Eco: Foucalt's Pendulum (25 page)

The visions are white,
blue, white, pale red. In the end they mingle and are all pale, the
color of the flame of a white candle; you will see sparks, you will
feel gooseflesh all over your body. This announces the beginning of
the attraction exerted on the one who fulfills the
mission.

¡XPapus, Marlines de
Pasqually, Paris, Chamuel, 1895, p. 92

The promised evening
arrived. Aglie picked us up just as he had in Salvador. The tenda
where the session, or gira, was to take place was in a fairly
central district, if you can speak of a center in a city whose
tongues of land stretch through hills and lick the sea. Seen from
above, illuminated in the evening, the city looks like a head with
patches of alopecia areata.

"Remember, mis is an
umbanda tonight, not a candomble. The participants will be
possessed not by orixas, but by the eguns, spirits of the departed.
And by Exu, the African Hermes you saw in Bahia, and his companion,
Pompa Gira. Exu is a Yoruba divinity, a demon inclined to mischief
and joking, but there was a trickster god in Amerind mythology,
too."

"And who are the
departed?"

"Pretos velhos and
caboclos. The pretos velhos are old African wise men who guided
their people at the time of deportation, like Rei Congo and Pai
Agostinho...They are the memory of a milder phase of slavery, when
the blacks, no longer animals, became family friends, uncles,
grandfathers. The caboclos, on the other hand, are Indian spirits,
virgin forces representing the purity of original nature. In the
umbanda the African orixas stay in the background, completely
syncretized with Catholic saints, and these beings alone intervene.
They are the ones who produce the trance. At a certain point in the
dance, the medium, the cavalo, is penetrated by a higher being and
loses all awareness of self. He continues to dance until the divine
being has left him, and he emerges feeling better. Clean,
purified."

"Lucky mediums," Amparo
said.

"Lucky indeed," Aglie
said. "They attain contact with mother earth. These worshipers have
been uprooted, flung into the horrible melting pot of the city,
and, as Spengler said, at a time of crisis the mercantile West
turns once more to the world of the earth."

We arrived. The tenda
looked like an ordinary building from the outside. Here, too, you
entered through a little garden, more modest than the one in Bahia,
and at the door of the barracao, a kind of storehouse, was a little
statue of Exu, already surrounded by propitiatory
offerings.

Amparo drew me aside as
we went in. "IVe figured it out," she said. "That tapir at the
lecture talked about the Aryan age, remember? And this one talks
about the decline of the West. Blut und Boden, blood and earth.
It's pure Nazism."

"It's not that simple,
darling. This is a different continent."

"Thanks for the news.
The Great White Fraternity! You eat your God for
dinner."

"It's the Catholics who
do that. It's not the same thing."

"It is too. Weren't you
listening? Pythagoras, Dante, the Virgin Mary, and the Masons.
Always out to screw us. Make um-banda, not love."

"You're the one who's
syncretized. Come on, let's have a look. This, teo, is
culture."

"There's only one
culture: strangle the last priest with the entrails of the last
Rosicrucian."

Aglie signaled us to go
in. If the outside was seedy, the inside was a blaze of violent
colors. It was a quadrangular hall, with one area set aside for the
dancing of the cavalos. The altar was at the far end, protected by
a railing, against which stood the platform for the drums, the
atabaques. The ritual space was still empty, but on our side of the
railing a heterogeneous crowd was already stirring: believers and
the merely curious, blacks and whites, all mixed, some barefoot,
others wearing tennis shoes. I was immediately struck by the
figures around the altar: pretos velhos, caboclos in multicolored
feathers, saints who would have seemed to be marzipan were it not
for their Pantagruelian dimensions, Saint George in a shining
breastplate and scarlet cloak, saints Cosmas and Damian, a Virgin
pierced by swords, and a shamelessly hyperrealist Christ, his arms
outstretched like the redeemer of Corcovado, but in color. There
were no orixas, but you could sense their presence in the faces of
the crowd and in the sweetish odor of cane and cooked foods, in the
stench of sweat caused by the heat and by the excitement of the
imminent gira.

