The Day of Ogum (Salvador)

Back in time, when Kings were Kings and Gods were Gods, the mythological African city of Irê, composed of seven different villages, was conquered by a superhuman warlord named Ogum. After leaving one of his sons as governor, Ogum departed for more glorious and successful military campaigns. One day he returned to Irê expecting adulation and recognition. But no one spoke to him, for he returned on a special festival when everyone was on a vow of silence. Ogum was unaware of this – in his eyes here was a crime of lése majestè, so in an act of rage, he embarked on a terrible massacre of the seven villages of Irê. When he found out what his choleric temper was capable of, the great leader stood back horrified, for this was not a first. His explosive temperament had led him to many acts of fury, but none so impetuous. Blood, especially innocent blood, demands blood in return. So, he took out his sword, the sword that had slain so many enemies in so many battles, and killed himself in an act of such transcendent emotional intensity and remorse that the warlord became an orixá, an African god, the god of war, of iron and of the number seven.

If Ogum had been white, Roman and called Mars, his star sign would have been Aries, his pathos would have been turned into an opera by Gluck, and the sons of Ogum would find their horoscopes in the Daily Trivial. But because he’s black and African the followers of the candomblé religion had to endure Roman-style persecution. In the 1930s, they came under the jurisdiction of the Vice Squad, which dealt with drugs, illegal gambling and prostitution. Until recently in Brazil their religious functions had to be authorised by the Secretary for Public Security.

The Words You’ll Need

azulejos = tiles

baião = Bahian ballroom dancing

Baiano/a = native of Bahia

camareiras = cleaning ladies

com leite frio = with cold milk – the Brazilians make white coffee with hot milk

com licença = excuse me

consulta = consultation

lembrança = memento

lomito = pork fillet

mal-educado/mal-educada = crass; it’s an insult to Brazilians to tell them they’ve had no education. Amazingly, this is a source of pride for the self-made entrepreneur in Britain.

muito prazer = glad to meet you

negro/preto = black. Unlike in English, the word ‘negro’ has been reclaimed in Portuguese (like the word ‘queer’ in English) and has no offensive connotations.

pai/mãe-de-santo = father/mother of the saints – chief priest/priestess of the terreiro.

rapaz-de-programa = rent boy, escort

Recôncavo = the country backlands of Salvador

senzala = slave quarters

sucos naturais = fruit juice

terreiro = candomblé place of worship

Um real só! = only one real

uma fita = a tape

27

Òkàn

I can think of no place other than Salvador where the airport bus eschews the direct autoroute and winds its way through the best parts of town, providing you with a sense of the city’s measure. I was going to Hotel Palace on Rua Chile, which meant that I travelled from the airport to the main bus city terminus for over an hour; but this was an hour well spent, map in hand, judging distances, stamping visual images on sights underlined in blue ink and breathing in the names of neighbourhoods as they rolled by. We entered Avenida Dias da Silva – this must be Pituba; the zoo – here’s Ondina, this stretch of sand with all those windsurfers – black windsurfers I had to pinch myself – must be Barra; these are the old aristocratic areas of Vitória and Canela, and we’re going up, up to the High City - the Cidade Alta - through the Praça Castro Alves – I tried to imagine the gate to the city which stood here – into the bus terminus off the Praça da Sé.

Like many visitors to Salvador I got lost in clichés: I was in the capital of Bahia, the most African of Brazilian states (forget Belgium, Bahia is the size of France), cultural hub of the country, seat of the most famous Carnaval outside Rio, first capital of Brazil, founded in 1549, earlier than some European ones (say, Madrid or St Petersburg), breeding ground of half the musical talent of the country and the source of serious crime warnings by every travel guide. Where did they say it was most dangerous? Near the Elevador Lacerda and the Ladeira da Misericordia.

About where I am now, I suppose.

I looked around. It was one o’clock in the afternoon, Monday, and there were plenty of people and police about. Relatively safe.

Anyway, there was no turning back, for Hotel Palace was the one I’d decided upon. It gets a name check (and action) in Jorge Amado’s Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands and I am a big Amado fan – believe me, magical realism did not start with Salman Rushdie. I will never suss out those Swedish bestowers of Nobel literature prizes and their obsessive hatred of commercial success. Winston Churchill has won and not Graham Greene; Rudolf Eucken and not Bertold Brecht. And when the Portuguese language came to be honoured in 1998, who got the prize but José Saramago and not Jorge Amado. Frankly, I know how their obscurantist, elitist minds work: as the Swedish Academy’s press release reveals, Saramago’s first major success didn’t come until he was 60, whereas there is hardly any language Amado’s work has not been translated into. Hey, don’t start me off on this subject, because I’ll take off and land on another planet. Where was I? Another planet – oh yes, Salvador.

I took up my fifteen-dollar room on the top floor – fifties in its ampleness and design, with an old haut-bourgeois air about it: strong, wooden wardrobes, large taps on deep washbasins, heavy curtains on tall, narrow windows, embroidered sheets on uncomfortable beds – and left almost immediately, camera in my backpack, photocopy of my passport in my back pocket, money stuffed down my sock. I wanted to see Salvador while it was still light for I was at my most apprehensive. Dammit, those warnings from the travel guides eventually creep under your skin.

I met Nelson in the Terreiro de Jesús, the old Jesuit Square, outside the church of São Pedro. He followed me inside. I saw him and checked my camera as if he were able to steal it by telekinesis. Back to The Beach: you know the scene when the guys just know that Leonardo DiCaprio’s backpacker would want to try cobra’s blood and offer him a glass? I must have been emanating similar vibes for Nelson picked me out of the tourists admiring the tame rococo interior.

‘Hello,’ he said in English as he introduced himself. ‘I’m Nelson. I’m a guide.’

I studied him carefully. His features were West African: short, oval face the colour of espresso with a tiny moustache and straight black hair. He treated everything, including my comments, with a sense of urgency and seriousness that verged on opaque antagonism. He wore a white shirt, black trousers and black polished shoes. Shoes are important – the poor in Brazil (and the not so poor) walk around if not barefoot, at least with primitive springy flip-flops; Nelson at least appeared respectable. I decided to ignore him but then he offered me the glass of cobra blood: ‘Do you want to come to a candomblé ceremony?’ he asked.

If there was one thing guaranteed to hold up my interest it was that.

‘What ceremony?’ I asked back in Portuguese. This threw him, but he recovered well.

‘A normal ceremony. Not a tourist one. In a proper terreiro. Today is the day of Ogum.’

The rococo around me diminished in importance.

‘What’s your name?’ he asked, switching into his mother tongue and taking advantage of my hesitation.

‘John. And I thought the day of Ogum is Tuesday,’ I replied. ‘Or Wednesday. Today it’s Monday.’

Was that admiration in his eyes?

‘You will want to come,’ he said. ‘Today is the special day of Ogum. His feast day. You are very lucky. We don’t have such a ceremony every week. Actually, we do. For the tourists. Would you rather go to that?’

In another city, another country, Nelson would be a highly successful second-car salesman.

‘How much will it cost?’

‘Nothing to get in. I’ll take you there. For twenty reais?’

Good grief. Only a fiver.

‘Will there be others?’

‘There will be locals but not many tourists. You won’t be able to take pictures.’

I stood there with mixed feelings. Despite all my skepticism, I thought he was genuine.

‘Is it in Salvador?’

‘Yes, yes, not too far, in Federação. Fifteen minutes by car. Tonight around eight o’clock.’

John, how brave are you?

‘OK,’ I heard myself say. I knew I was rolling head-first into some kind of adventure, but I had no idea that soon I’d be living inside a real Poppy Z. Brite horror story.

Nelson took out a pencil and paper: ‘John, write down your name, hotel and room number.’

I wrote it down.

‘Oh, the Hotel Palace,’ smiled Nelson. ‘I know it. Be ready for seven tonight.’

He patted me on the back.

‘Don’t worry, John. You’ll like it. Let’s have a walk together around the area.’ And with a pause for emphasis: ‘This is not a nice church. Come with me.’

We walked down the Praça Anchieta to the church and convent of São Francisco, which contains the greatest ballast of gold and silver in all of Brazil: just the gold used is one whole metric ton, and the silver chandelier alone weighs 12 and a half stone. The Franciscan brothers were not as contemptuous of wealth as their patron: the eighteenth-century interior is sumptuously gold-leafed and the ceiling, inlaid with jacaranda wood, is illusionary baroque at its best.

‘See that bird on the ceiling?’ asked Nelson, who had got in free while I had to pay a ticket - so he might be a guide, after all.

‘Yes.’

‘Move about and see what happens.’

I walked back and forth looking up. Not only did the bird’s gaze follow me wherever I went, but it turned its head as well!

‘Now come over here.’

He showed me a courtyard full of large blue azulejos dating from the sixteenth century, each panel depicting a different parable or myth. Outside we passed by the unique plateresque façade of the church of the Third Order of São Francisco formed wholly from chiselled stone. I had seen this in Seville’s cathedral and in Mexico City, but this early Renaissance style, which uses stone to mimic the excessively elaborate filigree work of a silversmith, is Spanish, not Portuguese.

