If only I could have at least kept those messages, all the little papers the women gave me... I don’t yell anymore, or even complain; I’ve gone dull. Stunned by the blow. Defeated, changed. Bos Mutas, the mute ox.
Zahra Bayda brings me a coffee, strokes my head, makes a Spanish tortilla, she doesn’t know how to console me. Me, the inconsolable. All day long, I don’t say a word to her. At night I resume the jeremiad.
“Everything I’ve written, they burned it!”
Zahra Bayda gets up and embraces me. She laughs at me, full of compassion.
She’s not wrong, my melodrama is starting to verge on comedy. On the fourth or fifth day I finally land, recover somewhat, give up, accept the disaster. The truth is, they were papers, nothing more. Paper, paper, and more paper. Paper, my notebook. Paper, my thesis and all my notes, and stories, and gathered testimonies. Paper, the letters from migrant women, their fruitless declarations of life, a shipwreck survivor’s scrawl. Smoke signals scattered by the wind.
It’s almost eleven at night. Zahra Bayda leaves me to my own devices and starts her nightly rituals, which are always religiously the same, carrying out even the simplest gestures with devotion, like lighting little incense sticks or reviewing the tasks in her planner, but the most complicated ones too, like the tongue twister she repeats like a prayer, spell, or just the pure tongue twister that it is. She disrobes with a ceremonial slowness, revealing the hills andvalleys of her body’s secret landscape. She showers with water hot enough for plucking chickens, dries herself with her own towel—she doesn’t like to use mine or for me to use hers—and dons one of her old, worn, faded cotton shirts. Then come the talcum powder and flip-flops for her feet. For her face, an algae salve she makes herself; her hands, meanwhile, receive the softening effects of an expensive, elite rose cream her daughter sends from Europe. Then comes a balsam for her hair, a long ceremony that involves going strand by strand. As she performs this rite, I gaze at her wide, powerful back. A miller’s back.
She boils water on the hot plate and makes ginger tea with lemon and honey. At that point, aromatic vapors already fill the room, floating church-like shadows, and she opens the windows wide. The contrast between inside and outside temperatures gives her chills, forms goose bumps on her skin. As a closing to her rituals, she leans on the window frame and stares out at the night for a long time, letting the moon wrap her in its halo. I watch her and wait. She stays absorbed in her own silence, like those women in Bonnard’s paintings who bathe in light.
“Come, let’s go to bed,” she finally says, kissing my forehead.
And my forehead burns with the queen’s kiss.
A Night of Love a Thousand Years Before Christ
Cette chanson d’amour, qui toujours recommence.
—Gérard de Nerval
Once upon a time... in very ancient times, once upon a time there was what there was and also what there was not, and what was going to happen happened and did not happen. It was on Safar night, not one night but a thousand of them, after the second—or millionth—resurrection of Goat Foot, also known as Sheba, the princess slaughtered long ago by a butcher’s blade.
The memory of the dead, that closed box. Goat Foot still lies buried after her execution when her memories suddenly revive, open the lid of their box, and escape, let loose to fly around in a whir of wings. The first ones are mere impressions, vague anxieties, fragments of an old litany that reaches her after rolling through centuries and generations, insistent and rhythmic, a melody, a love song that tells of a faraway king.
Something was left unfinished, something—but what? Goat Foot racks her brain trying to pin it down: An unmet commitment? Apromise? A wager having to do with marriage? A faraway king... what was his name?
I’m going to look for him, she says to herself. I’ll look for him, I’ve got to find him, I owe him something.
She sets out, stumbling, there’s the limp she already had and now on top of that she’s numb and half frozen from all the stillness underground, as bewildered as Lazarus after the unsought miracle of his resurrection. So goes Goat Foot too, on her pilgrimage of the lost. Queen of Sheba? Queen of nothing. It’s all gone, everything, except her empty hands and bare feet. Her beloved sister is dead. Her empire has vanished, and so have her olibanum caravans, perfume trade, incenses, valuable things. Nor does she have packs of camels or dromedaries anymore, or even a horse, her horse, what became of her black colt, the one with suns in its haunches and a flash in its eyes? Everything, they took everything from her, all that’s left of her former existence are glints, disappearing sparks; she’s returned to the world defenseless and naked as a newborn.
