All myths burn and are burned.
But things do not end there. The god who dies on Good Friday is resurrected on Easter Sunday. If Persephone descends to Hades every winter, it’s so she can joyfully rise up again in the spring. The Phoenix is reborn from its own ashes. Osiris, the dismembered one, is reassembled like a puzzle and made whole again. Aeneas returns from hell unharmed and triumphant, and Odin undoes himself from the tree, illuminated by Knowledge. So too with Goat Foot, Princess of Sheba, my Moorish Queen, Lady of the Rising Sun, Madonna of the Almond, and Heroine of the People of the Dawn, who will have her throat cut like a young lamb every time Antares reddens the sky, but will emerge again the next morning in the fullness of her beauty, vitality, and strength.
High above, from the roof of her palace, the Maiden watches the bloody ceremony. She wears her mantle of foam, and a necklace of tears against her chest, a green palm frond in her right hand and a cup of the water of forgetting in her left. The perfect oval of her face, of her impassable beauty, betrays no emotion. Below, at the altar, the Butcher swells with pride, as he will personally be carrying out the sentence. As ceremonial attire, he wears the same black apron as always, but on his head, instead of the Phrygian cap, he wears the costume of infamy, of devious death: an executioner’s hood that covers the whole face except for the essential holes for eyes, which spark. The strangest part is that the Butcher takes off his hood in one fell swoop before removing Goat Foot’sveil and tunic and gathering her hair to expose the nape of her neck for his axe. Against all required protocols, the Butcher has shed his hood and revealed his face before the watching crowd. Why this unusual gesture? To accentuate his cruelty, or as a sign of respect for his victim?
According to the alaleishos, it was an instinctive gesture spurred by his surprise at the young woman’s naked beauty. In the pallor of a trance, hands tied behind her back, naked from the waist up, offering her swanlike neck with utter dignity, Goat Foot must have been a stunning apparition. A whole revelation for those who only knew her covered in black cloth. The Butcher, an eroticized male, feels the moment’s ferocious sensuality.
“You are death,” he whispers into Goat Foot’s ear, “and I am Death.”
Then he makes the cut, almost sweetly, like an act of seduction or even possession, while Goat Foot lets go lightly, without spasms or cries, as if her body were falling into someone’s arms, as if the earth receiving her were soft, like someone seeing off a boat into the distance while the wind flutters their kerchief of farewell. The scene is so strangely harmonious, so ethereal in its choreography, that the Maiden, from her palace, feels betrayed. Is it rage, or jealousy? That will never be known.
Victory for the heartless pair? In the end, do the villains win, the Maiden and the Butcher? More or less, more or less, they will die too, if not today, tomorrow. Misery loves company, as the saying goes. But there’s a difference: When they die, it’ll be forever. Goat Foot, on the other hand, will emerge from her martyrdom victorious, held by eternity and transformed by that axe blade into a mythical, superhuman being. At least that’s what the alaleishos believe, and they’re happy for her, because they know her story doesn’t end there.
One of the many paradoxes of Goat Foot, Queen of Sheba, is that in truth she never becomes queen, at least not in this turn of themythic spiral; maybe in one of the next ones she will, though it’s unlikely, because crown and throne are things she doesn’t want, and will not want. Also, the current cycle is not yet complete, as Goat Foot still has a commitment to keep. There’s a certain bet in motion that nobody so far has lost or won.
Prayer to Lucy
The pandemic has arrived in Addis Ababa. The city is under quarantine, though few carry out its rules; the cafés and shops are still open, people move through the streets exposed to the disease, and meanwhile at night, after curfew, the police beat stragglers with their nightsticks. Zahra Bayda and I are to report to the Ethiopian MSF team tomorrow to start working with them, so today we have the afternoon free and we decide, out of courtesy, to visit Lucy.
I’m speaking of LucyAustralopithecus afarensis.
“Salve, Grandmother, this is how I greet you even though you’re almost a girl, because despite your three million or so years of age, it’s believed that you died when you were fifteen,” Zahra Bayda prays before the urn containing the remains of the very first known woman. “How small you are, Lucy, anascent little flame mutating among the australopithecines,1 and how amusing too, a woman barely three feet six inches tall, and that’s if you were upright, because you’re the one who started the habit of walking on two legs, and once you stood up you learned to set your gaze further and further in the distance. There you go, observing everything fromthe height you gained, all snazzy and poised on those two paws, or, better put, feet, as we call them today: that Black woman walking, that Black woman’s got rhythm, that’s how Celia Cruz would sing about you, Celia the great Cuban guaracha vocalist, praising your newly acquired grace.
