by Umberto Eco
I felt like a walking blender mixing strange concoctions of different liquors. Or maybe I had caused some kind of short circuit, tripping over a varicolored tangle of wires that had been entwining themselves for a long, long time. I bought the book on the Rosicrucians, thinking that if I spent a few hours in these bookstores, I would meet at least a dozen Colonel Ardentis and brainwashed psychics.
I went home and officially informed Amparo that the world was full of unnatural characters. She promised me solace, and we ended the dav naturally.
***
That was late 1975. I decided to put resemblances aside and concentrate on my work. After all, I was supposed to be teaching Italian culture, not the Rosicrucians.
I devoted myself to Renaissance philosophers and I discovered that the men of secular modernity, once they had emerged from the darkness of the Middle Ages, had found nothing better to do than devote themselves to cabala and magic.
After two years spent with Neoplatonists who chanted formulas designed to convince nature to do things she had no intention of doing, I received news from Italy. It seems my old classmates—or some of them, at least—were now shooting people who didn't agree with them, to convince the stubborn to do things they had no intention of doing.
I couldn't understand it. Now part of the Third World, I made up my mind to visit Bahia. I set off with a history of Renaissance culture and the book on the Rosicrucians, which had remained on a shelf, its pages uncut.
26
All the traditions of the earth must be seen as deriving from a fundamental mother-tradition that, from the beginning, was entrusted to sinful man and to his first offspring.
—Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin, De l'esprit des choses, Paris, Laran, 1800, II, "De l'esprit des traditions en général"
And I saw Salvador: Salvador da Bahia de Todos os Santos, the "black Rome," with three hundred and sixty-five churches, which stand out against the line of hills or nestle along the bay, churches where the gods of the African pantheon are honored.
Amparo knew a primitive artist who painted big wooden panels crammed with Biblical and apocalyptic visions, dazzling as a medieval miniature, with Coptic and Byzantine elements. Naturally he was a Marxist; he talked about the coming revolution, but he spent his days dreaming in the sacristies of the sanctuary of Nosso Senhor do Bomfim: a triumph of horror vacui, scaly with ex-votos that hung from the ceiling and encrusted the walls, a mystical assemblage of silver hearts, wooden arms and legs, images of wondrous rescues from glittering storms, waterspouts, maelstroms. He took us to the sacristy of another church, which was full of great furnishings redolent of jacaranda. "Who is that a painting of?" Amparo asked the sacristan. "Saint George?"
The sacristan gave us a knowing look. "They call him Saint George," he said, "and if you don't call him that, the pastor gets angry. But he's Oxossi."
For two days the painter led us through naves and cloisters hidden behind decorated façades like silver plates now blackened and worn. Wrinkled, limping famuli accompanied us. The sacristies were sick with gold and pewter, heavy chests, precious frames. Along the walls, in crystal cases, life-size images of saints towered, dripping blood, their open wounds spattered with ruby droplets; Christs writhed in pain, their legs red. In a glow of late-Baroque gold, I saw angels with Etruscan faces, Romanesque griffins, and Oriental sirens peeping out from the capitals.
I moved along ancient streets, enchanted by names that sounded like songs: Rua da Agonia, Avenida dos Amores, Travessa de Chico Diabo. Our visit to Salvador took place during a period when the local government, or someone acting in its name, was trying to renew the old city, and was closing down the thousands of brothels. But the project was only at midpoint. At the feet of those deserted and leprous churches embarrassed by their own evil-smelling alleys, fifteen-year-old black prostitutes still swarmed, ancient women selling African sweets crouched along the sidewalks with their steaming pots, and hordes of pimps danced amid trickles of sewage to the sound of transistor radios in nearby bars. The ancient palaces of the Portuguese settlers, surmounted by coats of arms now illegible, had become houses of ill-repute.
On the third day, our guide took us to the bar of a hotel in a renovated part of the upper city, on a street full of luxury antique shops. He was to meet an Italian gentleman, he told us, who wanted to buy—and for the asking price—a painting of his, three meters by two, in which teeming angelic hosts waged the final battle against the opposing legions.
