Where Tigers Are at Home
Page 48
Mariazinha stretched out her hands to bless the gathering, revealing an abnormality that disturbed Loredana beyond all reason: the priestess of Omulú had lost her left thumb. But someone flung herself into the terreiro—it was Soledade, transformed into a whirling puppet. For several seconds she fought against a supernatural enemy, hitting the air, protecting her head, then went rigid, seized with spasms. Mariazinha sat up in her chair:
“Exú has ridden her!” she roared in a hoarse, hardly recognizable voice. “Saravá!”
“Saravá!” the crowd responded, while Soledade was swaying her hips in simian fashion, her whole body twitching.
“Exú Caveira, master of the seven legions!” Mariazinha went on. “Exú death’s-head! May Omulú, prince of all, descend! May he consent! May he come down to us!”
Loredana could not believe her eyes. Like the word “idol,” until now “trance” had been for her merely a term from the manuals of anthropology, a manifestation of hysteria that could affect only the feeble minded or the irrational. She had of course been expecting something of the kind, but she was more astonished by how easily people could succumb to it than by the sight of the trance itself. Soledade looked like a genuine madwoman, she was dancing, rolling her eyes, speaking in tongues, acting out some primitive scene or other, her look vacant, slobbering, rolling in the ashes of the figures drawn on the ground, getting up, starting all over again. Bewildered by the violence of her fit, she felt a degree of contempt for her friend, mixed with pity and panic.
No one else seemed surprised at the exhibition. The silent queen continued to refill the receptacles with jurema and the pipes with the mixture that greatly increased the effect of the alcohol; from time to time a man or a woman would drop their calabash and throw themselves into the thick of the mystery, in convulsions, distortions, ridden by one of the spirits whose name Mariazinha immediately added to the list—Exú Brasa, Burniron; Exú Carangola, Sidragasum; Exú da meia-noite, Haël; Exú pimenta, Trismaël; Exú Quirombô, Nel Biroth—begging them again and again to intercede for her with Omulú, the master of all of them. People shouted abuse at the beings unleashed in the terreiro, commented on their gestures and their grimaces. Overtaken by events, Loredana drank and smoked everything that came her way. Her eyes were stinging, she was thirsty for water and light, but that night, filled with wonder, she explored what Brazil had to offer.
Then Soledade collapsed like a rag doll. At the request of the woman sitting beside her, Loredana helped to carry her back to the side. She was dripping with sweat and her head was nodding, her eyes closed, her muscles relaxed. Loredana, frightened by this faint, was patting her cheeks when Soledade gave the first signs of coming to. Hardly was she conscious again than she was asking the people around her …” Exú Caveira!” she said to Loredana with a radiant smile, “I’ve been ridden by Exú Caveira! Can you imagine?”
“Not really,” she replied, devastated by the ravages on her sweet face.
By now the situation seemed to her to defy the imagination’s occult laws; Mariazinha’s followers were falling one after the other into the dust, brought down by the sudden withdrawal of the spirits that had them in their grip. Cries were heard, groans, orgasmic screams. Loredana was caught between the desire to go back to her room and the certainty that she would never find the way.
At a sign from Mariazinha, erect before her throne, the drummers changed their rhythm. Those still possessed by the spirits came out of their trance almost immediately and they were quickly helped back to their places.
“Oxalá, meu pai,’ the priestess intoned, “tem pena de mim, tem dó! A volta do mundo é grande, seu poder ainda é maior!”
A man rushed up to her, knelt down, quickly placed his head on the old woman’s feet, then stood up and took the hand she held out to him. With another movement they came close enough for her to give him a swift accolade, first on the right shoulder, then the left, and Mariazinha made her follower turn under her arm, as in rock-and-roll, before letting go of him. The man took a few steps back and stood there, dazed, a smile on his lips. Now they all ran up to perform the same ritual. Once it was done, some fell into their trance again or grasped the priestess’s skirts, weeping tears of happiness and gratitude.
Despite Loredana’s instinctive resistance, Soledade dragged her toward the altar. When she was presented, the mother of saints nodded her head, as if assessing what she could read in her expression. Putting her left hand on the back of Loredana’s neck, she placed her thumb between her eyebrows: “What you must do, you must do, escape is not possible,” she said. “What you must do, you will do for me …”
Then it was the same ritual as for the others. Loredana was left standing under the lights of the terreiro, open-mouthed, dumbfounded by the burning sensation boring into her forehead.
There were more dances, trances, prayers. Their thirst for jurema seemed unquenchable, for all of them the world had plunged into that frontier zone where sense and nonsense were the same. Then a negro was at the center on the terreiro: the Axogum. The name had preceded him on the lips of all the adepts. He sprinkled manioc and dendê oil on the hens, lit matches above them and took a machete out of its sheath.
“Thus let the plague die, leprosy and erysipelas,” he declaimed in a voice hoarse from alcohol. “Arator, Lepidator, Tentador, Soniator, Ductor, Comestos, Devorator, Seductor! O old master, the hour has come to fulfil your promise to me. Curse my enemy as I curse him. Reduce him to dust as I reduce this dried hummingbird to dust. By the fire of night, by the blackness of the dead hens, by their cut throats, may all our prayers be granted!”
