The Call of Desire
As for me, Bos Mutas, I can’t really say why I’m so fixated on the Queen of Sheba.
Gérard de Nerval believed that fascination with her belonged to a certain chosen few, exceptional people whom the queen chooses to mark with a kiss on the forehead that turns them into devotees.
That’s not me, of course, I’m a nobody and I don’t have that kind of rank.
I’m no genius nor idiot, no warrior nor saint, mine is more of a crushing normalcy; there’s nothing in me to warrant posing as chosen, or receiving some firebrand on my forehead, unless it’s from some loose screw in my mind—the queen’s been known to choose madmen too, maybe that’s why she stalks me and I’m constantly spellbound by her, riveted, enmeshed.
Sometimes I wonder whether my fascination verges on a kind of religion.
Why not? At the end of the day, religion means keeping your gaze obsessively on an image beyond your reach.
“You’re not the first to be enchanted by the Queen of Sheba,” Zahra Bayda tells me, “and you won’t be the last. It’s a form of insanity, you know? There’s no cure either. And it’s dangerous. It can lead to suicide.”
“Yes, yes, I’m aware. The alaleishos say—”
“The alaleishos are old gossips, they lie and spin tales,” interrupts Zahra Bayda. “Keep your distance, there’s something murky in them. Don’t take what they say at face value.”
“Well, I believe them,” I dare contradict her. “Plato himself talked about the stories of nursemaids, how they keep memories of the past alive.”
“You can believe Plato, but not the nursemaids.” Zahra Bayda skillfully hews to logic.
I’ve told her I’m here to write my dissertation on the Queen of Sheba, but she doesn’t care, she mocks me by advising that I start my thesis like a fairy tale: “Once upon a time, oh! Once upon a time there was and there was not.”
I’ve been obsessed with the Queen of Sheba since I was eight or nine, when my parents took me on a cruise down the Nile, back when our family still had money and luxury boats weren’t yet laden with infected passengers who carry plagues from port to port.
It happened one night, in the second-class section of that cruise down the Nile.
After dinner, the main stage featured a traditional full-cast show: zither music, drums, torches, acrobats.
Suddenly the lights dimmed and the emcee called for applause to welcome the Queen of Sheba, who would grace us with her mystical seven veils as she belly danced.
It was the first time I ever heard that name, Queen of Sheba, and I must have imagined some crowned grandma, a Queen Isabel draped in veils.
So I was blown away when I saw a young woman, all curves and bare, abundant flesh that seemed to me an unknown continent.
The music sped up and the woman started a strange, provocative dance, shaking like a big, obscene, possessed spider.
I’d never imagined such a thing could exist; I’d never been struck so deeply by anything except perhaps the boa constrictor a snake charmer had circled around my neck a couple of years before, or the boiling volcano we’d visited in Nicaragua.
Even those didn’t move me like this. The Queen of Sheba’s stunning stage presence left me pale, gripping the couch.
Her female nakedness seemed a sacred discovery.
She was of another world, this person revealing amazing, unfathomable body parts in a whir of tulle and sequins.
A circus costume, I suppose, but to me it seemed sumptuous, finery from the East. To the beat of the drum, she shook those mounds of vibrant, tempting flesh and moved her curves with a sensual ease that marked me to this day.
I remember the moment when she raised her arm and I glimpsed a bit of hair in her armpit; that armpit wasn’t like my mother’s, smooth and pink, but raw and hairy, more like my father’s. I even caught its scent.
She emitted a dense, salty scent, a blend of used underwear, Catholic Mass, and paella.
I took it as a call. Or, better yet, a command.
I immediately knew she was a powerful being who possessed the intensity of an earthquake, a blaze, or an action film.
I knew that, if she wished, she could destroy the universe.
I was frightened, and captivated—those are the precise words: I, captivated by her; I, her terrified captive; I, defenseless before her, all the more so when she began to wail, moving her tongue like a snake and making a sharp rejoicing sound that landed in my ears like the call of desire: the fearsome, irresistible song of the sirens in the ears of Odysseus.
The woman shimmied her flesh, gleaming with oil and sweat.
Her breasts had a life of their own, and her undulating belly transfixed me.
I felt I was in the presence of a goddess or a madwoman, and I stayed put between my mom and dad, sinking into the couch and drinking that desert beauty with my eyes.
