by Rona Jaffe
It was very hot in Rio. In their stifling little apartments dressmakers were busy stitching sequins and feathers and beads and pieces of fur onto elaborate costumes which would be worn at Carnival a month and a half later, their windows wide open to admit whatever slight breeze there was during the day. Great false birds’ heads with varicolored plumage, empty bodies of golden dragons, limp black cloth faces of Blackamoors, lay on the wooden floor at their feet, like the aftermath of some monstrous carnage. Later these costumes and masks would come to life and parade across a floodlighted ramp high above the street to the applause and cries of street crowds who had waited for hours to see them.
Meanwhile it was hot, and every day the beaches were crowded from early morning until evening. In Copacabana someone drowned in the undertow nearly every day, and rich tourists emerging onto their balconies for breakfast these hot mornings might turn away squeamishly from the sight of a crowd gathered below on the beach—around something, and you always knew what—and decide to have breakfast inside the room after all.
The children were on summer vacation from school. Wives, if they could afford it, went up into the mountains with their children for the months of most intense heat, to Petropolis, Itiapava, Cidade d’Ouro, Terezopolis; or to the windy peninsula of Cabo Frio and Buzios. The husbands were summer bachelors, working in the city during the week and joining their families on weekends. In Portuguese summer bachelors are called cigarras if they enjoy themselves, because the cigarra is the locust who sings all summer. On weekday nights during the hot summer the nightclubs were filled with these cigarras, some of them dancing with girls, others alone table-hopping, enjoying their temporary freedom discreetly—in public at least.
Helen Sinclair wondered if there was a female version of cigarra, for a wife whose husband had gone off and left her in Copacabana. She was a poor sort of cigarra, she thought, because she did not have the least inclination to go out and enjoy herself and sing, even if she had known how to go about doing it. She telephoned Mil Burns.
“Bert’s away for five days. Last night there were Macumba candles on the beach again. They make me so nervous. I want to go to a Macumba once and for all and satisfy my curiosity. Do you think Phil would take us?”
“Ha,” Mil said dryly. “You want to go to a Macumba? Good luck.”
“Won’t you come?”
“For what?” Mil said. “They’re a lot of hokum. Candles and old Lindoya bottles. I can look into my garbage pail and see old Lindoya bottles, I don’t have to drag myself to God knows where.”
Margie had seen several Macumbas, one of which she was sure had been the real thing. “They made a circle of gunpowder,” she told Helen. “Then they lighted it and the whole thing exploded into the most beautiful colors. Neil took pictures.”
“Let’s go,” Helen said. “If I wait for my husband I’ll never see one.”
“Oh, I really don’t want to see another,” Margie said.
“Why? Is it boring?”
“Oh, no. You’ll see why …”
“I’ll never see why at this rate. It’s so frustrating to be in a fascinating place like Rio and then never go anywhere or see anything.”
In desperation Helen called Leila, although she knew Leila would be the last person to want to go somewhere like that.
“Of course I’ll take you to a Macumba,” Leila said. “I will bring some of my friends. I have spoken to them very much about you. I want you to meet them. We can go this week. There are two kinds of Macumba, the one for good spirits and the one for bad. I would rather go to the good one. But if you are in a hurry we can go to the one for Black Magic, because it is the one coming next. It doesn’t really matter.”
“Black Magic? They call up evil spirits?”
“People go there to wish bad things to people they do not like. In a White Magic Macumba they pray for health and cures and good things. But we can go to the bad one. You don’t have to be afraid.”
“I’m not afraid,” Helen said. “I mean, why should I be?”
But when she found herself at the foot of a steep flight of temporary steps that had been cut into the side of the mountain, she was afraid. It was a very dark night, two days after her telephone conversation with Leila. The Macumba candles had been lighted on the beach, and at ten o’clock she and Leila and a Brazilian couple who were old friends of Leila’s drove in Leila’s car up into the hills. At a crossroad there was a square of lighted candles set into empty bottles in the roadway. They turned there, and continued to climb, until they saw another lighted signal flickering in the dark. The trees were so leafy and thick above them that Helen could not see the stars. She told herself this was where the favellas were, that Maria probably lived here, but she could not help feeling it was all new and frightening, a place that would vanish tomorrow. From somewhere on top of the mountain they began to hear, then, the sound of voices in a singsong chant, very softly at first because they were far away, and then louder. Leila parked the car beside the mountain and they got out.
A crude wooden hand railing had been put up beside the flight of steps. It was almost impossible to see anything in the light of the flares that were set at the foot of the steps and then high at the top. No one spoke. The sound of chanting rose and fell, hypnotically, and somewhere a woman screamed as if she were carried away by religious ecstasy. In the darkness Helen could just make out the outline of another parked car, and somehow its ordinariness reassured her. It didn’t seem as if any of the participants up there on the mountain drove a car; she was sure the car belonged to tourists, curious, ordinary people, perhaps even with cameras and flashbulbs.
“They are here,” Leila said to her friends.