And so we met Signor Agliè. Impeccably dressed in a double-breasted pin-striped suit despite the heat, he wore gold-rimmed eyeglasses and had a rosy complexion, silver hair. He kissed Amparo's hand as if he knew of no other way to greet a lady, and he ordered champagne. When the painter had to leave, Agliè handed him a pack of traveler's checks and said to send the picture to his hotel. We stayed on to chat. Agliè spoke Portuguese correctly, but it sounded as if he had learned it in Lisbon. This accent made him seem even more like a gentleman of bygone days. He asked about us, commented on the possible Genevan origin of my name, and expressed curiosity about Amparo's family history, though somehow he had already guessed that the main branch was from Recife. About his own origins he was vague. "I'm like many people here," he said. "Countless races are represented in my genes.... The name is Italian, from the ancient estate of an ancestor. Perhaps a nobleman, but who cares these days? It was curiosity that brought me to Brazil. All forms of tradition fascinate me."
He told us he had a fine library of religious sciences in Milan, where he had been living for some years. "Come and see me when you get back. I have a number of interesting things, from Afro-Brazilian rites to the Isis cults of the late Roman Empire."
"I adore the Isis cults," Amparo said, who often, out of pride, pretended to be silly. "You must know everything there is to know about them."
Agliè replied modestly: "Only what little I've seen of them."
Amparo tried again: "But wasn't it two thousand years ago?"
"I'm not as young as you are." Agliè smiled.
"Like Cagliostro," I joked. "Wasn't he the one who was heard to murmur to his attendant as they passed a crucifix, 'I told that Jew to be careful that evening, but he just wouldn't listen'?"
Agliè stiffened. Afraid I had offended him, I started to apologize, but our host stopped me with an indulgent smile. "Cagliostro was a humbug. It's common knowledge when and where he was born, and he didn't even manage to live very long. A braggart."
"I don't doubt it."
"Cagliostro was a humbug," Agliè repeated, "but that does not mean that there have not been—and still are—privileged persons who have lived many lives. Modern science knows so little about the aging process. It's quite possible that mortality is simply the result of poor education. Cagliostro was a humbug, but the Comte de Saint-Germain was not. He may not have been boasting when he claimed to have learned some of his chemical secrets from the ancient Egyptians. Nobody believed him, so out of politeness to his listeners he pretended to be joking."
"And now you pretend to be joking in order to convince us you're telling the truth," Amparo said.
"You are not only beautiful, but extraordinarily perceptive too," Agliè said. "But I beseech you, do not believe me. Were I to appear before you in the dusty splendor of my many centuries, your own beauty would wither, and I could never forgive myself."
Amparo was conquered, and I felt a twinge of jealousy. I changed the subject to churches, and to the Saint George-Oxossi we had seen. Agliè said we absolutely had to attend a candomblé. "Not one where they charge admission. They let you into the real ones without asking anything of you. You don't even have to be a believer. You must observe respectfully, of course, showing the same tolerance of all faiths as they do in accepting your unbelief. At first sight a pai or mae-de-santo might seem to be straight out of Uncle Tom's Cabin, but they have as much culture as a Vatican theologian."
Amparo put her hand on his. "Take us!" she said. "I went to one many years ago, in a tenda de
umbanda, but I can't recall much about it. All I remember is great turmoil."
The physical contact embarrassed Agliè, but he didn't take his hand away. He did something I later saw him do in moments of reflection: reaching into his vest with his other hand, he took out a little gold-and-silver box with an agate on the lid. It looked like a snuffbox or a pillbox. There was a small wax light burning on the table, and Agliè, as if by chance, held the box near it. When exposed to heat, the agate's color could no longer be discerned, and in its place appeared a miniature, very fine, in green, blue, and gold, depicting a shepherdess with a basket of flowers. He turned it in his fingers with absent-minded devotion, as if telling a rosary. When he noticed my interest, he smiled and put the object away.
