Chapter Green Horse #2
I didn’t insist, and we changed the subject.
We were already near our house and about to go in when Zahra Bayda got the idea of going deeper into the sea.
In the dark water, the cloth of her abaya hugged her body and made her seem more naked than if she’d actually been naked; draperie mouillée, draped veils that lend fluidity to forms, make them more mysterious and suggestive.
Once I overcame my surprise, I took off my clothes, ran to the water, and dove in too. Zahra Bayda found my naked run hilarious: a girl’s laugh in an incredible woman’s body.
“You’re so big, and so hairy!” she shouted. “You look like a bear, Bos Mutas.”
“Ursus mutas sum. . . . Ursus mutas et nudus in mare et in noctis medio sum!”
Zahra Bayda plunged her head forward into the water, emerging in a single thrust back that unfurled her long wet hair in the air like a fin. Her abaya floated around her like the body of a jellyfish. Under the water, to the sway of waves, her body parts rocked, formidable and free.
“The man’s like a bear, the uglier he is, the more handsome he gets,” she shouted at me.
“So you admit that I’m handsome to you.”
“I only said you’re like a bear.”
The water brings bodies together, spurs laws of touch unlike those on land.
In the water, as in dance or in childhood, limits fall away, and humans touch each other without reservations or meanings.
That night in the sea, Zahra Bayda and I were two marine monsters, playing and splashing.
Pure delight, the sensuality of her back’s curve into her stunning bottom, which rose in the foam and shone in the moonlight.
There is a word in Spanish for a bottom like that, calipigio, an essential adjective not found in any of our dictionaries.
It comes from the Greek kallos, “beautiful,” and pyge, “butt,” and in that moment I thought it was the only adjective worthy of describing her glorious, round, firm rear end: Not for nothing did the Greeks use it to describe the marble statue Venus Callipyge, in which the goddess lifts her peplos to her waist and looks backward, as if inviting admiration of her Olympic behind.
“Your bottom isn’t in the dictionary,” I shouted at Zahra Bayda.
“What’s with you and my bottom?” she shouted back, and we kept throwing water at each other by the handful.
It was the most childlike fun, mere pool games, and yet the whole thing felt very erotic to me, like the frolic of horny dolphins.
We were still at it when we were surprised to see, in the distance, in the water and in the middle of the night, great black birds nervously splashing around.
Ghosts in the mist? We looked closer: They were women.
Bathing in the sea with their clothes on, in accordance with the mandatory rules: Yemeni women swim in the dark, fully covered, when nobody can see them.
They were so far away, they couldn’t have seen our features or recognized us, but close enough that the same waves moving across their bodies also broke against our own.
Zahra Bayda took this as a warning sign.
“Let’s go home!” She let loose one of her sergeant’s orders, turned her back to me, and started walking away along the shore with a lovely sway of her hips, quite striking on a sergeant.
“Well, well, ma’am,” I called out, “who would have known you were so gorgeous?”
The waves, which had been peaceful and playful, had grown into white walls of foam.
Zahra Bayda went into the house and returned with a towel for me to dry off on my way out of the water.
Was she having fun with confusing me, toying with my feelings?
Sometimes she was authoritarian, like a general, and at other times as beneficent as a mother: an unsettling mix.
The time spent in the sea with her had eased the weight of recent pain and death. I closed my eyes, and thought, Tonight won’t happen ever again; the euphoria of moments just passed turns melancholic.
“I had a friend, he was a political prisoner,” Zahra Bayda told me once we were back home, after showering.
She’d put on the huge Batman shirt, worn from use, that she used as pajamas.
Her hair was wrapped in a towel, she smelled of wash water, and, true to her habit of dousing her feet with talcum powder, she’d left white footprints on the floor.
I liked it. I liked the flavorful grace of her domestic presence.
“Do you want tea?” she said.
“Do I want what?” I asked, with too much emphasis, as if she were offering me something else.
“Tea, silly, do you want tea?” she repeated, reaching for a teapot from the shelf. I was excited to glimpse her armpit, as naked and dangerous as a carnivorous flower.
“What happened to your political prisoner?” I asked, putting sugar in my cup and a few drops of milk in hers.
“He was in prison until he died. A little before that, he’d sent me a postcard that said: There will always be a sea where you can wash your soul.”