The pai-de-santo went
forward and took a seat near the altar, where he received the
faithful, scenting them with dense exhalations of his cigar,
blessing them, and offering them a cup of liquor as if in a rapid
Eucharistic rite. I knelt and drank with my companions, noticing,
as I watched a cambone pour the liquid from a bottle, that it was
Dubonnet. No matter. I savored it as if it were an elixir from the
Fountain of Youth. On the platform the atabaques were already
beating, to brisk blows, as the initiates chanted a propitiatory
song to Exu and to Pompa Gira: Seu Tranca Ruas e Mojuba! E Mojuba,
e Mojuba! Sete Encruzilhadas 6 Mojuba! E Mojuba, 6 Mojuba! Seu
Maraboe e Mojuba! Seu Tiriri ? Mojuba! Exu Veludo, i Mojuba! A
Pompa Gira ? Mojuba!

The pai-de-santo began
to swing his thurible, releasing a heavy odor of Indian incense,
and to chant special orations to OxaM and Nossa Senhora.

The atabaques beat
faster, and the cavalos invaded the space before the altar,
beginning to fall under the spell of the pontos. Most were women,
and Amparo made sarcastic asides about the sensitivity of her
sex.

Among the women were
some Europeans. Aglie pointed out a blonde, a German psychologist
who had been participating in the rites for years. She had tried
everything, but if you are not chosen, it's hopeless: for her, the
trance never came, was beyond achieving. Her eyes seemed lost in
the void as she danced, and the atabaques gave neither her nerves
nor ours any relief. Pungent fumes filled the hall and dazed both
worshipers and observers, somehow hitting everybody¡Xme
included¡Xin the stomach. But the same thing had happened to me at
the escolas de samba in Rio. I knew the psychological power of
music and noise, the way they produced Saturday night fevers in
discos. The German woman's eyes were wide, and every movement of
her hysterical limbs begged for oblivion. The other daughters of
the saint went into ecstasy, flung their heads back, wriggled
fluidly, navigating a sea of forgetfulness. The German tensed,
distraught and almost in tears, like someone desperately struggling
to reach orgasm, wriggling and straining, but finding no release.
However much she tried to lose control, she constantly regained it.
Poor Teuton, sick from too many well-tempered
clavichords.

The elect, meanwhile,
were making their leap into the vacuum, their gaze dulled, their
limbs stiffened. Their movements became more and more automatic,
but not haphazard, because they revealed the nature of the beings
taking possession of them: some of the elect seemed soft, their
hands moving sideways, palms down, in a swimming motion; others
went bent over and moved slowly, and the cambones used white linen
cloths to shield them from the crowd's view, for these had been
touched by an excellent spirit.

Some of the cavalos
shook violently, and those possessed by pretos velhos emitted
hollow sounds¡Xhum hum hum¡Xas they moved with their bodies tilted
forward, like old men leaning on canes, jaws jutting out in
haggard, toothless faces. But those possessed by the caboclos let
out shrill warrior cries¡Xhiahou!¡X and the cambones rushed to
assist the ones unable to bear the violence of the gift.

The drums beat, the
pontos rose in the air thick with fumes. I was holding Amparo's arm
when all of a sudden her hands were sweating, her body trembled,
and her lips parted. "I don't feel well," she said. "I want to
go."

Aglie noticed what had
happened and helped me take her outside. The night air brought her
around. "I'm all right," she said. "It must have been something I
ate. And the smells, the heat..."

"No," said the
pai-de-santo, who had followed us. "You have the qualities of a
medium. You reacted well to the pontos. I was watching
you."

"Stop!" Amparo cried,
adding a few words in a language I didn't know. I saw the
pai-de-santo turn pale¡Xor gray, as they used to say in adventure
stories, where men with black skin turned gray with fear. "That's
enough. I got a little sick. I ate something I shouldn't
have...Please, go back inside. Just let me get some air. I'd rather
be by myself; I'm not an invalid."

