“That’s you,” says Lorna.
“Yes, I’m made to Yemaya for many years now. Now, look, you see we have palm leaves all over the walls and the ceiling, because in Africa we danced under the sky in groves of trees.”
“What are all those yams?” Lorna has located the source of the earthy odor. There are perhaps two hundred large yams piled around a pedestal draped in elaborately beaded yellow and green silk brocade. Similar brocade hangs as a canopy from the ceiling. Dozens of candles flickered around it, interspersed with cut coconuts and opened bottles of beer, soda, and rum.
“Gifts to Ifa,” said Mrs. Paz, “this is his sopera, that pot, you see, it contains his fundamentos, his sacred stones, and all of these, these little statues and medals, these are gifts from those he has helped.”
Mrs. Paz falls into conversation with a small man dressed all in white, the santero, Pedro Ortiz, and Paz whispers into Lorna’s ear, “Are you having fun yet?”
“It’s…fascinating,” she whispers back, but when she looks at his face she is astounded to observe that he is frightened. His mother appears at his side with two stern-looking women, and after a short conversation in rapid Spanish, the three of them whisk Paz out of sight.
Then without any particular signal or announcement, the drums start to beat. The throng reassembles itself before the drums, leaving a small sickle-shaped area of floor vacant. Lorna has never heard drumming like this; it is entirely different from the drumming of popular music, even Cuban popular music, enormously complex, like a language, dense with data, insistent; she feels her body taken over by it in a disturbing way. The people are swaying now, and chanting: ago ago ago. She sways with them despite herself.
Now people are entering the dancing area, they are barefoot, and although they are middle-aged women and men they appear to move with the grace of professionals. Lorna looks past them to the people standing on the other side of the dance floor and sees Jimmy Paz. He is dressed in a white robe and has a white cloth wrapped around his head. His face is blank, no, not blank exactly but presenting an expression she has never seen on it before, not at all an American face anymore, more like a carving in some tawny wood. She feels like an alien here, and fear starts to tug. The embarrassment monster cranks up in her head, What are you doing here this is crazy what are you doing with this idiotic relationship what will your friends say…? The chants grow louder and louder, drowning out the monster’s voice. Then, suddenly, the drums fall silent.
Something has changed in the room. Lorna is aware of it without knowing just what it is. The air seems cooler and drier, but at the same time harder to see through. The faces of the people glow oddly, and seem mysteriously beautiful. When she was in college Lorna took LSD several times and she recognizes this state as similar: something has happened to her brain. She knows she should be concerned but is not. She turns to the woman next to her and whispers in her primitive Spanish, “Why did they stop? What’s happening?”
The woman says, “Eshu has opened the way for the orishas.”
The drums start up again, a quite different rhythm than before. Now there is another dancer on the floor, and Lorna sees that it is Mrs. Paz. Her dance is a swooping undulating thing, all waves and spray, with a balanced force underlying the moves. The image of the sea pops into Lorna’s mind and she seems to scent salt air and coolness. The people are chanting Oké oké Yemaya l’odo, l’ari oké. The drumming reaches a crescendo, the higher pitched drum utters a set of sharp reports, and Mrs. Paz falls to the ground as if shot. Women surround her, help her to her feet, and take her away. The drums are silent, people are chattering now as if at an intermission. Lorna asks the same woman what has happened. The woman smiles and in English says, “The orisha has arrived. Yemaya is here.”
Mrs. Paz comes back to the room, and now Lorna for the first time feels a thrill of real fear, because this can’t be happening. They have decked her in a cloak of blue and white that has thousands of small seashells worked into its surface and must weigh twenty pounds, but Mrs. Paz carries it like chiffon. She is at least ten inches taller than she was an instant ago and sixty pounds heavier, her breasts are like cannonballs and her belly is a whale’s back. Her face is stern but ineffably kind and not the face of a human being at all. Her hair has been untied and falls down her back in dense stiff coils, as if carved from ebony. The drums start up again, and the drummers sing a song in some African language. Mrs. Paz-Yemaya circulates around the dance floor, inviting people to dance and whispering things in their ears. She approaches Lorna, pulls her out onto the floor. They whirl and stamp together.
