Jean-Marie Blas De Robles - Where Tigers Are at Home

Overcoming her revulsion at the sight of the dirty bottle and the small quantity of thick, red liquid left in it, she forced herself to swallow a mouthful. It was acrid, very high in alcohol, with an indefinable taste of green leaves and cough syrup. Mariazinha must be completely inebriated to drink something like that.

It was at that moment that she heard the drums, very close, beating out the rhythm of the samba.

“Go and sit down,” Mariazinha said, taking them out of the room. “And you,” she added to Loredana, “try to do as the others do, don’t resist anything the night will bring.”

“Come on, it’s this way,” Soledade said, once they were alone, “I didn’t think she was going to let you attend the macumba , it’s super! You’ll see, you haven’t got anything like this in Italy …”

Loredana followed her to a door leading out behind the house. She stared, open-mouthed, at the sight that greeted her: there were about fifty people there, men and women, sitting on the ground or on low benches around a wide rectangle of swept earth. An old telegraph pole had been placed at the intersection of the diagonals; several strings of fairy lights spread out from it, making a canopy of light above the audience. Standing behind their instruments, three young drummers seemed to be getting a kick out of their own virtuosity.

To Loredana’s great relief, the people paid no attention to them. They moved aside quite naturally to let them sit down on the edge of the terreiro . The crowd was buzzing: the dispossessed, marked by privation and fate, ghostly beings, their swarthy skin shining in the many-colored lights. Certain mulatto women were wearing long white dresses that made them look like Tahitians in their Sunday best. On the other side of the area Loredana saw Socorró. Their eyes met without her showing any reaction at all. She was more saddened than surprised by this disdain; the old woman must find the presence of a stranger unseemly in that place. Even Soledade’s attitude to her had changed. She sensed that she was distant, reserved, despite the occasional whispered remark:

“The silent queen,” she said, pointing to a slatternly adolescent who was holding out a calabash filled with jurema to them.

It was Mariazinha’s niece, a mute girl whose job it was to serve the gathered crowd. She drew the drink from a large bucket with a tin jug eaten away with rust that dribbled the red liquid over her calves. Equally silent, and resigned, was the cluster of black hens tied by their legs to the central post. Crude pipes were being passed round; they were filled with a mixture of tobacco and pot which made your head spin with every puff. Kept at ground level by the nocturnal humidity, the smoke hung around like mist, giving off a scent of eucalyptus.

The rhythm of the drums quickened as some men placed Mariazinha’s wicker throne, with its back to the darkness, between two pyres on the side of the yard that had been left free. Then they brought in a little table, on which the silent queen placed a white cloth and a covered object, which she handled with an indefinable look of fear. Bowls of popcorn and manioc also appeared, the traditional offerings to Omulú, as well as the array of his attributes: a kind of loincloth with an openwork bonnet and the xaxará , the bundle of reeds tied by rings made of cowrie shells, which Soledade explained as a kind of scepter imbued with magic power. The fires on either side of this altar were lit, the drums fell silent, and all eyes turned toward the house.

Her bottle of jurema in her hand, Mariazinha went to the middle of the terreiro ; she walked in a bizarre manner, taking little hurried steps, as if her ankles were hobbled with invisible chains. Close to the central post, she stopped to take a mouthful of jurema , which she sprayed over the hens. After having put her bottle down, she took a bag of ash from beside the altar, made a hole in it and started to draw large figures on the ground. In a loud voice she uttered invocations that the crowd immediately took up with fervor:

São-Bento ê ê, São-Bento ê á!

Omulú Jesus Maria ,

Eu venho de Aloanda .

No caminho de Aloanda ,

Jesus São-Bento, Jesus São-Bento!

Behind her she left geometrical figures, stars and black-headed snakes.

Then she went to the edge of the arena and had another drink and puffed a pipe, blowing the smoke into the faces of the onlookers. She was reeling now, but in an artificial way, imitating the confused walk of drunks. Back at the altar, not far from where Soledade and Loredana were sitting, she put a tremulous hand toward the covered object that drew wild-eyed stares. With one movement, she lifted off the cloth and stepped back, as if repelled by a magnetic force; the drums started up again louder than ever.

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.