Where Tigers Are at Home (62 page)

Loredana looked at the shiny wooden statuette that had set off murmuring among the crowd. It was a sort of horned Buddha, seated in the posture of abandonment—under its tucked-up leg a little monkey carved in bas-relief seemed to be making a penis bigger than itself on a wheel—with a goat’s face that expressed a strange mixture of gentleness and severity. Hanging round the neck of this Asiatic Beelzebub, a human thumb swung to and fro for a few seconds before coming to rest.
Eidos, eidôlon
, image, ghost of a thing … an idol! With a sense of disgust, Loredana became aware of what that word must have meant for generations of horrified Hebrews or Christians, of what it still meant for all the people around her. Something dark and terrible invested by the god with his power like a second skin, like his very form.

A long groan ran through the crowd; Mariazinha had started to tremble all over her body, her arms extended before the idol. Her eyelids were fluttering, very quickly, sending out flashes
from her rolled eyeballs. A little foam formed on her lips as she was carefully carried to her chair. She sat there, motionless, paralyzed by her trance, then relaxed, opened her hands. She smiled. But with what eyes and what a smile! Her face had taken on the serenity of Khmer statues, of the most enigmatic Greek statues of young girls. However, it was another memory that came to dominate, that of certain features glimpsed in a film seen a few years previously. The director—Loredana had forgotten his name—had had the idea of filming, one after the other, thousands of passport photographs, men and women mixed, with no distinction of race, age or hairiness. Once a certain projection speed had been reached, the improbable happened: out of this crowd of successive individuals one face took shape, one single calm, unreal face—nowadays people would call it “virtual”—which was neither the sum, nor a résumé of the photos that had been put together, but something that transcended them, their common base, that of a humanity that was shown for the very first time there. It was as if the door to the secret had been left ajar or one of her own dreams had been projected before her. Loredana had thought of God. When the film had begun to slow down and the vision disappeared to be replaced by a simple stroboscopic effect, then by images in which she started to see the features of each individual again, she had felt extremely frustrated. She would have liked to have kept the epiphany before her eyes for ever, to feed on it in eternal contemplation, not living anymore, such was the way it fulfilled all expectation, deprived the senses of all desire. And here it had manifested itself again, stuck on Mariazinha’s face like a glass mask … 
Ialorixá!
Loredana proclaimed her joy at the same time as the congregation, moved to tears by the coincidence of this sudden fusion with all the others. She had not been alone in recognizing the Unnamable, seated on the wicker throne.

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 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 receive 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: