Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [102]
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. Aglie 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,” Aglie 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,” Aglie 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.
Aglie 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.”
Aglie understood my uneasiness and suggested we go to an all-night bar in Cppacabana.
At the bar I didn’t speak. Aglie 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 orixas, 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 long-distance 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