend, he was a political prisoner,” Zahra Bayda told me once we were back home, after showering.
She’d put on the huge Batman shirt, worn from use, that she used as pajamas. Her hair was wrapped in a towel, she smelled of wash water, and, true to her habit of dousing her feet with talcum powder, she’d left white footprints on the floor. I liked it. I liked the flavorful grace of her domestic presence.
“Do you want tea?” she said.
“Do I want what?” I asked, with too much emphasis, as if she were offering me something else.
