The Maiden: pearly skin, without wrinkles or blemishes, with a soap bubble’s silky shine. She prides herself on being immaculate and glorious, because she’s known no man, keeping them at bay like an arrogant diva. She seduces everyone with her splendor, but submits with military discipline to her own routines of abstinence and refuses to sleep with anyone. It is said that the Maiden fights the waking of the senses with the same ferocity with which males hunt in the wild. And here’s the core of the mystery: The Maiden spurns all sex, and yet becomes a mother. Without a man’s involvement, by the grace of magic, she gives birth to Goat Foot. If you ask the alaleishos about this unusual pregnancy, they explain in few words.
That’s how it was, they say, that’s how it went, Doncella got pregnant as a virgin and without a man’s help. That’s how it happened, which is why it must be believed.
Or: It must be believed because it happened that way.
But the omens weren’t good. On the night of the birth, mysterious characters appeared on the high stone walls of Mamlakat Aldam, the Maiden’s Red Palace, written by the hand of God, of fate, or of Banksy. That part is unknown. A troubling apparition, akin to theMane, Tekel, Farestraced upside down by invisible fingers before Balthasar, king of Babylon, during one of his lustful opulent orgies, announcing his empire’s collapse. Or like theHelter Skelterscrawled by Charles Manson and his murderous sect on a refrigerator door in the midst of a bloody slaughter.
The prophetic words of Mamlakat Aldam, the Red Palace, weren’t written in Safaitic or Dadanitic letters, nor in Aramaic or the Arabic of the Koran, but in the dialect of the dead. The Maiden herself couldn’t understand them. Nor could anyone else, not even the sages who were sought for counsel. Here the old women declare that this muraled message that so terrified the Maiden said,Not you, but her: not the mother, but the daughter. Meaning: Your daughter will beremembered across the centuries and you will be forgotten—a sentence as painful as the one revealed to Snow White’s stepmother by her magic mirror, a harsh truth that drove them both to seethe with envy. In any case, whatever it was, just because nobody deciphered the letters on the Red Palace doesn’t mean their power wasn’t felt; they marked the girl’s birth as unlucky and turned mother against her own child. So it goes with the written word: Even if nobody reads it, its mere existence can set the laws of curse or blessing into motion.
Goat Foot, or Sheba, eldest daughter of the kingdom of Sheba, came into the world in a birth devoid of pain, coitus, or fertilization, a sterile and perfect event. Perfect? Perfect until her mother, the Maiden, looked at the being she’d just pushed out and had the disappointment of her life, for despite the baby’s angelic face, she wailed and suffered from a twisted foot and little legs covered in hair. An unpleasant apparition. In that small, rebellious being, with its furred body and goatlike foot, the Maiden saw a punishment and a backward evolution, like the sprouting of a pig’s tail. A return to primordial chaos.
“Goat Foot,” she replied dryly when asked what she’d name the girl. “Let her be called Goat Foot.”
Priding herself on being extremely clean, devoted, and immaculate, the Maiden, driven by pity and revulsion—more the latter than the former—concluded that the newborn was by nature dirty and stained, or maculate, an offense to sight, smell, and decency. She refused to hold her or breastfeed her, and ordered her slaves to bathe her every day and scrub her with water and vinegar.
Every time little Goat Foot sought tenderness from her mother, or human warmth, she found only the smooth cold of completely shaved skin, the clean and neutral scent of bleach, a painful lack of smiles, and the absence of the soft, narcotic effect of physical affection. The Maiden refused to show her child her own strict hygiene practices. She didn’t train her to use the chamber pot nor to feel disgust at her own excrement, which all civilized beings should keepfar away, even when it comes from their own bodies. Nor did she teach her to brush her hair, blow her nose, play with dolls, or cover her mouth when she coughed. She didn’t make sure the girl learned feminine ways or table manners, or developed musical abilities, gambling skills, or grace on the dance floor. She didn’t even give her daily and nightly routines, leaving her on her own to do and undo as she liked, at any hour.
So Goat Foot started life as a child without boundaries, a blend of contradictions. She embraced multiplicity and renounced nothing, in a splendid mix of animal and human, dirty and clean, living and dead, past and future, white and black. Just like nature itself, Goat Foot gathered and fused it all in a great unity where everything fits and finds its place. Because she, the small Princess of Sheba, always understood that in the great confection of the cosmos, alpha and omega bite each other’s tails.
Seven years after the first birth, the Maiden became pregnant again, but this time the high walls met the dawn unspoiled by any ominous graffiti. The heavens sent friendly signs and a girl was born, blessed and protected; the Maiden held her to her frozen breast and baptized her Joy, or Alfarah, declaring her the sole legitimate heir of all the kingdoms. If you ask the alaleishos if she did it as a mortal blow to her firstborn, they’d say yes. If you ask whether a double virgin conception is realistic, they’ll answer emphatically, “If the Maiden could get pregnant once, why not twice?”
Young Alfarah was a happy child, true to her name. But the same couldn’t be said for her older sister, Goat Foot. Far from it. The Maiden hadn’t wanted to spread panic or confuse the royal court with news of her first birth’s wretched results. She’d wrapped that first baby in a blanket with three black lines through its intense blue, the color of luminous ether, and ordered her buried alive ten elbows deep, somewhere far from Mamlakat Aldam.
“Take her away from my sight,” she declared. “Bury her in a grave so deep not even hungry hyenas can dig her out.”
She was, of course, referring to those eager, carrion-eating hyenas, the ones possessed of big clitorises, erect as penises. Was the Maiden a bad person?
“Bad, bad as milk,” reply the alaleishos.