He slit the throat of one of the hens; a woman, the one who had brought the offering, dashed across to drink the first spurts from the arteries. She was seized by a trance as if by a virulent poison. The hens were passed from hand to hand, as the Axogum sacrificed them. Now the calabashes had a mixture of blood and jurema. Even more people were falling into a trance, the terreiro was filled with a sort of solemn euphoria, the kind that sometimes follows a funeral meal.
For a long time now Loredana had been swallowing everything that was passed to her without giving it a second thought. When Soledade had a sticky, twitching decapitated hen in her hands and pressed it like a wineskin to squeeze out the juice, she held out her calabash to her with a smile. Nothing was important anymore. Obey the night—Mariazinha’s words were still flickering in her memory—let the unexpected come, accept things, all things, without naming them. The statuette was glittering in the light of the fires. Baal Amon, Dionysus: drunken gods, fragile gods, deities smeared with the white lead of the charnel houses.
They were eating the entrails of the sacrificed chickens when a man suddenly rolled over the ground with all the signs of a convulsive seizure. The crowd howled to Mariazinha; she brought the attributes of straw and shells: the loincloth of Omulú, the xaxará. The man put them on. The drums stopped. In the silence, the people slowly parted, seized with sacred terror at the sight of this nightmare creature now standing on the dancing floor. Braided openings at eye level gave the bogeyman a round visor, as if the creature that had donned it could see on all sides. A hand came out of the loincloth, holding the scepter and the apparition started to revolve, at the same time moving round the central pole, a sphere in orbit round the fixed axis of the universe.
Led by Mariazinha, the gathering saluted its god:
He’s come back from the Sudan,
The one who respects his mother alone …
He’s limping, he’s stumbling with fatigue
The one who haunts the graveyard bones …
A tôtô Obaluaê!
A tôtô Obaluaê!
A tôtô Bubá!
A tôtô Alogibá!
Omulú bajé, Jamboro!
He was there, the god they had begged to come, he was dancing, jerkily, alternating little leaps with his feet together and octopus-like undulations. A trance descended like a mist over all his devotees. Some ran over to Omulú to recei
ve his blessing—a tap on the shoulders with the xaxará—others collapsed where they stood, bellowing, jiggling. The women undid their hair and shook their heads furiously, their faces veiled by their hair. Everyone was dancing to the rhythm of the drums that had been released. A kind of savage epilepsy swept through the terreiro.
Loredana was still observing all this as a spectator. She was also following the rhythm of the drums, swaying forward and back, cradling her own isolation, invisible at the heart of this company of the blind. Even Soledade, frenzied, no longer saw her. She found it almost amusing to observe the strange commotion—abrupt regroupings of cockroaches on a patch of grease—which suddenly began to spread: a woman threw herself on a man, lifted up her skirt and took him there, in front of everyone. They were caught up in an orgiastic wave that broke over the night. The god himself interrupted his dance, joined the crowd for a swift coupling, then returned to the arena to continue his ponderous dance. The bulbs were no longer lit, but someone must have been feeding the fires, for the bacchanal was gilded by high, desolate flames. An unknown man took Soledade. And as their bodies touched her thigh, Loredana saw their faces, strangely calm, strangely empty, in the vigorous embrace; a lascivious solemnity, which she observed, without judging it, with the sense of having gone beyond the limits of intoxication, of being out of her depth. The remnants of reason were sounding the alarm in her head, but she forced herself to drink in order to free herself from the control of that authority, impatient to catch up with the frenzy at work all around her. Something fundamental was moving over this mass of humans, something she desperately wanted to receive but that filled her every fiber with a twilight dread. There was a stirring of organic matter, a ferment of worm-ridden compost—a presence—and Omulú was there in front of her, unmoving, frightening, his penis sticking out through the raffia strands. Like a stained-glass window exposed to the fury of a fire, her mind flew into a thousand fragments. For a few seconds she made every effort to gather them together, stricken by a sense of absolute urgency, sheer animal panic. Then she lay down, half on Soledade, half on someone else, not even on the ground, her eyes staring up at the sky. Hands tore away her skirt, a body weighed down on her with the dry crackle of a straw mattress. The god penetrated her, giving off a smell of candle wax and crumbly soil.
She came to again a few minutes later. As she stood up, a sticky fluid dripped down from between her legs.
“He’s going to leave,” Soledade kept repeating in desperation, “he’s going to leave. Come on, quick!”
She dragged her into the arena, where the congregation was gathered round to see the last convulsions of the god. Mariazinha had taken back the xaxará and was making strange signs above him:
He’s going back to where he came from
To Luanda,
To Luanda,
May he take the sheaf of our prayers,
May he grant them before he returns.
Finally the man possessed by the god lay motionless, stretched out on his back, a Christ without his cross, a dervish released from his vertigo. They lifted up his body so that the mother of saints could remove his garb. And under the mask there was another mask, that of a man, jaw hanging loose, a blank expression on his face—the face of Alfredo.
