Lorna wonders if she has taken some drug. She is starting to feel a little nauseated now, from the smells and the heat and the closeness. Mrs. Paz holds her arm and guides her around the room, greeting people, introducing her son and his friend to others, and exchanging a few words in a language Lorna doesn’t know. Mrs. Paz explains that it is Lucumi, the language of the religion, from Africa.
The other people have the worn faces of the hardworking non-rich Cubans of Miami, the moppers of floors, the caretakers of the old, the sandwich makers. Many of these people are dressed in odd colors, and Mrs. Paz explains that these indicate the particularsantos, theorishas, to whom they are bound: white for Obatala the Calmer; red and white for Shango, spirit of force; yellow for Oshun, the Venus of Africa; green and black for Ogun, the Warrior; blue and white for Yemaya, the Mother, the Sea.
“That’s you,” says Lorna.
“Yes, I’m made to Yemaya for many years now. Now, look, you see we have palm leaves all over the walls and the ceiling, because in Africa we danced under the sky in groves of trees.”
“What are all those yams?” Lorna has located the source of the earthy odor. There are perhaps two hundred large yams piled around a pedestal draped in elaborately beaded yellow and green silk brocade. Similar brocade hangs as a canopy from the ceiling. Dozens of candles flickered around it, interspersed with cut coconuts and opened bottles of beer, soda, and rum.
“Gifts to Ifa,” said Mrs. Paz, “this is hissopera, that pot, you see, it contains hisfundamentos, his sacred stones, and all of these, these little statues and medals, these are gifts from those he has helped.”
Mrs. Paz falls into conversation with a small man dressed all in white, thesantero, Pedro Ortiz, and Paz whispers into Lorna’s ear, “Are you having fun yet?”
“It’s…fascinating,” she whispers back, but when she looks at his face she is astounded to observe that he is frightened. His mother appears at his side with two stern-looking women, and after a short conversation in rapid Spanish, the three of them whisk Paz out of sight.
Then without any particular signal or announcement, the drums start to beat. The throng reassembles itself before the drums, leaving a small sickle-shaped area of floor vacant. Lorna has never heard drumming like this; it is entirely different from the drumming of popular music, even Cuban popular music, enormously complex, like a language, dense with data, insistent; she feels her body taken over by it in a disturbing way. The people are swaying now, and chanting: ago ago ago. She sways with them despite herself.
Now people are entering the dancing area, they are barefoot, and although they are middle-aged women and men they appear to move with the grace of professionals. Lorna looks past them to the people standing on the other side of the dance floor and sees Jimmy Paz. He is dressed in a white robe and has a white cloth wrapped around his head. His face is blank, no, not blank exactly but presenting an expression she has never seen on it before, not at all an American face anymore, more like a carving in some tawny wood. She feels like an alien here, and fear starts to tug. The embarrassment monster cranks up in her head, What are you doing here this is crazy what are you doing with this idiotic relationship what will your friends say…? The chants grow louder and louder, drowning out the monster’s voice. Then, suddenly, the drums fall silent.
Something has changed in the room. Lorna is aware of it without knowing just what it is. The air seems cooler and drier, but at the same time harder to see through. The faces of the people glow oddly, and seem mysteriously beautiful. When she was in college Lorna took LSD several times and she recognizes this state as similar: something has happened to her brain. She knows she should be concerned but is not. She turns to the woman next to her and whispers in her primitive Spanish, “Why did they stop? What’s happening?”
The woman says, “Eshu has opened the way for theorishas.”
The drums start up again, a quite different rhythm than before. Now there is another dancer on the floor, and Lorna sees that it is Mrs. Paz. Her dance is a swooping undulating thing, all waves and spray, with a balanced force underlying the moves. The image of the sea pops into Lorna’s mind and she seems to scent salt air and coolness. The people are chantingOke oke Yemaya l’odo, l’ari oke. The drumming reaches a crescendo, the higher pitched drum utters a set of sharp reports, and Mrs. Paz falls to the ground as if shot. Women surround her, help her to her feet, and take her away. The drums are silent, people are chattering now as if at an intermission. Lorna asks the same woman what has happened. The woman smiles and in English says, “Theorisha has arrived. Yemaya is here.”
