The Nur Ul Ain Tiara #2
On the tables there’s also an assortment of cookies, pastries, and other delicate Yemeni baked goods, which, on occasions like this one, are prepared with a special, expensive honey whose name is spoken in English: “honeymoon honey.” It’s made by bees fed only from the ilb tree, also known as the caramel tree, which truly does have the scent, taste, texture, and color of caramel; since it’s considered an aphrodisiac, it’s used for wedding-related festivities and honeymoons.
I love hearing Zahra Bayda’s precise way of telling all this without missing a detail, lingering on each little pastry, each party favor, each ribbon or curl of lace.
She, earthquake of the desert, general of battlefield hospitals, confronter of diseases and bombings, whom I’ve seen break a board with a karate chop and send an assailant running with a kick to the knees.
She, Zahra Bayda, the doctor to be reckoned with, fascinated with these feminine baubles?
“You really seem to like them,” I say.
“What?”
“All those feminine baubles. It sounds like you enjoy them.”
“I do. And you seem to really like hearing about them.”
It’s true, I like it, I’ll admit it. I like listening to her and imagining her there, in tight French lingerie like the other women in the tafrita, reclined on pillows in a disquieting pose.
Although who knows, in truth her tall five feet nine inches of stature might not fit on those flirty little cushions, it doesn’t matter, in any case that’s how I like to imagine her, and as she continues her story, I can almost see her in that mafraj, lost in khat-induced daydreams. But no, none of that rings true.
I don’t think Zahra Bayda is going around in frilly, revealing bras and panties, that doesn’t seem like her style.
Better put, I know that’s not her style, because I’ve seen her underwear in the patio of our house when she hangs them up to dry, and they’re white cotton pieces, no fuss about them.
No. I can’t imagine a Zahra Bayda in garter and corset.
On the other hand, I can, if I’m honest, imagine her naked.
Sometimes, as I watch her walk, work, or rest, I find myself guessing at what’s beneath her tunic.
I suspect firmness and many shapes, appealing, compact, generous.
May she forgive me, may she never find out.
I don’t know when it happened, but I’ve been turning into an avid observer of her body and vibrations.
I shouldn’t be doing it, it’s not appropriate.
I’ve spent my life dreaming about imaginary women whom I make real, and now I’m getting carried away in the same vein but in the opposite direction: I have a real woman before me, and I’m making her imaginary.
The delirium overpowers me, I can hear the Queen of Sheba murmuring, like in Flaubert’s story, I am not a woman: I am a world!
My cloak has only to fall in order that thou mayest discover a succession of mysteries.
1 It’s not that I want to fantasize about Zahra Bayda in such ways, it’s that I can’t help it, her nakedness invades me, it wants to possess me and I try to resist, like Bill Murray fighting off the ghost of Dana-Zuul.
Murmurs fill the mafraj. The women exchange information, catching up by word of mouth on recent events, from the tragic to the ordinary.
Everything ends up mixed in the whispers: life and death twined together, luxury and poverty hand in hand, today a mirror of yesterday.
Caramel honey to sweeten tragedies. These women talk about everything with a sensual indolence, who lost a son in the war, what a newborn will be named, who received a sapphire bracelet as a gift.
Cholera outbreaks in the neighborhood, seasoning for lamb kabsa, villages flattened in the night, anti-wrinkle creams, locust plagues, the love scandals of Gaviota in the Coffee telenovela, the ruin of harvests.
One single tone applies to everything that gathers and stirs in the flow of their everyday lives.
“They’re people with money, they don’t suffer from public catastrophes like the poorer masses,” Zahra Bayda tries to explain. “Which doesn’t mean they don’t have their share of burdens or sorrows.”
“The wealthy cry too,” I offer.
The groom would not be present at any of these parties, nor even at the wedding.
He’ll celebrate his part with men, while the bride celebrates elsewhere with women.
All this has me thinking. I wonder how much Yemeni women really miss male presence, on these special occasions and in life in general.
I’d say, not much. All the sensuality, friendship, mutual support, luxury, confidences, freedom, and laughter, all the good and pleasurable things in life unfold when they’re in a female space, without male company.
