The Girlfriend's Guide to Gods

by Maria Dahvana Headley

  In the version you wrote, my sister and I were one person, constituted entirely of love. We opened our shirt to feed you from our breasts, though we were ourselves starving. We were awed at the sight of your sun, dazzled at the wonder of your world. You grieved when you thought we might die, though this would make your own journey less complicated. You'd been thinking of where to put us: a zoo, a museum?

  You dumped us onto the floor and went to your library. I went to the kitchen. My sister went to the bedroom. You could not see our edges. We were your girls. You didn't know our thoughts. You didn't know what was beneath the mattress. You didn't know what was in the pocket of my apron.

  Time passed.

  There are other versions of our stories, just as there are other versions of yours: in come the white men, and they get sick, which throws them on the mercy of the people they're invading. We are in the trees watching as they arrive on stretchers, snake-bitten, feverish, starving, fighting furiously with one another, Pilgrims, fur trappers, journalists and geographers, millionaires, filmmakers, translators who speak nothing near our language, preachers who say they'll teach us, teachers who say they'll reach us. Untouched, they say, and touch us.

  Call death a kind of exploration. Call hands on someone else's skin a kind of expedition. Call us the ground, and call yourselves a flag.

  And now see what we call you. You are the dragon we slay, the ship we wreck. Your safety is not our business.

  This is not the story you wrote. This is the story we wrote.

  I was the kind of girl who was born to serve, the people from outside told me, while I sharpened their knives. I was working in their kitchens. I was always mistaken for a cook, by you, by them, by everyone. I had the kind of face that looked kindly, the kind of body that looked built to enfold the hungry. I held a knife up to the firelight and tested the blade on my fingertip. It worked the way it should. I was no stranger to knives.

  I had my sister with me, her twins nursing, and we were writing the battle plan, the two of us diagramming armor, inscribing knife hilts with names other than the ones they thought they'd given us. We could read and write. We had our own names, and our own language.

  You thought you knew what we wanted, but we had wants of our own.

  Here is something I learned in the hundreds of years I spent in the center of the Earth and later in the libraries and bedchambers, pressed between your pages, carving my way out of your stories with one of the knives you gave me to show your readers that I was a spitfire, a flame-breathing beauty with black hair and barbed bits.

  Imaginary countries and imaginary cunts are in the same category. They are the same story.

  Look at this volcano, the heat of the center of the Earth pouring out in flame. Look at the way the outside splits open and becomes the inside, the way that helmets are not enough to keep your soft skulls safe. Look at the catastrophe of birth.

  My sister and I are coming up from beneath the ground, our fingers tipped in claws. We are springing through the soles of the feet of the men standing over our home. Your name is a synonym for swing, and my name is earthquake, taking your library and opening its contents to the elements, tearing your chinos thread by thread into nests for the birds whose eggs you've broken. The center of the Earth is not a windowless room, but a room with a long view to the sky, not a hollow object, but a goblet full to spilling.

  Call it a skull. Call me a demon. Call me a disastrous expedition, a haunted pilgrimage. Know that I am still drinking from your bones.

  You are the book I am writing. You are the story I am searing into the skin of the ones who come after me. I name you after myself. I call your country after my sister. I plant a flag in your heart and drive it in, claim your territory and tell the world that no one was here before I arrived.

  Are you an old man now? You are. Are you wordless, your hand shaking as you write your adventures? You break into convents. You break into caverns. You are the best worst they ever had.

  Listen to me tell your story. You've lost the ability to speak. You're standing before all the men of your generation, trying to tell them that you've won, but your footage is forgotten. There is no one left for you to call to. You will have to call for me.

  You think I'm the kind of girl who'd ask you to write the story of your life.

  “Ti amo,” you say to me. I have not been brought to the surface to feed you milk. I traveled with you not because of love, but because of fury. My sister mothered your children. Our sense of wonder was intact. We wondered at your frailty.

  “Je t'aime,” you try.

