Chapter 7 The Fertile Confinement
The Fertile Confinement
Everything would have been different if the Maiden had understood that the fine hair on newborn Goat Foot was just the sweetness of peach skin, a baby’s fuzz, soft and auburn. But no. That’s not how it went.
The first major event in Goat Foot’s life was to be punished for being a baby with inconvenient, hairy looks. Profuse hair on a human female: Abominable defect? Source of shame? Yes, for the Maiden it was.
Everything related to hair is taboo, hard to interpret; all that’s known for sure is that the Maiden cast out her firstborn and decreed that she’d enjoy no velvet or smooth silk, cherries or watermelons, not even sweet dates or any other form of comfort.
The girl was taken away under cover of night, in a secret procession, wrapped in that intensely blue cloth with black stripes that foreshadowed her tragic destiny.
A troupe of paid mourners broke the air with cold wails.
Behind them came the emaciated sex workers who specialized in showing up to burials and offering their bodies among graves.
In the middle of the entourage, a eunuch carried Goat Foot, who was destined to die before dying, or to know death in life.
This was the price she’d have to pay for an unknown crime, the atonement imposed on her, even though all children are born innocent.
Behind the eunuch there trailed two shuffling old servant women, Anguish and Sorrow, whom the Maiden had ordered to torment her daughter in the underworld with daily doses of small, humiliating, tedious deaths.
“What if that’s not how the story went? If it wasn’t the mother who hated Goat Foot, but the other way around?
” Sometimes, the alaleishos wonder and doubt, despite their unshakable faith.
“It could be. Or could not be. Every face has many faces, all myths have a thousand interpretations, and all hate is a two-way street,” they say, answering their own questions.
In the damp ditch where her mother sent her, Goat Foot, the rejected princess, has only a few belongings scattered on the ground or crammed into chests, and a small altar she’s assembled in the depths of her cave.
“Descent takes tremendous courage!” the alaleishos exclaim with admiration.
To leave the known world, penetrate what’s feared, search for clarity in darkness: Goat Foot was capable of it.
She turned herself into an initiate, right there in the earth’s womb, and learned to carve precious stone; developed an oblique intelligence that could interpret oracles, solve riddles, and decipher dreams; worshipped the mysteries; embroidered a shirt of a million stitches by hand; discovered medicines for smallpox, coronaviruses, and cancer; and bathed in the sulfurous waters of eternal youth.
The ages pass and she continues there, buried.
Sorrow and Anguish have died and Goat Foot can’t even turn to those harpies for their insidious company.
She’s tired of the cockroaches crawling over her pillow, and she longs for the caress of sun on her skin, which is turning green from the damp.
She’s learned everything the universe below can teach her, she’s sated by so much eternity and misses the feel of instants.
Sometimes she hears something from the world above, where daylight shines. The moans of a girl who’s suffered disappointment.
“As if you were someone else’s son,” the girl weeps, “you no longer sleep on my breast.”
“Oh, oh, oh!” the alaleishos cry. “How Goat Foot grieves to hear that lament that reminds her of something, or nothing, of what she never had or wants to have!”
Once in a while, other sounds are heard from above that she hadn’t noticed before but now reach her ears.
Vague murmurs, phrases on the wind, loose words.
The wail of wild dogs, hermits’ prayers, owl hoots, shepherds’ whistles, some traveler’s tired sighs, the voices of women closing windows.
Goat Foot pines for a house with doors and windows.
She startles at the booming of many steps on the earth: They’re the Malencoii warriors, marching to battle in goat masks.
She hears a sailor’s song: “If someone gave me a boat . . .” Until she catches a conversation between walkers:
“And after that?” asks the father.
“We’ll go back home,” replies the son.
“You know the way, son?”
“Yes, Father.”
Goat Foot is pensive. What home could she return to, when she never had one? Above her head the night ripples and curves, but she, buried, cannot see it.
“Kiss me with the kisses of your mouth, for your love is sweeter than wine,” a song echoes vaguely. “Come, my love, let us go to the fields and spend the night among the wildflowers, so the dawn finds us among the vines.”
Who could be crooning this way? A strange babbling that fills Goat Foot with longing.
The buried princess sleeps, and dreams of a secret night visit from a very tall man—one might call him colossal—with a cape of liquid gold and dark, living curls spilling over his shoulders.
He is the fourth Wise Man, called Heretic, and he travels against the guiding light of the North Star.
His face is in flames, he has the voracious eyes of a lynx and a clairvoyant’s inverted horns.
Goat Foot sees an admirable resilience in him: He’s an orphan, with no father or mother, no genealogy or end of his days, which is why he wears a hat whose brim is in the shape of an eight, or infinity sign.
There’s something seductively feminine in his silky eyelashes and the gentle ripples of his golden cape.
He’s a giant beast who stirs dread and fascination, and who wakes in her an attraction to what’s feared.
He stands before a small table where he’s placed yellow objects that look like spheres, or plates, or alum stones.
Goat Foot understands that this giant is also a banished, punished creature, just like her, and that they’re bound by an invisible knot.
Despite his appearance, the giant magician is kind.
She stares openly at him and sees a reflection of herself; they both live at the margins, they are the marginalized, they are proof that true power resides in what’s been pushed outside.
He plays with her, entertains her with magic tricks, makes her laugh.
He gives her one of those yellow objects, and she puts it in her pocket.
She understands that the fourth Wise Man is initiating her into an unorthodox form of knowledge, the occult science of heresy, which she wants to study.
“What is your god called?” she asks him.
“My god is called Abyss.”
“And where is his word written?”
“His word is called Silence.”
“And that god of yours could protect me and hear my prayers?”
“My god doesn’t listen, nor see, nor protect. He has no desires, nor hatred, doesn’t think or remember, doesn’t move or stay still, doesn’t live or lack life.”
“So what does your god do, then?”
“Not much. He lies calm and alone on the vast plains of a time without time.”
When the princess wakes, Heretic will have disappeared along the path that moves away from the North Star, lost among veils of light and darkness.
The yellow objects or alum crystals will also be gone.
Goat Foot won’t remember anything about the meeting, except the terror and fervor stirred in her by those avid eyes, which she’ll recall later when she sees those eyes again.
“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 of broken images and stony 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 horse galloping 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.”