The Call of Desire #2
I liked the “handsome” part; in those days I was tall and gangly and had serious doubts about my physical appearance.
Handsome? Me? Wow, thank you. Susceptible as I was to flattery—all the more so when it came from Dana/Sheba—I took it as a command and accepted the rosemary sprig, though deep down I knew she was laying some sort of trap; nobody calls a skinny, acne-riddled preadolescent with zero sex appeal “handsome” unless they’ve got something up their sleeve.
“No gift for me?” the queen asked, pinching my arm.
“What do you want?” My voice came out in a whisper.
“Give me your watch.”
I felt obligated to obey, and was loosening the wristband when my mother intervened. She’d been watching, and now she pulled me back and accused Dana of abusing a young boy. I, the young, abused boy, yanked at my mother’s sleeve in an attempt to stop her from insulting the woman.
Careful, she’s the Queen of Sheba! I wanted to warn her, but my mother wouldn’t have understood what I meant.
“Get out of here, you hag, you thief!” she shouted at Dana, pulling out a coin and throwing it at her with contempt.
Queen Dana spat on the coin, threw it far, and glared at me, pointing her finger my way and uttering a curse that fell upon me like a bucket of dirty water.
“You’re a stupid boy,” she shouted at me, already walking away. “I curse you: Nobody will ever love you.”
I figured my mother and I had won the battle when our enemy left humiliated, but in the end it was only a partial triumph. The harshness of her prophecy stayed with me, this notion that no one would ever love me. My mother had to embrace and console me.
“I’ll love you forever,” she assured me, believing this could neutralize the spell.
But apparently it couldn’t, because three or four years later, before I turned fifteen, sorrow and misfortune swallowed me whole when a cancer that had long tormented my mother, and that she’d tenaciously battled to keep at bay, finally got the best of her and killed her.
My mother never cried, not even during the worst of her illness, when she suffered unbearable pain. She was tough, and wouldn’t soften, except at the thought of one memory that tormented her: that of a certain small girl in a country far away.
“She was lovely,” she told me, “a slip of a thing . . .”
And yet she had enormous eyes, too big for her face, dark eyes that knew too much, eyes of black fire that widened in fear, as if she knew what was happening, or perhaps because she didn’t understand.
She couldn’t have been older than four, maybe five, with brown features so fine they seemed painted with a delicate brush, but with a rich tangle of hair that seemed to store up all her energies.
That’s how my mother described her, between hiccups and tears.
My sweet, brave mother, who in her youth had been something of a missionary, a volunteer, always traveling to troubled, impoverished places, devoted to acts of charity and redemption.
My mother wept as she talked about this child.
She said that despite the passage of time, she couldn’t forget her; if anything, the girl only became more real with time, as if my mother carried her inside.
The guilt had plagued her ever since that day in some desolate corner of the world, I don’t know where, when a mother approached her with a small daughter clinging to her hand.
The mother delivered an order to her daughter in their language, an order understood by no one except the girl herself, who immediately attacked her with a valor unimaginable in someone so small.
“With the force of a new recruit headed to war, she released her mother’s hand and grabbed mine,” said my mother, who was not yet my mother in the story but who would become her one day.
“Take her, keep the girl, I’m giving her to you,” the woman said, breaking into a run as my mother, shocked and confused, held on to the child’s hand.
The woman made a quick getaway, and once she was out of reach she turned back toward my mother and yelled, “Take her, I can’t feed her, she’ll starve to death here.
Take her, she’s sick,” she begged. “You can cure her, you live far away, where there’s food, you can feed her, you can educate her, she’s a good girl, she’s ill, take her and heal her. ”
That’s when my mother reacted, as the magnitude of what was at stake began to dawn on her, and she tried to chase the woman down and return the girl, but the woman was already blending into a crowd that parted like a sea and closed fast around her, swallowing her whole.
The child didn’t cry, only looked around with the seriousness of an adult, a kind of solemnity that left no room for tears, the stiff resignation of a little toy soldier.
There was something mysterious and sacred in that silent girl.
Throughout the day, my mother stayed with her, the two fused in a kind of survival pact, or a complicity and support through this moment of great tension and uprooting.
Who knows how many times my mother told me about how guarded the girl was, how shockingly whole and composed in the thick of the drama.
Only her gaze betrayed her anguish as it lingered on each person, each object, with an intensity that bordered on X-ray vision.
She wouldn’t eat, or say a word, or even respond when asked her name, and when offered toys, she took them politely and immediately put them aside, with the smooth and delicate manners seen only in those who are defenseless.
The woman had shouted that the child was sick.
But with what illness? She had no fever, except in her gaze.
The medical exam to which she was swiftly subjected revealed traces of malnutrition and a pallor rare in people of her coppery complexion.
She seemed relatively healthy, though she did have a passive way about her, letting life go by without trying to change anything, as if she didn’t dare ask more of reality than it was willing to give, and my mother, despite her lack of training as a doctor or even nurse, immediately knew that if this child suffered from anything, it was the incurable ailment of sadness.
“I won’t say she looked at me with affection,” my mother confessed, “but with tolerance, a kind of acceptance, as if deep down she trusted me and my ability to keep the commitment fate had thrust on us. And I let her down.”
They’d spent a long time facing each other, the child frozen like a deer in headlights, without protesting or begging, just there, rigid as a bird who’s flown into a window, sitting quietly as if she didn’t understand or, perhaps, as if she understood all too well.
All of a sudden she reached out and brushed her fingertips along the blue silk foulard my mother wore around her neck, drawn by its intense colors, and finally let out a word, the only one she’d utter in the hours they spent together.
“Azraq,” she murmured. Blue. Just that: blue.
Then my mother took off her foulard, wrapped it around the girl’s shoulders, and said, “I’m going to call you Blue. For me, you’ll always be Blue.”
Meanwhile, the other people who were there made inquiries, sought a resolution to the impasse, searched fruitlessly for the girl’s mother. Nobody knew what to do.
Finally, exhausted, the girl closed her eyes from one moment to the next, and night had long fallen when representatives of a humanitarian organization arrived and offered to take charge. They took the girl, half asleep, still wrapped in blue silk, leaving my mother sick with attachment and guilt.
She never heard anything about the child again, and never forgave herself.
I tried to calm her by pointing out the obvious: You can’t just take a kid like that, there are rules, laws for the protection of minors, they would have stopped you at the airport, you can’t fly off all of a sudden with a girl who isn’t yours . . .
My mother tried to justify her actions, but kept failing.
To the point where she—that absent little girl—lived with us in her strange, nonexistent state through our searing living memory of her, which has become my inheritance.
Although my mother always referred to her as Blue, I, true to my obsession, called her Little Sheba, imagining her as a tiny, delicate Queen of Sheba, fragile as a sigh, unreal as a memory, vague as old guilt. Blurred, like an echo of pain.