  Am I the woman now, here at your crumpled bedside, holding a spoon? And here is my sister on the other side of the bed, holding a knife.

  “Ich liebe dich,” you whisper.

  Look at how we are young and you are ancient.

  “Open your mouth,” I say to you, in a language you never learned. “Let me close your gaps. Let me fill you up.”

  “Let me imagine your future,” says my sister.

  The Orange Tree

  Shelter me in your shadow

  Be with my mouth and my word

  Watch over my ways

  So I will not sin again with my tongue.

    —  Solomon ibn Gabirol, eleventh century

  1.

  Since the beginning of the world, there've been a thousand ways invented to be lonely. In a market stall, surrounded by speechless wooden wares, or banished to a black rock in the center of the sea. In a tower, feet forced into standing, floor too small for kneeling down, the only view a high window, the world below made of fire. On a road, parched, nothing but horizon. In the dark, visited by spirits jealous with their leavings.

  At the tops of certain mountains there are places for those the world refuses, and at the bottoms of other mountains there are prisons for those the world regrets. There have been boulders installed for leapers once the never is too much.

  The quiet is never quiet, not to the lonely. The quiet is full of newborn babies crying and lovers murmuring. The quiet is full of wineglasses and whippoorwills. Screaming quiet is the way the world lets a man know he's alone forever, with no remedy but death or sorcery.

  2.

  Málaga isn't a city where loneliness should overtake a man. Sweet milk, grapes and almonds, figs, lemons, bitter oranges, pomegranates, a view across the ocean from Spain to the coast of Africa. It's beautiful everywhere, everywhere but where Solomon is. Wherever he steps, there is sorrow and pain.

  Solomon's come south from Saragossa to the city of his birth in a last attempt to heal himself. He's saltfish. Something's climbed beneath his skin, creating scabrous ridges on the sides of his ears and lips, and a cough, sometimes bloody. It isn't leprosy, but it looks enough like it that the neighbors shun him. No medical man can help him, and no woman will have him.

  Alone in his house, Solomon names a cloud of dust, picturing an Avra with delicate fingers and a quick smile. Then he sweeps her into the street and watches her blow away. God doesn't permit men to knead dust into something with a heart. There is a short history of forbidden creations, a litany of longing. To defend a city, one might permissibly make a warrior of clay. One is not allowed to do that in order to fulfill selfish desires. There will be no blank-faced brides made of mud in Solomon's house. There's no hope of love now, not the way he looks. He's spent twenty years describing the thousand ways, and no time on any softer arts.

  The four-hundred-thirty-fourth way to be lonely is the loneliness of the sleepless, awake while the world is not, moon risen, bats with it. Small owls, and teeth in the walls. A coverlet made of sand, a bed made of blisters.

  When Solomon wakes each morning his mind is filled with words chewing at each other's tails, tangling toes and tongues. Unspoken poems run through his house, little long-legged darknesses. When he's on his pallet at night, words stand on their hind feet and stare at him. He can't sleep, nor can he organize w
ords into sentences. When he lights a candle, he sees books he'll never finish. Words hide in the shadows and in the cracks in the walls, refusing to be written.

  All he has are words, and none of them serve him. None of them even care for him.

  Solomon sits alone at supper, taking figs from a dish painted with a lustered ship. He touches the ship's outlines, the oars, the rigging.

  Had he a ship, he might sail to some far-off country where women had never seen men and thus wouldn't recognize him as a ruined specimen. He has no ship.

  He idly makes a heap of fine sawdust and positions it across from him. Tziporah, he thinks, and then, realizing what he's doing, brushes her abruptly from the table. That dust isn't a wife.

  Solomon spends an hour staring bitterly at the sky, mapping more of the ways of loneliness. The spheres above him, the sky filled with planets, and all of them are in love. He's a solitary star in the process of dying, the last of a galaxy, the only point of light in a bad piece of darkness.

