by Umberto Eco
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 é Mojuba! É Mojuba, é Mojuba! Sete Encruzilhadas é Mojuba! É Mojuba, é Mojuba! Seu Maraboe é Mojuba! Seu Tiriri é Mojuba! Exu Veludo, é Mojuba! A Pompa Gira é Mojuba!
The pai-de-santo began to swing his thurible, releasing a heavy odor of Indian incense, and to chant special orations to Oxalá 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. Agliè 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—me included—in 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 re-lease. 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 were 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—hum hum hum—as 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—hiahou!—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."
Agliè 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—or 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 agogo, 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, Agliè was to talk to me about the difference 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—in 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 agogo, 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 é de veludo, rebordado todo em ouro, o seu garfo é de prata, muito grande é seu tesouri ... Pomba Gira das Almas, vem 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. Agliè 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," Agliè 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," Agliè 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.
Agliè drove in silence through the night. When he stopped outside our house, Am
paro 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."
Agliè understood my uneasiness and suggested we go to an all-night bar in Copacabana.
At the bar I didn't speak. Agliè waited until I had started sipping my batida before he broke the silence.
"Race—or culture, if you prefer—is part of our unconscious mind. And in another part of that unconscious dwell archetypes, figures identical for all men and in all centuries. This evening, the atmosphere, the surroundings lulled our vigilance. It happened to all of us; you felt it yourself. Amparo discovered that the orixas, whom she has destroyed in her heart, still live in her womb. You must not think I consider this a positive thing. You have heard me speak respectfully of the supernatural energies that vibrate around us in this country. But I have no special fondness for the practices of possession. An initiate is not the same as a mystic. Being an initiate—having an intuitive comprehension of what reason cannot explain—is a very deep process; it is a slow transformation of the spirit and of the body, and it can lead to the exercise of superior abilities, even to immortality. But it is secret, intimate; it does not show itself externally; it is modest, lucid, detached. That is why the Masters of the World, initiates, do not indulge in mysticism. For them, a mystic is a slave, a site of the manifestation of the numinous, through which site the signs of a secret can be observed. The initiate encourages the mystic and uses him as you might use a telephone, to establish long-distance contact, or as a chemist might use litmus paper, to detect the action of a particular substance. The mystic is useful, because he is conspicuous. He broadcasts himself. Initiates, on the contrary, are recognizable only to one another. It is they who control the forces that mystics undergo. In this sense there is no difference between the possession experienced by the cavalos and the ecstasies of Saint Theresa of Avila or Saint John of the Cross. Mysticism is a degenerate form of contact with the divine, whereas initiation is the fruit of long askesis of mind and heart. Mysticism is a democratic, if not demagogic, phenomenon; initiation is aristocratic."
"It is mental as opposed to carnal?"
"In a sense. Your Amparo was guarding her mind tenaciously, but she was not on guard against her body. The lay person is weaker than we are."
It was late. Agliè informed me that he was leaving Brazil. He gave me his Milan address.
I went home and found Amparo asleep. I lay down beside her in silence, in the dark, and spent a sleepless night. It was as if there were an unknown being next to me.
In the morning Amparo told me that she was going to Petropolis to visit a girlfriend. We said good-bye awkwardly.
She left with a canvas bag, a volume of political economy under her arm.
For two months she sent me no word, and I made no attempt to seek her out. Then she wrote me a brief, evasive letter, telling me she needed time to think. I didn't answer.
I felt no passion, no jealousy, no nostalgia. I was hollow, clear-headed, clean, and as emotionless as an aluminum pot.
I stayed in Brazil for another year, with the constant feeling that I was on the brink of departure. I didn't see Agliè again, I didn't see any of Amparo's friends. I spent long, long hours on the beach, sunbathing.
I flew kites, which down there are very beautiful.
GEVURAH
34
Beydelus, Demeymes, Adulex, Matucgayn, Atine, Ffex, Uquizuz, Gadix, Sol, Veni cito cum tuis spiritibus.
—Picatrix, Sloane Ms. 1305, 152, verso
The Breaking of the Vessels. Diotallevi was to talk to us often about the late cabalism of Isaac Luria, in which the orderly articulation of the Sefirot was lost. Creation, Luria held, was a process of divine inhalation and exhalation, like anxious breathing or the action of a bellows.
"God's asthma," Belbo glossed.
"You try creating from nothing. It's something you do once in your life. God blows the world as you would blow a glass bubble, and to do that He takes a deep breath, holds it, and emits the long luminous hiss of the ten Sefirot."
"A hiss of light?"
"God hissed, and there was light."
"Multimedia."
