The Devil's Cup

by Stewart Lee Allen

  My informant on all this was a New Age American I’d met in Rio. He told me the valley was near the city of Brasilia.

  “It is right in the center.” He gave me a knowing look. “Between the fifteenth and sixteenth parallels.”

  Brasilia, the national capital, was one of the Utopian megaprojects of the 1960s, a completely preplanned city constructed in three years in the middle of the Amazonian jungle. Enormous slum-shanty towns surround the city and everyone said it was positively hellish. I didn’t find it so bad once I got there—just another empty, ugly city in the middle of nowhere. It reminded me a bit of Los Angeles.

  I ended up being guided to the university, set about eighty miles out of Brasilia proper, by a man who attached himself to me while I was waiting for the bus.

  “You are going to the Valley?” Before I could respond he’d placed his hand reassuringly on my shoulder. “I’ll take you there. We will be friends. My name is Meister.”

  “Thanks,” I said. Meister seemed an odd creature. His sole facial expression was a twitch that writhed across his lips every time our eyes met. It was, I believe, a smile. My new friend sat next to me on the bus. After an hour of curiously bland countryside—Brazil overall reminded me of a golf course—the bus stopped in front of a large yellow arch painted with moons and stars.

  “You understand that this is a place of the highest spiritual level possible,” he said, pulling me off the bus. “You wish to go in? You wish to see our work?”

  “Oh, well, yes,” I replied uncertainly. I couldn’t stop ogling the crowd on the other side of the arch. This was a university?

  “Come!”

  He led me through the crowd and into a windowless building. What interesting uniforms everybody was wearing! As my eyes adjusted to the building’s light I saw that I was in a long, low room whose walls were covered in symbols from a number of major religions, stars of David, crosses, etcetera, all painted primary red and yellow. At one end of the room sat a twelve-foot statue of an Indian woman holding an enormous steel spear.

  “This is where we do our work,” Meister said. He led me to a bench. “Wait.”

  All the women were wearing gauze blouses and skirts made of bunched-up pink and turquoise scarves. The costume seemed vaguely Arabic, especially the headpiece. Actually, they looked like Barbara Eden in the TV sitcom I Dream of Jeannie. The men wore skin-tight black jeans and ten-gallon cowboy hats, with supershort vests ending just below the armpits. I recognized the outfit from another TV show, Wild Wild West. A few men wore ankle-length gray capes with six-inch-high collars: Barnabas Collins, of course. What the hell, I wondered, was going on? Everybody was lined up around the Indian statue, palms turned upward, apparently soaking in its mystical vibrations. Two teenage girls sat motionless on either side of the statue.

  Meister returned and handed me a cup full of a milky liquid. “Water,” he said to my dubious look. “Drink. It cleanses.”

  I obeyed and pointed to a photograph of a wild-looking white woman. “Who’s that?” I asked.

  “That’s Tia Neiva,” he said, upturning his palms toward the portrait. “Leader.”

  “Oh,” I groaned, politely mimicking the gesture. I knew the name Tia Neiva. She was a woman who had started receiving messages from extraterrestrials while working as a truck driver during Brasilia’s construction in the sixties. This wasn’t a university. (Obviously, right?) It was a church that had been set up according to instructions sent by a fleet of flying saucers that remained hidden on the other side of the moon. The church’s duty, according to Tia’s writings, was to prepare the Earth for their landing on December 31, 1999. Every day, hundreds of the priests gather about a huge Star of David floating in a nearby lake (the star is a cosmic radio antenna) to receive messages and recite the following prayer to the people of the planet Capela: “Oh, Simromba of the Great East of Oxala, in the enchanted World of the Himalayas, prepare my way, illuminate my spirit, so that I may go forth fearless in the final advance of the New Age.”

  I wanted to go home. The combination of the room’s heat and the faint smell of vomit was making me feel dizzy. Every time I stood up, however, Meister pushed me back into my seat. “What, you don’t want to see our work?” he kept saying, growing increasingly aggressive as the hours wore away. He made me drink some more “water.” I noticed that people across the hall were vomiting into buckets. The stench grew thicker. Someone started making a horrible choking, screaming sound.