  As a young man he walked the roads of Andalusia and mapped brightness instead of the night. Black lace on golden skin, copper glances, the gentle mouth of a serving maid as she circled the table with a jug of wine. He was invited to meals in fine houses and published as a philosopher, but he made more enemies in such houses than friends. There was something wicked in his soul as well as in his skin. Perhaps the Almighty means him to live in solitary misery, a scalded man, but he finds himself in rebellion.

  There are options. Witchcraft or suicide. Death or sorcery. The choices are clear.

  Solomon has two new texts, bought during his last travel north. He has for years called himself a translator, bartering and wheedling, when in truth he wanted these volumes for something else. He's translated words, but he wants to translate other things. At last  —  this is his seventh night sleepless  —  he takes the books down and unwraps them from the linens that keep them safe from dust. The Banū Mūsā's treatise on the construction of ingenious devices, and the Sefer Yetzirah. There are instructions in both, recipes for things more complicated than joy. Nothing in it is obvious, but he's a poet. What he lacks in logic, he adds in lyric. He combines the instructions and draws a diagram.

  The five-hundred-ninety-third variety of loneliness is the loneliness of first light, a dawn unwitnessed by anyone else, sun rising over the sea, a cracking seam in the world.

  When he was sixteen and ignorant of his future miseries, Solomon boasted, “I am the Song and the Song is my slave.” Even if that was true then, it's no longer enough.

  The two-hundred-fifth way to be lonely is to hear an echo and think it is the voice of a friend.

  At twilight Solomon dresses himself in a wide-brimmed hat, long gloves, a scarf about his throat and shoulders, a thin saffron-dyed robe, and a veil over his face. He goes into the Jewish quarter.

  The nine-hundred-sixty-eighth variety of loneliness is the loneliness of planning magic and keeping it to oneself.

  The moon rises as Solomon walks. It's spring and the trees are in bloom, but Solomon prefers the stars: they're brighter in winter. Lightning laughs in the distance. Nighttime is, at least, less lonely. He's free of the house. No one draws back from him in horror, because his garb covers everything.

  He passes a garden and smells salt, clove, and cinnamon. The sky blooms with the roses of Venus, constellations of pale pink nard, falling stars of jasmine. He stops to inhale, and imagines sharing what he's seen. He could bring a wife a bouquet of all the flowers of this city, both poetic and actual. He could tell her every secret he's stored in his skull, every desire for murder, every yearning for love. He could pile them all at her feet and wait for her to look up and smile at the precious things he'd given her. He'd tell her about the assassination of his mentor, the way he wandered adrift after it. He'd tell her about the hundreds of elegies he's written, and about the grammars, the dictionaries. He'd recite them all from memory, until she knelt before him to tell him that it was time to sleep. He would go. He would not be an unreasonable husband.

  At last he arrives at the orange grove.

  “I need a tree,” says Solomon. “Not too small a tree.” He shows the grove man the size he means, stretching his arms.

  “The entire tree?” the owner asks, looking at Solomon. “What will you do with a tree? How will you carry a tree?”

  “The roots as well,” says the poet.

  The tree-seller sighs. “It won't grow back once it's cut. The roots should stay here in the earth, to feed the ground.”

  “The roots,” says Solomon again.

  The seller takes Solomon's coins, shrugging, and brings out his shovel. The five-hundred-sixth form of loneliness is the loneliness of drought, trees dropping their leaves and fruit, humbled by heat, a tree-seller amongst them, praying in vain for the clouds to burst.

  The tree-seller shovels.

  Solomon has a cart's worth of orange tree in the end, and he hires a donkey to haul it.

  The seven-hundred-thirteenth variety of loneliness is the loneliness of driving a cart back to town in the dark, a donkey breathing loudly, smelling blossoms. The oranges from these trees are too bitter to eat, but their blooms are perfumed with the smell of sweat and sex.

  At the carpenter's house, Solomon gives the carpenter the tree with its heady blossoms and wilting leaves, the roots a tangle of black soil and beetles. With the tree, he passes over a green glass cup from his own kitchen, and the lusterware dish painted with the ship. At last he gives the carpenter his diagrams. He pays him in maravedís from the publication of The Fountain of Life, the only thing he's written that seems likely to pay. Planets devoted to God, each one with its own section. He's out of fashion now, he fears. No one pays for poetry.

