Back to Wando Passo by David Payne (books to improve english txt) 📕

an absentee, so there was no one in the house but us. To be clear, Addie, we’d been chaste until that time, and this was by Clarisse’s choice, not mine. That night we slept in separate rooms in separate wings. On Sunday morning, the sound of drumming awakened me a little past first light. Shortly after, Clarisse knocked on my door. Understand, Addie, in all the time I’d known her, she’d dressed the way she had that first night at Tacón’s, like an unmarried Cuban girl of good descent. That morning she was someone else. She had a printed headscarf on, a red and green one of the sort they call vayajá, hoop earrings and a full skirt with petticoats. There were collares, strings of beads, around her neck and bangles on her arms. Her feet were bare.

“She led me down into the barracoon. I was the sole white person there, and the scene is one I can hardly describe to you. Addie, it was like the end of days. There were people moiling in the streets, dancing, selling jerked beef and plantains, playing games, all to the rhythm of those drums. Right out in the open, as women and children jeered and hooted, men put their cocks—forgive me—grown men put their cocks into great clay jugs to see if they could reach a layer of ash in the bottom and leave a mark. People stared and made way as we passed. I thought it was because of my white face, but then I noticed how they averted their eyes from her, as though Clarisse were some sort of royalty.

“Deeper and deeper we went, till we arrived at a small house, better than the other houses. The door was studded with cut nails and rivets in the Spanish fashion, and a design had been drawn on it in pembe, chalk, what they call a firma, a hieroglyph—I didn’t know that then. We passed through into the courtyard where the drummers were, three of them, playing on the caja, the mula, and the small one with the high tone, which is called cachimbo. The dancing was almost at a frenzy. Women with their arms akimbo made thrusting motions with their hips, advancing in a line, while others spread their arms like wings and banked and wheeled like flying birds. Clarisse introduced me to her godparents, Demetrio and Esperanza, two old Congos dressed in white. When Demetrio raised his hand, the drumming stopped.

“‘Padrino, Madrina…,’ Clarisse said in the silence, ‘Godfather, Godmother, this is Harlan, who has asked me to become his wife. I come to seek your blessing and the blessing of this munanso on our marriage.’

“Demetrio lit a cigar from the candela at his feet and, without warning, puffed the smoke directly in my face. I flinched, Addie, and several people laughed, but it was kindly laughter. I did not feel ridiculed. And then I heard a bleat and turned to see a young man leading a goat onto the patio. Demetrio unsheathed a knife and dripped the wax from a black candle in lines along the blade, each side. People began to wash the goat’s feet and its mouth, and Demetrio chanted, ‘Kiao lumbo! Kiao lumbo!’ And then he pressed the goat’s head to my genitals, to Clarisse’s breasts, and began to speak in a loud, demanding voice, Spanish mixed with words I didn’t know, ‘We are here today to ask the blessing of this rama, both the living and the dead, upon this marriage. And we invoke the nkisi, and above all, Zarabanda, by the power of these firmas, that our sister, Clarisse, may be blessed in her union with this man.’

“And then, Addie, he showed the knife to the goat, which was pulling and shitting, rolling its eyes as if it knew, and he said, ‘Buen meme, y a lesa kwame,’ ‘Good goat, you will go into a sleep.’ He sang this and then whispered something in its ears and nose, and it grew calm, Addie. It grew tame. It was the strangest thing. And then the crowd drew back, and I saw, for the first time, in the center of the patio, what the dancers had obscured, a pot, a black iron pot.”

Now the small hairs stand on Addie’s back.

“In it were the limbs of trees, many different kinds, and the horns of animals, deer, a ram; there was a machete, there were bones. Animal bones, some of them, but not all. In the center was a human skull.”

The clearing in the woods, the fallen tree, and what she saw inside…All this returns to Addie as he speaks, and she feels chilled, though these are not the sorts of chills that come from cold. And it’s curious, isn’t it, how swiftly she—who’s often smiled at “Negro superstition,” at the ax head under the mattress to cure the rheumatism, at fence-grass tea and the hurried shoving of the poker in the fire when the hoot owl cries outdoors; Addie, who all her life has encouraged her aunt’s servants’ reason, their belief in Christ—how swiftly magic, presented in this light, reenters her life as a real possibility and wipes away the mistress’s smile of condescending knowledge, leaving, in its stead, the sober stare of a small girl contemplating a dark wood at dusk.

“Demetrio presented the knife to this pot, Addie,” he goes on, “with the deference of a vassal to his lord, as though it, too, were sentient, or as though some sentient thing resided there, and the people began to sing,

“‘Ahora sí menga va corre, como corre,

Ahora sí menga va corre, sí seño,

Ahora sí menga va corre!’

“I understood the Spanish, Addie, all but that one word, ‘menga,’ which is from an older tongue, but when Demetrio plunged the knife in the goat’s throat, I understood. The word was blood, sacrificial blood, and they were singing, ‘Now the blood will flow, surely it will flow, surely now the blood will flow.’ Demetrio collected it, as it spurted, hot,