"Turmoil? I hope, my sweet lady, that, although you are so perceptive, you are not excessively sensitive. An exquisite quality, of course, when it accompanies grace and intelligence, but dangerous if you go to certain places without knowing what to look for or what you will find. Moreover, the umbanda must not be confused with the candomblé. The latter is completely indigenous—Afro-Brazilian, as they say—whereas the former is a much later development born of a fusion of native rites and esoteric European culture, and with a mystique I would call Templar...."
The Templars had found me again. I told Agliè I had studied them. He regarded me with interest. "A most curious circumstance, my young friend, to find a young Templar here, under the Southern Cross."
"I wouldn't want you to consider me an adept—"
"Please, Signor Casaubon. If you knew how much nonsense there is in this field."
"I do know."
"Good. But we'll see one another soon." In fact, we arranged to meet the next day: all of us wanted to explore the little covered market along the port.
We met there the next morning, and it was a fish market, an Arab souk, a saint's-day fair that had proliferated with cancerous virulence, like a Lourdes overrun by the forces of evil, wizard rainmakers side by side with ecstatic and stigmatized Capuchins. There were little propitiatory sacks with prayers sewn into the lining, little hands in semiprecious stones, the middle finger extended, coral horns, crucifixes, Stars of David, sexual symbols of pre-Judaic religions, hammocks, rugs, purses, sphinxes, sacred hearts, Bororo quivers, shell necklaces. The degenerate mystique of the European conquistadors was owed to the occult knowledge of the slaves, just as the skin of every passerby told a similar story of lost genealogies.
"This," Agliè said, "is the very image of what the ethnology textbooks call Brazilian syncretism. An ugly word, in the official view. But in its loftiest sense syncretism is the acknowledgment that a single Tradition runs through and nurtures all religion, all learning, all philosophy. The wise man does not discriminate; he gathers together all the shreds of light, from wherever they may come.... These slaves, or descendants of slaves, are therefore wiser than the ethnologists of the Sorbonne. At least you understand me, do you not, lovely lady?"
"In my mind, no," Amparo said. "But in my womb, yes. Sorry, I don't imagine the Comte de Saint-Germain ever expressed himself in such terms. What I mean is: I was born in this country, and even things I don't understand somehow speak to me from somewhere.... Here, I believe." And she touched her breast.
"What was it Cardinal Lambertini once said to a lady wearing a splendid diamond cross on her decolletage? 'What joy it would be to die on that Calvary!' Well, how I would love to listen to those voices! But now it is I who must beg your forgiveness, both of you. I am from an age when one would have accepted damnation to pay homage to beauty. You two must want to be alone. Let's keep in touch."
"He's old enough to be your father," I said to Amparo as I dragged her through the stalls.
"Even my great-great-grandfather. He implied that he's at least a thousand years old. Are you jealous of a pharaoh's mummy?"
"I'm jealous of anyone who makes a lightbulb flash on in your head."
"How wonderful. That's love."
27
One day, saying that he had known Pontius Pilate in Jerusalem, he described minutely the governor's house and listed the dishes served at supper. Cardinal de Rohan, believing these were fantasies, turned to the Comte de Saint-Germain's valet, an old man with white hair and an honest expression. "My friend," he said to the servant, "I find it hard to believe what your master is telling us. Granted that he may be a ventriloquist; and even that he can make gold. But that he is two thousand years old and saw Pontius Pilate? That is too much. Were you there?" "Oh, no, Monsignore," the valet answered ingenuously, "I have been in M. le Comte's service only four hundred years."
—Collin de Plancy, Dictionnaire infernal, Paris, Mellier, 1844, p. 434
In the days that followed, Salvador absorbed me completely. I spent little time in the hotel. But as I was leafing through the index of the book on the Rosicrucians, I came across a reference to the Comte de Saint-Germain. Well, well, I said to myself, tout se tient.