Aside from economic, reproductive, and status-related matters, it strikes me that Yemeni women have little need of men.
They’ve created a self-sufficient bubble all to themselves.
They spend the most pleasant moments of their days in their crystal tower, or, one might say, their adobe tower, high up on the top floor, gathered in the tafritas of the mafraj, where they light cigarettes and smoke, sing, dance, talk.
Not one of them lacks her own cell phone in a crocheted case.
They chat and text, snap photos of each other, take selfies and send them to friends.
And those friends share the pictures with their brothers, who share them with male cousins or coworkers.
A photo contraband smuggled via cell phone.
An undercover trafficking of images. With one click, from the mafraj, an image of a young woman flies to the screen of a young man, who stares at it in some other part of the city.
Cell phones undermine restrictions. They allow a woman to build intimacy with a fiancé or flirt with a stranger, and erase it all immediately so all traces of the crime disappear and there’s no punishment for the woman who bared her face to a male, a forbidden thing, extremely forbidden, as is smoking, as is laughing, dancing, singing, listening to music, and wearing high heels.
Even so, it’s clear that customs are secretly changing, even here, in impenetrable Yemen.
As for Hanani, she has no digital contact with her future husband, who would see it as a disgrace: When it comes down to it, he’s an old-school landowner who probably disdains the use of cell phones even for himself.
For now, the only image Hanani has seen of her suitor is a color photo taken in a studio, framed in silver.
She’s never seen him in person, not even once, though it is common to do so, because in this case the traditional meeting of both families for the exchange of gold for the bride’s hand never took place.
A man as powerful as this one doesn’t move, much less go to a woman’s house.
To seal the deal, it was Hanani’s father who had to travel to where the groom was.
What Hanani sees in the framed photograph is a sullen patriarch, at least sixty years old; hermetic lips, eyebrows as tangled as sparrows’ nests, the beard of a prophet.
A lynx’s eyes, glaring through glasses. Red-and-white scarf fastened with a ring to his head, formal attire, a white tunic.
He wears a camel hair coat trimmed in gold, half open to show his protuberant belly, and a large, bejeweled jambiya dagger with its curved tip, tucked into an embossed leather belt.
“An ogre . . .”
“A maniac grandpa.”
The image scares Hanani. Everything about that man stirs fear: his appearance, his excessive wealth, his power, his radical religiosity, his attachment to archaic customs, the rumors that link him to recent murders and the arms trade.
Plus the fact that he’ll be taking her to live in his own dominions, far from Sanaa and her own family home.
Ironic comments and muffled laughter fill the mafraj when the silver-framed photo of the suitor makes the rounds among friends.
He’s all nose and belly. Old, fat, furious, and ugly, yes, but he’s covered in gold: Deep down, they all envy Hanani a little.
The worst part is that she’s been called on to become a fourth wife.
“Four wives? Even Mirza Hussain had only three.”
Mirza Hussain and his lament for lost loves.
He had three wives when he was rich and young, the same three he lost when he grew poor and old.
Fatima, the one who sang; Zeliz, the one who smiled; and Zaida, the one who danced .
. . how we laugh, Zahra Bayda and me, full of gentle nostalgia on the Oasis patio, repeating by heart the words of Mirza Hussain, the old man who sells carpets and invokes the three beloveds destiny stole from him, Zaida, Zeliz, Fatima, my thoughts go to all of them on this sweet Safar night, perfumed by all dreams, by all desires.
. . .2 Three loves that left forever, Zaida who smiled, Fatima who sang, Zeliz who danced . . .
“The one who danced was Zeliz, not Zaida. Zaida is the smiling one.”
“Zaida smiles, Fatima sings, Zeliz dances . . . and Hanani becomes the fourth wife of a northern sheik.”
“Not first, nor second, nor even third, but fourth.”
She’ll be the last in the hierarchy and will have to contend with the other three.
That worsens the offer considerably. Something must snap in beautiful Hanani, who’s so intelligent and accomplished .
. . but with a clear disadvantage: She’s the single mother of a sixteen-year-old son.
And she herself is already thirty-four, almost twice the age considered appropriate for a bride.