Lorna looks into the eyes of the orisha of maternity and of the sea. Now she is not at the bembé anymore. She is lying with her mother on the glider on the porch of their beach house on the Jersey shore. She is four. They are alone in the house, the father and brother are off somewhere, and she has her mother all to herself. They are examining Lorna’s shell collection, talking quietly, her mother reads from The Golden Book of Seashells. Lorna can smell the iodine breath of the sea and her mother’s scent, sweet sweat and suntan oil. She is perfectly secure in love.
This just for an instant but so real!
Now Yemaya is stroking Lorna’s body, her hands strong and soft, it feels as if they are penetrating her flesh, stroking her insides. She is talking in a deep voice, not Mrs. Paz’s voice at all, but Lorna cannot make out the African words. Lorna feels her knees give way, but the women standing on either side of her hold her up. She feels tears breaking through, the knife-at-
the-back-of-the-throat feeling, and she now recalls that from the moment the drums started the heaviness of her impending death has been absent. But now it returns.
The drums change their song. Now they are wilder, nervose, irritating. She sees Paz has returned to the circle. He’s looking right at her but makes no acknowledgment that he’s seen her. Mrs. Paz embraces him, she seems to tower over him, she seems to pick him up as if he were a child, which Lorna knows is impossible, but she seems to observe it. People are in the way now, she can’t see them, but in any case this has become a sideshow. All eyes are fixed on a woman of about thirty with a round face, she is whirling and dancing with abandon, thrusting her hips, flailing her arms. The congregation is chanting Oya Oya, and after an impossible leap, the woman faints away. The older women help her up, they drop a tunic of maroon silk over her head and a necklace of skulls. In her hands they place a long black wooden lance, carved with figures.
Lorna asks the woman next to her what’s happening. “Oya,” says the woman, with awe in her voice. “Ruler of the dead.” Oya is a popular fellow at the bembé, it appears. People gather around him for news of the dead, and press offerings of currency to his sweat-slick skin. After a good deal of this, Oya dances with some people, a wild bacchanalian fling, and then, before she can think to resist, Lorna feels her arm grabbed with an irresistible force and she finds herself dancing with Death. Sweat is in her eyes, stinging, and that must be why she sees not a round-faced young woman but a gaunt man with eyes that seem to fill their whole sockets with black, glistening oil and she recalls with horror what she saw when Emmylou showed her the demon. The orisha says to her be prepared this life of yours is almost over, perhaps in words, perhaps in her head. She feels light-footed, graceful, terrified, full of sexual abandon. But with the terror she feels a sense of deep comfort, for just behind her left shoulder is the loom of her mother’s being, her scent. She knows if she turns now the ghost will be there and she will lose her mind, go screaming off into the night.
Nausea rises in her throat. With a heave she breaks from her partner, pushes through the crowd, and out the front door. It is a cool night and the air outside feels like air-conditioning’s chill against her dripping face. She staggers to the curb, kneels, and pukes.
Lorna walks unsteadily away from the bembé. She finds Paz’s car, climbs in, and within minutes sinks into grateful, exhausted sleep.
When she awakens, Paz is beside her and th
e car is moving at speed, heading south on Ludlum.
“You all right?” he asks, when she stirs.
“I guess. Somewhat wiped out, really. What happened to you?”
“Oh, they…I participated in what they call a limpieza. I got washed and anointed in the bathroom. Now I’m pure.”
“What did they do to you?”
“It’s hard to describe,” said Paz carefully.
“Try.”
Paz ignored this. “I heard Oya took you for a whirl around the floor.”
“Yes.”
“Any comments?”
“No. Why won’t you tell me?”
“You first. Oya doesn’t appear very often, and when he does it’s a big deal. Did he say anything to you?”
“I couldn’t understand any of it.” Despite herself a groan escapes her lips. She says, “But…but anyway, it was a lovely evening, Jimmy, and I want to do it again real soon.”
