by Rona Jaffe
A large, stout old woman, dressed in a voluminous white sheet and puffing on a cigar, walked out of the crowd then and into the clearing. She hopped up and down with surprising energy despite her huge bulk, puffing intermittently on the cigar and letting forth a stream of unintelligible words. Everyone seemed pleased to see her doing this and watched her seriously and admiringly. The fat woman began to whirl. She whirled around and around, digging up the dirt with her bare toes like a pile driver, the bits of earth spraying out around her feet, her arms held stiffly at her sides, her fingers crooked like the claws of an arthritic. Then she fell to the ground and writhed there, babbling the unknown tongue, clawing at the earth with her stiffened fingers. Finally she lay still, her eyes rolled back so only their white showed. She was left to lie there where she had fallen.
A thin woman then followed her, and a very old man, both of them hopping and whirling independently, as if no one were watching them but the spirit that had overtaken their jerking bodies. Ahhh … came a sound from the crowd, a sound of awe and satisfaction. The spirits of Macumba had been called up; the spirits were here. The thin woman fell into a crouch, her head rubbing the dirt, her arms and legs curled together as if she were a sick animal. The old man tripped and sprawled awkwardly, and then tried weakly to get to his feet. A man entered the clearing from the crowd to help him, and when he was standing again the old man tried again to do this possessed dance, although he was so weak he could hardly move.
There was a young girl’s frightened scream. From the bleachers a girl who could not have been more than sixteen tore herself away from the restraining hands of her friends and tried to crawl under the fence to get into the clearing. She hit her head on the wooden crossbar, so loudly that Helen could hear the crack, but she did not seem to feel it. Blood was pouring down her cheek from a cut above her eye, and the eye was beginning to close, but she did not seem to feel that either, and she danced and hopped until she fainted. The girl who had screamed began to sob.
“She is my sister!” the weeping girl cried out. “She is my sister! Someone help her!” She broke away from the others and jumped over the fence.
There were several people bending over the fallen girl, and two of them lifted her and carried her out of the clearing. Her sister followed, crying, holding on to the unconscious girl as though her touch might save her. The blood she had left where she fell was beginning to seep into the bare earth.
People were beginning to come forward now as supplicants to the altar, to ask for favors. Kill my enemy, make my enemy sicken and die. My husband beats me; put a curse on him. Kill my wife, because I have found a better woman. Break my neighbor’s legs; he has stolen from me. Requests in ominous whispers to the dark spirit, from hearts so full of superstition, resentment, and frustration that the force of these emotions alone filled the air like the power of a presence. It was not the black spirit of evil these people were calling upon, but the dark fears within themselves. Standing behind the fence, staring at the tiny winking candle flames, listening to the song that was as old and persuasive as the sound of the tides of the sea, Helen began to tremble.
I want, the people whispered to the dark spirit. I need, I need, I need. Take me away, into the sea, into the sky, into the heart of the candle flame. Give me a new life. Help me.… The night breeze wafted the ugly odors of poverty and filth, the rooster screamed from a dark shack, and the strange, sweetish cigar smoke hovered on the air, filled with fever dreams. Helen felt her body beginning to sway with the music.
Her feet moved, first only a tapping in time to the rhythm of the song, then forward. She felt herself inching toward the fence and she was powerless to stop. The clearing was almost filled now with people hopping and writhing, crying out in the sounds they had kept locked within their hearts, tortured, guttural sounds, the voice of the Macumba magic. A very old woman, bent over with arthritis, crept into the clearing and suddenly straightened up with a shrill cry of triumph. She fell to the ground then and crawled, her arms outstretched and fingers clawing ahead of her, oblivious of the dirt that covered her dress, her chin, even her mouth, as she strove to reach closer to the call of the spirit.
Oh, God, Helen thought, I don’t want to be old like that and lost. I want … I want … She felt delirious. She wasn’t sure what it was, but she knew that something had already been lost to her, and had been lost for a long, long time, stolen, unattainable. Loneliness filled her and she felt such an emptiness that it seemed as if there were no body inside her skin at all. She held out her arms and her empty hands, not knowing for what, moving forward and shivering in the warm night breeze.
She brushed by the partition as she moved forward and she felt a hand take hold of her shoulder, so lightly it might not have touched her at all. She stopped and turned her head. Sergio Leite Braga was standing against the men’s side of the partition, reaching out with his hand, his face very white in the candlelight.
“Let’s get out of here,” he whispered in English. She realized then that his hand was cold, and he looked as if he were going to be sick.
“I … don’t know,” she whispered.
“I’m leaving for a while,” Sergio said. His tone was forcedly casual, but he spoke so quickly she knew he would not give her time to decide. She suddenly felt that if he were to leave now he would melt back into the black, leafy mountainside and she would never meet him again.
She went quickly to Leila and touched her. “I’m going to wait in the car.” She pushed past the others again, past the men’s area, and out to the gate which led to the dark steps.
