Crossing the River (20 page)

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New Year's Eve in Salvador
New Year's Eve in Salvador

A
FTER A FULL DAY
of van and bus rides, the nine of us made it to Salvador, checked into the Barra Guest Hostel, and headed up to the Pelourinho, the historic neighborhood. We were in search of Afro-Brazilian music. The place was rocking. The sounds of drums and electric guitar ricocheted down narrow, stony streets. There were lots of talking hips and rapidly shuffling samba feet, hundreds of witty and flirtatious conversations, all spoken through the pelvis. We said the kids could wander around as long as they stuck together. I was happy just to sit and survey the scene. I had all of our credit cards, cash, and iPods and was leery of the tight crowd. From our vantage point at one end of the Terreiro de Jesus plaza, we heard several competing bands.

Skyler came running back with Carson. “Watch the guys in the back,” he said excitedly, pointing to ten or twelve guys with big round drums threading through the crowd on the right. In the back, the biggest red, yellow, and green striped drum was flipped up into the air above the drummer's head each time before he hit it. I was entranced, but I could feel my mind being pulled away. Something was happening over on the left.

Molly and Brooke suddenly appeared out of the crowd. Molly was clearly flustered. The story poured out of her.

“I didn't think I would be that scared. But it was scary.”

Big breath.

“But I'm okay. I'm okay.”

She was stoically holding back tears.

“This boy, he wasn't very old, maybe like Skyler's age? He was hanging out with us—you know, ‘Hey,
amigas.
'” She dropped into one hip in a casual, hanging-out way. “Then he just grabbed my necklace and ripped it off!”

For her sixteenth birthday, my mother had given her a gold chain with a teardrop pendant of small rubies.

“I grabbed his arm and was yelling, ‘
Cadê, cadê?
'”—Where is it?

Really, in Portuguese! I was impressed. I didn't think my mind would have jumped to a foreign language in an emergency.

“You were like a ninja,” Brooke said excitedly.

“I was hanging onto him so hard, I think I really wanted to hurt him.” Molly's mind was replaying the scene. “I've never felt like that before.”

She seemed a little alarmed.

“Then this woman found it on the ground and gave it back to me. People were so nice and helpful. The boy was scared. Can you hold these?” she asked me as she pulled her crystal studs out of her ears. “I don't want to wear them.”

It was clearly time to leave.

“I never thought it would be
that
scary,” Molly mused as we searched for a taxi. “I always thought I'd just give over my cell phone or whatever.”

We squeezed five into a car, Molly squished in between Skyler and me.

“I hope they didn't hurt the boy,” she said, her voice fading. She sounded exhausted.

As I sank back into the cushioned seat, my own complicated net of emotions started to surface: pride in my ninja daughter, relief that nothing worse had happened, and the oddly analytical parenting thought that it was good to have a few scary things happen—as long as there was no lasting harm—to help your children brace for the less nurturing parts of the world.

Northeastern Brazilians are known for their practice of Candomblé, a religion brought by the slaves that blends pantheistic beliefs from Africa with Catholicism. When Peter and I had scored our date in Salvador by ourselves three months before, we'd hired a guide to take us to a Candomblé ceremony, some of which were now open to tourists.

Our guide, Luis, was a slender, balding man, wearing white pants and a pressed button-down shirt. He led us to a van full of other
tourists, which would take us, after many stops to ask directions, to a house in a hilly, dirt-road neighborhood, about thirty minutes away. I couldn't tell if someone lived there or if it was used only for Candomblé.

That night, they would be invoking Logun Ede, one of many
orixás
, or ancestors with connections to the spirit world. People arrived, dressed in blue and yellow, the colors of this particular
orixá
. The men wore collarless African tunics and brimless caps, the women loose blouses, ankle-length ballooning hoop skirts, and wrapped headscarves—Aunt Jemima, of American-syrup fame, in brocade. Everyone shone, with sequins, satin, and borders of lace.

Inside a large room, people in everyday clothes sat in white plastic chairs set in rows at either end—women to the right, men to the left. Peter and I seated ourselves at opposite ends of the room. Leaves were strewn over the concrete floor. Fluorescent lights gave the room a bright, flat light that seemed a little surreal under the circumstance.