Mrs. Paz comes back to the room, and now Lorna for the first time feels a thrill of real fear, because this can’t be happening. They have decked her in a cloak of blue and white that has thousands of small seashells worked into its surface and must weigh twenty pounds, but Mrs. Paz carries it like chiffon. She is at least ten inches taller than she was an instant ago and sixty pounds heavier, her breasts are like cannonballs and her belly is a whale’s back. Her face is stern but ineffably kind and not the face of a human being at all. Her hair has been untied and falls down her back in dense stiff coils, as if carved from ebony. The drums start up again, and the drummers sing a song in some African language. Mrs. Paz-Yemaya circulates around the dance floor, inviting people to dance and whispering things in their ears. She approaches Lorna, pulls her out onto the floor. They whirl and stamp together.
Lorna looks into the eyes of theorisha of maternity and of the sea. Now she is not at thebembe anymore. She is lying with her mother on the glider on the porch of their beach house on the Jersey shore. She is four. They are alone in the house, the father and brother are off somewhere, and she has her mother all to herself. They are examining Lorna’s shell collection, talking quietly, her mother reads fromThe Golden Book of Seashells. Lorna can smell the iodine breath of the sea and her mother’s scent, sweet sweat and suntan oil. She is perfectly secure in love.
This just for an instant but so real!
Now Yemaya is stroking Lorna’s body, her hands strong and soft, it feels as if they are penetrating her flesh, stroking her insides. She is talking in a deep voice, not Mrs. Paz’s voice at all, but Lorna cannot make out the African words. Lorna feels her knees give way, but the women standing on either side of her hold her up. She feels tears breaking through, the knife-at-
the-back-of-the-throat feeling, and she now recalls that from the moment the drums started the heaviness of her impending death has been absent. But now it returns.
The drums change their song. Now they are wilder, nervose, irritating. She sees Paz has returned to the circle. He’s looking right at her but makes no acknowledgment that he’s seen her. Mrs. Paz embraces him, she seems to tower over him, she seems to pick him up as if he were a child, which Lorna knows is impossible, but she seems to observe it. People are in the way now, she can’t see them, but in any case this has become a sideshow. All eyes are fixed on a woman of about thirty with a round face, she is whirling and dancing with abandon, thrusting her hips, flailing her arms. The congregation is chanting Oya Oya, and after an impossible leap, the woman faints away. The older women help her up, they drop a tunic of maroon silk over her head and a necklace of skulls. In her hands they place a long black wooden lance, carved with figures.
Lorna asks the woman next to her what’s happening. “Oya,” says the woman, with awe in her voice. “Ruler of the dead.” Oya is a popular fellow at thebembe, it appears. People gather around him for news of the dead, and press offerings of currency to his sweat-slick skin. After a good deal of this, Oya dances with some people, a wild bacchanalian fling, and then, before she can think to resist, Lorna feels her arm grabbed with an irresistible force and she finds herself dancing with Death. Sweat is in her eyes, stinging, and that must be why she sees not a round-faced young woman but a gaunt man with eyes that seem to fill their whole sockets with black, glistening oil and she recalls with horror what she saw when Emmylou showed her the demon. Theorisha says to her be prepared this life of yours is almost over, perhaps in words, perhaps in her head. She feels light-footed, graceful, terrified, full of sexual abandon. But with the terror she feels a sense of deep comfort, for just behind her left shoulder is the loom of her mother’s being, her scent. She knows if she turns now the ghost will be there and she will lose her mind, go screaming off into the night.
Nausea rises in her throat. With a heave she breaks from her partner, pushes through the crowd, and out the front door. It is a cool night and the air outside feels like air-conditioning’s chill against her dripping face. She staggers to the curb, kneels, and pukes.
Lorna walks unsteadily away from thebembe. She finds Paz’s car, climbs in, and within minutes sinks into grateful, exhausted sleep.
When she awakens, Paz is beside her and the car is moving at speed, heading south on Ludlum.
“You all right?” he asks, when she stirs.
“I guess. Somewhat wiped out, really. What happened to you?”
“Oh, they…I participated in what they call alimpieza. I got washed and anointed in the bathroom. Now I’m