He was standing there waiting for her, and when he saw it was she he turned without a word and opened the gate. Two natives were standing there who had arrived too late to be allowed in. They were standing patiently and resignedly, leaning against the fence, and one of them carried a bottle of cachaça. They looked as though they would be willing to wait there all night.
Helen had to hold on to the railing and look carefully at the ground to keep her footing. When they had gone a few steps Sergio looked back to see if she were still there, like a man first coming back to consciousness, and then he slowed his pace so she could follow close behind him. They could hear the sounds of the singing and outcries all the way down the hill.
The air seemed very clear at the bottom of the hill, and the voices and lights were so far away that now they seemed only a bad dream which one could view with tolerance and no fear. But Helen could not stop trembling. She did not feel ill; she simply felt as if something within her had been exposed and was exposed still, throbbing and vulnerable. She did not know what to do to close it up and protect it again, so she waited and trembled.
Sergio took her hand, and his hand was no longer cold. “Do you feel all right now?” he asked.
She shook her head. “I feel so strange. I don’t know what’s the matter with me.”
“I do too. I had to get out of there.”
They began to walk slowly, hand in hand, toward his car. Although Helen had heard gruesome stories about what happened to people who ventured into the favella district alone at this hour of night, now she did not feel in the least afraid. She felt as though every evil thing which might happen was safely occupied in that orgy on the mountaintop. The plateau where they were was still high; through the trees she could see the faraway glitter of the city. She had a sense of height and isolation, but now not loneliness.
“I need a drink,” Sergio said. “I think that would help.”
“Do you feel strange?”
“Very. You know, my friends were smiling as if it were all a big joke. They didn’t feel anything. But I felt something supernatural. I don’t know what it was. I knew I had to get out of there, and when I looked at you I knew you did too.”
“I felt as if I were going to join them in two minutes,” Helen said. It didn’t seem ridiculous to say that, even now; she was still too close to it. “I wonder why.”
“Some people are more psychic than others,”
Sergio said. “It’s a kind of extrasensory perception. How is it that one person can tell what another is thinking, when no one else senses a thing? We felt it, and our friends didn’t.”
“I was wondering if there was something in those cigars those people were smoking,” Helen said.
“We weren’t.”
“No.”
He opened the door of his car for her and helped her in. It was a small Brazilian-make car, something like a Volkswagen. “Can we leave?” he asked.
“We should tell them.…”
“They’ll know we left. They have the other car.”
“Yes,” she said.
“Let’s get a drink.”
She nodded, and he started the car. As they drove slowly down the dark, bumpy road she felt herself beginning to relax. She thought of a gin and tonic and the warmth it would bring her. It occurred to her briefly to invite him to come home with her for a drink, but then she realized immediately that whoever saw them would think he was going to be her lover, and worse he would probably think so too. The thought of home was only an instinctive reflex; she did not really want to go home at all. The apartment seemed so foreign, so different and far away, it was as if by appearing in her own living room with her newly awakened emotions she would be making an entrance into someone’s parlor covered with blood from an automobile accident.
They drove into Copacabana and he parked the car in front of a very small, air-conditioned boâte. There was only one other couple in the room, sitting in a dark corner, and on a tiny bandstand a man sat on a stool playing the guitar, with his eyes closed. There was a minuscule dance floor, and the walls behind the booths were made of illuminated glass with live fish swimming behind them.
Sergio ordered drinks, and Helen drank hers so quickly she scarcely had time to feel it sting as it went down. She felt the warmth then, and she also felt lightheaded. “I may live,” she said.
“I hope so.”
“Are you a Brazilian?” she asked abruptly.
“Of course. My father and grandfather and great-grandfather too. Why?”
“I don’t know,” she said, slightly embarrassed. She did know why she had asked, but she was ashamed to explain it. She had wondered because he seemed so familiar and like herself, so perceptive of whatever was in her, that she had the provincial inclination to reject anything that was foreign in him because that meant a mystery. “Because … you’ve never been to a Macumba before,” she lied. “You said so.”
“It’s true.”
“What made you come to this one, finally?”
“I don’t think I’d better tell you,” he said. “You won’t believe me.”
“Of course I’ll believe you.”
“I went there because I knew you were going to be there, and I wanted to see you again.”
“You’re right; I really don’t believe you,” Helen said. She laughed. “Me? After five seconds in a swimming pool?”
Sergio looked at her intently. It was not the way most people look at other people, because the other people are within their range of vision, but as if he were really looking at her; she almost saw herself reflected in his eyes. “Listen,” he said slowly. For the first time she heard the very faint trace of a Portuguese accent. “After five seconds in the swimming pool, as you put it, would you have wanted to see me again? If some good friend had told you I was going to be some place tonight and you knew you would see me, would you have wanted to be there? Think,” he said slowly. “I want you to tell me the truth.”
“I never thought about it,” Helen said.
“Think about it now,” he said gently. His voice was soft but matter-of-fact, as if there was nothing preposterous in this question at all. “Sergio Leite Braga is going to be at the Macumba tonight. We are all going together. Would you like … do you want … to see him?”
