You’ve Really Got to Think About It
You’ve Really Got to Think About It
The Maiden, enthused by the offer of some king in Jerusalem and determined to marry off her lame daughter, orders that she appear immediately.
Reluctantly, Goat Foot complies. Even though she’s become more powerful than her devious mother, she still doesn’t dare openly defy her.
Deep down, she hasn’t lost hope of receiving a maternal embrace, and she heeds the call despite an inner voice that warns nothing good can come of this.
She decides to travel to Mamlakat Aldam by foot, not horseback, to give her time alone and tame the chaos of her thoughts.
She prepares for the road by wrapping her body in strips of black cloth, like a shroud, leaving no inch of skin exposed.
Over that, a long abaya. Face covered with a crude leather mask in the style of Hannibal Lecter.
On her head, a tall, wide-brimmed straw hat; on her neck, all her amulets.
Dressed this way, she looks like the witch Goya painted during one of his murky states of consciousness.
But things are simpler than that, she’s just dressed in the manner of local shepherdesses, the ones whose armpits exude a dense, smoky scent, who have to bear long journeys in the stifling heat, who can’t find shade as they guide their flocks in search of grass in those eerie valleys full of ruined fortresses and bloody temples, where only this witchy clothing can protect them from the fury of the sun.
Although the trip will be long and risky, Goat Foot won’t flaunt any caravans or armed warriors.
She’ll only call for the simoom, the young red wind that holds the qualities of all that spins, that flips and unfurls, and that’s always been her accomplice and protector.
When simoom whips up, its strength is equivalent to an army’s.
The Bedouins fear its onslaught. They call it Is-Tifl, thief of children, and they make their small children wear backpacks full of stones so the weight will stop gusts from whisking them away.
They also call it Malandro, because at night it tears the wool coverings off awnings, makes them fly, and sends people running to get their roofs back.
There are times during which the simoom blows gently and stealthily into tents without waking a soul, refreshing men, caressing women, and chasing flies from children’s eyes.
Then the Bedouins bless it and call it Rakhim, the melodious.
“Come here, Red!” Goat Foot calls the simoom by its familiar name. “Come, Red, come!”
The simoom crosses the desert to heed the call. It comes obediently, sweetly, whistling symphonies, spinning clockwise. Goat Foot strokes its neck as if it were a colt and dives into its turbulence as if into a stream. If she tires, he breathes encouragement.
They say goodbye on arriving at Mamlakat Aldam.
The simoom gets lost on the horizon and Goat Foot enters the labyrinthine alleys that curve between the thousand shops of the bazaar.
Washhouses, silversmiths, inns, jewelry shops, vendors of fabric and spice.
An overexcited hive of merchants, vendors, orphans, outsiders, goats, chickens, stray dogs.
Alone, limping laboriously on the long walk, Goat Foot moves through the great market’s effervescence.
In her dominions in Hadhramaut she spends more time with the silence of the dead than the noise of the living; here she’s bewildered by music and loud announcements, smoke clouds, the sting of spices, the glow of colors, the bittersweet steam of meat exposed at the butchers’ bazaar.
The crowd recognizes her despite her witchy clothing and yields a path for her.
“Move aside,” they whisper to each other, “move over, it’s the lame daughter of the Maiden, let her pass, it’s her, is it her? Yes, it’s her!”
The princess limps on through air infested by a court of miracles, a carnival of crutches or dance of the ragged and the gaunt.
Lepers, cripples, trash eaters, garbage pickers who beat the palace doors in hopes of a handout.
They display their sores, their mutilated arms, their legs as twisted as gnarled branches, their pain that has no mouth or scream, their red moles.
The dying unbandage their rotted hands and stretch them toward the princess, hoping she’ll deign to look at them and throw them the coins of contempt.
Within this smelly, sorrowful throng, Goat Foot, the Black-Maned Lioness, thinks she detects something familiar lurking, a figure she’s felt very close before, though she doesn’t know when, someone who’s following her, or hounding her?
There it is, in that pile of spurned people, there’s that presence, not as a sensation so much as a certainty, it’s there, no doubt about it.
She distinguishes him in the mob, standing out, isolated in his own storm, dandy of the slums, remover of illnesses, lord of misery.
