The Three Floors of Your Guilt
As we drive through the desert, Zahra Bayda explains to me that a Catholic woman, a patient of hers, is dying and has asked for a confessor.
Is she insinuating that I should offer her patient confession?
No, she’s not insinuating, she’s proposing it without beating around the bush and is assuming it will happen. But it’s not possible.
“Please understand, ma’am, that I’m not a priest.” I’m insisting on calling her ma’am. “I’ve been banished, I’m a renegade who escaped the monastic life.”
I tell her this; I repeat it. But these details don’t seem to matter to her, and as I start to cede ground, I also start to understand that whatever Zahra Bayda wants, Zahra Bayda gets.
We finally arrive at the camp, and, despite exhaustion from the journey, we head directly to the camp’s hospital, where Yameelah Semela, the sick woman who’s asked for a confessor, is waiting for us.
There are few Christians living in Yemen, but there are some.
They’re very devoted and very persecuted.
Yameelah Semela is one of them. Her final hour has come, but she’s putting it off to seek forgiveness before she dies.
My hands tremble, I move jerkily, I’m talking too fast. It’s been almost seventy-two hours since I last slept and my exhaustion is so intense that it’s turned into its opposite, the frenzied intensity of a cartoon character; I feel like I’ve got more battery power than the Energizer bunny.
I’m dazed. What if the dying woman starts her confession saying, like Nerval: I am the wretched widow wandering through fog without solace?
Despite my sad state, Zahra Bayda thinks it best for me to see the woman immediately, because tomorrow could be too late.
All right, now or never. Am I expected to absolve her? I, the worst of all, the false priest, the least qualified?
“It’s enough for you to keep her company and listen to her.” Zahra Bayda leads me by the arm to the cot where the sick woman lies.
I’m comforted by having heard Pope Francis, some time ago, say on the radio that in critical cases, in the absence of a priest, it’s enough for the dying to sincerely repent their sins. Fine, Francis, I’ll try to help her get to a place where she can forgive herself.
Yameelah Semela is expecting me; I’ve been told she’s keeping death at bay until I arrive.
Her eyes shine in the chiaroscuro, feverishly bright; she looks like a small animal deep in a cave of agony.
Her body is slight beneath the sheet, light enough to levitate.
She’s still young, but she carries the weight of mountainous time, and she’s at the brink of succumbing to a cancer that had been neglected for years.
She arrived at this MSF camp too late, when the disease had metastasized. Her feet poke out, as blue as her lips.
“They’ve walked so much,” she says. “They won’t have to walk anymore.”
“This is Bos Mutas and he’s come to help you,” Zahra Bayda says by way of introduction, adding that I’m not a priest, but I know about such things.
Yameelah Semela assents. She takes my hand in both of hers with a hope I don’t deserve. She covers herself to the neck with her sheet, smooths her hair, clears her throat to recover her voice, and looks at me with an imploring fervor that disarms me.
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”
“Yameelah, I’m not a priest,” I say.
“You seem like a priest,” she says. The lucidity of a dying woman? The clinical eye of someone who’s seen it all?
Zahra Bayda has filled me in on this woman’s life. She came here from Ethiopia some years ago, fleeing misfortune and leaving behind her mother and five brothers. She brought her only son with her, a months-old baby who soon died of malnutrition.
“Say a prayer for me, Father,” Yameelah says.
No, I won’t recite some Christian prayer for this woman, won’t promise her that Heaven will give her the happiness denied here on earth. No. She deserves my respect. I won’t ask her to surrender meekly, to forget past sorrows and submit in her final hour. I will not do it.
We communicate through an interpreter who serves as a bridge.
In place of prayer, I recite a Dylan Thomas poem for her, “And Death Shall Have No Dominion.” She croons in a low voice and the interpreter, whose name is Kia, accompanies her, clapping her hands.
She explains that what they’re singing is a hymn from the Eastern Orthodox Church, to which they both belong.
I ask her to translate the lyrics for me, and she says she can’t, she herself doesn’t understand them because they’re not in Amharic but in Geez, a language from biblical times.
Yameelah sits up with great effort and rests against her pillow. She takes a breath and a few sips of water, then confesses that she is carrying guilt and has a recurring dream in which she’s constantly being punished.