  I brushed aside Meister’s hand and left. He followed, urging me to go back so “I would understand.” I found the bus and got on, only to realize it was going in the wrong direction. For the next forty-five minutes I rode through dozens of dusty villages, all populated by cult members dressed in those ludicrous outfits. There seemed to be thousands (actually, there are an estimated twenty thousand followers). I rode along with my mouth open in disbelief; I’d had no idea that anything like this existed anywhere. What will these people do, I wondered, when A.D. 2000 rolls past and nothing changes?

  1 This area specializes in an unbearably bitter coffee bean called Riote. Reputedly the world’s worst bean, because of its high iodine and salt content, it is a delicacy in New Orleans and Turkey.

  Preto Velho

  Macaco veio, macaco veio cafésaja come que?

  Monkey came and the coffee bushes died.

  What do we eat now?

  Brazilian slave song, circa 1800

  I TOOK A BUS HEADED TOWARD Bolivia. My visit to the Valley of the Dawn had left me feeling as if my trip had been cursed, and I decided to give up my search for the Zar cults. It was obvious the Zar spirits did not want to communicate with me.

  I was now traveling by day through hundreds of miles of flat green soja fields. Soja is a palm-like six foot leaf from which oil is extracted. (I felt like an ant in the middle of a football field.) Soja is the last step in the Brazilian agricultural cycle, which consists of first burning off the jungle and planting a cash crop like coffee. When this has depleted the soil, you let it rest for a bit and then plant another cash crop, like coffee. Everyone knows that the burning of the Brazilian jungle has had a devastating impact on the globe’s ecosystem. What most Java junkies don’t realize is that keeping them supplied has caused a significant part of this havoc. In the past, most South American plantations used “shade” farming, a technique that allows the coffee trees to grow interspersed with traditional foliage. In the mid-1970s, Brazil’s plantations switched to the so-called sun growth method. This means that the forest is burned off and only the coffee trees remain.

  For workers it means searing sun and heat. For the environment it spells deforestation, greater use of pesticides, and degraded soil quality. The most pressing issue is decreased biodiversity in trees and bird life. Sixty percent of North American birds winter in South and Central America. As the traditional shade plantations disappear, these birds simply have no place to go. Sun plantations support 90 percent fewer bird species than shade farming, according to the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center in Washington, D.C.

  Of late there’s been a trend to sell so called shade coffee. This means the beans were grown under the older, more environmentally friendly conditions. There’s no quality difference, and it’s probably the least any junkie can do to rationalize his or her habit.

  After thirty hours of this hell I arrived in the town of Campo Grande near the border. This is cowboy country, and the bus station was designed so that a visiting gaucho could fulfill every need without ever leaving the terminal. There were two porn theaters (Friday Nite Delite! was playing during my visit), three barber shops, and bars galore. The stores featured one-stop “Gaucho Day Care Packs” containing three bags of rice, four bags of beans, Spam, laundry detergent, hair gel, and five bars of soap.

  Beyond the bus station was a medium-size town full of leather goods and Spanish one-stories. It’s so hot people put their Popsicles in a tumbler between licks and then drink the liquid.

  The citizens, oddly enou
gh, are proud of their mild climate.

  “You were in Cuiaba?” scoffed the manager of Hotel Continental. “It was 45 degrees Celsius [115 Fahrenheit] there today—here it was only 39 [105]!”

  He kicked some kernels of popcorn out of my room.

  “I don’t understand why this room is so dirty,” he said, scowling from under his white fedora. “We are usually very careful about this!”

  A few minutes later he returned with an explanation.

  “This room still has someone sleeping in it!” he said triumphantly. “I knew there had to be a reason.”

  He led me to another equally disheveled room. I asked him about the crowd of people I’d seen in front of a nearby building.

  “That is the Spiritual Center.”

  “What is the Spiritual Center?”

  “Brazilian spirits.”

  It was the first lucky break I’d had in Brazil. I had been making inquires about Afro-Brazilian cults in every city I visited, but it’s still a secretive movement, since it had only recently been made legal.

