A Night of Love a Thousand Years Before Christ #3
Goat Foot sees him in the distance, in the middle of the blackness, a small corner of night lit by a fire, and she approaches with the hope of finding a bit of warmth and company.
A group of shepherds has gathered around the fire; they play soft, repetitive music.
One of them is on his feet, dancing in a mesmerized state, between dreams, gaze turned inward, head thrown back.
He spins without stopping, in a state of holy intoxication, arms outstretched, the palm of one hand open to the sky, the other facing the earth.
Goat Foot is mesmerized, watching him. Despite his large size, the dancing shepherd moves with the sinuousness of flight, as if time stands still as he turns, as if his feet don’t touch the ground.
He’s tall and gorgeous, in fact he’s very tall, his figure looks immense against the starry night sky, and yet he seems weightless.
Still spinning, the shepherd crosses his arms over his chest, and in that moment Goat Foot could swear the man is still and that it’s the dome of stars that moves around him.
“Keep sleeping,” she says to him in a very low voice, so as not to wake him. “Let me stare at you while you sleep and spin . . .”
“Come, whoever you are, come,” he says to her, becoming aware of her presence.
“I can’t go with you, I’ve come here to marry the King of Jerusalem.”
“I am Jerusalem,” the shepherd says, and she immediately recognizes him.
She’s seen him before, she’s had him right beside her, she’s even spoken to him and taken objects from his hand.
It’s him, without a doubt it’s him, always the same.
Though with his identity changed and with a different appearance, this shepherd that now dances by a fire is the same magician with lynx’s eyes and hair like a knot of snakes, and is also the same beggar lit by fever, the living spasm.
“I know you’re the magician and the beggar,” she says. “But are you also the king, the only lover and the last?”
“And you, queen, are you the first and the last?”
King and queen, yes, but now transformed into shepherd and shepherdess.
The courtly love between monarchs, that elegant long-distance courtship, can only eroticize bodies and flood the senses if the monarchs become shepherds, perhaps because monarchs don’t know how to love nor can they love, or because their royal stiffness deprives them of the pleasures of simple mortals.
“I’ve searched for you everywhere,” she tells the shepherd.
“You wouldn’t seek me if you hadn’t found me.”
“Wherever you go, I will go.”
“Wherever you live, I will live too.”
There’s no need for further conversation, they’ve recognized each other and the distance has dissolved. The bond tightens; they have come together.
It all happens quickly, yet also with the phenomenal slowness with which stars turn through space.
What follows has no sequential logic, it unfolds like the comings and goings of a sleepwalker, the blurred consciousness, the intoxication of love, the mind a delicious disorder.
Everything seems more real than real and at the same time glows like a dance of light and illusions, or like a series of images shining randomly on a great cosmic screen.
Apparitions that glimmer for an instant and immediately go out, making way for the next ones.
The lovers descend together to the pools of Hesbon, to bathe.
Goat Foot lets her hair down, and it cascades to her waist, black and red like a flag calling for war.
He marvels at her beauty, but for a moment, foreboding clouds his spirit.
What if it’s true, what he heard said so many times before, that Goat Foot is as hairy as an animal?
Then they take off their clothes for the ritual immersion, and nakedness appears like a place of initiation.
Solomon looks at her with great care, checks what he wanted to check, and says to himself, contentedly, Down is where down should be, and where rose petals should be, rose petals are there.
Each thing is as the God of Beauty made it.
4 The body of his beloved is like velvet, lightly covered in soft fuzz, like a peach.
She, meanwhile, confirms the falseness of some of the warnings she’s heard, that he was an old man bereft of energy, useless in bed.
That’s not how it is. Solomon possesses the gift of eternal strength and replenished youth; as a lover he’s imaginative, giving, and ferocious.
Everything is ready for their embrace.
But how can it be told, what really happened from that moment forward?
Is it possible to know what a night of love was like, a thousand years before Christ?
Miraculously, we know. We know because it was written.
The text has survived to document this exact event, the most ancient night of love in known memory.
The two protagonists of this story, the two royal shepherds, play the role of closing the mythic cycle of the Song of Songs, that erotic delirium with its ambiguous, sumptuous, and magical cadence, a testimony to that night of nights that spans centuries.