An ancient terror invades her, a stink that makes her pull back: The underworld still calls her. Demise is never final, the cycle of life has begun again but she’s not fully there yet, she’s still on the way, the grave hasn’t yet freed her entirely, Goat Foot can’t defeat death completely, the way Scheherazade did; for now, she has to cross Haceldama, the noxious valley of Haceldama, repository for the rivers of blood and jumbled entrails that spill from sacrificial altars, flow through cities in exposed pipes, and pour from the door of Waste.
Goat Foot crosses this dumping ground with her abaya gathered up, to protect it from the rot. Abaya? Isn’t she naked? Not anymore. Now she’s wearing coarse linen, the black cloth and tall hood of the shepherdess-witches of Hadhramaut, and she gets farther and farther away from Hadhramaut until the vapor scatters, and then, yes, sweet air fills her lungs, energy rushes through her body again, she recovers her confidence, her luminous beauty shines, and shesets out walking, prepared to find the king even if she has to roam all the way to the horizon. The truth is, she’s closer than she believes, but doesn’t know it.
She senses people nearby, thinks she hears the bleating of sheep. It seems she’s arrived in a shepherds’ valley. She feels a warm, gentle pulse, a calm presence at her side.
“Latif! My soft little lamb, with the long eyelashes!” Goat Foot shouts when she recognizes him, squeezing him against her chest.
That warm body’s touch fills her with affection and makes her cry without knowing why, a strange thing, this crying, so mysterious is this country of tears! says Saint-Exupéry.
“Nobody’s going to sacrifice you on an altar, little lamb,” she says to him. “Nobody. You won’t be an offering to any god, none, you won’t be a sacred victim, never again, your blood won’t run in the sewers of Haceldama, no, not your blood nor mine.”
The air shines dark, it’s clearly night, but everything is a nocturnal white. Goat Foot starts to run, with a single purpose in mind: I’m going to find him. I’m after that king, but how to know where, merged as he is with the mist. What was his name? Solomon or Suleiman, Jedediah, Temple, Israel? All those names or none? Goat Foot laughs as she remembers those cloying perfumes he sent her, believing they’d win him the bet. The old wager for marriage between them, where Goat Foot had to write a verse as beautiful as, or more beautiful than, the ones by the poet king, and he had to create a perfume as seductive as, or more seductive than, the ones she made. She never fulfilled her part of the promise; she tried, but at the last moment she’d change her mind; she couldn’t write anything convincing, just fragments that sounded nice but had no meaning, nothing that would do, vague gibberish that would make her lose the contest, so she never sent them, it wasn’t worth putting them to the test. He, on the other hand, die-hard gambler that he was, determined to win the bet and, along with it, the princess’s hand, had persisted in sending her the syrups and pachoulis he got fromcrushing roses from all the rose gardens: explosions of floral scent with a touch of cinnamon, sometimes, at other times of honey or ginger, which to her were barely even usable for soap or dessert. When the experiments he sent weren’t too sweet and frivolous, they were too intense: golden petroleum in a state of slow internal combustion, closer to anointing oil than to perfume. This Solomon can’t get anything right, Goat Foot thought with scorn.
Since then, time has passed, and things have happened, some good, others not so good, and on this night of Safar, she decides the moment has arrived for her to fulfill her part of the wager. She’s going to give Solomon a few broken lines that speak of some apparitions or forebodings that have come to her repeatedly in dreams.
She’s going as a shot in the dark, walking with her eyes closed. Blind? No, but half asleep. A sleepwalker. It’s said that sleep is the royal path toward archaic memories of love, and she moves forward unseeing toward the arrival of something great. She enters a state of passionate unrest. She can’t eat or drink, her throat is closed, she longs for a different kind of food, like brides who strive to lose weight to fit in their tight white silk dresses that cinch like a corset and cut off breath.
“Oh, love of too much flesh!” sighs Goat Foot (like Teresa).
The brain’s temporal lobe, which houses mnemonic and sensory functions, doesn’t focus on vision or hearing and instead favors aromas, touch, and flavors that stir our memories and instincts: It intensifies smell and taste, two senses of the gourmet, cannibalistic soul. Goat Foot is going to bite that faraway king when she finds him, she’s going to eat him up with kisses, is it wrong for lovers to devour each other? You could say she’s in love, but why now, and not before? Because love doesn’t come when called, but when it wants to.
“If you see my beloved, tell him I’m waiting for him,” she asks the shepherds as they bring their animals into stables for the night.
“That cannot be,” they reply. “He is alive and you’re dead, you exist in realms that don’t touch.”