‘This is Spanish baroque!’ I exclaimed.

‘The only example in Brazil,’ Nelson replied. ‘It was only rediscovered in the 1930s. It had all been covered by plaster for centuries.’

Nelson was enjoying my speechlessness.

‘Have you been to the historic district of Pelourinho, yet?’ he asked.

‘I literally walked from my hotel to the Terreiro de Jesus and met you,’ I said.

‘Well then,’ he replied and took me to the irregular expanse of the Largo do Pelourinho walking far too quickly amongst the kaleidoscope of colours, smells and sounds of its backstreets, each of which I could have spent hours in. When I stood outside the Casa Jorge Amado looking down on the hill past the elegant mauve Church of the Black Slaves and up towards the Carmelite monastery, I understood why this area is a vast UNESCO monument containing 3,000 dwellings. This is a snapshot of life in times past and no Internet café in the corner or reggae club posters on a building site can alter the fact that you have walked into a time bubble. Yes, there are other places where you can peek through the mist of centuries: Pompeii, Mistra in Greece, Machu Picchu in Peru, Fatipur Sikri in India, but this time bubble is alive and thumping with the throbbing vitality of the original.

I felt Nelson’s hand on my shoulder. How long had I been standing there?

‘Let me show you one last thing,’ he said.

We walked through a yard passing Hotel Pelourinho, a converted student house where a young Jorge Amado wrote his book Suor. Nelson climbed nimbly up a tight flight of stairs to a balcony. I was too dizzy to figure out whether there was public right of way: I just followed Nelson who stood on the roof and showed me the view.

‘Look,’ he said simply.

I was high on the High City – and I was looking down on the Low City - the Cidade Baixa: on my left the Elevador Lacerda, the gigantic 236-foot public lift connecting the two towns; below me the bustling Comércio with its yellow bazaar building; on my right the never-ending port of Salvador …

But in front of me the sun lay low on the Bay of All Saints – the original Bahia, which gave the city and the state its name; vast, calm, imposing, unconquerable. So yes, I was back in time, and I was a follower of Mem de Sá, the iron governor of the new colony; I was a young priest in the entourage of the first Jesuit bishop, Manuel de Nóbrega; I was Toledo Osorio, sent by the Spanish king to defeat the Dutch – for what I saw had hardly changed in the centuries since they stood up here and gazed west. My imagination aflame and my cheeks in a teenage rush, I turned excitedly to Nelson who was enjoying my wonderment.

I wanted to tell him that, for a moment, I felt all-powerful like the old colonial masters.

I froze.

That would make him … that would make him …

I gritted my teeth. I mustn’t forget. This was the place where slaves were stripped naked and whipped and tortured and put in stocks for punishment. In every new Brazilian town, according to the old Portuguese custom, a pole was erected in its principal square as a symbol of authority: the pelourinho, the whipping post. And all the saints of the bay can never atone for the injustices perpetrated on Nelson’s ancestors for they weigh heavily on his shoulders and when he looks down, he can never ever feel like I did then, and that, by itself, is a crime.

Embarrassed, I toned down my excitement to a simple, whistling ‘Wow!’

Méjì

Do you know proportionally how many African slaves were transported to North America out of the whole three-hundred-year transatlantic slave trade? Only 4 per cent. The rest went to the Caribbean and South America, with the lion’s share landing on Brazil: a whopping 38 per cent, accounting for just under 4 million souls.

Where did they come from? Mostly from three tribes: the Angolans who spoke Quimbundo and have given the world the words ‘zombie’ and‘tanga’ (which now means a G-string swimsuit, but originally meant loincloth); the Nagô speakers of Yoruba who provided the main religious language and rites for candomblé; and the Gége or Juju of Dahomey (now Benin) whose main contribution to world religious awareness was the fetish puppet. But as the Greeks and Romans had different names for the same deities (Zeus/Jupiter, Venus/Aphrodite), so did the nations of Africa. The Yoruba Ogum is the Juju Gu and the Angolan Mucumbe. The devil Exú is the Angolan Bombogira and the Juju Elegbá. A Yoruba spirit-god orixá (literally ‘ruler of the head’) is a Juju vodum – voodoo, the word which has come to describe the whole spectrum of New World African ceremonies. Bahian candomblé, like Rio’s Umbandá or Cuban santería is – historical and geographical distances notwithstanding – the same as our more familiar Haitian voodoo: African religion syncretised with Catholic beliefs.

Why did it not take root in North America? Simply because the Protestant churches did not tolerate the worshipping of statues and offerings like the Catholics did. In Brazil one could easily keep a statue of Yemanjá (a kind of female Neptune) in the senzala and pass it off as Nossa Senhora da Conceição. Ogum was St George with the lance; Oxalá the creator, the very original Angolan ‘zombie’, was our own resurrected Jesus Christ; Iansã (a close match would be goddess Diana of the forests) was Santa Barbara and so on. For in the minds of the devotees, we are all one and we all believe in the same values, so the Catholic cult of the saints was mixed with the voduns, the statues with the fetishes, the Sunday mass with the trance dance and holy communion with ritual sacrifice.

*****

‘Will there be any animal sacrifice?’ I asked Nelson, who had arrived promptly, only twenty minutes late. Since no dark colours, especially black or red are allowed in a candomblé ceremony, I was wearing that white Bad Boy T-shirt with light khaki combats and was wondering whether I would be drenched in goat’s blood. ‘If I’m going to get muck on me, I have a cheaper T-shirt I bought in Fortaleza.’

‘No, this is perfect,’ said Nelson.

‘Will there be any animal sacrifice?’ I repeated.

Nelson shook his head. ‘No. And you wouldn’t be allowed to participate. Only affiliates are allowed in those. There was probably a ceremony earlier in the day, and they prepared the orixá’s food to be distributed afterwards.’ He waved me to a parked taxi.

‘Oh,’ I said getting in, ‘what food is it going to be?’

‘Black cock,’ said Nelson.

I should never have asked.

‘But a special Angolan one – imported and then bred in the terreiro.’

I noticed the taxi meter stayed off. ‘Can you put it on?’ I asked.

Nelson dismissed me. ‘It’s only going to be about 15 reais,’ he said. ‘I had trouble getting a taxi at this time of day and arranged the price with him in advance.’

‘I thought twenty reais would include you taking me there and back,’ I protested.

‘Yes,’ said Nelson, ‘but my friend with the car let me down so we have to take taxis.’

Small-time hustler, but I should be OK as long as he thinks he can get more out of me.

We took a right from the central artery of Avenida Reitor Miguel Calmon, and I gasped. It wasn’t just the change of scene with the bright lights of cars giving way to the semblance of a drive in a country road – it was the suddenness of it as the maze of narrow, unpaved roads with no street lighting started unfolding. One minute you’re in the central throughfare of Brazil’s third major city and the next in an impoverished favela. Nelson had to direct the taxi driver through the barely lit, deserted streets, flanked by decrepit dwellings and watched by mute silhouettes, until we reached a clearing on top of a hill.

‘The terreiro of Oxumarê,’ said Nelson, pointing at a large, white bungalow.

The terreiro was rectangular, like a low-ceilinged basilica. Inside, a single set of benches was arranged in a U, broken only by a small corridor to the door. At the other end there was an alcove where the musicians, the ogãs, all male, would play the ritual music, their only instruments three conical ketu drums. In the middle of the room stood a large floor-lamp with a stone base and a stuffed armadillo, Oxumarê’s beloved animal, stuck halfway up, its legs forced around the pole like an overweight koala in a gladiator suit. The colour scheme was overwhelmingly cyan and the décor neutral and nondescript, especially after the golden ostentatiousness of São Francisco. Leaves were strewn on the floor; paper flags and plastic swords hung from the blanched walls. There was nothing that could not be bought in a Pound Shop where every piece of bric-a-brac costs a quid.

I took my seat on the right bench facing into the centre of the U; the sexes were strictly segregated – men sat on the right and women on the left. There were seven other tourists apart from myself: an elderly French-Swiss couple and their son, three Austrian guys and a German girl. After the terreiro started filling up, ours were the only European faces in what would eventually turn out to be a 200-plus capacity crowd. I saw an entrance on the musicians’ right and a sign: Reservado p/eguns – reserved for spirits.

‘Where does that lead to?’ I asked Nelson.

‘To the inner chambers of the terreiro,’ Nelson said. ‘For initiates only. That’s where the sacrifices take place.’

I tried to be droll.

‘Are there ever any human sacrifices?’ I asked.

‘Not in candomblé. In Quimbandá. Have you ever thought where all those disappearing street children end up?’

Quimbandá is the black magic aspect of Umbandá, which is a modern spiritualist candomblé-style religion practised in Rio: the forces unleashed by spirits can be used constructively or destructively, leading to white or black magic. I dismissed the thought; this was scaring the gringo.

‘Although,’ he added ‘there is this terreiro in the Recôncavo–’

‘What about it?’

‘You noticed that the land around here is clear? Terreiros need to be built in an environment resembling nature. They can’t be in the main square like Christian churches. It’s much easier in the country than in the city. To reach this terreiro in the Recôncavo you have to walk eleven kilometres through the forest. Not even the authorities know about –He shut up abruptly.