  The center was my first stop next morning. As I headed out, however, the man at the hotel’s front desk stopped me.

  “You are the man with the questions for the spirits?” he asked with a big wink. “Questions, eh?”

  His name was Mario, a plump fellow with a happy face and an ear covered in purple mold. He told me that the Spiritual Center was devoted to Kardecism, a quasi-syncretic cult made popular in the 1800s by the French mystic Allan Kardec. Waste of time.

  I asked him if he knew of a Candomble temple.

  “You want to talk to a Boreesha, eh?” Or that’s what I thought he said. It gave me a start: it sounded like he had said Bori-Zar.

  “What did you say?”

  “Boreesha,” he repeated, writing it out on a piece of paper: Or-i-x-a. I knew the word. Orixas are the spirits of the Afro-Brazilian cults, and I’d seen it a zillion times while doing research in Paris. What I hadn’t known was that, spoken, it opens with a muted b, and the x is pronounced “za.” The Candomble Orixas were the Bori-Zar spirits of Africa.

  Mario didn’t know any Candomble groups. His sister, however, was a priestess of the related Umbanda cult. Would I like to meet her?

  “You have questions?” He gave me another of his special winks. “Ah, I know you do.”

  “Many. How much will it cost?”

  Mario raised his hands in horror. “No, no money. There is no need to give money.”

  “Really?” I liked that. Then I remembered the “present” of green coffee beans I had given the Ethiopian Zar priest. “Should I bring presents?”

  “Presents are fine,” he said. “They like tequila.”

  I’D EXPECTED THAT IF THE ZAR RELIGION EXISTED HERE IT WOULD be part of the popular Candomble religion. But it appeared to be more prominent in the Umbanda group, an Candomble offshoot popular among Brazil’s poorer urban population. Candomble predominates in the north, the traditional center for African culture, whereas Umbanda is more popular in the south. Both groups worship at churches called terreiros, named after the clay courts used to dry coffee beans like the one I’d seen at Baron Grão-Mogol’s home. Both call their spirits Orixas, a name derived from the Bori-Zar cosmology. Candomble’s Orixa sprits, however, retain traces from the days when African slaves disguised their gods as Catholic saints. The pantheon includes hermaphroditic Oxamare, who likes champagne, and Oxala, who prefers offerings of white corn. Umbanda Orixas, for reasons I don’t understand, are much closer to the Ethiopian Zar spirits inasmuch as they are based on racial archetypes like o caboclo, an American Indian spirit, and the European warrior, o guerreiro. The most powerful spirit, though, is Preto Velho, the spirit of the old African slave, whose favorite offering is, of course, coffee, fresh-roasted just like it was when he was growing up in Africa two thousand years ago.

  When Mario’s friend, Walter, appeared to drive me to the Umbandan priestess the next day, I had a pound of coffee beans handy, as well as a box of cigars and a bottle of rum. Walter, a puffy-looking white man with sad eyes, eyed the rum.

  “I’m divorced,” he said, appropos of nothing.

  The priestess was still asleep when we arrived at her shack. Walter and I waited in her clay courtyard. Over the fence I could see Campo Grande’s modern downtown skyline. Sitting in a witch doctor’s courtyard and seeing a twentieth-century skyline seemed terribly Brazilian; the country seems to exist half in a Frank Lloyd Wright/bikini daydream and half in a traditional African village.

  A bald turkey wandered up and gave me the evil eye. A boy offered us water. The priestess, Neva, wandered out and launched into a lecture about Preto Velho.

  “Preto Velho is very serious,” she said. “He doesn’t like bad things. He thinks very deeply about all. You don’t fool with him, because he has suffered so much. Around his ankles are the scars from the chains used to enslave him, and his wrists too. His back is covered with scars from the master’s whipping, and sometimes you have to bring his coffee to his lips because he’s still hanging by his wrists in the slave boats. He’s old, old and wise, Father Africa, which is why he comes when he smells the coffee being roasted, because coffee came from where he was born. But as much as coffee, he likes his pipe. Nothing makes him happier than to sit in his chair of an evening with his pipe and a glass of wine.”