It’s him, him again, that young man with a feverish fire in his eyes.
“What’s going on with that man, why is he writhing so grotesquely?” ask the alaleishos.
He suffers from a condition called the mercury illness. Common to those who are bedeviled or possessed, the sickness lashes the body, distorts features into wild expressions, and spurs limbs into disjointed motion. With each toss of the head, the man’s face is whipped by his own curls.
Goat Foot hears the needy refer to him as the Puppet.
The Puppet? Yes, it seems as if strings were pulling at his arms and legs from above, forcing jagged shakes and violent movement.
They also call him the Restless One, or the Prince: His disease is the same one kings inherit in their blood.
The same one that befalls hatmakers, saddlers, miners, and anyone who exposes himself by trade to quicksilver, or mercury.
Though he arrives in the district singing with hornpipes and castanets, his contortions scare the good neighbors, who chase him away with sticks. His name is Marcabrún.
Marcabrún, son of Marcabruna. The son succumbed to mercury poisoning, the mother a leper.
There is Marcabrún in this precise moment, in front of Goat Foot, who stares at him, perplexed.
It’s him: a living spasm of tortured beauty.
The air of a defeated king or starving lion.
From his tall height, the beggar tilts his head.
He’s all red eyes beneath the dense curve of his eyebrows, fixing his gaze on the princess and leaving her smitten, as if shot by an arrow: His gaze hits the mark, pierces it.
Goat Foot notices that the man’s fleshy—sensuous?—lips move as if uttering words that make no sound. Is he insulting her? Shouting mute obscenities? Is he revealing secrets she can’t hear?
The Puppet’s tremors ease, and he approaches, until he’s less than arm’s distance away.
Goat Foot’s heart beats hard. The man walking toward her is not a sick beggar; he’s impoverished illness personified.
Will he infect her, cover her with death?
Instinct tells her to back away and flee contact, but she stays still.
There’s something sacred in this man that paralyzes her.
He’s so close now that he could push her or tear her jewels off, scratch her chest, lick her cheeks, kiss her mouth. But he doesn’t.
The air bristles with anticipation. Time becomes a square thing, the sky spins in slow spirals.
Light blazes, the sun shines with its archetypal black crown.
This proliferation of signs, what does it mean?
Could they be new signals? The alaleishos discuss the matter and can’t agree.
Is this meeting coincidental, or no? (Borges might ask himself that question.) Or does it happen, just because?
The way, on a chessboard, the queen and the bishop meet face-to-face.
An improbable thing: The bishop is a minor piece, and the great queen moves through squares he can’t access.
Even so, the two face each other and graze each other with their breath.
The beggar arrogant in his stinking rags, the princess modest in her black tunic and straw hat. He haughty, she serene.
A curious exchange takes place. She gives him a handout and he offers her a small object, yellow and heavy. She takes it, puts it away without looking at it, and later will forget it; she won’t remember she’s carrying that object in her pocket, like a captive bird.
A deep sound escapes the beggar’s throat, leaving everyone with their hair standing on end. It’s the wail of a deer, or the darkest tone of a cello. Then he says, in a booming voice, like Edward Norton in Kingdom of Heaven: “I am Jerusalem.”
Is that what the beggar said? Goat Foot does something completely unexpected, removing her mask to let him look at her for an instant of true confrontation, or recognition, that could have gone longer if his convulsions hadn’t returned and changed him, changed the scene.
Goat Foot gathers her abaya and continues on her path, leaving that place far behind to get free of the spell.
She stops to catch her breath at the doors of the Red Palace, her mother’s bustling home.
This is where Goat Foot was born, in this unpleasant place that holds more resentments than it does memories.
Her chest is heavy with an old knowledge: Nothing good can come from the Maiden.
In the distance, a rooster sings and wild dogs howl.
From the battlements, the queen’s archers aim their arrows at her, but they can’t intimidate her.
Without windows or rooftop terraces, the building is turned inward, invaded by echoes, while on the outside it projects the solidity of a mountain.
Biting the bullet, she crosses the drawbridge; down in the moat she sees packs of scavenging shadows that move restlessly, because it’s almost time to be fed by the guards.