The Exquisitely Old
The city of Sanaa is the most monumental of apparitions.
Time immemorial has passed through it like light through crystal, without leaving a mark or stain.
Its stunning beauty rises from the pages of One Thousand and One Nights only to land directly in the sights of Eurofighter Typhoon planes and Predator and Reaper drones.
There are three secret cities that embed themselves forever in your dreams. The third is Machu Picchu. The second, Varanasi.
The first is Sanaa.
Bab-al-Yaman, the main entrance to Sanaa’s Old City, is the threshold into a lost era that’s taken root here, a Muslim medieval dreamscape rife with the scent of sewage, spices, and incense that refuses to leave because there’s no one to tell it that times have changed.
There’s no room left in our world for Sanaa’s tall clay towers delicately adorned with white adobe friezes, nor for the fresh green breath of its orchards, nor for its courtyards where blind camels circle around stone mills.
And yet, it all remains here, in the middle of Sanaa: The mirage refuses to disappear.
I take to this city with the zeal of a man possessed by impossible love.
Like a thousand-year-old woman who stays forever young thanks to veils that hide her: That’s Sanaa, unreachable.
Wars, disease, religious intolerance, and blood feuds keep the city inaccessible to me.
I’m here thanks to a miracle, and that miracle won’t come again.
I don’t understand how Sanaa can still exist; at any moment a plague of locusts, a dust storm, or a coalition air attack could erase it from the map.
But she persists. Sanaa, the exquisitely old, lives on in the midst of disaster.
Despite her war wounds, she is still the most beautiful of all.
I roam her quickly, running behind Zahra Bayda, who’s picked me up at the airport and now has some shopping and other errands to attend to.
I cling to Zahra Bayda like some Theseus, she’s my Ariadne’s thread—or maybe my very Ariadne—and the possibility of losing her scares me, for without her this labyrinth would swallow me whole.
“How long has it been since you’ve eaten?” she asks, and at a table in the crowded market, we’re served lamb kebab and coffee with ginger, pepper, and cinnamon, hot and sweet. I eat with an orphan’s hunger.
Zahra Bayda walks very fast, setting the rhythm, I can’t slow down to look around and have to settle for filling my memory with visions that whirl by from one instant to the next.
Stores and towers, fragrant gardens, street vendors offering khat leaves or precious stones.
Men with sharp daggers at their belts. Women fine as shadows who have me imagining the beauty hiding beneath their many veils.
At an elevation of 2,340 meters—7,677 feet—in the mountains of Djebel Ayban, Sanaa is one of the highest capitals in the world, after Bolivia’s La Paz, Colombia’s Bogotá, and Ethiopia’s Addis Ababa.
A living anachronism, a remake of biblical times, Sanaa was founded before the spread of people and of tongues, its patriarch was Shem, son of Noah, and it was populated by the sons of Shem, who were called Elam, Ashur, Arphaxad, Lud, and Aram, and later by his grandsons, Mash, Uz, Hul, and Gether, and after that by many more, all the way to the proud men who today carry loads or trade camels and goats as they chew khat, curved butcher’s knives at their waists.
Were they all born spontaneously, from nothing?
How did so many males sprout into being, when the Yemeni annals mention no women in the original Sanaa?
Might there have been a queen, slave, mother, prostitute, priestess, or female baker?
No, not one. Recording female lives was not of interest to the scribes of those times.
With one single, notable exception. The tradition speaks of one woman. Only one: her.
She who didn’t have to be a saint, nor virgin, nor poor, nor whore to earn a place in the pages of the Testaments.
To be recognized, she didn’t have to behead anyone, like Salome or Judith; it was enough for her to be herself, the woman of Sheba, in power and wisdom.
She, the slippery one. She, the mystery.
And what if Sanaa was the kingdom, and the Lady of Sheba its queen?
Two in essence, with a single head and body, bride and lover: Sanaa, the fortified city and its unattainable queen.
Her. I’ve come here to seek her name and the letters of her surname, for her I’ll write a bolero song, a noir novel, or a Viennese waltz.
I want to tell her truths and air out her lies.