Three men entered and took their places behind the drums. The resounding, repetitive beat began. A stocky man sang out, and the people in the chairs responded. The others, dressed in their Candomblé clothes, began a circular dance that would go on for the next hour, step-touching in unison. They, too, sang. Each song seemed to have its special hand gestures, gestures Peter and I had seen many years before at a durbar, a gathering for chiefs, in Ghana, West Africa: a faint wave with the right hand, then with the left; stacked fists paddling right then left, all floating, dreamy.

Seamlessly, the trances began. Hands behind the back, knees buckling, a person would double over, emitting a groaning shout or several quick yips. Some shook. Those not in trance took care of them, placing a gentle hand on a shoulder, helping them to rise. All of a sudden, the whole group filed out through gold curtains into a long back hallway. The drummers took a break. Platters of savories and sweets and plastic cups of soda pop appeared, passed by some of the dancers who had just been in trance minutes before.

When the break was over, the drums started up, faster now, and out of the back hall came one man, then two, their shirts gone, their eyes closed. They danced with renewed energy, wildly spinning, step-
cross-jump, chests pumping. The onlookers clapped, faster and faster, driving the dancers. The curtains parted, and Oxum, the mother of Logun Ede, appeared, several of her, in fact, in ballooning skirts and armbands of glittering gold. Sparkling tiaras sat atop their gold head wraps; veils of beads hid their faces.

That was when the chic white woman in patent-leather sandals and a strapless hot-pink top slipped out of the chair next to mine and collapsed at my feet. The young Brazilian woman on my other side looked dismayed, but she caught the white woman's Gucci purse as she fell. The regulars looked bemused. They shook the fallen woman's shoulders and cleared strands of hair from her face, but she didn't come to. She was rolled onto her stomach and covered from head to foot with a long white lace cloth. She began to vibrate and shake, pelvis bouncing off the ground. Then they lifted her up and carted her off to the back room. I thought she was a tourist like me, but I never saw her again.

Afterward, as Peter and I trudged back up the festooned driveway, I told him about the woman next to me going into a trance.

“Luis did, too,” he told me. “He kind of fell back into my lap, then doubled over. They took him into the back room.”

As we turned into the dirt street, Luis was there. Peter put a hand on his shoulder.

“How're you doing?”

“I'm fine. I'm fine,” he said in his quick, efficient manner.

It was eleven thirty at night. People murmured quietly as the van picked its way over the ruts and through the potholes of the darkened neighborhood. I tried to sort out where we'd been—not so much geographically, but psychically. It was as though the rational bolts of my mind had been loosened, and now I wasn't quite sure how to piece it back together again.

On our return to Salvador in December, Adams, the receptionist at the Barra Guest Hostel, found a guide for us to see another Candomblé ceremony. As a child of our rational, logical, scientific, everything-is-explicable Western world, I find I never tire of seeing trance ceremonies. Here in Brazil would be the fourth time, after
Ghana and Indonesia, that I'd sit mesmerized, initially trying to explain what happened to these transformed people—where they “went”—and finally giving up. This time, we had the Kadas-Newells, Brooke, Molly, and Skyler in tow, and, to our surprise, the guide turned out to be Luis.

“This will be a little different from what you saw last time,” he told us confidentially. “It's a family ceremony. There will probably be more of us than them. They will be evoking Exu, the
orixá
of the street.”

He was right. As before, the van took us to the outskirts of Salvador and wound through dark dirt streets before stopping outside a house. Not just any house: a burned-black life-size statue of a two-legged being holding a pitchfork stood outside. We filed through a door into a courtyard, where we were each turned in a circle by a man dangling an incense burner.

As before, leaves were strewn over the floor inside the ceremonial room. The ceremony was already in progress, and the thundering pulse of three drummers filled the space. That's where the similarities ended. This time, there was no separation of men and women, and only two participants went into trance. When one reappeared, he had been dressed in red brocade pantaloons, and his bare torso was wrapped in silver fabric tied in large bows in the back, like a Christmas package.