  Preto Velho, she said, loves the little children. There is a special holiday for them in September, “when all the little ones they come and they visit with him. It makes him very happy.”

  If I’d seen Neva on the street I would have thought she was a secretary. She was a broad-shouldered woman with a square face, a look accented by her close-cropped afro. She dressed like an aerobics instructor: pink tights and a tacky white sweatshirt. Her lips were painted bright red. She told me about the other African spirits, particularly Escrava Anatasia, a woman with a cruel iron muzzle over her mouth “so she cannot scream all the pain she has suffered at the hands of her slave owners.” I thought about the Baron Grão-Mogol’s sadistic orgies.

  “You have seen Preto, no?” she asked. I had seen many statues. He is portrayed as a kindly African grandfather dressed in white, wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat. He’s usually seen relaxing in a chair with a corncob pipe in his hand.

  “Ahh, yes, he loves the pipe. Not so much cigars.” She waved to the box I had brought. “He likes his pipe and his wine and his coffee. These are the good things. And so—you would like to speak to Preto Velho, yes?”

  I hesitated. After all, I wasn’t really a believer. I thought it would be disrespectful to put her through the ordeal of being possessed. But I did want to speak to him; of course I did.

  Neva saw the truth.

  “Come,” she said. “I see you do.”

  She led Walter and me back to a room with the sign tenda ogun hanging over the door. There were lit candles and, at one end, a long table covered with Umbandan statues. There were about a dozen versions of Preto Velho and a variety of Catholic saints including St. George and the Virgin Mary. There was a statuette of an Indian woman I recognized from the Valley of the Dawn. One that I found particularly puzzling was a blue-eyed blond girl sucking her pinky.

  “Here,” Neva was excited, like a child about to play with a favorite uncle. She thrust a simple pipe into my hands. “This is Preto Velho’s pipe—I told you how he loves it. Oh, how he loves that pipe! He does!”

  She had Walter fill it with tobacco. She made me strike a tomtom. “This is to wake him. He’s always napping, that one!” she said, laughing. “But this will wake the lazy old one!” She began beating out a simple one-two rhythm, chanting “Ti-a Mar-ia! Ti-a Maria!” to a bleak little tune. I noticed a three-foot Preto Velho figure on the table. He seemed to be leaning forward on his cane.

  “This is his cane!” Neva shouted in my ear. She shoved a white cane into my hand. Its handle was carved into the likeness of an African man. “He’s so old! So old! That’s why he needs that cane. Better not call him if you
don’t have a cane for him to lean on!” She was crossing herself, kissing the tablecloth, banging on the drum, and chanting simultaneously. A friend wandered into the room, her hair in pink curlers, and lit the pipe. Neva was consumed in a convulsive shiver, and Preto Velho was with us.

  He was an old fellow, bent double with age, stumbling about the room and muttering to himself. Someone grabbed the cane out of my hands and gave it to him. Someone else pulled up a stool. Preto sat and immediately started complaining in a broken voice—where was his pipe? he wanted to know. Walter handed it to him, and for a few minutes Preto sat mumbling and smoking. I noticed how the whitewashed walls glowed in the light. Finally, Preto took Walter’s hands and gave him a quick blessing. Then it was my turn.

  I asked a few token questions about money, the future. But my real question concerned my girlfriend, Nina. I had been unable to reach Nina at the number she’d given me, and after our tumultuous parting in India, I wasn’t sure she wanted to have anything to do with me. I asked Preto whether I should return to her in New York or head back to my brother’s house in California.

  One of the most infuriating things about speaking Spanish in Brazil was that they understood me but I often couldn’t understand them. Preto Velho comprehended my question and answered it at length. But his Portuguese, two hundred years old and with bits of some African dialect thrown in, was completely incomprehensible. The only thing I was sure I understood was when he demanded to know if I had understood him. I always replied yes; I just couldn’t bring myself to ask a thousand-year-old African spirit to try speaking a little slower.