Voltaire wrote of him, "C'est un homme qui ne meurt jamais et qui sait tout," but Frederick the Great wrote back, "C'est un comte pour rire." Horace Walpole described him as an Italian or Spaniard or Pole who had made a fortune in Mexico and then fled to Constantinople with his wife's jewels. The most reliable information about him comes from the memoirs of Madame du Hausset, la Pompadour's femme de chambre (some authority, the intolerant Amparo said). He had gone by various names: Surmont in Brussels, Welldone in Leipzig, the Marquis of Aymar or Bedmar or Belmar, Count Soltikoff. In 1745 he was arrested in London, where he excelled as a musician, giving violin and harpsichord recitals in drawing rooms. Three years later he offered his services as an expert in dyeing to Louis XV in Paris, in exchange for a residence in the château of Chambord. The king sent him on diplomatic missions to Holland, where he got into some sort of trouble and fled to London again. In 1762 he turned up in Russia, then again in Belgium, where he encountered Casanova, who tells us how the count turned a coin into gold. In 1776 he appeared at the court of Frederick the Great, to whom he proposed various projects having to do with chemistry. Eight years later he died in Schleswig, at the court of the landgrave of Hesse, where he was putting the finishing touches on a manufactory for paints.
Nothing exceptional, the typical career of an eighteenth-century adventurer; not as many loves as Casanova and frauds less theatrical than Cagliostro's. Apart from the odd incident here and there, he enjoyed some credibility with those in authority, to whom he promised the wonders of alchemy, though with an industrial slant. The only unusual feature was the rumor of his immortality, which he undoubtedly instigated himself. In drawing rooms he would casually mention remote events as if he had been an eyewitness, and he cultivated his legend gracefully, en sourdine.
The book also quoted a passage from Giovanni Papini's Gog, describing a nighttime encounter with the Comte de Saint-Germain on the deck of an ocean liner. The count, oppressed by his millennial past and by the memories crowding his brain, spoke in despairing tones reminiscent of Funes, "el memorioso" of Borges, except that Papini's story dates from 1930. "You must not imagine our lot is deserving of envy," the count says to Gog. "After a couple of centuries an incurable ennui takes possession of the wretched immortals. The world is monotonous, men learn nothing, and, with every generation, they fall into the same errors and nightmares, events are not repeated but they resemble one another ... novelties end, surprises, revelations. I can confess to you now that only the Red Sea is listening to us: my immortality bores me. Earth holds no more secrets for me and I have no hope anymore in my fellows."
"Curious character," I remarked. "Obviously our friend Agliè is playing at impersonating him. A gentleman getting on in years, a bit dotty, with money to spend, free time for travel, and an interest in the supernatural."
"A consistent reactionary, with the courage to be decadent," Amparo said. "Actually, I prefer him to bourgeois democrats."
"Sisterhood is powerful, but let a man kiss your hand and you're ecstatic."
"That's how
you've trained us, for centuries. Let us free ourselves gradually. I didn't say I wanted to marry him."
"That's good."
***
The following week Agliè telephoned me. That evening, he said, we would be allowed to visit a terreiro de candomblé. We wouldn't be admitted to the actual rite, because the ialorixa was suspicious of tourists, but she would welcome us herself and would show us around before it started.
He picked us up by car and drove through the favelas beyond the hill. The building where we stopped had a humble look, like a big garage, but on the threshold an old black man met us and purified us with a fumigant. Up ahead was a bare little garden with an immense corbeil of palm fronds, on which some tribal delicacies, the comidas de santo, were laid out.
Inside, we found a large hall, the walls covered with paintings, especially ex-votos, and African masks. Agliè explained the arrangement of furniture: the benches in the rear were for the uninitiated, the little dais for the instruments, and the chairs for the Ogã. "They are people of some standing, not necessarily believers, but respectful of the cult. Here in Bahia the great Jorge Amado is an Ogã in one terreiro. He was selected by Iansã, mistress of war and winds...."
"But where do these divinities come from?" I asked.
"It's complicated. First of all, there's a Sudanese branch, dominant here in the north from the early days of slavery. The candomblé of the orixas—in other words, the African divinities—come from this branch. In the southern states you find the influence of the Bantu groups, and this is where all the intermingling starts. The northern cults remain faithful to the original African religions, but in the south the primitive macumba develops toward the umbanda, which is influenced by Catholicism, Kardecism, and European occultism...."
