“Could it be that it exists, that thing people call love, that’s as strong as death or perhaps even stronger?” ask the alaleishos.
“It exists, it exists, and although Goat Foot doesn’t know it yet, she will one day.”
“How will she know it, when she’s still buried?”
“She’ll get out, she’ll get out, soon she’ll leave her burial site.”
Nestled in the depths of the depths, the princess feels an unease she can only calm by devouring herself, starting with her left foot, then the right, then rising to swallow her own stomach, heart, tongue, mouth, until there’s nothing left to consume. She’s dying of thirst and has to settle for drinking her own tears. She feeds off her own pain until she can’t cry anymore, and that’s when she becomes nothing. An anxious, pulsing nothing, a living nothing, underground: like petroleum, pure energy at the verge of bursting. Thanks to her exile and unmooring, Goat Foot becomes more powerful than any sovereign on earth, because she learns to be queen of herself.
Living death became her fertile confinement, as Dr. Blanche’s mental institution did for Gérard de Nerval. Or Marie Curie’s small, radioactive laboratory. Fresner’s prison for Jean Genet, and Teresa of Ávila’s monastery cell in Medina del Campo. Juan de la Cruz produced his monumental “Spiritual Canticle” while imprisoned in a dark hole with only bread and water, and Fernando Pessoa produced all his creative work on the fourth floor of house number four. Emily Dickinson lived a flowered confinement in her secret garden of ferns; Burroughs, in a claustrophobic Bowery basement; Elvis Presley, before a toilet, receiving on his forehead the revelatory kiss of shit; and Patti Smith, glimpsing other worlds through the keyhole of a shabby room at Hotel Chelsea. Each of them locked up in their own small place away from the world, in a hole of infinitely compressed matter where the universe hides what it knows. Bathing in the waters of the dark. A tomb that engenders some kind of resurrection. A hole that reveals to each person the calling that most deeply resonates, and that gives them the tenacity needed to heed it.Hole as threshold. The burn a cigarette leaves in silk. The mouth to the rabbit’s lair, into which Alice falls.
So it was too for Goat Foot, Princess of Sheba, Black-Maned Lioness, when she was buried alive in a corner of the desert, until her initiation is complete and she finally feels desire to see the wide world above. Which means the time has arrived. While before, she accepted being dead, now she wishes to be reborn. And, as the saying goes, where there’s a will, there’s a way. Only those who want resurrection can be resurrected. She wants it intensely, so she’s ready to float upward and shine through the Orient like the morning sun. Now she can live among women and men.
“Yes!” shout the alaleishos as they clap and laugh, for their queen and protector will soon return.
Fourteen dust clouds whirl across the land on powerful winds, raising enough sand to darken skies and lengthen the night, forcing all the people and animals of the kingdom to prolong their sleep. A general paralysis sets in. Nobody is awake when the blizzard howls over Goat Foot’s tomb, opening geological layers and wresting her up from the depths. Life runs through her veins like a stream of light, by turns forceful and faint, still uncertain or intermittent rather than a constant flow.
Goat Foot reaches the surface and looks at the world. She sees the desert and the great absence that inhabits it, made ofbroken imagesandstony rubbish.1 She leaves her tomb as transformed as Lazarus, and any witnesses of the miracle would be fascinated and afraid, because her beyond-the-grave aura blends into her great beauty. Resurrected, revived, you could say she is full of grace, though impure, for she’s been touched by death. If Goat Foot has become immortal, as myths do, she owes it to the fact that death can’t take what it already took and had to return.
The alaleishos swear they can see her now—about time!—or at least, they can glimpse her. She appears far away, on a black horsegalloping through the sky, stiff and distant, waving a pale flag like Cid Campeador riding Babieca.
“What black horse?” protests one of the old women. “Goat Foot doesn’t have a horse, whether black, chestnut, or palomino.”
“She doesn’t have one, but she will.”
Before the resurrected princess had finished shaking off the dirt and recovered from rigor mortis, a rumor had spread that on returning from the underworld, she uttered certain words, heard only by the wind. What were they? Nobody knows.
It’s complicated, yet also simple: From this moment on, Goat Foot starts to roam the earth transformed into a gorgeous young woman. Limber and thin, with copper-brown skin and rare cadmium-colored eyes. Black tresses, their tips dyed with henna. Curious blue tattoos on her face and arms. A beautiful, wild creature. Dark angel. Child of the mountain. Aside from the twisted foot, itself a rare thing, she possesses another unusual feature: her status as a fugitive from death, a strange way of living that involves the feeling that you’re always in the depths of something even as you float along the surface.
The revived princess feels anxiety in her stomach, a mix of cramps and stabbing pain: She knows hunger for the second time. She feels goose bumps, the urge to find a hearth, chattering teeth: She knows cold. She watches a thread of blood from between her legs, where there is no wound, trickle down her thigh: She understands that she’s a woman and is already thirteen. Seeking shelter, warmth, and food, she walks across deserts of death and thirst.
The ancestral downpour has eased, the great waters have retreated, and the surface of the earth is the wide, exposed bottom of the sea. The remains of Noah’s ark lie half buried in the sand, the petrified wood poking into the air like the ribs of a dinosaur. Goat Foot carries a great emptiness inside her.
