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L A S T + W E E K Tuesday April 29 Uzbek low tech
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Travelers' Tales: Brazil
+ + + + + + + + + + + + BY CHRISTOPHER HALL
This was my night of Candomblé, the centuries-old ritual in honor of spirits carried to the shores of the New World in the hearts of enslaved West Africans. For twenty years I had dreamed of visiting Brazil and experiencing this rite firsthand. Finally, in a country town fifteen miles outside Salvador, my night of Candomblé was unfolding. And despite those years of accumulated expectations, the night was proving far more fascinating -- and puzzling -- than I ever imagined.
The evening had not begun auspiciously. While still at the hotel, carefully dressing in the outfit of long pants and white shirt suggested by the tourism official who'd located the ceremony for me, I'd had a sudden attack of nerves. How was I going to find the terreiro, the house of worship where the Candomblé was to be held? I had only the name of the town and my rudimentary Portuguese to help me. Once I found the place, what was going to happen? Would I know what to do? And could I find a taxi or bus to take me back when the dancing and chanting stopped in the early hours of the morning? I continued to worry as I walked the few minutes to the bus stop. Sporadic, fat drops of warm rain fell from the starless sky and hit my clothes with a soft thud, leaving a pattern of blotchy dots. I found a jitney marked with the name of the town and joined a few silent locals already seated inside. We took off, plunging into the deep, humid night of the Brazilian countryside.
The jitney arrived at its destination a half-hour later, and with the help of a fellow passenger I located the terreiro -- a tin-roofed, cinder-block building set at the far end of a walled yard. Light poured from the doorless entry and its flanking pair of unglazed windows, illuminating rectangular patches of packed earth and scrubby plants. The sound of a few voices and a solitary drum drifted across the yard. I sidled up to a window and peered in.
The room had obviously been prepared for a celebration of some kind, but there was no one to be seen except four small boys. One of them stood on a drum-filled dais across the room, intently playing a conga almost as tall as himself, while the others ran between rows of wooden benches placed against the side walls. The empty concrete floor in the center of the room was strewn with hundreds of fresh leaves; overhead, zigzagging strings of white tissue-paper cutouts hung limp in the still air. The boy with the conga glanced up, spotted me, and stopped playing. A bewildered, startled look came across his face, a look that made me question whether I'd be as welcome at the ceremony as my contact had promised.
I wandered the town's one haphazardly paved street for the next hour, enduring the open stares of children and periodically checking the terreiro. Small groups of people, some dressed in their Sunday best, slowly gathered in the street outside the terreiro and quietly chatted among themselves. Eventually -- as if on some cue that to me was imperceptible -- they filtered through the dark yard and into the building. I followed them, and once inside saw that women and children were moving toward benches on the left. I headed to the right, with the men, and squeezed into a spot on the back bench. No one seemed to notice me.
Almost immediately, the drumming began. Staccato reports shot from the dais and electrified the room. Conversation stopped as we all locked our eyes on the five men beating out intricate, syncopated rhythms on throaty congas and high-pitched bongos. Outside, a crowd collected, craning their necks to get a view through the door and windows, while next to the dais a gravel-voiced man in dashiki and matching cap started to chant in an African dialect. There was a jostling at the doorway and the crowd parted. Then, one after another, thirteen hoop-skirted women slowly entered, swaying in time to the music and singing in high, nasal tones. Their dresses and elaborately tied head scarves were made of starchy, white lace, and as the women dipped and turned in their slow, undulating dance around the center of the room, a vegetal aroma rose from the carpet of leaves being ground underfoot. I could hear the hard, metallic clink of shiny bangles and amulets on the women's arms and the rustling of the innumerable strings of multicolored beads that hung from their necks. The oldest dancer -- a rail-thin woman of perhaps 80 years, whose blue-black skin hung from her face in great folds -- passed in front of me. My eyes met hers, and she smiled.
