The Pédauque Dynasty
Lavish hair on a female body, the defect that led to Goat Foot’s disownment and exile.
But is it really such a monstrous defect?
Zahra Bayda knows an ancestral technique for getting rid of it that consists of spreading a mix of arsenic sulfide, honey, and quicklime along the body.
Careful: This salve can be dangerous. It can inflame and burn the skin if not removed immediately, but when it’s used right it can pull up hair by the root .
. . as long as the muzayyin, or shaver, is highly skilled with the mussel shell, whose razor’s edge is sharper than hunger itself.
“People fear the muzayyin,” says Zahra Bayda.
“They marginalize them, avoid looking at them, believing their job to be profane and somehow perverse. That’s why the work is almost always done by foreign women, who already carry stigma and so have less to lose.
The muzayyin know how to remove that caustic salve from the body fast enough to prevent burning, and they have the needed expertise to avoid cutting the skin with the sharpened shell. ”
So if the remedy was known, why didn’t Goat Foot solve her hypertrichosis problem from the get-go?
According to one version, she was impeded by the Maiden, who declared that any muzayyin who shaved Goat Foot would have her throat slit with one swift cut by the same mussel shell she’d dared to use.
Another version tells that Goat Foot herself had rebelled outright, embracing her hairy condition and refusing to allow any shaving.
It’s no surprise. Hair is still hair, in mythic times and in our own, and as with Sheba, another great woman has defended the right to flaunt improper hair, and that is Patti Smith, my beloved punk singer, my absolute favorite, a potent kind of contemporary Queen of Sheba, irreverent and untamed, who has been called the Punk Queen of Sheba for good reason.
For one of her album covers, Patti Smith chose a photo of herself in a tight undershirt, gaze turned inward, arms high, armpits exposed and unshaven.
The record label shouted to high heaven.
Hair in underarms! Repugnant, completely unfeminine, a real affront to public decency!
The album stirred up irrational fury. Stores refused to display it in their front windows.
Shame. But not for Goat Foot, nor for Patti Smith: Both of them conveyed their respective pilosity with admirable aplomb.
Hair, hair, hair. Why abhor a few poor strands growing in armpits and groins, well-oiled with pheromones, whose noble purpose is to make us sexually attractive? Why are matters of hair so complicated, those hairs in particular and all of them writ large?
I’ve lived that drama in the flesh, because I, Bos Mutas, also came to the world almost as hairy as a bear cub, or perhaps as a half-shorn bear cub.
But my mother didn’t reject me for that.
Since I was a baby with chest hair, my mother would say to people: My child was born wearing a little vest, my boy will never be cold.
But not everyone responds so cheerfully.
I’ve also had onerous requirements put on me because of it.
The very first girlfriend I more or less had, just before I joined the monastery, told me she’d kiss me if I got hair removed, so I let her take me to a place called Rabbit’s, where they pulled the hair from my chest and shoulders with hot wax while I screamed.
A medieval torture, physically speaking; the emotional damage immediately followed, when I felt myself a stranger in my own poor scalded skin, and saw myself as bald and white as a guava’s worm.
On the other hand, there’s the matter of the clubfoot, or goat foot, the second reason for her queen mother’s spurning and punishment. The thing is, the Maiden, uncultured and arbitrary as she is, knows nothing about the powerful legion of pédauque queens, among whom her firstborn is a main figure.
Pédauque, from the Occitan word pé d’auca, or “goose foot,” and by extension “goat foot,” “eagle foot,” “fox foot,” and in general the foot of any animal, is a mark of higher wisdom and talent that characterizes a series of women, Bigfoot women, recognizable through their limp.
Their dynasty begins with prehistoric creatures such as Yetis with their long hair, deadly claws, and difficulty walking on slopes because of their defective feet.
Herders of the yaks that populate Yeti territory, knowing their weakness, advise fleeing them by running downhill.
The pédauques also include the Sasquatch, another branch of the Bigfoot family.
These are giant females whose existence is questioned, despite the footprints they’ve left on five continents.
In the Middle East, pédauques arrive on the scene with Goat Foot, princess and heiress to Sheba, and later they arrive in Europe with the Queen Pédauque, of Visigoth origins, from the Toulouse region.
And with the Scandinavian goddess Freya, a warrior with a falcon foot and a feathered cloak that makes her fly.