“There will always be a sea? Are you sure?”
“Yes, always.”
I took her hand.
“And what else will there be?” I asked.
“You tell me.”
You tell me: Those were the code words that opened the way to what followed, the flood of desire exploding like Christmas fireworks in festive neighborhoods.
You tell me. Yes, Zahra Bayda, I’ll tell you.
I’ll tell, and I’ll do, and you’ll tell and do, and then we were shut into my room together without knowing how we got there, and finally it started, what had been so hoped for and so long awaited, so long repressed, and that, I now learned, had been mutually felt since almost the beginning.
Our great longing, compressed into a three-by-four-meter space, made for eager movements and stumbling advances; that, plus the certain clumsiness of very tall people, who when making love tend to end up in obtuse geometries and somewhat comical dances.
How to describe that night; Clash of the Titans?
That, perhaps, in a narrow cot that barely bore the press of us and creaked as we celebrated every victory with tribal shouts the pillow couldn’t drown.
In all this, there, deep in the back of my mind, a fleeting thought tried to open space: Pau is going to kill us, a night of love shouldn’t be noisy when you share housing with four other people.
Pau was going to kill us, if not out of jealousy, then because of the commotion in that little house where the other residents were trying to sleep, and where plasterboard partitions were intimacy’s only paltry shelter.
At some point, Zahra Bayda and I tiptoed down the hall from my bed to hers, which was across the house but a double bed and more suited to a final, less impulsive, more intentional round.
But on our way we went to the bathroom, and then the kitchen for some water, and between one thing and another the night got away from us and dawn found us asleep in each other’s arms.
Pau woke us soon thereafter, knocking on the door.
He opened it slightly and saw Zahra Bayda in my arms, her dark skin even darker against the white sheets, with goose bumps from the fan’s breeze.
Pau was carrying two cups of coffee, which he placed on a little table without saying a word.
Then he soundlessly placed a sheet of paper at the foot of the bed and left, closing the door.
Pink dawn light entered through the window: the hermetic hour, according to the Greeks, as Hermes is born in that first instant of the day, when the sun emerges and tints the sky with a sweet radiance.
Zahra Bayda read the note aloud. It was from the Taliban. It announced death for the woman who walked the beach at night with a man who wasn’t her husband.
We got dressed to go talk to Pau, but he’d already left.
The people of the house, discreet as always, didn’t complain about the noise we’d made the night before, didn’t even mention it.
Or maybe they did, perhaps there was some protest, but we didn’t notice; to Zahra Bayda and me, everything seemed surreal, except for our own joy.
We were so happy that everything made us laugh, even the Taliban’s threat.
Pau, in contrast, didn’t find it funny, as we learned around midday when we sat down with him to talk; we agreed to avoid any attempts against Zahra Bayda’s life by having her leave a few days early for her trip to Barcelona, where she’d be participating in an MSF meeting and attending her daughter Iftiin’s graduation.
Before that, she and I would spend five days in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia; I’d accompany her on that leg of the journey.
For now, we’d have to head to Sanaa by road; it was critical for us to leave our current location as soon as possible.
So as not to draw attention, Zahra Bayda covered herself entirely in black clothes, like a Yemeni woman.
She looked strange and moved differently, as if she were someone else.
I couldn’t wait for her to take it all off and be herself again, in one of those colorful African tunics that freed her arms, kept her steps limber, and allowed for that sway of her hips with which I was so enamored.
It didn’t matter, nothing mattered, nothing could overshadow that moment in which the world seemed to us a joyful place.
Though she was dressed like a widow or nun, Zahra Bayda looked at me and let out a laugh, the exact same laugh that rang out when she wore African clothes.
We arrived in Sanaa in time to catch our plane.
We left behind that city sunk in a war with invisible enemies, like in an episode of The Twilight Zone where, at breakfast, someone in a remote country presses a button, and a child here dies.
In Sanaa, the air burned, and bombings left behind gaping black mouths in the ground.
A young man said to his dead bride: “You’re going to your destiny, my love.
” In the flash of an instant, towers crushed their residents in ruins.
The dead are so many, there was no ceremony for them.
Smoke rose in spirals, dust settled over cushions.
That same routine repeated daily, simple, without remorse, like when a listless child gets bored of his toys and starts to kick them.