  “Hinged,” Solomon says, pointing at various places on the diagram. The carpenter usually makes doors. Solomon wonders if he's literate.

  He has no certainty, only longing. He'll do the most difficult part of the magic himself, but for this part, the handwork, he has no skills. He goes home and waits, alone, alone, alone.

  3.

  “The poet's commissioned a cabinet,” the carpenter tells his father. “But it's a strange one. He insists I use the entire tree to build it, the shavings and the dust, the roots and the leaves, the flowers. It'll take days of planing and shaping, and even then I'll have to bend the wood in too many places. He wants it hinged at every compartment, and he wants a musical instrument built into it. I don't know what to tell him.”

  The carpenter's father shakes his head, and so the carpenter goes to his mother. She's not from Spain at all, but from a city across the sea. She has different skills than those his father possesses.

  “He pays us well for this?” she asks.

  The carpenter shows the coins, looking uneasily at the branches he's meant to shape.

  “Well enough,” she says, counting them. She examines the diagram with interest, annotating it, drawing the outlines of an instrument from her homeland. At last she scratches in another small alteration, a tiny compartment to be placed deep within the creation, and sealed.

  “I should not make this,” the carpenter says. “It will offend.”

  The carpenter's mother glances sharply at him. “The commission is a kind of cabinet, whatever it looks like. Deny what you've made if anyone asks who made it. But we'll take his payment.”

  She hides the poet's coins away in her apron, then brings her son sheets of metal, pounded thin, a curved knife, and a tiny hammer. She consults the diagram again, goes to the market, and returns with a stillborn goat, bought for its tender hide, and the tanned skin of a doe. She brings tools for carving and stitching: awls, a vial of a particular oil, sand for polishing.

  What the poet has commissioned is no sin to her people. The desert has wandering fountains, and the holy have help.

  The thirty-ninth form of loneliness is the loneliness of a woman who can see her home from across a sea but cannot return to it. The loneliness of childbirth in a foreign la
nd, none of the rituals, none of the other women. The loneliness of a marriage made across a table, cooking food, the sound of men talking the language of this country, not of the one you came from.

  The carpenter's wife comes from a family whose men made objects for kings. Her son and husband are not what she'd have chosen for herself had she been doing the choosing. If she were a man, she'd have spent her life working metal and dark wood, inlaying it with gemstones and camel bones.

  Instead she lives on the southern coast, looking over the water at the weather of the continent she's lost.

  So the carpenter and his mother work the wood of the orange tree, sanding and polishing, putting in hinges. They work at night when the other work is done, and in the dark the workshop fills with the scent of sap, fruit, and pitch. There are the sounds of strings being plucked and then bowed, the sounds of taut leather being tapped. The carpenter's mother adds an instrument from her home, and while she builds the instrument she sings the songs it should play.

  The carpenter's mother sits on her heels, looking at the blistered hearth where the fire caught out of control one afternoon beneath a spitted goat. The goat, with its twisted horns and yellow eyes, is long gone, but she remembers its voice, the song it sang, beheaded. She takes a handful of the ash, presses it hard into her palm, shapes it.

  Her son crouches beside her. “People want strange things,” he says. “Nothing I'd wish for.”

  “Most people don't,” she says, working the ash, adding a tiny piece of parchment with something scrawled upon it, a word in her own language, and then more ash. “Most people want things to remain the same forever, but the world changes, and we change with it.”

  She pets the wood, finds a long splinter, and tests its sharpness. She soaks it carefully in the oil until it shines. Perhaps things like this cabinet are made all over the world, and always have been, but she only knows them from her home city, and then only small ones, playthings for the wealthy. This one is different.

  She kneels, and opens doors until she arrives at the secret door hidden deep within the commission. She places her handful of ash there, a gift to it.