‘Are you Christian?’ I asked after a while.

‘Of course,’ said Nelson. ‘I was baptised Catholic.’

‘And you also believe in candomblé?’

‘I am an initiate myself.’

‘But – but …’

‘Candomblé accepts that every religion points to the true God. There are no contradictions.’

‘And what do your Catholic priests say?’

Nelson’s expression hardly changed.

‘They don’t like it so I don’t tell them,’ he answered with impeccable logic.

An effeminate old man dressed in a gold costume emerged from the reserved area.

‘Who’s that?’ I asked.

‘He’s the pai-de-santo. He is the chief priest of the terreiro, along with Dona Tania. She’s the mãe-de-santo, famous in all of Salvador. She’s very powerful.’

‘He’s white,’ I remarked. ‘I thought this was an African-only religion.’

Three young white men in their twenties dressed in white linen robes emerged behind him.

‘It’s an African religion most of the time,’ said Nelson, ‘but there are exceptions.’

Several elderly women sat on plastic chairs opposite, and the men showed great deference by kneeling in front of them and kissing their hands.

‘Is Dona Tania one of them?’ I asked.

Nelson shook his head.

‘No. These are mães-de-santo from other terreiros. There she is.’

There was no questioning Dona Tania’s hierophantic presence: once she walked in, the room felt full. She was younger than I had thought; I reckon she was still in her late thirties – but African men and women are notorious for ageing gracefully, so I could be wrong. She was tall, handsome, big, very big, and dressed like all the others in a maid’s uniform with a white lace apron that reached to the bust and functioned as a bra, leaving the shoulders bare. She scrutinised the surroundings, and her stare crossed mine for a moment. Was that a calm, regal nod I detected before she averted her eyes to embrace and kiss the pai-de-santo?

‘Notice that the pai-de-santo is homosexual,’ said Nelson.

I feigned surprise. ‘It never crossed my mind.’

He missed my sarcasm.

‘Fifty per cent of men in candomblé are homosexual,’ he went on.

‘Why?’

Nelson’s expression, always serious and unsmiling, became puzzled. He thought for a bit.

‘No one knows,’ he said. ‘But especially in the temple of Oxumarê you have many male homosexuals. It’s the orixá who is homosexual.’

Pardon me?

Dona Tania led several barefoot women ranging from a septuagenarian to a twelve-year-old (guessing again) to the door. They knelt and kissed the floor with reverence.

‘They’re asking permission from Exú, the guardian of the threshold,’ whispered Nelson in my ear.

‘Permission for what?’

‘For the ceremony. Tonight the spirits will enter the bodies of the dancers summoned by the drums. Exú will lead the way, then most likely Ogum. He’s rather impatient.’

‘Isn’t Exú the Devil?

The drums started thumping and made my chin twitch.

‘According to the Christian church. But no, think of him more like an angel. He intercedes. When he intercedes with evil intent, he can be the Devil.’

‘Isn’t it dangerous being possessed by a God, let alone the Devil?’

‘It is. These mediums’ – he pointed at the women – ‘are very experienced, even the little ones.’

The drums echoed harder and harder playing the oró, the invocation to each spirit, and drowned Nelson’s words. The first and smallest drum is the lé, the one that mutates the rhythm; the second, taller one is the rumpi, used for the sharp counterpoint that characterises all African-rooted music from syncopated jazz to the off-beat of reggae; and the big standing one is the rum; this keeps the beat, which becomes faster and faster as the entreaties to the deity grow more determined. These are the sacred drums, each of which has been generously sprinkled with the blood of a specially decapitated chicken. Candles, palm oil and offerings have stood a whole night in front of each one so that the drum can be infused with their strength. For these drums summon gods – and if any recalcitrant deity is moody and doesn’t want to party, a double cowbell, the agogô is rung to sap the deity’s disfavour, for its sound is irresistible, piercing through the battery of bongo-drummery like a whistle.

The women started rotating in a circle and around their own axis, slowly at first, eyes closed, feet and shoulders bare, layers of long, white, frilly undergowns swirling and bustling, light blue headkerchiefs demarcated by beads of sweat. The antiphonal chanting began: the call to Ogum ‘Ogum je’ and what is this – yes, they are all dancing privately, the dance of Ogum summoning down the iron spirit of a bygone age. ‘Ora Yeyê-o!’ – they’re calling Oxum, the Black Venus, who is always pictured holding an abebê, a golden mirror-fan; ‘Okê Arô’ – the dance of Oxóssi, the king of Ketu who became the spirit of the forest, green and blue like the jungles and the streams; ‘Epa Babá’ – terreiro calling Oxalá, the god who fell asleep when Olodumaré asked him to create the world, letting Odudua steal his thunder, though Oxalá woke up in time to create us humans at the end; ‘Odô Iyá’– the dance of Yemanjá, the Lady of the Sea, the Great Mother of all spirits; ‘Kawô Kabiyesile’ – ‘Long live the King,’ the cry to bring Xangô, the king with the three wives, the symbol of justice in an unjust land; ‘Ora Yeyê-o!’ – again? Is Oxum not listening to our signals and has to be called again? Bring on the agogô! Yes!

I looked at my watch: how long had I been sitting there? It had been an hour: the repetition dulls your senses. We were all sweltering in the heat. The Swiss looked as if they’d been dipped in a pool with their clothes on. I wiped my forehead – this wasn’t exactly boring, but it soon might be.

Then the youngest of the girls squatted in front of me, twisted her mouth as if to spit out a large stone and growled like a jaguar.

Métà

Back in time, when Kings were Kings and Gods were Gods, there lived a tall, strong man called Saboadã, the Oxumarê (king) of the Nagô nation. He fell in love with the beautiful Goddess Oxum, who had just left her husband Oxossi to live with Xangô. But the attentions of Saboadã sparked jealousy in Xangô – so a duel was in store with the inevitable result – the death of the mortal. Oxalá his father and Nanã his mother took away the body of Saboadã and transformed him into a serpent, the Oxumarê of the astral constellations, to pass his time amongst the stars. This serpent turns into a rainbow when the rain is over to transport water to the palace of Xangô in the sky and spends six months as a man – the serpent of the Earth – and six months as a woman – the serpent of the waters. Oxumarê is the god of duality: the Brazilian yin and yang embodied in one. He lives in waterfalls; his colours are those of the rainbow and his acolytes are the sexually unorthodox of this world. I was startled at the coincidence of the rainbow flag, the symbol of Gay Pride all over the globe, being the image of an African bisexual god-spirit for centuries before – but not as much as when I found out that Oxumarê is a full-blooded macho male in the original Yoruba culture.

It is only in Brazil that he’s bisexual.

*****

The shock of seeing a possession at first-hand over, I watched raptly while the crowd started ululating as a spirit possessed each dancer in turn. The heat, the cries and the repetitive, ingressive rhythm of the drums took their toll on the German girl first and the Austrians second. The Swiss left soon after, summoned by a bossy guide. By 10.30pm, two hours after the ceremony had started, I was the only white face left, tapping my feet. Where the untrained ear only hears the common denominator of the percussive hypnotic beat, someone who likes Jamaican dub like me picks out the underlying synthesis of mutating tunes as they erupt to the fore and then disappear under the gradual unfolding of new beats. The monotony was broken by a frail old man who lunged at the dancers, eyes closed, movements unsteady. He was caught by the pai-de-santo, who took the man’s shoes off and laid him down to rest.

I waved Nelson over. ‘Has he been possessed as well?’ I asked.

‘Some god is playing tricks. This old man is untrained.’

‘What will happen to him?’

‘The pai-de-santo will direct the god to someone who is trained to receive him.’

‘Can I talk to the pai-de-santo later?’ I asked. ‘I’m fascinated with this homosexuality business, especially because it runs counter to Christianity.’

‘Sure,’ said Nelson. ‘You can have your future told by Dona Tania, too.’

I wasn’t sure about that, but a huge communal wail filled the room and interrupted our conversation. From the inner entrance there came the gods – or the eguns dressed like gods. I recognised Ogum in pale cyan attire and a cheap, plastic sword; Exú in red and black with a pitchfork trident; Oxum in yellow and white; Omolú with a reed scarecrow dress covering his body; Iansã with her holy featherduster (no, I am not making this up); Oxalá in white, his long and multi-levelled hand-made sceptre wrapped in glorious Bacofoil. There followed new initiates, men in suits with cyan sacred symbols, what seemed like a wedding couple and a woman offering sweet blue cakes all around. The drums grew climactic and the audience started participating harder; they reached out to the dancing eguns, palms open as if to keep them inside their enclosure. The pai-de-santo stood by the door turning away any straying gods who might want to escape – didn’t they know this was a controlled trance? There were many embraces; between Dona Tania and the eguns; between the eguns and the audience. Ogum himself came up to me and asked for a hug. I stood up, embraced him and felt the divine breath on my cheeks. Take it from me, His Holiness suffers from halitosis.

