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

into a plate of salt and poured it on the skull, which they called ‘kiyumba.’ He was singing, ‘Fogoro yarifo, menga corre menga sangra sala lai la lai la,’ and he cut the goat’s head off with a sawing, slicing motion. Terrible, terrible. He placed it in the pot, atop the skull, and the drums exploded, Addie, all around, people chanted, prayed, and wailed, it was a Babel pierced with shrieks and moans of ecstasy. They threw themselves into the dance, they whirled and lost themselves, and after some time, one woman screamed and fell. People caught her arms. They supported her as her limbs jerked and quivered. Then she grew still. The tension left her face. She looked, briefly, like someone who was drunk, so drunk she couldn’t keep her eyelids open. Only a thin white sliver remained visible, and a rim of iris like a sun, a black sun creeping up over a hill. But there was something else there, too, Addie, not drunkenness, some awareness, still and old and deeply self-possessed. And then she stood and opened her eyes, and I was terrified for the first time. Because I saw her fall, Addie. I saw her close her eyes. When she opened them again, she was someone else. Her eyes were like eternity, two black lakes of thunder in which I saw the lightning flash. I’m forty-five years old, I’ve looked into my share of faces, but I’ve never seen a human being look like that. And when she began to speak, it was in a different voice, a man’s, commanding, deep. She picked people from the crowd and upbraided them. She told one man to give up alcohol for forty days, another to stop eating shrimp.

“Then suddenly she turned to me and something happened. My head began to swim. I felt light-headed, ill, and then my body caught on fire. I looked into her pupils, and there were what looked like sparks or fireflies swarming there, constellations of swirling stars, and they flew close, and I realized they were spirits, Addie, angels, ghosts, I did not know what they were, but I wasn’t frightened anymore. They were clothed in radiant white, clapping their hands and singing. I realized they were welcoming me. And I looked down and saw the courtyard where the dancers were, I saw Demetrio and Esperanza. I saw Clarisse kneeling beside a writhing body. Mine. I was lying on the stones. I’d left my body, Addie. It had fallen down, and I had left it, and these radiant presences, these beings of light, I wanted to go to them, to stay. I didn’t see my mother, but I knew she would be there, and these others, they would show the way. And I knew, too, that I would have to die to go. I knew that I was dying even then. I don’t know how I knew, Addie, many things were clear to me, and I will tell you, I was not afraid of dying, no, I wanted to, death seemed no more than opening a door and walking into the next room. And like that”—he snaps his fingers now—“they scattered. I fell to earth.

“I came to on the riverbank. The drumming went on, but it was in the distance now. I was naked to the waist. I was wet. Clarisse was washing me with something, some liquid—there was rum in it, and spice, albahaca…what is it called? Basil, basil, yes, of course, and pepper—the same thing they used to wash the goat. It’s called chamba, and it is to them like chrism is to us. She was weeping. I took her hand and asked her what was wrong. She told me the nkisi, the spirit that had mounted the woman and then passed into me, had said, through my own lips, that we could never marry, must not, that to be together would be a pollution. I was stunned. I asked her why. She shook her head. ‘The spirits don’t always give us reasons.’ ‘And you accept it?’ I asked. ‘You accept the end of everything we’ve felt and been to each other, just like that?’ She took my hands in hers. ‘Harlan,’ she said, ‘this is my faith. This house, this rama, is my house. It is my church. Demetrio and Esperanza are its priests. They are my mother and father. I’ve taken vows to them and to the nfumbi, the muertos of this line. To break them would invite their wrath.’ I couldn’t understand, Addie, I was hurt and reeling. I said, ‘The dead? What have they to do with us, the living? I’ve given up the life I would have had for you. What we feel, I’ve never felt before. Have you? Look me in the face and tell me it is not the same for you. Look me in the face and tell me you accept that it is wrong to love like this.’ But she couldn’t, Addie. She could not. Clarisse just looked at me with those dark eyes, and said, ‘Do you have any notion what you’re asking me to do? Do you have any notion of the price it would require not just of me, but of you?’ I said, ‘No, I don’t, none at all, I only know, whatever it may be, I’m prepared to pay.’ She gazed at me for a long time, Addie, and then she said, ‘Pues, que así sea’—‘So be it’—and she stood up and took my hand and led me into the grass beneath the willow trees.” He pauses now. His gaze trains over her left shoulder.

“It is a story, Harlan,” Addie whispers, and she is weeping now. “You should have married her, not me.”

“So I intended, Addie. Clarisse accepted me that day. We were lovers for three years, almost four. We became engaged. Weighing our situation, we both felt we had to tell Paloma and my father face-to-face. So, we booked passage home to Charleston. We boarded the