She says that, at night, a demon drags her into a tower with two floors and submits her to judgment there. On the first floor, he condemns her for the death of her child, and on the second floor he condemns her for abandoning her mother and brothers.
“Will you absolve me with your blessing, Father?”
“I’m not someone who can forgive you, Yameelah. You have to forgive yourself.”
“The demon won’t leave me in peace, Father, he returns every night.”
What can I say that won’t sound insipid? How to find words that could alleviate her guilt? The nurse enters to give her an injection and asks me to leave for a moment. I take advantage of the pause to think. Outside, the fresh twilight air invigorates me and slows the spinning in my mind.
“You’ve told me of the judgment to which you’re being subjected,” I tell Yameelah when I’m back at her side. “So let’s prepare your defense. Do you understand me?”
“Yes. Prepare my defense.”
“Here it is. Your defense against the demon’s accusations.
Next time, you’ll explain to him that you came to Yemen to work and send money to your mother.
No matter how hardheaded this demon is, he’s got to understand that you didn’t abandon your mother, nor your brothers, and that it wasn’t you who killed your son, but poverty and hunger.
Speak firmly to this demon, make him see that you didn’t work against your family, but just the opposite, you tried to give them better lives, even though that possibility ended up not being in your hands. ”
Yameelah Semela listens with a moving depth of attention, and then she grows drowsy without saying a word, spent by the emotional and physical effort. A pair of nurses enter, declare that’s enough for today, and take the cot back to its place inside the hospital.
Zahra Bayda lets me know I can spend the night in the mission, where she and three other doctors sleep.
It’s a small house with three bedrooms, a kitchen, a patio, and a single bathroom.
It has no more than the bare essentials, but that’s a lot compared to the general scarcity at hand.
Beyond the house, the world burns, but here everyday life makes its nest, yoked to objects that speak of past days: sheets hung to dry on the patio; a pair of shoes at the door; a heavy old fridge that no longer works and that only serves for storing pasta, garbanzos, and canned food; a well-worn copy of Orwell’s 1984.
I take this as a sign that I’ve come to a good place.
They put me in a small room that lets out onto the patio.
Despite the exhaustion, I can’t sleep; no matter how much I try to curl up, I don’t fit on this bed, I spill out lengthwise and sideways.
In my insomnia, I distract myself by going over my recent notes and stop at the expression past days.
Why did I write past days? Are there even past days, or days to come?
All the days seem to hold the same rhythm, each of them carrying its small Armageddon.
The collapse is irreversible, but moves forward with great calm.
The thing is, I can’t sleep. The hours stretch out, but don’t pass by.
I need to pee, and the bathroom is on the other side of the patio.
I stall until I can’t hold it anymore. I get up without making a sound to keep from waking the others and cross the darkness on tiptoes. A timid moon shines into the patio.
It’s nice outside. Aromatic herbs grow in pots and I’m lulled by a scent, chamomile, peppermint?
My mother would know it immediately, she too gardened in pots, thyme, rosemary, peppermint, basil .
. . who would have thought that halfway across the world, beneath a pale Muslim moon, I’d find a patio like the one in my childhood?
If only I could boil a tea from these leaves .
. . but I’d have to turn on lights and the stove: impossible.
Better to stay here as long as the cold will let me.
Through my headphones, I listen to an old Sephardic song, whose lyrics say, “Morenika, they call me, I was born white, and I became this way from the summer sun, morenika graciosika, that’s who I am . . .”
Morenika. That’s it. I’ve got you, Queen of Sheba.
Morenika Graciosika, that’s what I’ll call you.
None of this Lady of the Gate of Thula, nor Sovereign of the Desert of Ramlat, nor Mistress of the Palaces of Marib, nor who knows what else.
None of that. It doesn’t matter that you won’t confess your name to me; I’ll call you Morenika.
How silent you are, and slippery. It’s not true that you accumulated countless treasures.
You didn’t have, as Rubén Darío asserts, a palace of diamonds, a malachite pavilion, a hundred armed Black warriors, and four hundred elephants at the seashore.
You were a small, wild queen, now lost in the great night of time.
Oh, Graciosika, let me love you in my own way.
“Enough crowing about the Queen of Sheba, she didn’t exist and doesn’t exist,” Zahra Bayda said to me earlier, and I took it badly.