Two kids behind me – nine? ten? years old gave me the thumbs up. Apparently it is a great honour for a god to bless you. Before I knew it a plate of food had been placed on my lap. So this was the hallowed cock that had been ritually sacrificed earlier on to provide the ebó, the sacred nourishment for Ogum, who likes chicken, black beans and rice. I passed on the plate to the kids, remembering that candomblé ceremonies were also used to feed the poor in times past and, I suspect, in times present.

The eguns were now circling the audience, folding their dresses up like receptacles; the ululating crowd started throwing in money. Not unsurprisingly, they eventually assembled in front of me, beckoning me to reward them. They should have known that Nelson was their agent and gone to him to demand their cut, but there were far too many gods for me to resist their combined power and I succumbed, although Oxalá kept insisting for more and wouldn’t take no for an answer. Enough is enough! I felt something land on my shoulder from the direction of the two kids. It was a bean dipped in tomato sauce. One of them pointed at the other who was holding up a fork with a guilty expression. Dammit, I should have given Oxalá those five reais or else this Bad Boy T-shirt will never get clean.

I stepped outside where about half of the faithful were chilling after their encounters with the Divine. Nelson dragged me to a corner where the younger pais-de-santo-to-be were leaning on a wall in a tight embrace. He introduced me. They smiled in what can only be described as a stoned manner and tightened their grips on each other’s bodies.

‘Many men in candomblé are homosexual,’ said Nelson for the umpteenth time.

‘I’m interested,’ I said. ‘I’m gay, too.’

Nelson, as usual, didn’t register any emotion. ‘You’ve come to the right place – Bahia. All the major politicians and leaders of the arts and sciences in Bahia are gay.’

‘How does one become a pai-de-santo?’ I asked.

Nelson looked at me as if he didn’t understand why I couldn’t. I saw the cavorting libidinous pais-de-santo on the wall, and it came to me in a flash.

‘Like that?’ I said, opening my eyes wide.

‘How else? It’s transmission of knowledge from male to male.’

I laughed flippantly. Nelson shook his head.

‘Don’t laugh. Candomblé is much more serious than that. And candomblé is for life. In some religions miracles or spells happen because you believe in them. In candomblé it doesn’t matter. The spells will happen anyway.’

‘How does one do spells?’

‘Dona Tania can do some for you.’

I didn’t like that either.

‘I don’t want to see Dona Tania. I want to see the pai-de-santo and talk about homosexuality in the religion.’

‘OK,’ said Nelson, ‘I’ll manage that. Are you ready to leave?’

I was. We boarded one of several taxis parked outside the terreiro and returned to Rua Chile. I looked at my watch. It was 1.30 a.m. It had been a long day.

‘Is there anything open at this time of night?’ I asked Nelson.

Nelson said something to the taxi driver who let us off next to the Elevador Lacerda. There was a 24-hour diner with lomitos and hamburguesas and sucos naturais, eaten and sipped by Salvador’s nocturnal demi-monde, which in my frightener scale comes between Vampire and Undead. There were prostitutes and their pimps, lone young crackheads with red eyes and small gangs of, well, gangsters out on a run in town. The ubiquitous day police were nowhere to be seen – they probably think that anyone walking around the Elevador after midnight deserves a good mugging to cut them down to size. I paid for a couple of sanduíches and sucos for myself and Nelson; I pretended to tie my laces and used the extra money rolled up in my sock rather than flash my wallet.

We left and made our way towards Hotel Palace, munching slowly. But then I felt uneasy; I turned around and saw a man, pumped up on drugs, walking towards us. He was holding a rolled up newspaper pointed at our chests.

‘A gun,’ I thought, and nudged Nelson with my elbow.

Nelson waved me to walk on. He stayed back, faced the red-eyed would-be mugger and said something to him. They quibbled momentarily, but Nelson won the argument, and the guy walked away.

When Nelson caught up with me, I bowed respectfully. ‘That was very good,’ I said. ‘Candomblé magic scared him off?’

Nelson seemed miles away. ‘Ah, nothing. You don’t have to worry about anything when you’re with me.’

‘You are my Exú,’ my joke went on.

He looked at me, seriously as was his wont, but then, for the first time, I saw him crack a smile.

Mérìn

Exú is always teasing, playing practical jokes, pushing the limits of divine tolerance and human patience. Although he is identified with Hermes/Mercury, the messenger of the gods or a Christian archangel, the Catholic Church sees him, with his mischief-making and interfering old nature, as the Devil incarnate. Was not the Devil, after all, a full-time archangel before his fall?

One day Exú painted his body in his two favourite colours, taking care to stain one half of his body in red – up to his profile – and the other half in black. Then he asked the gods what colour he was. The gods on one side saw the black and the ones on the other side saw the red, so they all guessed wrong.

Exú laughed: ‘In order to judge me,’ he said, ‘you have to check both my sides.’

*****

I missed most of the next day because I slept like a log except for the bit where I had to fend off stubborn hotel cleaners who insisted on doing my room even though I just wanted to snuggle and sleep and roll around and sleep again. I hate conscientious camareiras who don’t recognise scruffy night owls and keep knocking at the door reminding them of breakfast. Breakfast? Excuse me, if Oxalá wanted us to be early birds, He would have given us beaks and wings!

I sat down at noon at the Cantina da Lua on the Terreiro de Jesús where I bumped into last night’s Swiss tourists. They were up in arms when I told them that they missed the costume show and the ritual food banquet – their guide was concerned that they shouldn’t hang around in Federação too late; why, even their taxi might be ambushed. Talking about guides, Nelson appeared out of nowhere carrying a large packet of Pampers. He answered my questioning look with a ‘For my daughter. She’s eighteen months old.’ He suggested we meet later.

I gave him short shrift, using the Swiss as an excuse.

‘Remember, I arranged for you to see Dona Tania tomorrow,’ he said.

‘I wanted to see the pai-de-santo,’ I replied.

‘It’s all the same. You can talk to Dona Tania instead.’

I made a gesture of acquiescence if only to make him go away.

The Swiss and I spent most of the day walking down the Pelourinho streets starting from the old town gate, now part of the Museum Portas do Carmo. This was next to Nossa Senhora do Rosario dos Pretos, a church built brick by brick by slaves and freed blacks who were not allowed to worship freely in the European churches – all the gold of the church of São Francisco was not for their eyes, as they entered backwards and crouched at a specially designed enclosure averting their gaze from Mass.

At the top open V-neck of the Largo de Pelourinho, the Casa Jorge Amado reigns. We were bombarded with biographies, photographs, videos and editions of Amado’s books on sale – plus a wallpapering of sleeves of his hardbacks in all the languages they have been translated into. At the bottom of the gentle Pelourinho declivity we started ascending the abrupt Ladeira do Carmo again to reach the Carmelite church and monastery. The original exterior of this church is quite fetching with its curved Mediterranean railings and simple neo-classical surfaces; the garden provides another Tardis-like glimpse of matters past with the original, unreconstructed catacombs leading into the netherworld of the runaway slaves, part of a maze network connecting crypt to crypt and cellar to cellar. ‘You can go all the way to Nossa Senhora do Rosario,’ the cleaner told me as I peeked into the hole, which looks as unkempt and hastily dug today as it must have three centuries ago.

The treasury contains, amongst the bejewelled chalices and silver cruet sets, the sui generis attraction of Salvador, the Senhor Morto: an early eighteenth-century cedar statue of Christ laid to rest, with thousands of rubies scattered about his body representing drops of blood shining triumphantly in death. For death was an occasion of celebration in Catholic Salvador with great libation and merriment taking place around the corpses buried inside the church walls. It was later, when various epidemics struck the city that fear of the dead body began to emerge along with burial in new specially designated areas – called cemeteries. When the Brazilian government decreed in 1836 that persons would henceforth be interred in the cemetery of Campo Santo (with a typically Brazilian bent the rights went to a private monopoly which could raise charges at will) the whole population – rich, poor, white and black revolted and overturned the gravestones of Campo Santo. This was the ultimate setback for a city which, having lost its capital status to Rio back in 1763 and its sugar-cane and tobacco power to the southern states with their mineral and coffee wealth, was condemned to sink further and further into the quicksand of epidemics that would diminish its pre-eminence.

*****

Tuesday night, and I am stuck at a police checkpoint between the Praça da Sé and the Terreiro de Jesús, scrambling to get into Pelourinho with dozens of other hopefuls. The police did not allow anyone without an identity card to enter. I showed my tattered passport photocopy – I wasn’t going into Pelourinho at night with my real passport. The policeman let me in and a small kid was also able to squeeze through. I looked back at the pleading throng. Were they all pickpockets about to be unleashed onto the unsuspecting tourists? Hardly. They were merely poor and would tone down the festive, upbeat face of the square.

A baião group was controlling the action on a stage in the Terreiro de Jesús with tourists dancing cheek to cheek with colourfully dressed Baianas – a dollar a picture. Food stalls, beer barrels and caipirinha lemon crushers were all touting for my attention. I could hardly move for the people. This was like trying to cross Rua Farme de Amoedo in Ipanema at the height of the Rio Carnaval. And this happens every Tuesday?

