Siete son los colores del arcoíris
reflejados en las ocho puntas de la Estrella de Lakshmi
When I feel that my lady guests from the past
are fully awake and present with me after some time spent, for all of us,
pondering about the meaning of the mantra I had created, I tell them about one
of my realizations.
-You know, ladies, I took advantage of the
night to “sleep on” some of my prejudices, and I re-watched the beginning of
that stupid movie, “El pecador de la
pradera”, “The Sinner of the Prairie”. I have heard more than once that
what gets on our nerves is actually very revealing if we are willing to know
why it makes us nervous or mad or impatient, because it has to do with
something we should deal with. Soooo, I have decided to listen to that “comedian”
again, because I remembered a sentence that had come to me one morning as I
woke up from a dream that I could not recall: “if something seems off or odd, it must be, somehow, Spirit
speaking... So let’s make sure that we’re not deaf to signs, otherwise
they will fade”. The repetition of “f” and “d” in that strange “wake-up
greeting” had naturally led me to repeat the Catholic Monarchs’ motto: “Tanto Monta, Monta Tanto, Isabel como FernanDo”, which stated the equal power and status between husband
and wife. So I armed myself with patience and rewound this piece of… anthology.
I started to accept that, maybe, Chiquito’s nonsensical gibberish could actually
be Spirit talking through the guy, and that I should therefore give it a second
try because I could find something of interest for me, especially if it was
“off” or “odd”… I was able to “stand” the first minutes of it, watching the
actors crawling as they talked nonsense, but there was something actually
really cool in the end of Chiquito’s speech: “Lucas, estamos perdidos… Perdí la última huella “distilar” en aquella
montaña gris. Cuidado con los alacranes y cocodrilos… ¡Tú has tenido la culpa!
Por aquí no se va a París. Hay tanta sequía que se ven las ranas con
cantimplora. Lloras por estos conductos
vocales lo que no supiste defender como una mujer”…
-I guess he meant instead: “Ibki
l-yawma bukā'a n-nisā'i ʿalā mulkin lam taḥfadhu ḥifdha r-rijāl”, well I
mean: “Lloras como mujer lo que no
supiste defender como hombre”, says Soraya.
-That’s what I thought at first too, I answer. But
then I pondered about it. And I heard
a melody from the past. As I say this, I take my recorder and play: la, fa, re,
re, la, sol, fa, sol-fa-mi, sol, fa, mi, sol-sol-sol, fa, sol, la-la… “Fátima,
allash, b’kit ana, Fátima mi corazón te llama” I sing in a smile.
-Any chance that someone would find a translation
button in your wonderful machine, Nathalie? asks Annie who really doesn’t like
it when she does not understand something.
-Haha, push MY button, I say, I am your flesh
and blood translator… I was singing a song that Soraya reminded me of. The song
I’ve just played is bilingual, in darija (Moroccan) and Spanish, and says
“Fatima: why am I crying, Fatima: my heart is calling you”. It was a song by a
local Moroccan band in Granada, something I remembered because of the hyper
famous sentence Soraya and I know about.
-It was uttered by Boabdil’s mother when they went into exile in the Alpujarra, says Soraya: “You are crying like a woman over something you were not able to defend like a man”. That’s what Fátima told her son, my stepson, when he cried over his (our) lost paradise: Granada, on his way to exile, with all his people, including his cold momma and his weak wife who would not make it to the other side of the Mediterranean when time would come for them to leave Spain for Morocco... Destiny seems to be doing things backwards, at times, isn’t it? she sighs.
-It was uttered by Boabdil’s mother when they went into exile in the Alpujarra, says Soraya: “You are crying like a woman over something you were not able to defend like a man”. That’s what Fátima told her son, my stepson, when he cried over his (our) lost paradise: Granada, on his way to exile, with all his people, including his cold momma and his weak wife who would not make it to the other side of the Mediterranean when time would come for them to leave Spain for Morocco... Destiny seems to be doing things backwards, at times, isn’t it? she sighs.
-Well that’s exactly what I want to focus on
here, Soraya. I answer. What sounded like an inversion in that stupid movie, a
mistake in the sentence, is actually fantastically accurate. Chiquito de la
Calzada says “to defend like a woman”, instead of “to cry like a woman”. Even
though I profoundly dislike the guy’s so-called humor, which I’d rather call
dumbness, I have to recognize that he made a point there. He shut Fátima up! Even
though she was “official” for society, she had never been Hassan’s true love… But
she held on to the idea of it because she had married him, and when he left
her, her pride, more than love, had been hurt so bad that she relinquished on
what I now learn to see as divine feminine traits: compassion as strength, love
as weapon, and emotions as what keeps the world in motion. We, mujeres, are
powerful beings, but not in the war-like sense that Fátima gave to it. So
thanks, Chiquito, even though I’m pretty sure that you managed this “sin querer queriendo”, heehee… And I choose to say, instead, “thanks,
Spirit!”