They walked to the other parked car, and standing beside it were the dark silhouettes of two men. “How are you? How are you?” came the whispers in the darkness, subdued. “This is my friend Helen Sinclair,” Leila said in English. She introduced the two men in whispers; Sergio something and José something-else, and then the six of them filed up the steps.
Helen tried not to tug Leila’s skirt as she followed her up the treacherous path, but she knew she was afraid. She was sorry they had come at all. It was a premonition, perhaps, or simply foolish nervousness; but she wished they had not come. There was something ominous in the air tonight, a feeling of change, a feeling of spirits released, that she had never known before, and it frightened her. She did not even know if the Brazilian friends of Leila’s who filed ahead and behind her up these primitive steps were frightened too, or believing, or unbelieving and amused, or even prepared to be bored. Helen hoped they were bored; it would reassure her.
“I’m afraid,” she whispered to Leila.
“So am I,” Leila whispered back. She laughed, a low, throaty sound in the black night. “I am always afraid when I come to one of these.”
At the top of the steps there was a wire gate, locked, and a flare set on top of a pole. In the distance Helen could see white-robed figures gathered in a huge circle, chanting and singing in unison. They waited for someone within to come to open the gate. “Psst!” one of Leila’s friends called. Within the enclosure a very dark-skinned, thin man dressed in a pair of summer trousers and shirt walked over to open the gate.
In the light of the flare Helen turned for an instant to glance at the faces of the two other men who had met them beside the car. One of them was a pleasant-looking middle-aged man with a mustache. The other she had seen before—he was the man who had spoken to her in the swimming pool that other night at the Brazilian party. When she looked at him he recognized her in the flickering light and smiled at her. She remembered that wolfine face very clearly then, and she smiled back. Suddenly she was annoyed at herself for never being able to remember Brazilian names, and she resolved to learn and remember his if she had to repeat it to herself all night.
“What’s your name?” she whispered to him.
“Sergio.” He smiled at her again then, very slightly, and whispered very slowly and
very clearly, “Sergio Leite Braga.”
“Sergio Leite Braga,” Helen repeated in a whisper, and she wondered if he were laughing at her. In the flickering half-light of the flares he seemed much more handsome than she would have remembered, his features finely chiseled in the light and darkness, not altogether human, like a satyr that had sprung out of this hillside.
“You must have been to many Macumbas before,” she whispered.
“Never,” he said.
She walked through the opened gate ahead of him, and the man who seemed to be the guide and gatekeeper motioned that all the men had to stand on one side of a partition and all the women on the other. Helen wondered whether this was because of religious reasons, or whether it might be to avert some kind of orgy. She followed Leila and the other woman and stationed herself with them on the women’s side, next to the partition, slightly separated from the other women who were already there. There was a crude bleacher set up, with all the space on the wooden planks already taken by women who had arrived much earlier than they had. Some of them had spread newspapers on the boards before they sat, and most of them were dressed up as for a party or for church. Most of them were Negroes. A woman stood beside the fence with a sleeping baby in her arms, and nearby was another woman with a little girl about three years old who was already whimpering from tiredness. There was a huge, oblong clearing ahead of them, surrounded by a low wooden and wire fence. The clearing was lighted by hundreds of small candles set at intervals along the ground. There was no grass, only smooth, trodden earth. At the far end of this clearing there was a sort of large shrine containing brightly colored plaster figures of saints, and illuminated by so many candles that it was as bright as day. Helen recognized Saint George, in armor and a cape, carrying a long sword and riding a plaster horse. There were several smaller figures of Saint George too, and other saints whom she did not recognize. The entire gaudy display, with its pagan art set upon shelves, reminded her incongruously of a booth of prizes at a country fair.
“Saint George,” Leila whispered in her ear. “Patron saint of this cult.”
“Of Macumba?”
“Shh!” Leila looked around to be sure no one had overheard. “Never say that word here. It frightens them. And whatever happens, do not laugh. If you laugh, they might kill you.”
Helen had had no previous inclination to laugh, but now, knowing it was not only forbidden but dangerous, she had to try not to giggle nervously as if the laughter were some horrible compulsion that was going to burst free from her throat and doom her. There was really nothing even slightly funny here at all. Gathered at the side of the clearing was a group of about fifty colored women, most of them young, all of them dressed in flowing white robes, like a choir, and singing the sweet, hypnotic chant whose words were so old and changed by usage that Helen could not make them out. The women sang the same lines over and over, in a melody both savage and tenderly sweet, their voices high and innocent, like the voices of children. The song seemed to draw the listener to them, so that the longer you listened the more you wanted to sing it too although you did not know the words. Helen opened her lips and felt herself trying to sing, slightly self-conscious and not really caring, swaying a little to the rhythm and straining to catch any words that would be familiar to her so she could repeat them.
She could sense restlessness in the crowd. Something was about to happen, or should have already happened and had not. It was not the kind of restlessness you sense in a theater when the curtain is delayed, but rather a sensation of uneasiness, of concern. The choir of white-robed women continued to sing, louder now and even more persuasively.