We did as she asked, but
when I went back inside, after the break in the open air, the
smells, the drums, the sweat that now covered every body acted like
a shot of alcohol gulped down after a long abstinence. I ran a hand
over my brow, and an old man offered me an agog6, a small gilded
instrument like a triangle with bells, which you strike with a
little bar. "Go up on the platform," he said. "Play. It'll do you
good."

There was homeopathic
wisdom in that advice. I struck the agogo, trying to fall in with
the beat of the drums, and gradually I became part of the event,
and, becoming part of it, I controlled it. I found relief by moving
my legs and feet, I freed myself from what surrounded me, I
challenged it, I embraced it. Later, Aglie was to talk to me about
the diiference between the man who knows and the man who
undergoes.

As the mediums fell into
trances, the cambones led them to the sides of the room, sat them
down, offered them cigars and pipes. Those of the faithful who had
been denied possession ran and knelt at their feet, whispered in
their ears, listened to their advice, received their beneficent
influence, poured out confessions, and drew comfort from them. Some
hovered at the edges of trance, and the cambones gently encouraged
them, leading them, now more relaxed, back among the
crowd.

In the dancing area many
aspirants to ecstasy were still moving. The German woman twitched
unnaturally, waiting to be visited¡Xin vain. Others had been taken
over by Exu and were making wicked faces, sly, astute, as they
moved in jerks.

It was then that I saw
Amparo.

Now I know that Hesed is
not only the Sefirah of grace and love. As Diotallevi said, it is
also the moment of expansion of the divine substance, which spreads
out to the edge of infinity. It is the care of the living for the
dead, but someone also must have observed that it is the care of
the dead for the living.

Striking the agogd, I no
longer followed what was happening in the hall, focused as I was on
my own control, letting myself be led by the music. Amparo must
have come in at least ten minutes before, and surely she had felt
the same effect I had experienced earlier. But no one had given her
an agogo, and by now she probably wouldn't have wanted one. Called
by deep voices, she had stripped herself of all defenses, of all
will.

I saw her fling herself
into the midst of the dancing, stop, her abnormally tense face
looking upward, her neck rigid. Then, oblivious, she launched into
a lewd saraband, her hands miming the offer of her own body. "A
Pomba Gira, a Pomba Gira!" some shouted, delighted by the miracle,
since until then the she-devil had not made her presence known. O
seu manto 6 de veludo, rebordado todo em ouro, o seu garfo 6 de
prata, muito grande e seu tesouri...Pomba Gira das Almas, vein toma
cho cho...

I didn't dare intervene.
I may have accelerated the strokes of my little bar, trying to join
carnally with my woman, or with the indigenous spirit she now
incarnated.

The cambones went to
her, had her put on the ritual vestment, and held her up as she
came out of her brief but intense trance. They led her to a chair.
She was soaked with sweat and breathed with difficulty. She refused
to welcome those who rushed over to beg for oracles. Instead, she
started crying.

The gira was coming to
an end. I left the platform and ran to Amparo. Aglie was already
there, delicately massaging her temples.

"How embarrassing!"
Amparo said. "I don't believe in it, I didn't want to. How could I
have done this?"

"It happens," Aglie said
softly, "it happens."

"But then there's no
hope," Amparo cried. "I'm still a slave. Go away," she said to me
angrily. "I'm a poor dirty black girl. Give me a master; I deserve
it!"

"It happens to blond
Achaeans, too," Aglie consoled her. "It's human
nature..."

Amparo asked the way to
the toilet. The rite was ending. The German woman was still
dancing, alone in the middle of the hall, ostentatious but now
listless. She had followed Amparo's experience with envious
eyes.

Amparo came back about
ten minutes later, as we were taking our leave of the pai-de-santo,
who congratulated us on the splendid success of our first contact
with the world of the dead.

Aglie drove in silence
through the night. When he stopped outside our house, Amparo said
she wanted to go upstairs alone. "Why don't you take a little
walk," she said to me. "Come back when I'm asleep. I'll take a
pill. Excuse me, both of you. I really must have eaten something I
shouldn't have. All those women tonight must have. I hate my
country. Good night."