ALCNTARA: Nicanor Carneiro
Gilda awoke with a start at around three in the morning and listened to the noises of the house. The baby seemed to be whimpering. She waited a little, hoping it would go back to sleep. A persistent wail, the kind that comes with a sudden release after someone has held their breath for a long time, made her sit up in bed.
“What is it?” Nicanor grunted without opening his eyes.
“Nothing,” Gilda said affectionately. “I’ll go see.”
Reassured by his wife’s reply, Nicanor Carneiro immediately went back to sleep. He had been working hard for months without finding the time to rest and the birth of their first child hadn’t helped.
Fully awake now, Gilda disentangled her nightdress and trotted off to the other room. She was worried, Egon had never cried like that before, he must be ill. As she switched on the light, a hand was placed over her mouth, stifling her cry: a man, his face distorted by a nylon stocking, was beside the cradle, facing her, the baby under his arm and a razor in his right hand.
“Not a sound, bitch,” the one who was holding her from behind whispered. “Do what you’re told and nothing’ll happen to him.”
She started crying with terror and at the sense of her own powerlessness. Her legs gave way. The point of a knife was pressed against her throat: “You understand? Call your husband. Just tell him to come, nothing else.”
She couldn’t utter a sound. The baby, purple, retching, was choking with terror. The man grasped her breast and tightened his grip. “Get on with it, you cunt, or I’ll stick this into you!”
Carneiro came running at his wife’s second scream. He stood there, hair tousled, his nakedness emphasising how skinny he was, looking as if he couldn’t believe what was happening.
“No time for sleeping,” the man in the hood who was holding his wife said, “we’re in a hurry. You’ve ten seconds to put your name to this piece of paper.” His glance indicated the pen and sheet of paper on the table. “You sign and we go; any quibbling and your fucking brat gets it first. Is that clear?”
“Leave them alone,” Nicanor said, his voice hoarse with anger, “I’ll sign.”
The man checked the signature: Nicanor Carneiro, folded the bill of sale and put it in his pocket.
“There, that wasn’t difficult, was it?” he said in satisfied tones. “All right then,” he went on, pushing Gilda toward him, “you can have your old woman back. She’s got terrific tits, you must have a great time, you lucky bugger. C’mon, Pablo, put the kid down, we’re off.”
The silence following this command seemed to stretch on and on. All eyes turned toward the cradle, where the man with the razor was clumsily shaking the inert body of the baby, as if trying to make it work again.
SÃO LUÍS, FAZENDA DO BOI: It’ll be in the papers tomorrow, Colonel …
“Frankly, Carlotta,” the Colonel said as he put down his napkin beside his plate, “you’re worrying about nothing.”
They were finishing their breakfast out on the patio. There was a flush of sunlight behind the still-wet foliage of the bougainvillea. Carlotta had hardly slept all night, her pale, bleary face was that of an old woman.
“Mauro’s a big boy now,” Moreira went on, “and from what I understand, he’s with people who know the area. They must have found what they’re looking for and it’s made them forget the rest of the world. You know what they’re like. So no news is good news. If something had happened to them—and I really can’t see what—we’d know by now.” He poured the rest of the coffee into his cup.
“Perhaps you’re right,” Carlotta said, massaging her temples. “I hope upon hope that you’re right. But I can’t set my mind at rest, it’s stronger than me.”
There had been a call from the University of Brazilia the previous afternoon. Not having had any news of the expedition, the Geology Department secretary wanted to know whether Mauro had contacted his parents at all. With the new semester starting in three days’ time, the vice chancellor was getting increasingly concerned about the prolonged absence of his principal lecturers. When Moreira had come home, he had done his best to reassure his wife, his confidence only increased by his belief in the proverbial absentmindedness of scientists. Carlotta had seemed grateful for the effort he made and as a result the switch of the title deeds had gone ahead smoothly. She had even thanked him for the promptness with which he had righted the situation.
“I apologize for the scene I made the other evening,” she had added. “I don’t care about the money myself, but it’s for Mauro, for him alone … You understand?”
OF COURSE HE understood. The Colonel gave his reflection a self-satisfied smile and patted his cheeks with Yardley lavender water. The “Countess of Alzegul” had ap
ologized to him and the Willis was being delivered that day. It was certainly getting off to the best possible start.
Back in her room Carlotta started when she heard the telephone ring—Mauro! Something had happened to Mauro! But her husband had already answered the phone, so she didn’t say anything, anxious for news of her son.
“The Carneiro business is sorted, Colonel. He’s signed, I have the bill of sale here …”
“Good, very good,” Moreira replied. “I knew I could trust you, Wagner.”
Disappointed, Carlotta was thinking of putting the receiver down when the voice at the other end of the line faltered. “Colonel … How shall I put it … Things went wrong … There was an accident …”
“What do you mean, went wrong? Out with it, Wagner, I’ve got a meeting in half an hour and I’m not dressed yet.”
“The baby … well, from what they told me … the baby choked to death, just like that. When the father saw it, he threw himself on one of my men and managed to pull his hood off … They panicked … It’ll be in the papers tomorrow, Colonel …
“You mean they’ve been …”
“Yes.”
There was a long silence during which Moreira stared blankly at his bedside table, incapable of gathering his thoughts.