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

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.