The Heartbeat of Life #2
I make note of every clamp, contraption, smell, color, gesture, scream.
Yellow tiles frame the drama on a sterile stage.
Barakat grips my hand hard, she’s found a source of support in me, or in my hand, and Zahra Bayda asks me not to leave.
I’ve never witnessed a birth, this is the most ferocious thing I’ve ever seen in my life, my pulse races and my legs falter.
But I still hold the young woman’s hand and don’t let it go for even a second while she struggles at the blade’s edge, sometimes lost, sometimes safe.
I don’t dare move, not even to blink, as if the outcome depends on my vigilance.
But Zahra Bayda is who it really depends on, and I witness how much sureness and calm she brings to her vocation as a midwife, to which she’s devoted her life.
Suddenly, a new maneuver of hers works, and as if by miracle the baby comes out: a tiny girl, so gray she seems made of wax.
She doesn’t move, nor cry, nor maybe even breathe.
“She’s alive,” Zahra Bayda declares, and a sigh of collective relief ripples through the room.
She’s alive, but exhausted from a colossal fight, and she still doesn’t know she’s won the battle.
Those minutes are tense and agonizing. As if she suddenly understood that she now has to be alive and inhabit this world, she finally begins to cry, first softly, as if trying it out, and then very hard, a victory cry.
You’re here now, brave little bull, our champion, you’ve crossed the Rubicon, welcome, invincible opener of holes with that oh-so-tenacious head, to which any obstacle will yield!
The mother relaxes, asks about her daughter.
“She’s fine,” they say. “We’ll take care of her, you rest. Sleep, Barakat, you can sleep if you like.”
It’s over: We’ve come through to the other side.
I did my part too, and now I’ve got no strength left.
As if I’d suddenly been unplugged from an electrical socket, my legs won’t obey me, blood drains from my face, and the lights go out.
Before I fall to the floor, someone notices and holds me up.
I’m ashamed for my weakness to be seen but it can’t be helped, I must be pale as a corpse and limp as a puppet.
Two people hold me up by the arms and lead me outside for some air.
“You weren’t even the one in labor,” they say, and laugh.
They sit me down in a corridor with fresh air, open to the outside, and bring me sugared water. They’ve saved me from the spectacle of fainting, which would have been especially ridiculous with a large man like me.
The baby is well, the mother too, Zahra Bayda and the team have outdone themselves and I’ve done my part; at least I didn’t start fainting until the end.
Here, outside, the fresh air, clean after the rain, fills my lungs with gusts of life.
It’s done. It’s over. “All’s well that ends well,” Shakespeare says.
All that remains of the downpour is a light drizzle, and I, sitting on my bench under the eaves, sip sugared water and can linger, now, to gaze at the landscape.
The scent of freshly roasted coffee reaches my nose—someone must be grinding it nearby—and I take in the beauty of the fertile mountains where coffee grows.
Look at that, it’s just like my native country, I think, and I feel right at home.
The aromatic steam of wet earth is familiar to me.
I know this feeling of being in humidity.
I recognize the dark green of the coffee trees and the way it blends, in the rise and fall of hills, with the yellowish green of banana trees.
I’ve lived all that, and long for it. If blindness makes us forget the color red, as Borges says, the desert makes us forget the color green, and what joy invades me now, on finding it again.
Who knew that in southern Ethiopia such sweet coffee lands shone green, so similar to my native lands but on the other side of the world.
Through the drizzle, a white sun glows, and the midday landscape is framed by a rainbow.
At night, we have dinner with the local team, composed of expats and Ethiopians.
Over a fire, they prepare shiro, a garbanzo stew, and we celebrate the success of our day’s work with tej, a honey wine.
Then we begin one of those nights around the fire, so traditional in Ethiopia, during which people tell old stories about horseback warriors and break out in spontaneous rounds of poetry and music.
Of course, the butt of the jokes at that party is me; I’ve been nicknamed Gizufi, the giant who faints at the sight of blood.
At dawn, Barakat, the young woman who almost died in the Toyota, is freshly bathed and smiling, with her baby in her arms and a striking yellow cloth on her head that makes her look even younger, just a girl.
A happy girl. In a few days she and the child will be transferred to a hospital specializing in closing obstetric fistulas.
“What are you going to name your child?” I ask.