The drumming, chanting, and dancing went on for several hours. The smell of the leaves grew increasingly pungent, until it seemed I was breathing the jungle itself. My skin glistened, on the verge of full sweat, while streams of perspiration ran down the faces of the dancers. Still the drumming continued, its sinuous pattern of constantly shifting rhythms lulling me into a comfortable state of dreamy awareness.
It was then that I noticed a plump, brown-skinned woman begin to tremble as she danced no more than ten feet from where I sat. At first, her trembling didn't really register with me, but as it grew and she ultimately sank to the floor, twitching and writhing, my heart raced. It was a trance, I realized. The woman, dancing herself into a hypnotic state, would receive, and be animated by, one of the African spirits in whose honor the ceremony is held. Several dancers carried the stricken woman from the room, and for the next hour other women -- mostly dancers, but also congregants -- were struck by a trance and either led or carried away. Many of them lurched back into the room a few minutes later, still in a trance, dressed in costumes indicative of the particular spirit inhabiting them. With eyes half closed, they repeated a lumbering version of their earlier dance. One woman returned with a giant, wooden bowl balanced on her head. The bowl was filled with little fried balls of spiced bean paste, called acarajé, which I'd already seen being sold on street corners in Salvador. The acarajé was distributed to everyone in the room, and I waited until I saw the others eating theirs before I did the same. The acarajé was flavorful but dry, and like a sponge it sucked the little remaining moisture from my mouth. I suddenly craved one of the tall, ice-cold Brazilian beers I'd grown so fond of during the previous two weeks.
Finally, the plump woman herself returned, resplendent in a flowing, pink satin dress, a veil of beads covering her face and a bouquet of blood-red roses in her arms. She moved in a swaying stupor around the room, repeatedly distributing a single rose to obviously important personages until nothing was left of her bouquet but the palm frond trim, a crackly cellophane wrapper, and a ribbon tying the two together. I watched with ever-widening eyes as she rounded the end of the room, approached the spot where I sat, and came to a stop right in front of me. She grunted and shook the bouquet. I froze, and she grunted again.
What did she want me to do? Through the beads of her veil, I saw eyes rolled halfway back in their sockets. The overwhelming smell of crushed leaves seemed to have displaced all oxygen in the terreiro. In desperation, I bowed toward the woman, hoping to appease her. She howled, thrust the bouquet at me like a weapon, and held it close to my body. In a panic, feeling the gaze of 200 believers on me, I slowly reached out and took the bouquet from her. The woman immediately stopped her howling, grunted once, and moved on. The appreciative looks from my neighbors led me to believe that, starting then and there, I became an honorary member of the terreiro.
As the Candomblé ceremony wound down, I joined a trickle of congregants slipping out of the terreiro through a back door, which led to the rear garden. There, to my astonishment, I found a large party in full swing. The garden air was fresh and sweet, and overhead the cloud cover was breaking up. The leader of the terreiro, the pai-de-santo, or medium, touched my arm and smiled as he walked by. A few minutes later, one of his assistants came up and handed me a plastic cup of icy beer and a plate of food -- grilled chicken, beans, rice, manioc. I thanked him and asked how I might return to my hotel. He told me not to worry, that he'd call for a radio taxi from the airport for me and the few others who'd come on the bus. First, he said, I should eat.
So, at three in the morning, under an emerging canopy of Southern stars, I joined the others. We laughed, talked, ate, and drank together for the next hour until, finally, the party broke up and the garden emptied.
As I prepared to leave the terreiro, one of the dancers -- now fully recovered from her trance -- told me I should return the following Saturday when the ceremony would be even more beautiful. She looked genuinely disappointed when I told her I'd be back home in the States by then. Rallying quickly, she made me promise to return the next time I was in Brazil.
She had no way of knowing, of course, that it was a promise I'd already made to myself.
Christopher Hall has traveled extensively in Europe and Asia and has written for numerous newspapers and magazines. Excerpted with permission of the author from "Travelers' Tales: Brazil," article ©1996 by Christopher Hall.
Read more about Brazil in "On the Amazon: Snapshots of a Green Planet" by Isabel Allende.
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