"But the lights of the Sefirot must be gathered in vessels that can contain their splendor without shattering. The vessels destined to receive Keter, Hokhmah, and Binah withstood their magnificence, but for the lower Sefirot, from Hesed to Yesod, light was exhaled too strongly in a single burst, and the vessels broke. Fragments of light were spilled into the universe, and gross matter was thus born."
The breaking of the vessels was a catastrophe, Diotallevi said. What could be more unbearable than an aborted world? There must have been some defect in the cosmos from the beginning, and not even the most learned rabbis had been able to explain it completely. Perhaps at the moment God exhaled and was emptied, a few drops of oil lay in the first receptacle, a material residue, the reshimu, thus adulterating God's essence. Or perhaps the seashells—the qelippot, the beginnings of ruin—were slyly waiting in ambush somewhere.
"Slippery folk, those qelippot," Belbo said. "Agents of the diabolical Dr. Fu Manchu. And then what happened?"
And then, Diotallevi patiently explained, in the light of Severe Judgment, or Gevurah—also known as Pachad, or Terror—the Sefirah in which, according to Isaac the Blind, Evil first shows itself, the seashells acquired a real existence.
"Then the seashells are in our midst," Belbo said.
"Just look around you," Diotallevi said.
"But is there no way out?"
"There's a way back in, actually," Diotallevi said. "All emanates from God, in the contraction of simsum. The problem is to bring about tikkun, the restoration of Adam Qadmon. Then we will rebuild everything in the balanced structure of the parzufim, the faces—or, rather, forms—that will take the place of the Sefirot. The ascension of the soul is like a cord of silk that enables devout intention, groping in the darkness, to find the path to the light. And so the world constantly strives, by combining the letters of the Torah, to regain its natural form, to emerge from its horrible confusion."
And this is what I am doing now, in the middle of the night, in the unnatural calm of these hills. The other evening in the periscope, however, I was still mired in the slime of the seashells I felt all around me, of the slugs trapped in the crystal cases of the Conservatoire, among the barometers and rusted clockworks, in deaf hibernation. I thought then that if there had been a breaking of the vessels, the first crack probably-appeared that evening in Rio, during the rite, but it was on my return to my native country that the shattering occurred. It happened slowly, soundlessly, so that we all found ourselves caught in the morass of gross matter, where noxious vermin emerge by spontaneous generation.
When I returned from Brazil, I hardly knew who I was anymore. I was approaching thirty. At that age, my father was a father; he knew who he was and where he lived.
I had been too far from my country while prodigious things were happening. I had lived in a world swollen with the incredible, where events in Italy wore a halo of legend. Shortly before leaving the other hemisphere—it was near the end of my stay and I was treating myself to an airplane ride over the forests of Amazonia—I picked up a local newspaper during a stopover in Fortaleza. On the front page was a prominent photograph of someone I recognized: I had seen him sipping white wine at Pilade's for years. The caption read: "O homem que matou Moro."
When I got back, I found out that, of course, he wasn't the man who killed Moro. Handed a loaded pistol, he would have shot himself in the ear when checking to see if it worked. What had happened was simply that an antiterrorist squad had burst in on him and found three pistols and two packs of explosives hidden under the bed. He was lying on the bed, since it was the only piece of furniture in that one-room apartment, whose rent was shared by a group of survivors of '68 who u
sed it as a place to satisfy the demands of the flesh. If its sole decoration hadn't been a poster of Che, the place could have been taken for any bachelor's pied-à-terre. But one of the tenants belonged to an armed group, and the others had no idea that they were financing the group's safe house. They all ended up in jail for a year.
I understood very little of what had happened in Italy over the past few years. The country had been on the brink of great changes when I left—left guiltily, feeling almost that I was running away at the moment of the settling of scores. Before I left, I could tell a man's ideology just by the tone of his voice. I was back and now could not figure out who was on whose side. No one was talking about revolution; the new thing was the unconscious. People who claimed to be leftists quoted Nietzsche and Céline, while right-wing magazines hailed revolution in the Third World.
I went back to Pilade's, but I felt I was on foreign soil. The billiard table was still there, and more or less the same painters, but the young fauna had changed. I learned that some of the old customers had opened schools of transcendental meditation or macrobiotic restaurants. Apparently nobody had thought of a tenda de umbanda yet. Maybe I was ahead of the times.
To appease the historic hard core, Piladc still had one of those old-fashioned pinball machines, the kind that now seemed copied from a Lichtenstein painting and were bought up wholesale by antique dealers. Next to it, however, the younger customers crowded around other machines, machines with fluorescent screens on which stylized hawks or kamikazes from Planet X hovered, or frogs jumped around grunting in Japanese. Pilade's was an arcade of sinister flashing lights, and couriers from the Red Brigades on recruiting missions may well have been taking their turn at the Space Invaders screen. But they couldn't play the pinball; you can't play pinball with a pistol stuck in your belt.