“That’s called loneliness,” the grandmothers say, with the clarity of a diagnosis. “It’s a hole in your chest, and it’s called loneliness.”
I, the Mute Ox
All the way to my lonely monastery on the mountain, that’s how far the Queen of Sheba went to find me after I’d been living there for three years, even though at that point I thought of myself as an adult and was pouring all my enthusiasm into the work of Thomas Aquinas, studying it so obsessively that I thought I’d forgotten my Moorish queen, the Lady of Sheba. But it turned out that she hadn’t forgotten about me.
First, let me be clear that I’ve never been the combative type, I’m more of one to hang back, made small by shyness or caught in daydreams. I spoke so little that the other novices called me Bos Mutas, the Mute Ox, a nickname I willingly accepted, because it was true that I kept my mouth shut almost all the time and also because I was writing my theology thesis onSumma Theologiaeby Aquinas, who was given that very nickname, Bos Mutas, as a teenager, when he was just starting out at the monastery in Lazio; he had a big, heavy body and went around so quiet and lost in thought that the others assumed him to be rather dumb. I, his timid student, received his nickname as an extremely humbling tribute to him, the great master, since my mind was a mere nanofraction of his; I was a poor, common ox perpetually in the yoke, while he was a winged ox of the majestic, Assyrian kind.
At that time, I spent days in the library, a refuge full of silence, ancient manuscripts, and the rancid smell of goat cheese, since ours was no magnificent Borgesian library, nor memorable like the Alexandrian one, nor was it labyrinthine like the one inThe Name of the Rose.No. Ours had been assembled against the odds in ancient sheds that, years before, the monks had used to make cheese out of raw sheep’s milk. The crude shelves now filled with books had formerly held piles of cheese in various states of maturity. Despite the inadequate facilities, you could breathe in the warm atmosphere there, it was somehow welcoming, a smell more of dairy than of books. This effect was heightened by the coarse wood, uneven floor, and persistent animal musk, which blended harmoniously with the leather that bound the parchments. As soon as I came through the door, I’d fall headfirst into the Middle Ages, as if through a wormhole.
One day, I was there at what we called the hour of mercy—after eating, in the refectory, the cooked vegetables the Dominican diet recommends at midday—and my fellow seminarians were strolling in the gardens, placid as cows as they digested their rations. Rations, that’s what we called that bland, boiled meal that must have been the same one served to Thomas eight centuries before; it comforted me to think he must have loathed it too. Meanwhile, I was in the almost empty library, studying the Latin version of Thomas Aquinas’sSumma Theologiae.I’d lingered over his reflections on man and woman as two beings in a single flesh, and I wondered how he could have reached that profound insight when he’d had no contact with women and, worse, feared them like the devil, according to Velázquez’s portrait of him in oil.
In that painting, Thomas appears faint and weak, but with his virtue intact, after using a burning log to ward off a prostitute who’d tried to seduce him. That painting had always struck me as pathetic, much as it was also very Velázquez. It wasn’t believable to me, this sorry portrayal of the immense Thomas collapsing and near-unconscious in the arms of a fragile angel after threateningto burn that poor woman, who flees fearfully in the background. Lies! This, and so many more! A misogynous distortion schemed up by the Church, which aims to make people believe its male saints are asexual and immune to desire. Placid Thomas, with his gentle manners, a noble education, and a lamb’s docile nature, trying to burn a woman with a flaming piece of wood, to reduce her to ash like some vampire? No. Not remotely believable.
I was reflecting on this matter, seated in front of that big tome, when Cirio the librarian came up behind me.
His name was Friar Silvio but we called him Friar Cirio because of his cerulean skin, which gave him a reptilian look. All monks are a little medieval and reptilian—just look at their coarse brown habits, shaved tonsures surrounded by a gourd of cropped hair, pallor, and garlic-soup breath. Not Friar Cirio, though. He dressed like a layman: wool sweater, gray pants, tennis shoes, and mouthwash breath. Still, a sickly whiteness, a hook nose, sunken cheeks, and a prominent Adam’s apple made him a direct descendant of Friar Savonarola. Friar Cirio’s demeanor matched his appearance, as it was severe and detached, draconian when it came to demanding the prompt return of books or enforcing silence in his domain. And yet, there was something in him that I didn’t see in other monks; let’s just say that, to me, this Friar Cirio was a man who held some secret knowledge that kept him alive. That’s why it wasn’t a complete surprise when, that afternoon, he came up behind me and whispered devastating gossip in my ear.
“You there, scalding your eyelashes with that reading,” he said, spraying me with his Listerine breath and tapping the handle of the paper cutter I had lying against the open pages. “You, Bos Mutas, should know that when Thomas Aquinas was about to finishSumma Theologiae, he stopped all of a sudden, cast his pen aside, and said that everything he’d written up to that point was a whole lot of cheap hay and hot air without rhyme or reason.”
I couldn’t comprehend what I was hearing.
“What are you saying?” I asked.
“You heard me. I said that Thomas refused to keep writing. He said everything he’d written was a bunch of useless hay.”
