had flooded her house. She then knelt and prayed to expel this profane story from her mind. I don’t remember the other penances, only the last. The lamps were already lighting the square, and by the time the girl stopped speaking my body was weak from sweating. The penitent’s name was Maniva. Small and frail, she said she’d come from far away to work in a local politician’s house and had ended up in the orphanage. She’d studied in the missions of the Upper Rio Negro, that’s why she spoke Portuguese. Before she lived in the Vila Bela orphanage, she couldn’t stop dreaming of blood. My blood was a nightmare, the penitent said. She was about twelve years old and was already an orphan when she saw blood running from her vagina and got a fright. The first blood. She felt her head throbbing, and cried out so much with the pain that her uncle took the poor girl to be cured by the village shaman. Maniva was forbidden from entering the house because menstrual blood was harmful to the shamans. It was sacred, prohibited blood. It was sent by the spirits of nature: thunder, water, fish and even the spirits of the dead. Then the shaman said that the creator of the world sucked the powder, made from crushed paricá leaves, from his niece’s vagina when she was menstruating, asleep. Some of the powder was scattered over the lands of the peoples of the Amazon and spread throughout the forest, but only the shamans can smell the powder and see the world; only they have had the power to open people’s eyes and then transform, create and cure other beings. The girl heard this: when the shaman sucks the blood, the dust, he dies; that is to say, his soul leaves his body and travels to the other world, older than this one, the beginning of everything. He opens his arms to the clouds, embraces the sky and sings; he sits and smells several times the powder with the bone from a falcon’s leg, and so brings the other world into this one. Looking at the moving clouds, the shaman said he was in a sacred, eternal world, and so could act in the human world. He saw what I couldn’t see, what none of us can see, said Maniva. He saw the bones in his own body, and saw his soul journeying to a far distant place, until it reached the mouth of the river that flows in the depths of the earth. Then he went on climbing up a ladder, on the way to the other heaven. The most ancient shaman lives up there, on the final ladder. A sky all white and silvery. A new world. A world without disease.
When the shaman stopped speaking, Maniva’s head was no longer throbbing. She never felt pain again. But the bloody nightmares tormented her life. After her uncle died, she went to Manaus, and then came to Vila Bela with a river trader. She journeyed on, dreaming of blood until she found Mother Caminal and prayed with her to erase the nightmare. She didn’t want to remember the shaman’s words. She crossed herself, knelt down and wept, her body shaking; then she stretched her arms skyward and shouted out the name of God and the Virgin of Mount Carmel. The pilgrims’ and orphans’ applause was accompanied by shouting, and I thought about the penitent and bloody nightmares. Maniva, the pilgrims, the orphans, the nuns—was everyone going mad? It was like a hallucination as, amidst the acclamation of the Virgin, the scent of lavender sent a shiver down my spine, and I turned round to find Dinaura’s lips touching my face. She appeared without my noticing, and caressed me with warm hands that made me feverish. I felt Dinaura’s body and began to sweat, and she only went away when three drummers and a dancer entered the bandstand. They were musicians from the quilombo Silêncio do Matá, and they were the surprise of the night. One of the men lit a torch and used its heat to stretch the snakeskin of the drums. The dancer announced that they were going to perform a homage to the Virgin. Then she began to dance, alone, in the middle of the bandstand, for some minutes. The musicians remained silent. Then, in unison, the sound of the drums burst out, loud as thunder. Dinaura gripped my arm with her sweaty