Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [77]
Hearing them talk about these cults convinced me that at least ideological suction, down there, swirled in the opposite direction. They described a panorama of internal migrations back and forth, the disinherited of the north moving down toward the industrial south, where they became subproletarians in immense smog-choked metropolises, eventually returning in desperation to the north, only to repeat their flight southward in the next cycle. But many ran aground in the big cities during these oscillations, and they were absorbed by a plethora of indigenous churches; they worshiped spirits, evoked African divinities...And here Amparo’s comrades were divided: some considered this a return to their roots, a way of opposing the white world; others thought these cults were the opiate with which the ruling class held an immense revolutionary potential in check; and still others maintained that the cults were a melting pot in which whites, Indians, and blacks could be blended—for what purpose, they were not clear. Amparo had made up her mind: religion was always the opiate of the people, and pseudo-tribal cults were even worse. But when I held her by the waist in the escolas de samba, joining in the snaking lines to the unbearable rhythm of the drums, I realized that she clung to that world with the muscles of her belly, her heart, her head, her nostrils...Afterward, she was die first to offer a bitter, sarcastic analysis of the orgiastic character of people’s religious devotion—week after week and month after month—to the rite of carnival. Exactly the same sort of tribal witchcraft, she would say with revolutionary contempt, as the soccer rituals in which the disinherited expended their combative energy and sense of revolt, practicing spells and enchantments to win from the gods of every possible world the death of the opposing halfback, completely unaware of the Establishment, which wanted to keep them in a state of ecstatic enthusiasm, condemned to unreality.
In time I lost any sense of contradiction, just as I gradually abandoned any attempt to distinguish the different races in that land of age-old, unbridled hybridization. I gave up trying to establish where progress lay, and where revolution, or to see the plot—as Amparo’s comrades expressed it—of capitalism. How could I continue to think like a European once I learned that the hopes of the far left were kept alive by a Nordeste bishop suspected of having harbored Nazi sympathies in his youth but who now faithfully and fearlessly held high the torch of revolt, upsetting the wary Vatican and the barracudas of Wall Street, and joyfully inflaming the atheism of the proletarian mystics won over by the tender yet menacing banner of a Beautiful Lady who, pierced by seven sorrows, gazed down on the sufferings of her people?
One morning Amparo and I were driving along the coast after having attended a seminar on the class structure of the lumpen-proletariat. I saw some votive offerings on the beach, little candles, white garlands. Amparo told me they were offerings to Yemanja, goddess of the waters. We stopped, and she got out and walked demurely onto the sand, stood a few moments in silence. I asked her if she believed in this. She retorted angrily: How could I think such a thing? Then she added, “My grandmother used to bring me to the beach here, and she would pray to the goddess