“Birihani,” she replies.
“Birihani?”
“It means ‘light’ in Amharic,” someone translates.
I look at young Barakat, I look at tiny Birihani, and I could almost say I hear a certain lullaby by Pedro Salinas float through the air; it seems to roll over the earth very slowly, with just the amount of rocking needed for the baby girl to sleep . . .
We return to Addis Ababa on the day Zahra Bayda is to fly to Barcelona.
Before heading to the airport, we take advantage of a few free hours to visit the city’s Lion Park, which houses the last Abyssinian lions, a black-and-gold mythological animal, a dethroned king who languishes in the torpor of his prison.
I’m the one who insisted on visiting the zoo, determined as I was to see a black-maned lioness; after writing so much about her, I had to see her in the flesh.
Zahra Bayda was against it, saying zoos were the saddest places in the world.
She also said there’s no such thing as a black-maned lioness, because only males of that species have manes.
She warned that we wouldn’t have enough time, that she’d be late for her flight.
And so forth. She was right about all of it.
We had to do it all against the clock, vexed at the sight of those magnificent creatures stuck in shabby cages, overwhelmed by the strong scent of ammonia.
Of course, there was no such thing as a black-maned lioness.
In the taxi to the airport, I got the deserved I told you so from Zahra Bayda, Didn’t I tell you we’d be late?
I’ll kill you, Bos Mutas, if I miss this plane!
I’m going to miss my daughter’s graduation!
To make things worse, she kept calling me by my whole name, I told you, Bos Mutas!
When she loves me, she calls me Bos, and when she loves me a lot, she calls me Bosi.
When she doesn’t love me, she accentuates a Mutas that sounds hurtful to me, something like, Be quiet, stay mute, don’t say anything more.
Despite all that, I’m glad to have gone to the zoo: It was like witnessing a wonder before it vanishes, because the Abyssinian lion is on the path to extinction.
That marvelous Ethiopian sovereign. The wild creature of Addis Ababa.
The supreme ambessa, the Panthera leo massaica, the lion of Maasai.
The lion of Judah, unequaled by any other, not even the lion of the Serengeti Plain, nor the lion of the Kalahari Desert.
It’s worth adapting that famous short story: When he awoke, the Abyssinian lion was still there.
To think that in other times this carnivorous monster, with its black Rastafarian hair, roamed calmly through the streets like a sheep dressed up as a lion, feeding on leftovers offered to him freely and licking the hands of Emperor Selassie, last direct descendant of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba .
. . and now, forgotten and caged, he still looks like a sheep disguised as a lion.
As he stared at us with endless indifference, Zahra Bayda and I made him a solemn vow: The day of Armageddon, before everything succumbed to the nuclear mushroom cloud, we’d come and open his cage door so he could escape.
Unfortunately, Zahra Bayda was also right about the third and last of her warnings: It was hard for us to find a taxi, and despite the driver’s suicidal speed at the wheel, we arrived at the airport far behind schedule.
And who was waiting for us at the entrance, mad as a marmoset?
None other than Pau Cor d’Or. Gesturing and shouting about how they were about to miss their plane, that many flights were canceled due to the pandemic, that if they missed this one, they’d be fucked, what had we been thinking?
The truth was, I’d never seen Pau so upset.
“The thing is, we went to see lions,” Zayra Bayda tried to justify herself.
“To hell with the lions!” Pau said in Catalan. He grabbed Zahra Bayda’s hand and the two ran toward the terminal.
Hey! Someone explain what’s going on! I was left seeing sparks.
What was Pau doing here? Somebody tell me something!
But they were already far from me, leaving without a word and without saying goodbye, they didn’t even turn to wave.
I understood nothing. Or almost nothing, as one thing was clear: Zahra Bayda was going to Barcelona with Pau.
The two of them together on a trip, and me here on my own. Damn, nobody told me about those plans.
It must have been in that moment that I caught the disease; my defenses came down and I caught it, though I’d surely been carrying it before; the thing is, an hour later, when I arrived at the hotel, I already had a fever.
Maybe there wasn’t any drama in their departure, it was possible that Pau decided at the last minute to attend the meeting in Barcelona, maybe it was just that, not a betrayal at all, but who knew.
In any case, the fever was already giving me chills.