Hysterical laughter that they find difficult to stop. In Lorna’s house, they are still sputtering in bursts as they rip each other’s clothes off and fall together on the floor of her hallway.
Nineteen
The
CONFESSIONS
of
Emmylou Dideroff
Book IV
My religion, such as it is, was a pure gift, a complicated densely layered device that I can barely understand. I have had the glory, yes, treats for beginners as St. Teresa says, the sweetness, as St. John calls it, of God’s embrace, but probably I would have walked away from even that God forgive me had I not loved Nora Mulvaney, of which more later, although it was not what you probably think.
The Rome headquarters of the SBC is a vast seventeenth-C. pile called the Palazzo Treschi, on Via Giulia between the Palazzo Ricci and the Criminological Museum. You go through an iron gate in a wall made of those purply brown stones they like for palaces in Rome and then you’re in a paved courtyard with a fountain and the original bronze statue of Marie-Ange and the dying lad. On its marble plinth are carved the names of the sisters who have died in service, and although the names are quite small two sides of the plinth are already full and a third has been started.
They have the language school and the residence and the administration there, one in each of the three wings. Nora took me there just after we got to Rome and I found we were both in a heap of trouble. We were called in to see Constance Mucha, the prioress general, the woman in charge of the daily operations of the Society, second in command to the Mother General herself. She was a sharp little woman with the face and small round glasses of a Gestapo inspector in a bad movie, who for twenty minutes reamed us both out about my escape. Then I was sent out while she and Nora argued about my fate. The memory business was the key. Nora convinced her that I could learn languages real fast, and that I’d be a boon to her work in Africa, and so all through that damp Roman winter and for a year afterward I worked on learning Arabic and Dinka. My Arabic teacher was Mr. Sulieman. He said I had a terrible accent, but he was amazed by my progress in reading. Before the year was out I had read and memorized swaths of the Quran and the Thousand Nights and a Night, not particularly useful, we thought, but it gave him delight to see me do it.
Nora and I lived in a little apartment in Monti near Trajan’s Market. Not much time for sightseeing, not interested much, Rome a little overwhelming for a hick white girl from Caluga County, the most distinguished architecture I had ever been in were the Caluga County Courthouse (1911) and Miami hotels. Out for daily mass at Chiesa Nuova, a tradition. In the old days we used to march out two by two from our palazzo to the church, but now we just show up. I didn’t mind this at all, the one part of going to church that always pierced me through and through, the Eucharist as poor Robert Lowell said, perfectly real like getting your hand wet, well he was crazy too. Once to St. Peter’s, horrified, clearly the Hall of the Demon King, full of Japanese tourists viewing the ruins of my dying civilization.
(Do you need to know about this? I am determined to finish this miserable story in the present notebook, the four books according to Emmylou, do I dare take more than the Gospels, no, and besides I am aware that I am a danger to you and others. Being crazy officially has been a nice rest, but this must end soon.)
Evenings, we hung out in an Irish saloon on the Via Leo-nina, drinking Guinness while she laid out for me the complex politics of the Society of Nursing Sisters of the Blood of Christ. Power corrupts she said, as our good old Lord Acton used to say and you know he was talking about the church and the pope. And money is power and it’s corrupted us, I mean the Society. You have no idea how much money we have darlin’, we’re living on the interest of the interest of it, and now we have some of us saying, well why are we always sending our poor girls out to foreign shores to be shot and raped by ignorant heathens, why not change things so that the ignorant heathens get some lumps too, a bribe here and there, a little private army, so that we can do God’s work and help more people? And you know the prioress bloody general Mucha-do-about-nothing, that’s her goal in this life. Why, she says, the Templars and the Hospitallers took up arms to save the sick and the poor pilgrims in the Holy Land, forgetting that they also helped destroy the Holy Land and made the name of Christ a stink in the nostrils of those people unto the present day, and the Templars all got burned at the stake for their greed. But a lot of the sisters don’t see that, especially the ones from the third world, they’ve got a different attitude, and the kind of war they’ve seen is different from the kind the Society used to know. Now it’s just gangs of thugs wandering around looting and killing, not proper armies with front lines and command structures, and they’re thinking, oh, if we just had us a troop of boys with rifles, maybe poor sister Angela wouldn’t have got the chop, what’s wrong with that? Now, see, the mother general’s got a head on her shoulders, but she doesn’t want to split the Society, so she temporizes and she’s got me to toss in Sr. Con Mucha’s face, so as to stay above the fray in a manner of speaking, between them who want us to hire private armies and me and me friends, who think it’s a rotten idea. And the whole issue would’ve never come up if it weren’t for the Trust, our golden calf, because even though the Trust keeps us independent, and allows the pope to wink at some of the stunts we pull from time to time, it also lets us contemplate hiring soldiers, so it’s still a gilded cage, d’you see.