Outside the Casa Amado a reggae singer was contorting his body to Bob Marley songs: ‘Get up! Stand up! Stand up for your rights.’ In front of the reggae singer stood a batería, a drum orchestra: the Swing do Peló, all seventeen of them, with two conductors – one for the top snares and bongos and one for the timpani and drums at the back. ‘Ratatata! Ratatata!’ The conductors were yelling, impelling, chiding, scolding, pushing the sweating musicians into higher levels of concentration. The rhythm penetrated my eardrums, dispensed with the singer’s attempts to provide a melody to the pulsing nerve of the batons – which ranged from drum sticks to long rubber hoses – and splattered the nerve endings on my spine. If this was a tourist attraction, then it failed, for I was in the middle of hundreds of gyrating locals: African women in white candomblé vestments and Muslim-like headgear swaying unobtrusively; big mommas with bosoms that could smother the Elevador Lacerda shaking their hips; sexually charged, dreadlocked young couples splashing their pheromones onto older men and women who grabbed the next passer-by for a dance. This was Fortaleza’s Pirata’s in the streets; this was Rio’s Carnaval in miniature. Yesterday the sacred drums were doleful and respectful, but today ‘Ratatata-tata-tata’ they are joyful, voluptuous and profane, exploding into my solar plexus. This is percussive concussion pulverising my brain, digging down, digging deep. I could not imagine my straitlaced Swiss friends enjoying this physical intensity. It is this lack of drums, the lack of a beat, that made European classical music – and ergo European civilisation – what it is: we are cerebral creatures; we crave melody or harmony to capture the mind; we have simply lost the rhythm. I wonder if we ever had it in us anyway. And yet, when the instinctive minimalism, the raw stomp and the choppy manic jerk of drums did arrive in the West and a gentle 4/4 rock ’n’ roll beat started shaking the shoulders of Western teenagers, that beat was ultimately responsible for scenes of mass hysteria unseen before or since.

Amongst the multitude I spotted a guy so handsome as to make the incessant drum beat fade from my ears. He looked like a tanned Richard Gere circa American Gigolo; he was dressed like a male model out of GQ: a red open shirt with tight black trousers and a tight gold necklace. Suddenly our eyes met amongst the bobbing crowd. They stayed fixed for a minute as he puffed out smoke from his cigarette cinematically.

Then I lost him as a tourist asked me to take a picture of her with the drum orchestra. Cursing slightly, I obeyed. She put the camera back in her purse and held it tight against her body. Yes, there were many tourists around, and they were all afraid. I saw a guy with his backpack worn forwards looking apprehensive, keeping a safe distance from the crowd. Not for him the bonhomie of dancing in a line shoulder to shoulder or the sharing of a bottle of beer. Two white girls shook off – violently – the offer of a hand by a black youth to enter the dancing circle. So to the $64,000 question – and it’s not a pleasant one: are we afraid of Salvador more than of the rest of Brazil because it’s more African, more black?

By now the Swing do Peló drummers and their constantly gesticulating conductors – who at one point, drunk on the passion of the rhythm, ever hypercritical of their retinue, nearly came to blows – were jogtrotting up the street with the reggae singer trying to flog recordings: ‘Uma fita. Uma fita Cinco reais. Dois reais. Um real só! ’ As the drum sounds vanished one by one, my senses started rushing in to fill the void the resonance was abandoning. I looked at my watch. I had been pummelled for 50 whole minutes.

I returned to the Terreiro de Jesus where the more gentle baião band was still bopping strong and bought a beer. As I turned around, I saw the red shirt before I saw his face. Richard Gere was next to me, and he was smiling.

Game on.

‘Hi,’ I said. ‘Tudo bom?’

Richard Gere introduced himself as Emerson.

‘I have no connection with Salvador,’ said Emerson with a friendly but vacant air. ‘I’m a Carioca.’ He pointed at another immaculately dressed man next to him. ‘Henrique, here, is Paulista. You?’

I told them the general stuff about my name, where I came from and where I’ve been in Brazil.

‘You went to a candomblé ceremony?’ Emerson asked in disbelief.

‘Yeah, it was good. I’m going to meet the pai-de-santo again tomorrow.’

‘Don’t. You don’t know what you’re letting yourself in for.’

‘Why?’

‘They are very powerful and dangerous,’ Emerson said. ‘You haven’t given them anything of yours, have you?’

‘Money.’

‘I mean something like your name, your address.’

My mind’s ear heard Nelson intone: John, write down your name, hotel and room number.

‘Well, I did write down my details on how to find me. What’s wrong with that?’

Emerson shook his head. ‘They have you now.’

A sense of unease crept over me. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Now they can put a spell on you. They can control you.’

I bit my lip.

‘What are you going to do after this?’ asked Emerson.

Was that an invite? I stayed silent for a minute while Emerson made an excuse and ran off to talk to a girl standing nearby.

His mate, Henrique, approached me.

‘Do you like my friend?’ he asked matter-of-factly.

I looked at him.

‘He is a rapaz-de-programa,’ said Henrique. ‘You got that didn’t you?’

Huh? What? Erm, of course, of course.

‘We are male models, and we were doing a shoot today for Elite magazine. Have you heard of it?’

‘No.’

‘It’s very popular. We're also looking to earn some extra money.’

I must have looked very shocked so Henrique waved Emerson back and whispered something in his ear.

‘You know what? You can have us both tonight,’ said Emerson.

A huge bout of clapping resounded around the square. The band had finished their last song.

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ said Emerson. ‘Am I too old? Am I too ugly? No, nothing of this. We are professionals and we choose who we go to bed with. Believe me, we wouldn’t offer this to you if we didn’t like you.’

I just had to ask. ‘How much?’

‘Fifty dollars. Both of us. We live in a hotel nearby,’ and he pointed towards the darkness of the backstreets. ‘If you don’t like it you don’t pay.’

He paused to make a point.

‘We can make all your dreams come true,’ he added, not realising how pathetic his banter was: only losers have dreams that come true for fifty dollars. There was no way I was going to be seduced into the backstreets of Pelourinho by a couple of rent boys.

‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m not tempted. I don’t normally have problems getting sex and I’m not going to start paying now.’

Emerson looked at me in disbelief.

‘You’ll go back to your hotel alone?’

‘Watch me,’ I replied and started walking away without looking back.

My tribulations were not over. Suddenly it seemed everyone in the square was after my body. The police had disappeared and the square had been transformed into a cathouse ante-room. A plump Baiana emerged behind her even plumper pimp, who was wearing a ‘100 per cent NEGRO’ T-shirt, breathed on me and gave me a bibulous kiss. One elderly matron, buttwise overendowed, slapped my bottom. ‘Olá gringo,’ she cried. A cinnamon-coloured leggy beauty stepped overzealously in front of me and squeezed one of the nipples under my vest. Hell, the natives were getting restless, nay, perfervid. My walk turned into a scamper towards the passage to the Praça da Sé, which had in store the most tragic vision of the night: a ten-year-old girl, dirty and barefoot, dressed in a single white piece of cloth that came down to above her knees. She winked at me suggestively in a disturbingly premature sexualised way. What was her price? A sorbet?

Márùn

There are many ways of divining the búzios, sixteen cowrie shells cut in half. Only the halves with the original cleft are held; the other halves are discarded. After ablutions and sacrifices, the shells remain a sacerdote’s own tarot cards; consecrated and personal. When they are thrown up and fall down, they are considered closed if they fall on the cleft (uncut) side – else they are open. There are sixteen open/closed ways they can fall, each associated with an orixá. But for a good dafa (consultation) you need the diviner – normally a mãe-de-santo – to detect one of those sixteen ways through the candomblé cosmogony for you. She starts with all sixteen shells in her closed palms and moves them from one to the other. She stops and picks up with the right as many as she can while they’re on the left. If one remains, she draws a single line on the floor. If two remain, she draws a double line. If more than three remain, she repeats the exercise, swapping between right and left until four lines (single or double) have been drawn – a pattern like, say, I, II, II, I or I, II, II, II. A single line represents a universe expansion/light; a double one represents universe contraction/darkness. In candomblé, events unfold through the struggle of light and darkness without any value judgement assigned to the opposites, as in: Light = Good, Darkness = Evil. Each of the resulting patterns has a Yoruba name and shows a way forward; the first pattern I drew is called Odi-Meji – the second is Obara Meji. Of course if candomblé was called Taoism we’d name the cowrie shell consultation I-Ching, write serious theosophical books about it and practise it along with reflexology and shiatsu in Islington alternative workshops. But since we are all racists, we call it black magic.

Note the value judgement.

*****

Although Nelson appeared at 11 a.m. at my hotel, nothing had been arranged.

‘Dona Tania is not ready for her consulta,’ he informed me.

‘I don’t want to know my future, thank you, Nelson,’ I repeated. ‘I want to have an intellectual discussion with the pai-de-santo. Now arrange that.’

While he was on his mobile phone, we walked up the Saúde hill, which must be what Pelourinho looked like before the late 1990s restoration spree. I could have been in the backstreets of Lagos for all I knew: semi-naked boys ran up and down the ladeira and housewives’ furtive looks behind dirty curtains followed my steps.

‘This is our house,’ said Nelson, and directed me to a door.