There she was, filling my life with her presence, while I faced her in a state of either ecstasy or panic, I don’t know which.
I was possessed by that big, tantalizing yet terrifying woman, so exposed yet so forbidden.
I felt an inner heat akin to hunger, or rage, or burning anxiety, something that suddenly boiled in me and that I didn’t recognize, couldn’t name, or perhaps you could say that Queen of Sheba was the first name I could give this sexual, cannibalistic rapture, this religious fervor, this ferocious passion.
I didn’t see the moment when she fixed her gaze on me, the boy paralyzed with wonder and fear.
But what happened is this: Still dancing, this towering figure came right to me, reached for me with her red-nailed, bejeweled hand, staring right at me as if with compassion, with irony, and with a maternal kindness in her eyes that offended my masculinity and made me feel impotent and tiny before her.
But she immediately thrust her black-and-red mane of hair over me, the way Medusa might have assaulted poor Perseus.
My heart hammered in my ears, and yet I managed to hear my father say, “Go on, son, dance with her, be a gentleman, can’t you see she wants to dance with you?
” Yes, I did see it, of course I saw it and of course she wanted to, she was insistent, pulling me by the hand, and I couldn’t find a way to escape.
I wanted only to flee, to get out of it, to protect myself from the onslaught.
I didn’t want to be a gentleman and I hated my father for many things he’d done in the past, like when he made me mount a horse bareback or beat me in every game or called me weak and incompetent or mocked my grades in school.
But I hated him with all my soul above all for betraying me by turning me over to the dancer of the veils while the rest of the audience exploded in laughter.
I sought my mother’s protection and couldn’t understand why she didn’t come to my defense.
My only recourse was the couch; I hid between its cushions and grabbed its legs as if to save myself from drowning.
I closed my eyes and surrendered to God: Sweet God of mine, I pleaded, help, forgive me, help me!
But sweet God did not reply and I heard only my father’s traitorous laugh, and, humoring him, the dancer’s laugh, harsh, defiant, mystical, mythical, irresistibly feminine.
Until she turned away and continued her show, drawing in another tourist more eager to join her dance, who made a spectacle of himself, a disjointed puppet trying to imitate her body’s undulations.
Meanwhile, I cowered on the couch, trying to make myself invisible so she wouldn’t think to press me again.
Then her voice and scent faded as she moved away, forgetting me already, ending her performance with full-bodied shimmies and a swirl of many-colored tulle, until she vanished forever behind a red curtain. An apparition, gone.
I’ve lost all my other memories of that trip to Egypt; I think I moved among mummies, temples, and pyramids like a zombie, without registering much and possessed by a single presence: hers. So that was the Queen of Sheba?
A couple of years later, once my father had abandoned us, leaving my mother and me in poverty, I saw the Queen of Sheba again.
This second unveiling took place in a tiled plaza, as my mother and I were about to get into a horse-drawn cart that would take us around the old parts of that city.
Suddenly I felt an unsettling presence and recognized her immediately: It was her, without a doubt, though she looked different this time, more sinister.
It’s always been the same, in this second apparition, the first one, and all the ones to follow too—every time.
Obsessively, though with slight variation, the Queen of Sheba has always manifested to me as both a threat and a temptation.
This second time, the queen had curly gray hair and wore too much eye makeup.
She struck me as unattractive, though at some angles she looked better.
She was wearing red, and in my shock she reminded me of Dana in Ghostbusters, or rather, Dana draped in red veils, who was really Sigourney Weaver playing the role of Dana, that phantom nymphomaniac who in an erotic, cannibalistic frenzy pushes Bill Murray onto a bed and declares, “I want you inside me,” and Bill Murray, more brazen than me, replies, “I can’t.
It sounds like you’ve got at least two or three people in there already. ”
I immediately connected the dots: Dana was one of the Queen of Sheba’s many faces, Dana was one of her many names, Sheba was resurrected in this Dana approaching me in that tiled plaza, all properness and pretentions, to offer me a sprig of rosemary when my mother and I were about to climb into a horse-drawn cart.
“Take it,” this witchlike Queen of Sheba said to me, grabbing my arm so hard I couldn’t get away. “It’s for you, handsome, a gift I’m giving you.”