Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [101]
The drums beat, the pontos rose in the air thick with fumes. I was holding Amparo’s arm when all of a sudden her hands were sweating, her body trembled, and her lips parted. “I don’t feel well,” she said. “I want to go.”
Aglie 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 agog6, 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, Aglie was to talk to me about the diiference 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 agogd, 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 6 de veludo, rebordado todo em ouro, o seu garfo 6 de prata, muito grande e seu tesouri...Pomba Gira das