Odd. Nelson had always been awkwardly semi-detached and never chummy.

His house was not poor or dirty; it was terraced (imagine – on a steep ladeira) and small to claustrophobic, but it had a modern, aluminium kitchenette, cheap wooden furniture, carpets, a TV with an inside aerial and a toilet with a flush. Nelson’s wife was short and pretty. His daughter, sitting on her lap, started crying instantly. His mother, suspicious of anyone who made her granddaughter cry, was reading letters by the window. I was introduced and given a slice of stale Madeira cake which I accepted, and water which I refused. (‘Not thirsty,’ I lied as the cake bestodged my mouth.)

‘How big is your family?’ I asked Nelson.

He counted mentally.

‘I have three half-brothers and two half-sisters. My mother was a bit wild in her youth,’ he said with indifferent innocence.

‘So what do your wife and mother do?’

‘My wife looks after our daughter Iracema.’

How Brazilian: a fictional Potiguar princess’s name for a Yoruba Bahian girl.

‘My mother manages three houses for an absent landlord.’

‘How much does a property cost to rent? Like your house’

‘About 150 reais a month,’ Nelson answered. ‘Most houses are modern inside. This is not a favela. It is a normal black neighbourhood.’

‘Poor?’

‘Only relative to Barra and Ondina. But compared to Federação …’

‘Is there crime?’

‘Not if you’re a local,’ answered Nelson. ‘People who live here have jobs.’

He looked at his watch.

‘We’d better go,’ he said. ‘We don’t want Dona Tania to wait.’

I took my leave of his family and followed him up the ladeira and down again to a bus stop.

‘So now you’ve seen my family,’ said Nelson.

‘Nice,’ I commented as the bus came and we climbed in. Of course, I paid for both of us.

‘You should try and see the area around the bay,’ said Nelson. ‘The Recôncavo, Cachoeira. I took a Portuguese couple there earlier this month. We rented a car. I am an excellent driver.’

So he did want to be chummy. Were we friends? I asked myself. No, I decided, for despite the level of trust that had been established, there was still an overwhelming commercial aspect to our relationship. Nelson wanted more work off me. I looked at him again as we sat down on two empty seats. He had offered to hold a set of books for a girl student standing next to him.

Things I Don’t Like About Brazil #6: Holding Someone’s Books on the Bus

Not quite a ‘don’t like’ this one – more of a ‘don’t understand’. I have seen this, especially in the Nordeste. If you are sitting down on a bus and a student carrying books stands next to you, you are supposed to offer to hold the books for them. This is baffling. OK, it is polite. But when you don’t give up your seat to an elderly lady or when you don’t offer to do something similar to someone with heavy shopping, it’s obvious that the custom is very specific. Why? Won’t you trust your cabbages to a stranger but you would your books? Are school books terribly heavy, modifying your centre of gravity and thus considered dangerous when the driver suddenly brakes? Are books supposed to be more worthless than your fruit and veg? And have those students never heard of daypacks? Or shoulder bags? Are they too poor? Or is it unsafe to walk with a backpack? Anyway, I refuse to carry anyone’s stuff on the bus, and I am considered a ‘gringo mal-educado’.

I wish I knew the finer points of why. Answers on a postcard please.

Now, John, you can tell people you’ve been to a favela.

We got off in Federação to visit Nelson’s uncle whose house was on our way to the terreiro down a rocky, muddy street with dwellings that seemed to have been scrambled together without any regard for the horizontal and the vertical. Some were solid and amorphous, made out of cement and corrugated iron. Some were plain spaces demarcated by chicken-coops. Some were just towers of rubbish. What was disconcerting was the lack of people. The sun was up and it was hot and the old Brazilian custom of sleeping on your portico was conspicuously absent.

‘Stay close to me,’ said Nelson.

I knew what he meant when I spotted the big, barefoot man clothed only in dusty cut-off jeans walking towards us. I clung up close to Nelson.

‘Olá,’ Nelson said to the guy. He didn’t answer back, his eyes fixed on me.

‘Olá,’ I said, too.

‘We’re going to my uncle’s,’ said Nelson, who’d stopped. ‘You know him,’ – and he mentioned a surname which the other guy understood. He pointed at me. ‘We’re both going to see him, and then we’re going to the terreiro.’

The semi-naked man let us pass, but his eyes never left mine for a second.

‘You go to your uncle,’ he said to Nelson. ‘And then’ – he pointed in my direction – ‘YOU leave.’

After this, any thought of a long social visit at Nelson’s relatives was gone. But oh, his uncle seemed so delighted to see me; his house consisted of two rooms with a mattress and a few basic articles of furniture, which did not extend to high tables or wardrobes. He pulled together his only two chairs, offered me the safest-looking one, on which my weight was precariously poised and started asking me how I liked Salvador. He was very friendly, but he had clearly just woken up. Was he unemployed? Possibly, as today was Wednesday. Had he been drinking the previous night? He certainly looked rough.

‘My uncle knows all you need to know about candomblé,’ said Nelson.

Then I got the sting. I was supposed to pay the uncle to learn about the religion instead of the pai-de-santo. And if I left the house, I would be in immediate danger. No wonder the uncle was pleased to meet the goose who would lay the golden egg.

I stood up.

‘We’ll be late for Dona Tania,’ I said. ‘Nelson, have you finished here?’

Nelson looked at me like a child caught stealing chocolate biscuits from the tin. ‘Yes, I have, but I thought my uncle who has more time and knows a lot about candomblé could fill the time …’

I turned to the uncle.

‘Muito prazer,’ I said in the firmest tone I could muster. ‘Let’s go, Nelson.’

I walked out alone as started down the street. Nelson ran behind me. I turned to remind him that I was not a pushover.

‘Nelson,’ I said, weighing my words angrily. ‘Don’t betray my trust.’

Although his expression remained unchanged, he must have understood, for he said nothing.

I felt I had the upper hand. This was the time to strike while the iron was hot.

‘And something else,’ I added. ‘Do you have the paper I gave you with my address on?’

At a loss to understand my animosity, Nelson opened his wallet and fumbled through a wad of pieces of paper with addresses and names. He found mine and gave it to me with a questioning look. Was it my impression or had someone torn off a piece of it? Had I not included my room number originally? There was no room number on the slip.

Overreacting or not, I tore it to pieces.

‘You know where to find me,’ I said.

‘What did you do that for?’ he asked.

I left the question hanging and paced ahead, but with the corner of my eye I noticed a glint of respect in his coal-black pupils.

*****

We had to climb the terreiro hill on foot. Steps, some wooden, some created from makeshift soil, led ever upwards. We passed the sacred tree where the food of the gods was deposited; I noticed the fresh offerings from Monday’s fiesta. Further up we met the cages where the sacrificial animals were kept – not much difference from a bog-standard farmhouse where animals are slaughtered for food on special occasions.

At the top I saw how the hill imposed itself on the surroundings. The view over Salvador was vast and uninterrupted; this was a small organic oasis in a concrete desert. The terreiro door was closed. There were only a few women about and a proud Angolan cockerel, which took a dislike to me. I noticed another pair of eyes following its movements. I recognised the twelve-year-old who had first snarled at me in the trance. Nelson picked her out, too.

‘Hey, how you’ve grown,’ he said. ‘My grandfather was your godfather, you remember?’

I left Nelson trying to establish blood vertical or non-blood lateral ties and asked the oldest woman there whether I could take a picture.

‘We have to wait for Dona Tania,’ she said and sat on a stone under a tree.

‘John was here on Monday night,’ Nelson announced.

The little girl and the old woman looked up with interest – forced or genuine, I could not tell. This world I had entered was quasi-oriental in its inscrutability. My normal judgement of character and body language was ineffective.

‘Did you like it?’ asked the old woman.

‘Very much,’ I said.

‘Yes, it was good,’ she said, nodding her head. ‘It was long.’

‘When did you finish?’

‘Oh … when the sun came up,’ she said.

That must have been four or five in the morning …

We sat waiting. I studied the extension of rooms behind the terreiro where the women and initiates-to-be lived. Terreiros subsist on the contribution of the faithful. One way of making money – especially in Umbandá – is to train initiates to tell fortunes by throwing the búzios and performing charms. But mostly the terreiro survives on alms and donations.

‘Is the pai-de-santo in?’ I asked.

The twelve-year-old looked at me, expressionless as usual.

‘The pai-de-santo is not in today’

I turned to Nelson.

‘No pai, no mãe,’ I said. ‘I feel like an orphan.’

‘Wait,’ he said. ‘Dona Tania will come.’

‘And I will ask her about the association between gay men and candomblé.’

Nelson looked up.

‘She will do your búzios,’ he said. ‘That’s what I told her.’

I pounced.

‘That is not what I wanted.’

The little girl leapt up.

‘There is Dona Tania,’ she announced.

The majestic, burly queen of Monday’s trance walked up the hill with her shopping. She nodded to us in acknowledgement and went into the back quarters.

‘And how much will this consulta cost me?’ I asked, becoming increasingly pissed off with Nelson.

He wavered a trifle too long.

‘For you, 150 reais,’ he said.