Or the German goddess Berchta, with one foot bigger than the other, predecessor to the long line of Berthas who over the centuries would inherit the same condition.
Among them the historic Bertrada of Prüm, also called Bertrada the Old, mother of Bertrada the Young and grandmother to Charlemagne.
Then there’s Berthe au Grand Pied, or Bertha Broadfoot, a princess who was replaced by an impostor until her mother, seeing she had webbed toes, recognized her as her unique and legitimate daughter.
The feminine myth of pédauques has its masculine equivalent in the royal family of Labdacus, a name that means “one who limps.” The Labdacus family ruled the city of Thebes, and its most renowned member was Oedipus.
The shepherd who was supposed to kill the newborn Oedipus changed his plans, left him alive, pierced his heel, and ran a cord through it to carry him on his back, as was done with small prey from the hunt; this caused the legendary defect his descendants would inherit.
The pédauque legend endures and recurs throughout the centuries, reappearing in our times in magnificent figures such as Frida Kahlo, the great Mexican Goat Foot marked from childhood with its unmistakable sign.
When she was six, polio attacked her right leg, leaving it thinner and shorter than the left, so that she had to wear orthopedic socks and shoes to hide the scrawniness of the affected calf.
Later, her pédauque condition would mark her in a brutal way.
Child of Sorrows, Madonna of Suffering, Virgin of the Ten Spades, at the age of seventeen, Frida is on a bus that crashes into a moving tram.
She emerges from the accident destroyed by an iron bar that tore through her, stabbing into her left side, shattering her hip and spine to come out through her pelvis, damaging several internal organs along the way.
Years later, her right leg succumbs to gangrene and is amputated.
A few little pecks like those of a bird, that’s what she’d call—with a very Mexican sense of humor—her endless wounds, fractures, and punctures that never fully heal and that torment her for life, forcing her to permanently wear a plaster corset, move with crutches or a wheelchair, and spend long periods of time immobile in bed.
Beautiful, hairy Frida, long-suffering, rebellious, and brilliant: a majestic pédauque who deserves the title not only because of her great talent and her foot, but also because of her hirsute condition, which she bears with pride and records in her self-portraits, in which she appears fine and very thin, in plaster corsets and traditional Mexican dress, with obvious fuzz darkening her upper lip.
When she marries Diego Rivera, a very large, fat painter, their friends say it’s the union of an elephant and a dove, and that Frida envies Diego’s boobs while Diego envies Frida her mustache.
In the lineage of pédauques, we can’t forget Patti Smith, included as a distinguished member ever since a concert she gave one certain January 23, in a sports arena in Tampa.
From the start, things get out of control and the show goes off the rails.
Patti seems determined to put everything into giving the six thousand people in the audience an unforgettable experience, a chance to make up for the limited success of her last album.
On this night, her band plays with a demonic spirit and her performance crosses the line.
She wants to surrender to it; she wants to captivate.
She moves as if possessed, murmuring spells and screaming like an animal.
She improvises a frenetic choreography. She crosses the stage, spinning like a whirling dervish, head flung back, eyes half shut.
The music explodes with intensity and Patti Smith hurls out one of her famous defiant phrases: C’mon, God, make a move!
1 At that very moment her feet tangle with a black speaker camouflaged in shadows.
Patti Smith falls headfirst into the void like a wingless angel and smashes into the cement floor fifteen feet below.
Daugherty, her drummer, would later say that as he watched her fall, he thought, My god, she’s either dead or going to leap right back onstage.
Patti Smith isn’t dead, but she’s almost there.
She took the impact on her back and head and lies in a pool of blood.
She’s shattered vertebrae in her neck and several bones in her face.
She’ll need twenty-two stitches, her vison will be fogged, she’s temporarily lost the use of her legs.
All this demonstrates that a limp is no hateful defect, as the Maiden sees it, no source of shame.
Just the opposite: It’s a rarified gift, a mark of extraordinary lineage, of great culture, energy, beauty, and sexual powers.
Not for nothing does the astute Suleiman, or Solomon, set his sights on finding Goat Foot and send her a marriage proposal as soon as he learns that she’s the pédauque heroine of Hadhramaut.
She, for her part, resigns herself to the hardships and pain of that broken foot, that twisted goose foot or clubfoot, though at the same time, as an unmistakable sign of divinity, it strengthens the myth of the Queen of Sheba through the centuries of centuries.