By uniting the verses Solomon creates with the ones the Queen of Sheba recalls, they compose the poem together, an intimate dialogue of beloveds, that love song that perpetually begins again, that incredibly precious relic, shielded from time and forgetting among the geological layers of bedrock.
And protected from censure: It’s surprising that in the Song there is no punishment or remorse, disapproval or sacrifice—just a joyful, open celebration of the act of loving, transformed into a single infinite truth.
The ritual is aromatic, hormonal: Those ancient verses hold the living scent of seduction, aphrodisiacs, secretions.
Milk that spills, honey and myrrh that pour between fingers, nard with its summoning perfume.
To penetrate the beloved is to enter an enclosed garden, a hidden water source.
The fruit of the beloved is sweet to the palate. Kisses are more intoxicating than wine.
The whole universe is the magnetized realm where these games of love take place, and nature opens, complicit with the lovers, offering them its wonders: grapes, apples, palms, cedar, fertile valleys, green mountains, vines, orchards, lilies, and nards .
. . and water, so much water, a delicious abundance of water, in fountains, rivers, streams, wells, dew, waterfalls.
There’s no more dryness, everything is reborn in living water, the most highly prized treasure for a couple of desert royals, which is what these two shepherds are underneath it all.
And then there are also those hidden, secret places of embrace: the shade of an apple tree, a dim bedroom, a bed strewn with flowers, a lion’s cave, a leopard’s mountain, a dinner that revives and enamors, noon meadows, green foliage, a cedar house.
The luxurious things Goat Foot used to transport in her caravans reappear, small bags of jewels, perfumes, incense, gold, silver, necklaces, earrings, ivory, sapphires, and marble. But they’re no longer bought or sold, now they shine symbolic light, like precious stones from the grottoes of dreams.
In the poem’s deep night, all is dark, so dark that colors are erased, the love scene seeming like a black-and-white film: the black of ink, the white of the page.
An ancient, silent film: The only sound in the Song is silent music, the sonorous solitude of which mystic poet Juan de la Cruz would speak, or perhaps also Chopin on composing his nocturnes, which didn’t yet exist, but which of course were already in the making.
The male lover is the stag who grazes among lilies, so agile at hiding and revealing himself, bellowing with thirst and desire, freely scattering his fertile broth of pheromones without fear of being sacrificed.
The female beloved is no longer the sacrificial goat, now she’s the mountain goat and also the entire flock, the sheep who graze, the wild gazelles, the young lambs who leap along slopes, and at the same time she is Latif, the infinitely sweet little lamb in Zurbarán’s painting.
She kisses her lover’s chest. Female and male blend into a single being, mixing masculine qualities and feminine caresses in a tireless ambiguity.
5 With the same joyful limberness, the lovers merge with the plant world and dissolve into the animal kingdom, they are the orchards and the pomegranates; they are simultaneously the sheep and shepherds; they are the stag and the mountain, they brush against the divine while remaining human.
The sound of water rolls through dreams, inviting them into a slow, sleeping dance.
The lovers run barefoot along hidden paths, losing and finding each other with an intensity that does not flag.
They run after each other as if all of nature depended on their bond, as if there were no tomorrow, because it is true that there would be no tomorrow if the lovers didn’t have their embrace.
Flight, which has reached the heights of utmost pleasure, suddenly plummets toward turbulent zones of extreme love.
Blood spins at its quickest, and the lovers surrender to the agony of seeking and not finding, the dialectics of asking without getting a reply.
They give out, they’re wounded; they’ve reached bottom, the place where love is a torment.
The throb of it is so intense that it becomes lethal, vital, the language of love is that of sacrament.
Passion becomes pleasure or suffering, jealousy burns, anxiety is an inner fire no river can put out.
Emptiness begs to be filled, the agony is one of finding what is later lost and then found once again.
Desire is an ember and devours like the grave, because love is as strong as death.
And that’s how it goes. Solomon and the Queen of Sheba have glided through the cracks between God’s wrath and the wars of men, to join in the most beautiful proclamation of all the times: erotic truth on the outside, a mystery on the inside, and the utterly drunken word6 of the Song of Songs.
Passion that lulls and devours. The love of all loves, that terrible and fascinating mystery.