I’m going to find out whether she defeated Solomon in their contest of wisdom, whether she stole his heart in bed or spurned him, and I’ll also learn of her other loves, wars, sorrows, children if she had them, the pain she experienced, and the joys.
The color of her favorite outfit, the weapon she used, what languages she spoke, how she braided her hair, whether she was savage or refined, whether she abused her power or was respected by her people, whether she rode a horse or camel.
Whether she put pepper, ginger, or cinnamon in her coffee, whether she took it sweet and hot on a corner like this one.
In an empty alley, a small being sits against the wall, a human lump.
She’s a beggar with her hand outstretched to passersby, of which, in this place, there are none.
The stubborn hand keeps begging. The woman barely breathes under her tangled rags, so still and absent she seems asleep.
They say that, on a street in Turin, an exhausted horse once got a brutal beating.
Nietzsche embraced the horse’s neck, wept, and collapsed.
I do not embrace this beggar in Sanaa. Nietzsche would have done so, he would have been able to close the distance, he would have known there was no distance because he too was the beggar, he too was the horse.
Me, I only give this woman a few coins, which she thanks me for with her hand at her breast: In exchange for my coins, she offers me her heart.
The panhandler of Sanaa goes still again, as if dozing beneath tattered cloth, and I ask Zahra Bayda to ask her what she’s dreaming. Zahra Bayda gives me a strange look, as if to say, What is wrong with this guy? But she assents.
“She says she dreams nothing,” she translates for me. “She says she came to this city full of dreams, but she has none left anymore. She says there’s only one, a tiny dream, the daily one: She dreams of somebody giving her a coin.”
We leave Sanaa’s Old City the way we came, through the adorned archway of Bab-al-Yaman.
Beyond the city walls, another song awaits: an abrupt return to the present, and to the suffocation of a run-down, overpopulated, dirty, disjointed modernity, of slow internet and rampant traffic.
Beasts of burden and ancient cars and trucks move through a jungle of telecom towers, and, on the sidewalks, piles of trash yield food to dogs and pigs.
Zahra Bayda. There’s something fascinating about her, some “black magic woman” quality, bringing that song to mind. She declares that she’s got one more thing to do and asks me to come with her.
“I’ll go anywhere with you, ma’am,” I say.
“Don’t call me ma’am.”
“I’ll call you whatever you prefer.”
“Don’t call me anything if you don’t want to.”
Doctors Without Borders wants to set up a health care outpost in this part of the city.
We walk the dilapidated urban landscape until we arrive in the neighborhood of Safia, where we ascend to the fifth floor of an abandoned building on decaying stairs.
In a bare, unlit room, Zahra Bayda finds the people she’s come to talk to.
I can’t quite see what’s between these damp walls.
As my eyes grow accustomed to the dark, the outlines of a group of women emerge.
They’re all standing. They talk among themselves and wave their arms with quick, nervous gestures, like birds.
There are fifteen of them. I still can’t distinguish their features, but I catch their scent, so dense it’s almost palpable: bodies wrapped in smoke and cardamom, incense and sweat.
When they see us come in, they go silent and sit on their heels, forming a semicircle.
They’re draped in colored cloths, head to toe.
Not their faces; as Somali women, they keep their faces bare.
Zahra Bayda settles onto the floor with them, and I squat like a soccer player posing for a photo.
I whisper in Zahra Bayda’s ear to ask whether my male presence among so many women might make them uncomfortable, and she says no.
It occurs to me that we Westerners live up off the ground, only using it to walk and step.
Here, in the absence of furniture, life unfolds at earth level.
“They’re Somali refugees. They survive here, in the capital, by cleaning houses by day. Each of them looks for work on her own, but at night they gather in a group, them and their children, in a room like this one.”
Zahra Bayda asks them questions, they reply, and I don’t understand a word.
One of them has her face covered; the others gesture toward her; they’re clearly talking about her.
They encourage her to unveil her face, and she finally does it.
She’s so disfigured that it’s as if she has no face. A faceless face.
“This woman is called Hasanana,” Zahra Bayda tells me. “She tried to kill herself by dousing herself with gasoline and lighting a match.”