A tall Negro man walked into the center of the clearing, wearing a costume that was a combination of that of a priest and a medicine man. His white robes and feathers flapped behind him. In his hand he held a stick which seemed to have been dipped in white paint or liquid chalk. An assistant walked behind him carrying a bottle filled with this white fluid. The medicine manpriest began to draw a series of signs on the earth: circles, lines, a long cross. Every now and then he dipped the end of the stick into the white fluid. It reminded Helen of the stuff Bert used to use when he painted white lines on a freshly rolled tennis court on summer mornings. Those days seemed so foreign now that she felt as though she were the only person in this group who even knew such things existed. The choir of women kept on singing, more softly now.
The medicine man—priest lifted his head and howled out a line of some strange language. “Yes, yes,” the women intoned. He stooped to draw more signs on the earth and then raised his head and spoke again, loudly, in a harsh voice. “Yes, yes,” agreed the women. They continued to sing. In the distance, from a favella in the darkness, a rooster crowed. Everyone applauded. Evidently this was one of the signs they had been waiting for.
There was a sense of growing restlessness. Again the rooster crowed, a cry so loud and roosterlike that Helen wondered for a moment if it were artificial. The people applauded again. How could they make a rooster crow in the middle of the night? It made her skin feel cold. The women continued to sing, sweetly, monotonously, hypnotically. The rooster crowed again, but this time his cry was so loud and sharp that Helen realized how they had made him crow. She didn’t want to think about it. She hoped they were only tweaking his feathers, not torturing him. She remembered then that in a Macumba blood had to be shed, and that often in these modern days it was only the blood of a living fowl, although sometimes it turned out to be human.
Whenever the breeze turned there was a stench from the open ditches which passed for plumbing here in the favellas. The ground was damp under her feet and she scarcely dared move in the dark. She glanced at the partition that separated the men from the women. She could see the raised heads of Brazilians with wide-open, glittering eyes watching intensely. No one turned to look at her. She realized that right now none of these people seemed to have any sex, male or female, but only the one common urge: to call up the spirits of Black Magic here on the dark mountaintop and hear the spirits speak through their own bodies.
The medicine man—priest walked around the periphery of the clearing now, looking at the bystanders. He stopped near to Helen and pointed with his hand to a man. The man came forward, through the opening in the fence, and walked into the clearing. He was wearing faded cotton clothes, like a worker, and he was barefoot.
Helen felt Leila’s cold fingers on her arm. “Oh, I thought for a moment he was going to choose me!” Leila breathed, her eyes wide with fear.
“I wouldn’t go,” Helen whispered.
“You have to go.”
The man who had been chosen hopped around the clearing in an awkward, stiff dance. Everyone watched him closely, in silence, except the white-robed singers, who continued their soft chanting. Suddenly he clutched his heart, his eyes rolled back in his head, his head fell back, and he emitted a guttural grunt as if he were choking. He stiffened, his hands at his sides, the fingers bent stiffly like the fingers of someone in an epileptic fit, and he crashed down to the ground, stiff and straight, not even putting out his arms to break his fall at the last second. There was a gasp from the crowd. For a few moments the fallen man did not move, and then he stirred weakly and began to writhe. Two men ran into the clearing from the crowd and helped him to stand and then almost carried him away. There was blood on his head and saliva coming out of his mouth.
The medicine man—priest looked displeased. He waved his stick and drew more signs on the earth. The assistant brought lighted candles and set them at various points on the white drawing. There was an obvious air of unease in the crowd now, and a stirring and whispering, as if something had gone wrong. A few feet behind where Helen and Leila were standing there was a wooden plank shack with an open front and a counter, like a sort of snack bar. The two men who had escorted the stricken man away reappeared and went to this shack, where a girl gave them tin cups of coffee. They whispered concernedly to the girl and she shook her head. Now several other people fro
m the crowd were drifting up to the shack to refresh themselves, all of them whispering and looking worried. The girl who was giving out coffee and some liquid that looked like cachaça seemed so gentle and pretty that Helen took up courage to speak to her.
“What is it?” she asked softly. “What has happened?”
“It is bad,” the girl whispered back. “That man was not supposed to fall that way. He disobeyed. The priest gave him a task which he did not do.”
“What will happen now?”
The girl shook her head. She seemed reluctant, or frightened. “I don’t know. They haven’t decided. He will have to pay some kind of penance or else the spirits will not speak tonight. Perhaps he will be whipped.” She shook her head again. “It is bad.”
Oh, no, Helen thought. I don’t want to stay here to see someone being beaten or tortured. I want to get out of here.
The medicine man—priest was in consultation with his assistant. More of the onlookers were walking about now, as calmly as if they were taking an intermission. Helen could not understand how they could be so calm; yet, it was not really calmness but resignation. They seemed to accept that something violent was going to have to happen before the spirits of Black Magic would be appeased, and until that form of violence was decided upon or showed itself spontaneously they were going to drink sugarcane alcohol and wait.
After a few minutes they began to go back to their seats. The singing began to grow louder. The man who had fallen went back into the clearing. He wore a small white bandage on the side of his head where he had been hurt by his fall. He began to hop, carefully and solemnly, around the outline of the white chalk drawing. Perhaps, Helen thought hopefully, they are giving him another chance. She shivered.