I did not. Oh, darlin’, she said, didn’t you read the little book? Where do you think the Trust gets its money, and of course I remembered and I said, oil, and she grinned and said right you are, and oil means politics, and it puts us in with some of the world’s worst, because what did oil ever do except make despots rich and ruin the people so unfortunate as to have oil under their feet, and I don’t even mention burning up the world. By God, if it was me in her chair I’d sell up and give the money to the poor and beg on the streets for the little we need. Dying for Christ is the cheapest game in the world, you know, it hardly costs a thing.
We didn’t have a sexual relationship I should say here. Nora was a strangely asexual sort of person, but with terrific erotic energy channeled into charismatic rather than genital lovemaking. There are people like that, although rare. Her brother was another. I came back from my Arabic lesson one evening and there he was in our kitchen, pouring drinks, Nora in drag, and twice her size. Peter was on leave from the army, thinking about getting out, and when I asked him what he did he said quartermaster, counting the sheets, and Nora laughed and said, he’s coddin’ ya, he’s in the specials, killed hundreds with his bare mitts, and he actually blushed red. I’d never met a man so sexy and at the same time without a hint of lust. Married with three kiddies and devout as Nora, it turned out. We went out and got drunk and he had to carry the pair of us home.
The next week we went to Nettuno, south of Rome, to the parachute center there, and I learned to jump out of airplanes. It took two weeks, one of ground school and leaping off towers, and then three actual jumps from a light plane, wheeling above the Tyrrhenia
n Sea, flying through pure blue and landing on a broad beach, and then once at night. The Society runs its own planes and pilots and has the largest air force of any religious order, the reason being ubi vademus ibi manemur, the Society is often unpopular among nations, but that makes no difference so we sometimes have to stay off the roads and away from borders and then we move people and goods by air drop. Also parachute training tends to strip out the easily frightened and those with an excessive fear of extinction. I found I didn’t mind it at all, no, going out the door after Nora seemed the most natural thing in the world, flying nuns, although it was considered tacky to so express it.
Last night in Rome, the fourteenth of March, me having been nearly two years in the city, and being able to make myself understood in Italian, Arabic, and Dinka, we wandered through the old city, giving away all our lira to beggars, something she did all the time anyway even though it was clear to me that nearly all of them were scam artists. But she saw them as suffering people doing us a favor, allowing us the grace of charity.
And off we go to Africa, a couple of plane rides, Cairo, Nairobi, and now a Land Cruiser over red dirt roads, to the border between Kenya and Sudan. I found I was right at home, because Africa is like one huge bad trailer park in north Florida, very hot, bug ridden, rich in biting flies, sweaty, smelling of sewage and vegetable decay and cheap cooking, full of poor poor people wearing T-shirts with sports logos. There are fewer shoes and no wrecked cars in the front yards, however. We went to Lokichoko, in Kenya, which is the main base for the vast empire of Help. Nora despises Loki and all it stands for, the rich working out their guilt in relatively comfortable surroundings, eating three squares a day among the starved, trying out their improving schemes upon the wretched of the earth, oops that didn’t work, let’s try this!, and when the bullets fly, it’s oh my, so long poor folks, we can’t stay, because we’re white and our bodies are simply worth more than yours are.
Valley of Bones Page 33