So bad it’s best not to mention her. One wonders what cruel things the Maiden uttered with those red, fleshy lips of hers, which seem to be external symbols of an inner wound that drives her to harm others. What is she hiding behind the mask of her beauty? Because her beauty is superhuman, nobody denies it. Though the alaleishos insist it’s a double mask: On the outside, the features are perfect, but on the inside, they’re horrific to an unbearable degree. They also say she’s wrapped in a blanket of white smoke, or foam, and that she carries a green palm in her left hand, and in her right, a cup of the water of forgetting.
The Maiden made sure her orders were followed: For Goat Foot, the unwanted child, there would be no parties or banquets, no monuments, no jars of perfumed water, no silk-draped halls. Beneath the earth, all that awaited her was gloom, ant armies, and eternal unease.
“Your alaleishos are crazy old women,” Zahra Bayda tells me, “and your Queen of Sheba must have been even worse.”
My Hamstrung Adolescence
With my father vanished and my mother dead, I found myself lost and alone in the world at fourteen, I, Bos Mutas, without a home or way of paying for my education, too young to support myself through work. So I was lucky to be accepted into the Dominican monastery, where I finished my studies. I certainly didn’t join them out of vocation. I wasn’t the type to pray, and my mother hadn’t been either; from her I’d inherited a more or less cordial relationship with God, but not a close one. The truth is, without imposing any conditions on me, those Dominican monks gave me food, room and board, instruction, and access to a library. It was a bargain, as they say, a winning lottery ticket that in that moment of extreme necessity and lack of options spurred me to embrace monastic life, almost by chance; I could just as well have joined the army or become a drunk beggar on the corner.
On those too-long silent nights in the novices’ group dormitory, I had plenty of time to cultivate my third-phase encounters with the Queen of Sheba, who sometimes appeared as a gracious halo to accompany me, and, at other times, as an incubus to torment me.There were frequent crises in which I let myself be carried away by jealousy or rebukes of her. But she’d forgive me and, in my moments of greatest sadness, rise from the mist, wave her arms, and sing: “Tell me, lonely boy, why so much pain?”
I suppose that, as a candidate for the religious life, I should have adored the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. But instead, I adored the Queen of Sheba. At the end of the day, why should I trust those male gods, when I had no particularly nice paternal memories; let’s just say my father’s bad temper was set off by everything I did: losing games, being shy with women, writing with my left hand, not knowing how to whistle, and, above all, wearing pajamas. It bothered my father that I slept in pajamas and not like a man, that is to say, like him, stripped down to underwear. Anything that had to do with me was a disappointment, a source more of unease than rage, but still enough to make my life miserable.
The catch was, now that I was in the monastery, I had to pray, and I felt better about worshipping a female deity; in that sense I took after Gérard de Nerval, my spiritual guide. Nerval, an anxious poet, devoted himself to pursuing impossible lovers such as opera divas, Asian goddesses, theater actresses, and all kinds of distant, extravagant beings. As I was plugged into the same neurosis, I followed that same path, which is how Patti Smith became the Queen of Sheba in my hamstrung adolescence.
For months I’d been searching art books in the monastery’s library for the many paintings that had been made over the centuries of the Queen of Sheba, but none of them seemed plausible. Not the ones where she’s kneeling before a king more powerful than her, nor looking like a prostitute or penitent saint, in chaste clothing or half naked in anklets and nose rings. None of those worked for me; they simply weren’t her, they didn’t speak to her real and true appearance, at once beautiful and strange, fresh and archaic, kind and fearsome, and it was frustrating not to be able to give my chimera aface. Until one day, by chance, in a random magazine, I came across a photo of Patti Smith.
As soon as I saw her, a small voice in my head said: It’s her. I had the wild, stunned sense that Patti Smith, the punk rock goddess, was the new Queen of Sheba,novae reinae Sabae! I’d finally succeeded in capturing the image of my mystical, erotic fever dreams. There she was, before my eyes: an aggressive, tempting woman with an ambiguous, androgynous sex appeal, a calm, cold gaze, wild black hair, legs for miles, thin with sumptuous breasts and a secret aura that said,No one can stop me, no one.
I clung to that photo like a holy relic; I cut it out carefully and kept it between the pages of my copy ofThe Imitation of Christ.The other novices also had their favorite saint cards tucked into missals and breviaries, but theirs were pious. TheMadonna of the Goldfinch, painted by Raphael. OrThe Good Shepherd,by Murillo, where a smiling boy embraces an also-smiling sheep. Those ones were fine and nice, but others weren’t. One in particular comes to mind, calledThe Child of Sorrow.In it, a boy of about seven carries the cross of his own martyrdom on his back. I’d thought of myself as the true child of sorrow, but this one beat me handily!
Regina Sabae. Almost thirty years after she first burst into my life on that cruise down the Nile, she still unsettled me. She, or that, or it, or whatever it was—old woman or girl, monster or goddess, legend or real history. Somehow, she was the key to something rooted deep inside me, a part of me I couldn’t know until I searched and failed to find it. I didn’t know where that obsession would take me, but I was sure it was taking me somewhere.
Not that I thought about it constantly. The apparition came and went, keen or blurred, and sometimes it even disappeared altogether. What I’m trying to say is, some obsessions persist. Even if they fade, they find a way to return, and in the long run they don’t leave you. It could be believed that the Queen of Sheba was a phantom presencefor me, like a child’s imaginary friend. But no. That’s not it. It’s more than that. She exists as a person who’sclearly visible in my constant dreaming, as an unmistakably human reality.1
If anyone remembers me when I die, they can say: Bos Mutas was the man who loved the Queen of Sheba.
I can’t explain it more than that, I hope it’s enough for now.
