Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [84]
Amparo put her hand on his. “Take us!” she said. “I went to one many years ago, in a tenda de umbanda, but I can’t recall much about it. All I remember is great turmoil.”
The physical contact embarrassed Aglie, but he didn’t take his hand away. He did something I later saw him do in moments of reflection: reaching into his vest with his other hand, he took out a little gold-and-silver box with an agate on the lid. It looked like a snuffbox or a pillbox. There was a small wax light burning on the table, and Aglie, as if by chance, held the box near it. When exposed to heat, the agate’s color could no longer be discerned, and in its place appeared a miniature, very fine, in green, blue, and gold, depicting a shepherdess with a basket of flowers. He turned it in his fingers with absent-minded devotion, as if telling a rosary. When he noticed my interest, he smiled and put the object away.
“Turmoil? I hope, my sweet lady, that, although you are so perceptive, you are not excessively sensitive. An exquisite quality, of course, when it accompanies grace and intelligence, but dangerous if you go to certain places without knowing what to look for or what you will find. Moreover, the umbanda must not be confused with the candomble”. The latter is completely indigenous—Afro-Brazilian, as they say—whereas the former is a much later development born of a fusion of native rites and esoteric European culture, and with a mystique I would call Templar...”
The Templars had found me again. I told Aglie I had studied them. He regarded me with interest. “A most curious circumstance, my young friend, to find a young Templar here, under the Southern Cross.”
“I wouldn’t want you to consider me an adept—”
“Please, Signor Casaubon. If you knew how much nonsense there is in this field.”
“I do know.”
“Good. But we’ll see one another soon.” In fact, we arranged to meet the next day: all of us wanted to explore the little covered market along the port.
We met there the next morning, and it was a fish market, an Arab souk, a saint’s-day fair that had proliferated with cancerous virulence, like a Lourdes overrun by the forces of evil, wizard rainmakers side by side with ecstatic and stigmatized Capuchins. There were little propitiatory sacks with prayers sewn into the lining, little hands in semiprecious stones, the middle finger extended, coral horns, crucifixes, Stars of David, sexual symbols of pre-Judaic religions, hammocks, rugs, purses, sphinxes, sacred hearts, Bororo quivers, shell necklaces. The degenerate mystique of the European conquistadors was owed to the occult knowledge of the slaves, just as the skin of every passerby told a similar story of lost genealogies.
“This,” Aglie said, “is the very image of what the ethnology textbooks call Brazilian syncretism. An ugly word, in the official view. But in its loftiest sense syncretism is the acknowledgment that a single Tradition runs through and nurtures all religion, all learning, all philosophy. The wise man does not discriminate; he gathers together all the shreds of light, from wherever they may come...These slaves, or descendants of slaves, are therefore wiser than the ethnologists of the Sorbonne. At least you understand me, do you not, lovely lady?”
“In my mind, no,” Amparo said. “But in my womb, yes. Sorry, I don’t imagine the Comte de Saint-Germain ,ever expressed himself in such terms. What I mean is: I was born in this country, and even things I don’t understand somehow speak to me from somewhere...Here, I believe.” And she touched