The rent of a house in Saúde for a month.

I went ballistic.

‘That’s it,’ I said. ‘I’m going. Sorry Nelson, you’ve been wasting my time. Goodbye.’

The old woman and the girl stood by blankly.

I rushed down the steep hill steps. Nelson and the Angolan cock ran behind me.

‘Dona Tania is the best,’ Nelson cried.

‘I don’t care. I’m not paying through the nose for something I don’t want.’

‘Dona – Tania – will – be – upset,’ I heard his voice dictate gravely.

By then we had reached the bottom. I confronted him.

‘If she knows everything, she’ll know it’s your fault,’ I said.

Nelson looked dejected. At last, an emotion.

‘How much do you want to pay?’

‘You should pay me for wasting my time! Do you know how much I charge per hour back home?’

‘What about my time?’ asked Nelson. ‘I took you to my home, the terreiro.’

I pulled twenty reais from my sock so hard I nearly ripped it.

‘Take that and disappear from my life,’ I said. ‘JUST GO!’

‘Only twenty reais?’ insisted Nelson.

I flagged down a cab.

‘Do you know something Nelson? You constantly try to rip me off and make me do what you want. Why? Because I’m just a source of money to you. This is not the basis of a friendship or even of a commercial relationship. I suggest you start seeing the tourists with the same positive attitude and respect they try to approach you with.’

I moved inside next to the driver. ‘Now get out of my life. I don’t want a guide in Salvador.’

The last I heard Nelson shout was: ‘DONA TANIA WILL BE VERY UPSET.’

Mèfà

To you a candle is only a piece of wax with a wick down the middle. But tell me my son, is a candle lit during a blackout and a candle offered to a god exactly alike? One is filled with your hopes, the other with your anger at being left in the dark. What really counts is what you put into things. Human beings are not aware of all their powers. Not a single gesture you make is without consequence, without effect. Every motion, every action, has invisible repercussions which create a presence that surrounds you. One day this presence which you create by yourself will reveal itself to you in broad daylight. It’s odd, you have no problem in accepting the existence of ideas such as liberty, will and so on. But you can’t understand the idea of power. Yet right under your nose every single day are examples of relationships between forces and their results. I suppose it’s primarily a question of vocabulary. You were taught to classify things under a certain label, and now you no longer see the things themselves.

From ‘Macumba’ by Serge Bramly: mãe-de-santo Maria-José talking to the author.

The taxi left me on Campo Grande, the big, unmanageable, featureless square at the bottom of the old town. I wandered aimlessly until I found myself by the Museum of Arte Sacra. The edifice itself is much more interesting than the exhibition, and a huddle of design students were squatting around in the extensive gardens with their sketchbooks and pens. A few young barefoot black males hidden in door thresholds observed me and my backpack as I walked down the salubrious Ladeira da Conceição. I was descending to the Low City – A Cidade Baixa – and the houses were leaning on the rock, multiple-storeys high, like skyscraper fronts for troglodytes. You might think that they looked smart and chic, but favelisation has long gnawed away any grace the façades might have had, even 50 years ago when Dona Flor descended those same ladeiras – I mean would have done had she not been a fictional character. I walked into the startling canary-yellow 1930s Mercado Modelo municipal market, a tropical version of Istanbul’s main bazaar. Olodum T-shirts, linen, acarajé paste in powder form, spices, art galleries, clothes, sacred herbs for orixás, necklaces, drinks, tacky souvenirs, gems, more clothes, wooden sculptures, plastic trinkets, paintings, pendants, Brazilian football kits, Renaldo tops – all in stalls whose proprietors seemed rooted at the spot for decades and who could suss you out in a second (‘Is he a potential buyer – is he not?’) like this old, mean and mingy Baiana in white robes – she must be an initiate – who saw me checking out her wares.

Then her pupils turned white, she moved suddenly forward and hissed at me like a caged rat.

*****

I withdrew to my hotel after an early dinner in the Largo Teresa Batista – bobó de camarão – that exquisite king prawn dish of coriander, tomatoes, mashed yams and palm oil which epitomises Bahian cuisine. Pelourinho looked empty after Tuesday’s drum extravaganza and resembled an armed camp even at seven in the evening. I had spent my day walking around the lower city, trying to shake off the still vivid memory of the scary spectacle I had witnessed in the Mercado Modelo. Unsurprisingly, I had developed a headache. I took two Solpadeines. Normally their combination of paracetamol, caffeine and codeine works wonders – but to no avail: my pain was sinus pain, deep below the eyes. When I walked into the bathroom to clear my head, I crashed my skull into the shower. Fuck! By the time I was towelling myself, I had a bump large enough to harbour a botfly. I lay on my bed with a sense of unease compounded by the unexpected pain.

I closed my eyes; I was a child in Athens – I was ill, and I was crying. My mother was crossing my face, murmuring some tune and slightly touching her teeth with her tongue three times, as if spitting without saliva. ‘Ptumas,’ she said. ‘Someone’s jealous of you my darling, you’re so cute, and they’re jealous.’ She put a pendant around my neck with a single blue bead and put me to sleep, which cured whatever symptoms I might have had. I learned later that she’d performed a kind of exorcism – common in the Mediterranean, where the evil eye is a fact of faith as unshakeable as sunrise and sunset – an exorcism transmitted and performed only by female relatives, which had ruled me out. I wondered if it worked long-distance.

‘Sleep,’ I said loudly to myself. ‘Sleep.’

The spell will happen anyway, Nelson had said.

*****

The noise woke me up in the middle of the night. Tok-tok-tok. I turned over. Tok-tok-tok. I looked at my watch. It was 2 a.m. Are they doing roof repairs at night? I tried to go back to sleep. Tok-tok-tok. The clanking noise went on at staggered intervals. There was no doubt. Someone was hammering on the roof and more fool me for being on the top floor and next to the elevator shaft, which acted as a noise amplifier. What kind of hotel was this, planning its maintenance at night?

I turned the light on and called reception. Reception didn’t answer. And didn’t answer. And didn’t answer.

Tok-tok-tok. The noise was driving me nuts.

I jumped out of bed, dressed my nakedness in shorts and sandals, left the room and took the lift to the ground floor.

To my surprise, there was someone at reception. My call must have woken him up.

‘Excuse me,’ I said angrily. ‘I was ringing for ages; why didn’t you answer the phone?’

The receptionist was unruffled.

‘The phone didn’t ring,’ he said. ‘Are you sure you dialled reception and not, say, the washroom?’

I let it pass.

‘There’s a lot of banging on the seventh floor,’ I said. ‘Are there any workers on the roof?’

He seemed genuinely surprised. ‘At this time of night? Certainly not on ours. Let me come up with you.’

We took the lift up to my floor and stood listening.

Nothing.

‘They must be taking a break,’ I said. ‘Believe me, they’ve been knocking for at least half an hour.’

‘Well, they’ve stopped now,’ said the receptionist, shrugging his shoulders. ‘Is there anything else I can do?’

I was going to say ‘Give me your strongest painkiller’ as my headache was still raging, but I thanked him and sent him down.

I turned the light off and curled back into bed.

When I was about to drift halfway between consciousness and alpha-wave emission, the noises started again – tok-tok-tok. This time, however, they appeared to be emanating from within me: I was about to dream I couldn’t sleep because of noises coming from the roof. I felt unable to stop the slide into semi-consciousness; the more I was sucked in, the louder the noises became. Where before there was just a whiff of suspicion regarding their presence, there now existed a near-audible reality. That’s it: I was to fall asleep but dream of the noise that would not let me rest.

There is a word for such a state..

I jumped up all sweaty. I listened for the clanging and the hammering. Not a sound. If I went to sleep they’d start again; I was sure of that. My watch showed that an hour had passed since I was last fully awake. I stood there and breathed in a couple of times. I picked up the phone and carefully made sure I dialled reception. They answered promptly this time. I cleared my throat. How much of what I remembered was true and how much a vivid dream?

‘This is the gentleman from 713,’ I said. ‘Remember I complained about some noise?’

‘They started again?’ the receptionist asked.

I breathed out with relief. I had not dreamt everything.

‘Listen,’ I dissembled. ‘I can’t sleep here.’

The receptionist remained silent.

‘Is there another room I could move to?’

‘We can arrange one for you tomorrow,’ he replied.

‘NOW!’ I said, raising my voice. ‘I want to move now.’

‘Now? It’s three-thirty in the morning, senhor.’

‘NOW! I want to move now,’ I insisted.

I heard him shuffling some papers.

‘There is one room three floors down,’ he said. ‘It’s a twin, whereas now you have a double bed.’

‘It will do fine,’ I said instantly.

And so it came to pass that at 3.30 in the morning I moved to a room which was surprisingly bigger and better than the first, having exhausted the patience of the receptionist who helped me pack and carry my stuff helter-skelter. Don’t shout, I gave him a decent tip.

No one knows my new room number now.

I went on to sleep like a log.