“I’ve arrived in Addis Ababa and I’ve got you here before me, Lucy, incredibly remote mother,” Zahra Bayda says to her with devotion. “You, first female human on the planet, me here outside and you in there, sheltered in your glass urn in the middle of this dusty museum. And here come the rest of us, Grandmother Lucy, sometimes well-anchored, sometimes crawling on our hands and knees, all the womankind of the world following in your footsteps.
“Just look, Lucy, our grandmother, grandma, alaleisho, abuela, nonna, àvia, aljada, amona,” Zahra Bayda prays on, “just look at what a crowd it is, we are thousands upon thousands walking the paths of this earth still seeking, as you did, a place where a good life might open its doors to us. And with us go our Selams, which is what your first child was called, Selam, also exposed in this forgotten Addis Ababa museum, stiff and nestled in the glass urn next to yours. You must have borne several more children too, fertile Lucy, and when I ask the guide how we know you were a woman, whether that’s in your bones somehow, they say it’s in the width of your pelvis. You had some hips on you, Grandma, like we all do, and you too endured the pain of childbirth.
“Because you are the Alpha and Omega, old Lucy, you the Madonna and you the pietà, with you the immemorial drama of the human race begins, this birthplace and deathplace through which we all ride, you, me, all of us. On a desolate street in Sanaa, in the shadow of tall clay towers, there crouches an old woman whose face I did not see. But does it still exist, Sanaa—the most beautiful city, oh! the oldest on the planet—or has it disappeared by now in the boom of missiles and hum of drones? Do you have a name? I askedthe woman curled up in deserted Sanaa, and she said nothing. Do you have a dream? I pressed. I have a dream, she replied, a small one, I dream of someone giving me a coin.
“A young woman called Eliana has to ride her old motorcycle across the long bridge of Morro, which connects the two halves of Tumaco, a port on the Pacific Ocean with a Black population. She uses the bridge to reach the flower shop where she works. At the entrance to the Morro, men from a guerrilla commando throw her off her bike and gang-rape her. Eliana gets away when she can, adjusts her hair and clothes, gets back on her motorcycle, and manages to cross the bridge. At the other side, police officers await her, and they rape her too.
“On the island of Lesbos, at a refugee camp, I met a Syrian woman called Fatimah,” Zahra Bayda goes on. “Fatimah is constantly gazing out at the Turkish coast, which glimmers on the other side of the Aegean. Her rubber boat sank while attempting to cross, and she managed to swim to safety, saving Huna, her younger sister, a baby only a few months old who now wails in her arms. Her mother and her other sisters all drowned. Oh, Aegean, sea of Death. When the fishermen of Lesbos cast their nets, they occasionally catch corpses instead of fish.
“But why tell you all of this, Lucy, lion, source of all lineage, untamed shrew fighting for survival? Better to greet you in silence, little grandma, it’s better that way.” Zahra Bayda sighs. “What words could I use to explain what, to you, would seem incomprehensible, if, as they claim, your brain was the size of a peach, you were hairy as a monkey, and you loved climbing trees, as learned from the strength of your arms? How to explain, then, that you’ve left a never-ending trail of descendants because you reproduced like a bunny, and you were the first to defend your offspring with your own life, just as we all do, following your example, Lucy, lion.
“And now, with what words can I explain what would surelyseem unfathomable to you, little grandma, that all of it has been great, but deep down not so much, things haven’t gone so well, because you are the Alpha, yes, but also the Omega, beginning of the story and at the same time the announcement of its end. Today your energies collide against enemies that are too vast, you can’t imagine how vast, you’d feel diminished and shrunken in the face of the drama’s scope, you’d even laugh if it weren’t a weeping matter, I’m talking about wars, famines, hatreds, racisms, poverty, fascism, pogroms, catastrophes, and epidemics, not to mention the three most ancient faces of death: storms, loneliness, and fog.
