Goat Foot
Me? Not Queen of Sheba or queen of anything,” Zahra Bayda says, laughing.
“But my very first grandmother may have been. Who knows. My grandmother’s grandmother’s grandmother’s grandmother, maybe that one; at least that’s what everybody says.
Around here you can’t find a single person who doesn’t believe they’re descended from her. ”
Zahra Bayda is a trained midwife and also worked in Yemen as part of Doctors Without Borders.
She doesn’t like the Queen of Sheba, and doesn’t even believe she really existed, she tells me to stop with the tall tales, she’s too busy with flesh and blood people to concern herself with ghosts.
Though she confesses that she’s dreamed about her a couple of times.
“You see?” I say.
“What?”
“You dream of her too.”
“They weren’t dreams, they were nightmares.”
On the other hand, the old alaleishos revere their famous ancestor’s legacy as they cram into the kitchen and get high on khat.
They chew and chomp on khat, and the ones without molars use their gums to crush the bright green leaves into a ball of paste they store in their cheeks like a lumpy tooth infection.
The stories they tell have no endings and always start the same: “Once there was, or maybe there never was . . .”
After hours of chewing, at the edge of dawn, the old women feel a presence that prickles their skin and warms their souls.
It ripples the air and brings glimmers of joy, or the sweep of great power, or a supernaturally beautiful light.
Immediately they feel it: the queen’s kiss.
The anthropophagous kiss, long and deep, fragrant or poisonous.
It must be like Rimbaud’s venomous kiss in Hell, at least I think so; I tried khat once and all I sensed was its bitterness on my tongue.
The grandmothers say the queen’s kiss spurs a fever, freezing you on the outside and burning you within.
They warn me that for some, it’s a blessed kiss, for others it’s cursed, and you never know which way it’s going to go.
Possessed, the alaleishos declare: It’s her.
It’s her, she lives among us, she’s back.
It’s the Queen of Sheba. And since Sheba means “morning,” she’s the Lady of the Dawn, the Morning Star, Owner of Nothingness.
The grandmothers recite their holy ancestor’s many titles and smile beatifically.
“It’s her, she’s here,” they say, basking in the splendor of her visit.
The mythical Queen of Sheba: What was she like when she was alive, walking the earth?
Vibrant, powerful, virile, and seductive, the way Citati describes the protagonists of One Thousand and One Nights.
Also volatile, rude, stubborn, raised in a rough and bloody world.
A formidable woman, violent and violated: provoked.
As beautiful as Jerusalem and as terrible as troops in combat.
And with an ever-gaping wound: her mother’s rejection and her expulsion from the realm.
Neither feminine nor masculine. Some ancient texts describe her as an idol to both sexes, with breasts and a beard, penis and vagina.
Might the Queen of Sheba have been a great double being, blessed with a vague magnetism and explosive release?
Maybe, who knows. Perhaps she possessed the whole sexual spectrum’s powers.
Could she have been as beautiful as they say?
Horribly beautiful, like all mythological creatures.
According to the Song of Songs—where she goes by the name of Shulamite—her eyes are like doves; her belly like a sheaf of wheat or valley of lilies; hair like flocks of goats leaping on the mountain; a forehead like a pomegranate; breasts like grapes on the vine or twin gazelles.
This game of metaphors gains meaning in the context of the Song, but it’s hard to imagine if you approach it as a faithful portrait of a woman who undulates like wheat and lilies, leaps like goats and gazelles, and offers herself like pomegranates and grapes.
Can it be? Yes, it can, at least for me, Bos Mutas, who in my ridiculous love for her associates her with a mad and happy flock of goats, or nymphs, as they climb a steep, foggy slope.
I believe the Queen of Sheba resembles a goat or nymph more than she does Gina Lollobrigida, who plays her in Solomon and Sheba, the 1959 Technicolor movie.
Imagine a Lollobrigida free and mad as a nymph or goat.
Princess of the Morning, Lady of the Southern Wind, Balkis, Aurora Consurgens, Makeda, Black Lion Whose Mane Entangles Centuries, Regina Sabae, and on and on .
. . Despite her many titles, she had no name; according to the alaleishos, it’s because you don’t need a name if you don’t have anyone to call it with affection.
Though they also say she did have a name, but that it was so secret that not even her own mother knew it, a gesture of indifference and neglect, painful as a thorn in the daughter’s heart, but that in the end it turned out to her advantage, because you can’t be vanquished by someone who doesn’t know the letters of your name.
Around here, the old women believe that if the Queen of Sheba had no name, it wasn’t a loss but an abundance, that instead of one, she had many, as happens to beings who transform and have many faces.
She is all and none and at the same time she is herself, the legendary limping queen, and she is also Shulamite, the obsessed and sensual lover in the Song.
Hidden behind many names, she’s been muse to poets, to sleepwalkers, to mystics and punks; the goddess of drug addicts, of the dying, of geniuses and illuminati; a prophetess among lunatics and sages; the stormy moods of artists and depressives.
Woman among women, but not pure, nor virgin, nor blessed, but rather bound to eros, to demons, to ghosts and secret tongues.
1 Conceived in a time of giants and monsters, she grew unrestrained at her terrible games2 and was marked by a defect that, according to some grandmothers, was a simple limp, and according to others, a more severe symptom, such as a webbed left foot like that of a goose, or a cleft hoof.
Goat foot: There’s duality in the might of that woman who’s both a walker and someone who limps, nomadic and impaired.
The story of her foot might be imaginary: a physical expression of the irreparable harm or ever-open wound of loves interrupted.
Though her most devoted followers play it down, saying it was simply a matter of too much hair on her limbs.
A furry queen, blessed with natural hybridity between human and animal realms, a living incarnation of the black-maned lion kept in a cage at the Addis Ababa Zoo.
A woman covered in hair: divine gift or shame? Sign of excellence or of unworthiness demanding punishment? The Princess of Sheba spurs conflicting emotions.
At the opposite extreme stands her mother, the titular queen, called the Maiden because she’s captivating in her pure, eternal youth.
In the Maiden there is no depth, no abyss, her whole being visible at the surface.
Every day, she spends long hours gazing at her face in the mirror, ecstatic before the glow of her skin, as smooth and pure and hairless as an eggshell, which could be a secret sexual frustration, because no one has a keener thirst for ferocious sexuality than those who inhabit the cold mirrors3 .
. . with her unhinged mind, and her wild narcissism, her body at once rigid and tormented with lust .
. . she was always searching, looking for she knew not what. 4
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 the Mane, Tekel, Fares traced upside down by invisible fingers before Balthasar, king of Babylon, during one of his lustful opulent orgies, announcing his empire’s collapse.
Or like the Helter Skelter scrawled by Charles Manson and his murderous sect on a refrigerator door in the midst of a bloody slaughter.