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 agogô, 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, Amparo 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 orixás, 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 longdistance 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
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
