The Three Floors of Your Guilt #5
I’ve been calling Zahra Bayda ma’am since the moment I first saw her, when she came to pick me up at the airport.
At first sight, she seemed a mature woman to me, and the address seemed right.
I didn’t really take a close look at her appearance.
Well, that’s not quite true; I did look, how could I not look when she burst on the scene like an earthquake, talking loudly and gesturing vigorously and wearing bright colors amid all those silent, black-clad women.
That is to say, of course I looked, but not the way a man looks at a woman, more the way he might look at an approaching storm.
In the airport, my overall impression was of an energetic, commanding woman who gave orders we obeyed, all of us, the officials, the soldiers, and I myself, as if our mother had just arrived to put everything in order.
That’s what I saw, a possessive and nourishing mother of humanity, owner of the fiercest black eyes in the whole desert, the magnetic eyes of a shaman deep in a trance.
In the kitchen, hours before her birthday party, after touching on the subject of her age, I observed her more closely.
She’s a tall woman, with a sturdy body that seems free and comfortable under an ample tunic with a green, brown, and black pattern that she calls an abaya and that gives her a more African than Arab look.
Over that she wears the distinctive MSF vest, white with a red logo.
She’s given me one too, with stern instructions not to leave the house without it: Though it’s just a simple cloth, it somehow functions as a kind of safety shield.
Wow, this Zahra Bayda. She’s truly seductive when she beams her Somali smile, honest and full of large teeth, and she’s truly frightening when angry: She’s moody, why deny it?
She wears heavy earrings that stretch her earlobes.
Her most sumptuous treasure is a wild, shining mane she keeps hidden beneath a cap or turban except when she’s at home.
I tell her that her hair is only set loose at night, like ferocious dogs.
Then there are her hands, which are enormous, she moves them gracefully as she gestures like some great queen or like a person who knows they have phenomenal hands.
Everything about this woman is solid, and supreme.
“You’re an unassailable monument,” I told her.
“Have you tried to assail it?” she shot back. “Want to place bets?”
“My god.”
“Let’s bet on whether the Beatles ever sang ‘Bésame Mucho.’ The loser beats the eggs for the scones.”
“You’ll lose,” I warned. “I hope you know how to beat eggs.”
She searched YouTube and found the Beatles singing . . . what? “Bésame Mucho.” She was right, this version did exist and it was fun to watch too, with Paul McCartney still young and acting the clown as he shows off his vibrant baritone.
I fulfilled my penance, beat the eggs in a bowl, and mixed them with the milk.
“Oh, Paul McCartney!” Zahra Bayda said to the image on the laptop screen.
“You were so charming, with your little beard, I like the way you sing báaaasame musho. I would baaasar you, Paul, I would kiss you and baaasar you muusho if you asked me for it like that, with those calf eyes and that sweet little mouth.”
We put the scones in the oven. It was the quiet hours of dull heat and no further tasks awaited us before dinner, so we sat on the patio and killed time googling gossip about “Bésame Mucho” and the art of bolero music.
“It’s by a Mexican woman, did you know that, Bos? Her name is Consuelito Velázquez and she was sixteen when she wrote it. Sweet sixteen. The Wikipedia people say she hadn’t yet kissed anyone.”
“How do they know that?”
“It seems she herself confessed to it. But I don’t believe it. Nobody understands kisses like that, out of nowhere.” Zahra Bayda laughed, relaxed and charming. “I like this Consuelito, who declares ‘bésame mucho’ as if giving orders, kiss me or I’ll kill you!”
“Kiss me, or I’ll kill myself.”
“Incredible, at sixteen years old, Consuelito already knew the way to kiss is with your whole soul.”
“The way to kiss is like biting, or burning, or killing.”
“The way to kiss is with your life hanging by a thread, Consuelito says it herself: as if this were the last time. As if you were going to die, or something like that.”
“As if there were no tomorrow,” I said.
“There is no tomorrow.”
“There’s no tomorrow, Consuelito predicted it at the age of sixteen.”
“Another virgin prophet, like the Sybil of Cumae.”
“Nobody kissed the Sybil of Cumae?”
“Maybe Apollo.”
“‘She kisses like a machine,’ says a Pink Floyd song.”
“How many women have you kissed?” Zahra Bayda asked me.
“Me? A few.”
“Have you slept with many?”
“Nothing out of this world . . . What about you? Do you hold any sexual Guinness records?”
“It took me years to recover from a really brutal rape, but you know, I get along. You do what you can.”
I should have said something to her, asked something, expressed my .
. . condolences, horror, regrets? I didn’t know what to say, I think I didn’t even want to know.
I was still as a stone. I should have asked the most basic question, what happened to you?
But I didn’t do it, perhaps because I feared the response.
I’ve always been amazed by the ease with which women talk to each other, without shame or modesty, face-to-face, exchanging confidences in a gently, naturally flowing purr, with laughter or tears, with an immediate sense of connection, without forethought, like schoolgirls, as if as adults they were still wearing those same uniforms, the same tight socks and unlaced shoes, the same scrapes on their knees and book-filled backpacks slung on their shoulders.
That’s how my mother’s conversations with her friends always were, and as a boy I’d listen in, captivated not so much by what they said as by the way they said it.
Facing Zahra Bayda, I stayed quiet, unable to meet her gaze and shamed by the cowardice of my silence, though I had no idea how to break it.
I suspect that a deep feeling of guilt kept my mouth closed, though guilt over what I don’t know, I’ve never raped anyone, nothing was more foreign to me.
Guilt over being a man, guilt over the harm other men had done her, guilt that I hadn’t suffered as she had, guilt that I hadn’t gone through hell, guilt, guilt, guilt.
I would have liked to have been able to speak openly with her, but no, I couldn’t.
