You’ve Really Got to Think About It #2
Goat Foot reaches the great door, enters the palace, and advances carefully: She’s crossed the threshold.
She walks through halls of illusion that reproduce false skies and simulate green landscapes.
Her image is reflected on those walls, which slaves scrub daily until they’re as smooth and clean as mirrors.
All is perfection and cleanliness: Her mother has a phobia of anything dirty.
The air bears an aseptic stench of vinegar, steam from great cauldrons, smoke from branches burning in censers, fragrance-infused clouds.
A rose-colored passage stretches out with soft, breathing walls, made of living material.
A light flutter of helixes spinning in gelatin.
There’s a cellular gurgle of nourishing substance, a maternal presence impregnates the whole dwelling and controls each atom.
Goat Foot stumbles a little, recovers, keeps going.
At the end of that hall awaits the queen mother, in person.
Goat Foot feels the same desolation she did the first time.
She knows the protocol: She must not get close to the Maiden.
She stays fifty paces away, facing once again the perfect and completely shaved oval of her mother’s head, her impassive and eternally beautiful face, her floating mantle of extremely white foam.
She wears a necklace of tears and holds a green palm frond in her right hand, and a cup of forgetting in her left.
She stands over pools of fire and, at her feet, a salamander lies like a lapdog.
“Peace be with you, mater amantissima.” Goat Foot grits her teeth and offers the required salutation.
Once again, life has placed her before her elusive mother, who holds her in a spell of love and hate.
Before the vision of that extremely white mantle, Goat Foot recalls that when she was little she wanted to wrap herself in it—that cloud of foam, ethereal shelter—but her mother wouldn’t let her, shouting, “Don’t touch it, I don’t want you to infect my clothes with your smell!
” Goat Foot closes her eyes, trying to block out the memory.
The Maiden cuts to the chase. Without bothering with courtesies, she relays the official message the emissary brought on his albino camel: From a remote land, a king formally requested Goat Foot’s hand, some royal singer and poet by the name of Suleiman, or Solomon, owner of huge flocks of sheep, a palace under construction, seven prior wives, and thirty concubines.
The ladies of the court emerge from the back of the royal hall, a troupe of sycophants and charmers who line up behind the Maiden.
They memorized false praise to Solomon beforehand, and now they sing it sweetly, delighting in the details, above all the references to the suitor’s handsome physique and wealth, oh his black eyes deep as the sea, oh his long, curved lashes, his silky beard, his lavish retinue, his admirable wisdom.
Goat Foot is wary of so much flattery. Her guard goes up.
What mocking intentions hide behind her mother’s expressionless face?
The Maiden, who’s never cared about her firstborn, suddenly set on arranging her marriage?
“When I was born, you sent me off to die. Now you want to marry me off to deport me even farther away?” Goat Foot protests, then immediately regrets it and goes quiet.
She’s forgotten her commitment not to let her feelings show in front of her mother.
She contains herself so as not to reveal her complaints and grievances, withdraws discreetly the way she came, and seeks the exit through the rose-colored passage and the hall of mirrors.
After the long voyage, back in her own encampment in Hadhramaut, she lets loose a string of insults, hurls her spit, kicks furniture, and swears she’ll never marry anyone, much less wed that worthless so-called king, that con man from nowhere.
“Who said the princess was pining for male company, what does she need it for?” chide the alaleishos, all of them stubborn spinsters or satisfied widows, women without men. “Does Goat Foot succumb to the spell of a man? No way. Not her! She’s not willing. She doesn’t want to submit to his control.”
Goat Foot has her own opinion and vocation.
Does she really need a man, she of the independent spirit, she of the strong character and ambiguous sexuality?
She, the general of Sheba, she of the muscular back, well-toned arms, and troublemaker’s ways, she who eats with her hands and, when she’s done, wipes them on her blue kaffiyeh instead of washing them.
She’s learned since childhood to slit ox’s throats and bleed them in the ancient way to purify their meat; she rides in the dizzying dromedary race, every year without fail, and although she doesn’t win, she makes it to the finish line and leaves alive, besting many riders and beasts who die in the attempt.
All right, all right. So does Goat Foot dislike men?
Not necessarily, it could even be said that she’s attracted to them, above all if they’re young and dark-skinned, tall, silent, and prominent of nose.
Even so, she doesn’t lower herself, she neither falls in love nor yields to them.
She learned from the Maiden to keep distances as a way of imposing authority and strength of command, that’s how she gained the respect of the rugged people of the desert.
Gained respect? The alaleishos don’t approve of the phrase.
It’s something harder, more radical. Like the Abyssinian lion, Goat Foot wants to inspire fascination and panic, and she imposes submission at the sharp end of a whip.
Whip? That’s what the alaleishos say, but they’re known to exaggerate.
They insist that the princess is so precise with the whip that a single lash can kill a fly on a horse’s ear, without the horse noticing.
A warrior virgin, intact and splendid? That’s what some grandmothers believe, and they say that, in the matter of coitus, Goat Foot is as austere as her royal mother.
Others dissent. They say that, unlike the Maiden, Goat Foot indulges her desires and doesn’t deprive herself of the pleasures found in bed.
She has a destiny like that of Patti Smith, who picks up the most striking and talented skinny guys in the East Village: Robert Mapplethorpe, Sam Shepard, Fred “Sonic” Smith, Tom Verlaine, Richard Hell, all of them artists, geniuses of the bohemian scene, introverted and melancholic.
Patti likes them that way: divers of dark waters.
Tall as posts; emaciated as beautiful corpses; classy but intentionally unkempt, as if they’d rolled out of a hipster party to sleep in their car; given to addiction to controlled substances, or not so controlled; hetero or bisexual; pretty-faced and long-haired and intensely eroticized.
All of Patti’s lovers are cut from the same cloth.
As for the Princess of Sheba, she also can’t complain for lack of options.
Among the shepherds, scribes, priests, animal trainers, sculptors, and riders in her own domain, there are many young men who are fantastic, cheerful, and handsome who’d eagerly accept a night with her or, in a stroke of luck, the chance to take her to the altar.
And that’s without counting the wagon drivers, mathematicians, fighters, language teachers, astronomers, doctors, and bakers.
So if she has the prettiest young men of the desert at her disposal, why should she accept something from outside that she doesn’t need?
Why become the wife of a faraway monarch when, by defeating the Maiden, she could be crowned by her own right and in her own realm?
She puts it out of her mind, to the devil with that Solomon or Suleiman, with all his gold tributes, his poems, his concubines and wives, his silky beard and black eyes.
“To hell with him,” she says, asking to be brought a wineskin.
That night she drinks heavily, and the wine stirs in her a rare longing for true love.
As if she were no longer herself but someone else, someone different and enthralled, she lets herself be lulled by a very old song she must have heard centuries before, during her subterranean seclusion.
It’s a primitive music, sweet yet fierce at the same time, ceremonial and pagan, that sometimes lifts into lyric flights and at other times sounds like a muleteer’s simple tune.
It’s a song that nested in the depths of her memory and now returns little by little, in disjointed fragments, as if drawn by a thread of nostalgia.
. . . After a while, Goat Foot gets bored of daydreams, forgets all that lyricism, and goes back to overseeing her horses, camels, merchandise, and caravans.