“Dressed like the Portuguese colonists,” Luis told us.

On his head, he wore a black felt hat pierced with a feather and studded with teeth and cowry shells. Set at a rakish angle, it seemed in keeping with his strutting manner, the cigar he was smoking, and the cane he twirled like a Broadway dandy.

“Exu is open, like the street,” Luis explained. “He leads the way to opportunities. He's free. He can smoke and drink.”

Sweeping across the space with his eyes closed, he stopped quite miraculously two-inches from the stairs leading out of the room. He whipped up to a seated woman, pulled her out of her chair, kissed her on both cheeks, and proceeded right down the line until he'd kissed all of us, with his eyes closed. This was just the beginning.

Our dandy seemed to be methodically ticking through a list. He proceeded to go down the line of onlookers again, beckoning us to stand, sweeping a sheaf of leaves down our bodies top to bottom,
then, taking hold of our pinky fingers, he gave a firm downward jerk. I wondered if the kids would want to laugh, but they didn't. Molly, with her dancer's elegance, stood tall and solemn while she was cleansed, front, side, and back. Sprinkling gunpowder in the center of the floor, the dandy lit it on fire, creating a burst of sparking flame. Circus antics for the tourists? He smudged baby powder crosses on our chests and the backs of our necks and poured cologne into the palms of our hands, all with his eyes closed. Plastic cups of Fanta, guarana, and beer were passed, and then finally a basket for donations. The ceremony was over.

Adams, who had come with us, was puzzled. A Candomblé practitioner himself, he said he'd never seen a family ceremony opened to the public.

“Well, maybe it serves everyone,” Peter surmised. “We want to see what they do, and they get some money to support their ceremony.”

“Yeah, but it seems as though it might be an intimate sort of act,” I countered.

“I know. I wonder if it makes it harder to go into trance if you have all those people watching,” Molly mused.

“I thought it was interesting watching the watchers,” Mike said. “You could see some were buying into it more than others.”

The conversation went on. What part of it was African, what part Christian? Had they really been in trance, or hadn't they? Had it been authentic or faked? I wondered why that mattered so much—why it was so important to at least some of us to feel we'd seen the real thing, not just something trumped up for tourists. I've realized that one reason I travel is to feel connected to people unlike myself, so I'm grateful when they let me in, in any way at all. Performances meant for tourists almost feel like a way to keep you out, to be sure you see only the external trappings, while the heart remains hidden.

The next day in the breakfast line, Adams, a white headband pulling back his voluminous afro, showed me the cowry armband hidden under the sleeve of his polo shirt.

“I don' tell my parents I do this. They are Catholic. People say Candomblé is not good. But then you go to a ceremony, and you see them there, those same people who just criticized it. It's racism, you
know.” Like capoeira, Candomblé was still associated with blacks, even though people of many other races were becoming practitioners.

I was told there were Candomblé ceremonies in our town, in Penedo. I was curious as to whether they were similar to the ones we'd seen, but I felt hesitant to ask to watch one. In Salvador, they'd been embraced as part of the Afro-Brazilian culture that, along with capoeira, was now being marketed to tourists. In Penedo, when I'd mentioned Candomblé, people seemed a little embarrassed. Their embarrassment made me feel like a voyeur.

We were about to head into the Amazon, where Peter was hoping to meet people from the Yanomami tribe. I imagined if we could, it would be with a guide. Would what we saw be “real” then? I supposed this was part of what drew me to live in places rather than just visit, to find out what they were really like. But even then, a year was not enough.

“We're not like other hostels, you know.” Russell, the owner of the Barra Guest Hostel, was saying in his still-strong English accent. “We can't be. It's not enough to offer just a bed-and-breakfast these days. So we offer a bit more: a bit of fun, don't you know.”

It was New Year's Eve, and our hostel was putting on a dinner. I'd been last in line for the shower, so by the time I made it downstairs, Molly and Brooke were ensconced with a couple of rangy Australians. I knew Molly had been self-conscious about being younger than all the other young people, so I wondered how old she was tonight.