Something fails me when it comes to striking up close connections with people.
I can’t make it happen. I’m wary of what might be under other people’s skin or, worse, under their clothes.
For me, attempting intimacy is like leaping into water when you don’t know how to swim; how did I land in Yemen of all places, this lone, pressing, living sea of humanity?
The scones were in the oven, awaiting their moment, and the laughter between Zahra Bayda and me had run dry.
A sad silence now enveloped us. She carried pain and secrets that I could not and did not wish to imagine; we dwelled on different planets, mine light and cottony, hers serious and dense.
I felt a sudden pang in my chest, that Dane who’d made scones with her sprang to mind like an ache and I saw myself as a substitute.
All at once I was no more than the shadow of that other guy, and everything that had happened in that kitchen seemed surreal.
Zahra Bayda’s mind was already elsewhere, and she returned to Google and Consuelito as if nothing had happened.
She learned that “Bésame Mucho” had been banned by the Legion of Decency in Franco’s Spain for alleged immorality.
Even so, it became so fashionable that it was recorded in fifty languages by more than a hundred vocalists including Elvis, Plácido Domingo, Mina, Nat King Cole—
“And the Beatles.”
“Women used ‘Bésame Mucho’ to say goodbye to their men as they left for war.”
“That must have been during World War II,” I mused.
“Any war, I suppose. ‘Kiss me right now, Mambru, or Paul, or whatever your name is, and go off to your war.’”
“What was your Dane’s name?”
“The scones one? What do you want to know that for?”
“He was Nordic and breathtaking, like Mads Mikkelsen, admit it.”
“Kiss me, Mads Mikkelsen,” Zahra Bayda crooned on. “But if you’re going to kiss me, you’d better kiss me a lot, a lot, a lot, because over in Denmark you’ll die of cold, or maybe you’ll die in the war, or end up with another woman—dirtbag!—and you’ll never come around here again.”
Consuelito Velázquez didn’t succeed in writing another memorable bolero; she was the sibyl genius at sixteen and by the following year the gift was gone.
“The Beatles version doesn’t work,” I said.
“It’s fun, though.”
“That’s why it doesn’t work. A bolero has to ache, it has to be full of tears and psychologically twisted.”
“Is there no comic bolero?”
“The Beatles one. That’s why it’s not a bolero.”
I told Zahra Bayda that the best kiss in all literature is that of Stephen Dedalus, the Joyce character, when he says that as a young boy he felt his mother’s soft lips dampen his cheek and heard them make a small noise, deducing that this must be a kiss.
I also told her that there is a sweet and terrible kiss: the queen’s kiss, to which Gérard de Nerval alludes with letters penned in blood, when he confesses that it leaves a red mark on his forehead.
“Like a bite, or a burn?” Zahra Bayda asked, her interest piqued.
“The kiss that hurts Nerval could well be the same one featured in the Song of Songs; neither of them is a Western kiss, portrayed as soft, savored, labial, full of feeling. The other one, in contrast, is the rough, ardent kiss of the desert.
“In Hebrew, the songs’ original language, the word nashaq has a double meaning: ‘to love,’ and ‘to bite’; and with a slight phonetic variance it can also mean ‘to catch fire, to burn.’ Kiss and weapon share an almost identical word, and ‘to kiss’ also means ‘to bite, burn, or wound’: love and violence, hand in hand.
Kiss as cannibalism: not a muted kiss, [but] a circle of flames and weapons unsheathed. ”1
My explanations rambled on and lost the attention of Zahra Bayda, who left me talking to myself.
“How did you manage to recover?” I dared ask out of the blue.
“What?”
“‘Recover,’ that’s what you said.”
“Recover?”
“That’s the word you used.”
“The scones! Get them out of the oven, Bos, they’ll burn!” she ordered, avoiding my question. It seemed not all women were given to schoolgirl confidences. Zahra Bayda certainly wasn’t.
We saw each other again at dinner, when the ten or twelve members of the greater MSF team gathered to celebrate her birthday.
The food Leyla had prepared was fantastic, the scones slightly burned, and the Chinese wine undrinkable, but literally intoxicating.
We were tipsy by the second bottle, or at least I was.
Half the people chatted, the other half danced, and I sat alone and watched.
The CDs played at a low volume, the curtains were closed, and the lights were dimmed, which I at first took as a failed attempt at creating a certain disco ambiance, but I was told it was in fact to avoid the surveillance of that ghostly Taliban, the Black Turban, which forbids music and dance and enforces its rules through a hundred spies and a thousand eyes.
When Fonsi’s essential “Despacito” played, Zahra Bayda danced it with Pau in a frankly sensual way.
Sensual, at least, on her part: There she was, happy and beautiful, in a tight dress now, hair loose, lips red, striking black eyes lined with kohl; she had a natural gift for rhythm, an easy sway that struck me as very African and not Yemeni at all.
Cor d’Or was at her side, freshly bathed, ironed, and perfumed, in a white shirt, flaunting his great athletic physique but executing salsa moves with the stiffness of a robot or a Red Cross ex-soldier, perhaps thinking of Africa with his eyes on Zahra Bayda.
And? What did it matter to me? I, who hate parties, what was I doing at this one, a guest made of stone?
I didn’t know anyone, nobody knew me. I sat there like a lump, sulking and letting disquiet creep in.
A doubt assailed me. Could those two be lovers?
Zahra Bayda and Pau? And that doctor from Denmark, the Mads Mikkelsen of humanitarian medicine, the one who never let scones burn in the oven, Zahra Bayda’s lover, him too?
The rancorous Chinese wine was turning me into the jealous type.
At some point in the night Zahra Bayda approached me, tipsy herself, and took my face in her large mystic hands.
“For a bolero, Ravel’s,” she whispered in my ear.