Mèje

As João Trevisan, a Brazilian gay activist, writes in his book Perverts in Paradise, only women, because of their sex, are suitable to deal with the deities. It may be the nourishing Mother Earth nature of the feminine, for the divine in candomblé is downright physical: orixás eat and have special alimentary preferences, instantiate themselves corporeally after being summoned carefully by the musicians – the rhythmic patterns I heard in the feast of Ogum were as carefully and strictly memorised note for note as a Bach music score, else the gods would not recognise them – and have palpable human qualities, like the Greek and Roman gods with their jealousies, adulteries and tribulations. It was thus considered ‘unmanly’, if not blasphemous, for males to function as priests, and candomblé has an ecclesiastical order to match the Vatican’s. Unlike the Catholic Church, though, tradition was relaxed to admit men in the priesthood – what a fabulous counterpoint to the Christian debate on the ordination of women – though the central precept of the supremacy of femininity remained the cornerstone of candomblé doctrine. This laxity was the result of a syncretism not with Christianity but with native beliefs: the caboclos and pretos velhos, the ancestors and forest spirits of the Tupi and Tapuia were also introduced into the worship, like saints were in Christianity and Islam. Except that the native Amerindians’ medicine men, the pagés, were homosexual or bisexual because of their ‘feminine’, ergo mystical, qualities. This is how Brazilian Oxumarê turned androgynous – to refuse homosexuals in candomblé was to refuse the god himself.

And they’re not only welcome – they’re revered.

*****

All those days in Salvador and I hadn’t left the central area, so my headache, my Solpadeines and I decided to walk several miles down the beach to Barra and relax after last night’s tension. The gaze of the personnel at Hotel Palace followed me around with disquiet. My nocturnal shenanigans, which seemed so silly in the light of day, must have made the office rounds.

After the dilapidation, dereliction and desuetude of the old district, it was a relief to walk in the modern, refined streets of Barra and its strikingly parvenu shopping centre. Barra Beach, coming after the sandy wonders of Fortaleza, Recife and Maceió, was several strokes below par, but watching the surf that sunny afternoon was exactly what I wanted to do. Perhaps I should leave that compromised Hotel Palace and move to Barra for the rest of my stay in Salvador.

I lay down, closed my eyes and tried to relax the headache away.

I woke up, having dozed off for a few hours, a no-no in my health ledger, and highly out of character. Thankfully, I was wearing a baseball cap which protected me from sunstroke. I had slept badly overnight, so I suppose the nap was understandable – but it still did my headache no good.

If this persists, I’ll have to go to a farmácia.

Things I Like About Brazil #6: The Farmácias

They are not just chemists or drugstores. These are places open 24 hours a day were you can buy aspirins, insecticides, sun protection cremes, aphrodisiac ampoules and sanitary towels (not, I should advertise that I ever needed one); where you can be sure to find laxatives, antiemetics and antidepressants, vitamin C and toilet paper, steroid creams and antimycotics, cortisone pills and antihistamines; where medical prescriptions are considered red tape and the pharmacist is nurse and doctor (‘Do you want the amoxycyllin in pills of 100 or 500mg? Will thirty do?’) and where in smaller towns you can still find scales for the microsale of salts from magnesium oxide to antimony potassium tartrate.

It is a hypochondriac’s paradise, and I love it.

I had a coffee (com leite frio – something which perplexes Brazilians) in one of the waterfront cafés, in full sight of the Farol de Barra, the most famous sight in Salvador, theme of a thousand postcards. It is really called the Fort of Santo Antônio de Barra constructed in the mid-1580s, though it was unable to repel the Dutch 40 years later. When the Portuguese returned, they started building an estimated 450 fortifications on the coast. As I walked vacantly sun-dazed to the Farol de Barra, now containing the Nautical Museum of Bahia, I noticed a couple of Baianas selling food opposite the building. One of them looked at me directly as I passed. I recognised her immediately with alarm.

It was Dona Tania.

So this is what she does when she’s not answering the calls of the gods. She’s a plain acarajé lady.

I entered the Nautical Museum to collect my thoughts. I went past the shipping exhibits on mental automatic pilot until I found myself on the inner, elevated bailey with its old cannons, crenels, watchman towers and wonderful bay views. The sun was going down, but idyllic was not my disposition. I looked towards the front of the fort. I could only distinguish the silhouettes of the Baianas; Dona Tania was still there.

Once you enter candomblé you never leave it, Nelson had said.

I despaired. He might be right. Did I stay a tad too long in the terreiro and witness something I shouldn’t have? Was I hexed? Is there an offering to Exú on some street corner with candles and my name on it? They have even followed me to Barra. Perhaps I should leave Salvador. If I could only enter Dona Tania’s head, I would persuade her that it was Nelson who was responsible for yesterday’s mix-up. I wanted an interview, not a consultation. It was he who had interfered and wasted everyone’s time, part ripping me off, part befriending me, part manipulating me. If Dona Tania was angry at someone it should be him. If Dona Tania was so powerful, she should be able to read my thoughts and realise that I am sensitive to her religion and what it stands for, considerate to the memory of her ancestors and their fate – so why hound me?

It’s unfair Dona Tania – it’s unjust!

I left the museum furtively and walked up towards Vitória, avoiding the women. Then I stopped. Surely running away was not the solution. Better talk to Dona Tania face to face; ask her if I’m being followed; convey to her verbally what I’d been thinking inside the Farol. Agitated and flushed, I crossed the road just before the Forte de Santa Maria and approached the Baianas from behind.

‘Com licença,’ I said to Dona Tania as she turned her head.

I gasped. I couldn’t have been more shocked had I been whacked with Iansã’s featherduster.

This was not Dona Tania.

‘Acarajé?’ she asked.

I stood there even more shocked than when I saw her. I mean when I thought I’d seen her. Had I seen her? Well, not her as in ‘her’, but ‘her’ as in Dona Tania.

I recovered my verbal abilities enough to ask for the bus stop. She pointed at a spot a few yards away. What a jerk I must have seemed …

Or better put – what a jerk I was. How could Dona Tania even be selling anything? I’d been told she lived from charity alone. I’d made a mistake. All this fucking mumbo-jumbo, all this superstition coming from within, all this make-believe: changing rooms in the middle of the night, imagining noises, wanting to leave town, devising supernatural scenarios, conjuring up visions – John, you’re such a receptive, credulous headcase.

It was when I stepped on the bus that I realised my splitting headache had gone.

*****

The bus took me to the Praça da Sé. I walked by the Elevador Lacerda to watch the sunset and instinctively took the lift down. It’s so cheap, only five centavos, and the gravitational pull as you arrive moves your guts in that special, nauseating way I enjoy.

I looked at my watch. It was about 5 p.m. Any monument still open to take my mind off things?

A bus came, heading towards Bonfim. I hopped on impulsively to visit the famous Senhor do Bonfim, a church that has been identified with Oxalá/Jesus for centuries, a common place of worship for candomblé initiates and Catholics alike, a church whose steps are ritually washed by believers during one of Salvador’s most famous festivals, the Lavagem do Bonfim, an extraordinary church where miracles are an everyday expectation.

I should have known that it would be far from the fact that the church is never shown on the maps of central Salvador, but I’d never have guessed how far. In Salvador’s traffic, it took me one whole hour to get there and by the time I reached the square in front, night had fallen and the church’s edges were accentuated by illuminations. It was time for Vespers and the Praça was teeming with relic vendors; it’s so easy to fulfil your wishes here – buy a multi-coloured ribbon, a ‘Lembrança do Bonfim’, tie it around your wrist and make a wish. When it falls off, your wish will be granted.

I walked into the church along with many believers; amputees crawled up the steps unaided; old black women in those familiar white robes, straight out of some terreiro, kneeled and prayed, rosaries in hand; young and old responded to the Catholic priest who conducted the ceremony for the packed congregation. There were pictures hanging in the annex; pictures of people with ill-health who had believed and hoped for a miracle; there were scores of replica hands, heads, legs and arms next to the obligatory donation boxes for God, some God, to cure. It’s odd looking at churches as architectural gems, admiring the gold and silver and works of art and not experiencing their raison d’être: liturgy and collective prayer, the communal sorting out of ‘Who am I?’.

So who am I?

I know I am the sum of my experiences, the behaviour of my parents and the lottery of my genes. But I don’t know the Real Me, because I live within my Gestalt. The only way I can answer the question is to look at myself from the non-transparent face of a double mirror. And in the modern global village, disentangling the knots is more difficult than ever.

However, there is one knot somewhere I know not, that’s been untied.

We in the West took a wrong turn long ago, after the words were uttered: eat my bread for it is my flesh; drink the wine for it is my blood. We took a wrong turn, for we abstracted. That has been our problem ever since – living in our heads, observing, but not seeing. And when we tried to picture God again, it was already too late: we’d lost the plot, for we had trekked too far up the ersatz path. God is not a wise old man sitting on a cloud sticking out his index finger to a naked Adam – and oh, how skin colour matters – as Michelangelo would have us believe; God is not a jealous entity barking down commands from Mount Sinai on a chosen race – and oh, how race matters; God certainly does not wear a turban and decree that a woman is half a man’s worth – and oh, how gender matters. If God exists, She is mysterious indeed, but She’s around us, and I’d like to meet Her.

Well, maybe I have.

© John Malathronas 2003