She looked at her locked hands, remembering back to that moment when she had recognized him again; and then she looked at him and she felt that same small shock of recognition, but oddly intensified now. If someone were to ask her his question now she knew she would answer yes, or more likely she would not answer anything but she would be there. She shook her head. “It’s too late to have an abstract discussion,” she said. “I have to go home. I have some things to do, and my children—I want to be sure they’re all right.”
He smiled at her, but there was neither amusement nor taunt in it. He seemed vulnerable for a moment, and that surprised her, and then it did not surprise her. “And yourself?” he said softly. “Are you all right?”
“I? Of course.”
“You’re beautiful and charming and sweet. These are things that make other people happy. They aren’t the things that make you happy.”
“Is anybody really that happy?” Helen said. The vehemence of her own voice surprised her. Why, she sounded like Mil Burns, or even like Margie.
“What a sad and terrible question,” Sergio Leite Braga said. He gestured for the waiter.
She did not speak to him until they were in the car. She felt again, as she had during the nightmarelike Macumba rites, like crying out, Help me! But this time she was really frightened, for she knew that if she ever said anything to hint at this she would be lost, and her family, and Bert, and everything she believed in. And yet, what exactly did she believe in? She remembered how many times in the past few years she had needed to ask Bert, Do you love me? Do you really love me still? And she had always felt abashed and even a little afraid when she asked him, for fear he would think she was childish, for fear he might laugh, for fear he might answer, I … don’t know, Helen.
She had the obscure feeling that she had to test Sergio in some way, ask him some question that really did not mean what it said, some question he could answer in guarded words because he would know what she really meant. It would mean Help me, but it would be a harmless question, foolish perhaps but not dangerous, and she would never have to utter the dreadful words that would reveal herself to him and irrevocably, to herself. She glanced out the window at the streetcar tracks, and then turned her head swiftly to look at him, almost is if she expected to catch him looking at her with perfidy or lust or guile.
“You think I’m beautiful,” she said.
“You are beautiful.” He looked at her with that little smile. “I know it.”
“Thank you,” she said lightly. She turned away to look out the window again. She must have been drunk, she thought, because for no reason her eyes were full of tears.
“It’s not midnight yet,” Sergio said. “I want to show you something. Then I’ll take you home.”
She did not answer, and he turned the car and drove out toward the district of Laranjeiras, the place of orange groves. The streets were narrow and cobblestoned here and the houses were very large and old and ornate, the iron fences that surrounded them giving glimpses of palm trees and marble statues overgrown to their knees in tall grass. It was dark and still; everyone seemed to be sleeping within these dark mansions, or dead and gone into the past. He drove through a passageway at the end of an alley, and they were in a small courtyard, enclosed on three sides by silent houses—mansions, really—that seemed to be showing their backs. The courtyard was paved in old uneven cobblestones that gave a dull gleam in the light of the white moon. In the center was a dry fountain, fallen into decay, the dark mark of the water indelibly upon it like a frayed black ribbon. There were small orange trees set in front of the mansions, and a little curb, where horses had once stood, and carriages.
“This is a very, very old place,” Sergio said quietly. He turned off the engine of his car, and they looked at the silent square and did not speak for a while.
“Who lived here?” she said finally.
“Wealthy families in the old days of Brazil. When the women married they never saw their husbands until the day of the wedding. Then they would come to live in a house like this, and they would stay inside it for the rest of their lives.”
“And never come out?”
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br /> “Only to go to church,” Sergio said. “And sometimes to visit relatives, but always in the carriage, and always with the chaperone. Their lives were inside their homes, with their children and servants.”
“But if they didn’t love their husbands?” Helen said. “How terrible!”
“It didn’t matter whether they loved their husbands or not,” he said.
“How terrible,” Helen said again, more softly. She tried to imagine what it would be like, to be married to a man who didn’t love her, who only cared about her as a mother for his children and a mistress of his great house. It was so easy to project herself into this cold image that she felt a wave of loneliness and longing that numbed her.
“But these women had their children,” Sergio said. His voice was a whisper. “That was enough.”
“It isn’t enough!” Helen said.
He looked at her and smiled, and covered her hand lightly, touching the tips of each of her fingers separately with the tips of his own and lifting them one by one. “I want to make you happy,” he said.
She was stricken with embarrassment by the way she had revealed herself to him. “You’re so clever,” she said bitterly. Then she realized she had only made everything worse.
“I am clever about you,” Sergio said softly. “Are you offended?”
She shook her head.
“I want to see you alone. Tomorrow. Will you see me?”
“We have nothing to say to each other,” Helen said. “And you know it.”
“I have a great deal to say to you. But it might bore you to hear me tell you what you do to me.”
“Please don’t,” Helen said. She took her hand away from his, finally. “Look …” she said. “I … it isn’t as if I were a single girl on a … a vacation, where I could meet an attractive man and say to myself, What harm would it do if I fall a little in love with him? Go and chase a tourist. Let her feel flattered. She probably has nothing to lose but her loneliness. She’d be going from nothing to something. I would have to go from something to something else to get involved with you, and I can’t. I’m not that kind of person.”