“Give us your strength, millennial mother, little Lucy,” Zahra Bayda asks, on her knees. “You wouldn’t have been a virgin, or even a queen, just some common woman from among the hordes, the shortest and most wrinkled, but nevertheless what a spirit, your spirit, Grandma, what resistance and vigor, how unbreakable your commitment has been. I bow before you, as you see, and if it weren’t for this glass that separates us, I’d kiss your feet, which are so childlike, scorched, tiny, but tireless, insistent, nomadic. How you must have roamed, old wanderer, up and down, all across this gorgeous, tremendous earth. Maybe you can see us, there in the depths of your empty eyes? Here we women are, Lucy Australopithecus, look at us, then, and smile, show us those teeth you no longer have, with which you bit and mauled and chased adversity away. Weep and laugh with us, we’re the overflowing river of your great-great-great-great-great-great-granddaughters. Tiny and powerful hominid, give us your blessing with that scrawny little hand. They say that the archaeologists who discovered you happened to be listening to ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,’ that Beatles song about LSD, and that’s how they chose your name. Are you up there, Lucy drowned with diamonds, as in a hallucinogenic trip? Could you be a saint, then, and are you really in the sky? Fine, then. We’ll make reliquaries with the fifty-two bones you left us as an inheritance. Come on, LucyAfarensis, sweet grandmother, on this day, your birthday (turning three and a half million), remember us, tell us how to honor your example and follow in your footsteps, on this day when the blows are rough and the future so uncertain, oh, Grandmother, oh, oh, oh, look, things are getting ugly.”
The Heartbeat of Life
It’s been hours since we left Addis Ababa, and yet its crowds still surround us. Both sides of the highway hum with hives of people, donkeys, cows, and goats, as if we were moving through a very long line of market stands selling or bartering improbable goods, brass objects, battered chairs, medals, shirts from Barcelona’s soccer team, pieces of hose, yesterday’s newspapers. What’s already been reused is used again, as is what’s never had a use. Animals take over the asphalt; we duck around cows who doze unfazed in the midst of traffic. It’s rained a lot, people slosh through the mud and the youth working as boot cleaners make a killing. The outskirts of Addis Ababa spread their tumult out for miles, blocking our view of the great silent savannas of imagined Africa. What a crowd! It is clear that Ethiopia, a country with one of the highest birth rates, has tripled its population in the past forty years to surpass the hundred million mark. Wherever you look, you see women and children; Lucy and Selam have evolved and multiplied at an exponential pace. But their lives remain short; if the growth rate here is alarming, so are the rates of maternal and child mortality.
Graceful, slender women, crowned with tall cloth headdresses, move with the slow majesty of Queens of Sheba. With good reasonit’s said they might be the most beautiful women on earth. Elegant in and of themselves, without brands, or fashion, or trends, yet gifted with a natural poise and imperial dignity they claw from poverty with their fingernails. And children with doll’s eyelashes and the gazes of adults, and people of all ages with that well-known feature of large teeth: a Borgesian paradox, that the Creator would give them so much tooth and so much hunger too.
After twelve hours of travel, last night we arrived in the town of Mejo, in the woreda of Aroresa, in southern Ethiopia. Today, at eight in the morning, we set out with two local team members in an MSF Toyota 4x4 to do some outreach, traveling to isolated communities who can’t access the health clinic.
It’s pouring rain, as it does in tropical places, and the rural paths are full of mud. In the middle of nowhere a drenched woman emerges from the rain, trembling with cold, very pregnant. In reality, she’s almost a girl. In a whisper, she says her name is Barakat, she doesn’t know how old she is, nor how long she’s been pregnant. What she does know is that she can’t go on; she’s exhausted. She’s walked from her village in search of help, and her soul can’t take it anymore. We lay her in a cot and carry her into the back of the truck.
An unbearable smell invades the vehicle. What’s going on with this girl, who’s giving off that intense scent? Zahra Bayda examines her.
“Look at me, Barakat,” she asks. “Answer me, for how many days have you been having contractions?”
She replies with her fingers, gesturing two, three, or two, and she seems to verge on fainting. The bursts of pain bring her back to herself, but when the contractions ease she goes weak again, as if giving in. Do something for me, I can’t take it anymore, her eyes say, speaking on her behalf, because she won’t actually say a word, just murmurs—as if uttering a rosary—oh, oh, oh, in a way that’s deeply ancestral, almost primal, the same in every human tongue.
“She’s about to give birth and she has a fistula,” Zahra Bayda says. “We have to take her to the clinic immediately.”
But the mud makes our return agonizingly long; the truck gets stuck and won’t advance. Zahra Bayda explains to me that it’s an obstetric fistula: a wound between the legs that stays open, like a stigma. It’s the consequence of long, unproductive periods of labor without medical attention, sometimes lasting entire days, causing the fetus great suffering. The baby, unable to come out, presses against the pelvis with their head, elbow, or buttocks, pressing and pressing until it rips the mother open from the vagina to the anus: three holes made into one. A true curse. There’s little chance that the child will survive, and if the woman does, she’ll face infections and permanent incontinence.
