“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 décolletage? ‘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.”
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 ialorixá 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 orixás—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….”
“So no Templars tonight?”
“That was meant to be a metaphor, but no, no Templars tonight. Syncretism, however, is a very subtle process. Did you notice, outside, near the comidas de santo, a little iron statue, a sort of devil with a pitchfork, and with votive offerings at his feet? That’s Exu, very powerful in the umbanda, but not in the candomblé. Still, the candomblé also honors him as a kind of degenerate Mercury. In the umbanda, they are possessed by Exu, but not here.
However, he’s treated affectionately. But you never can tell. You see that wall over there?” He was pointing at the polychrome statues of a naked Indio and an old black slave, seated, dressed in white, and smoking a pipe. “They are a caboclo and a preto velho, spirits of the departed. Very important in umbanda rites. What are they doing here? Receiving homage. They are not used, because the candomblé entertains relations only with the African orixás, but they are not cast out on that account.”
“What do all these churches have in common, then?”
“Well, during the rite in all Afro-Brazilian cults the initiates go into a trance and are possessed by higher beings. In the candomblé these beings are the orixás; in the umbanda they are spirits of the departed.”
“I forgot my own country and my own race,” Amparo said. “My God, a bit of Europe and a bit of historical materialism, and I forgot everything, the stories I used to hear from my grandmother…”
“Historical materialism?” Agliè smiled. “Oh, yes, I believe I’ve heard of it. An apocalyptic cult that came out of the Trier region. Am I
