Paul Gregor (aka Paul Sebescen, 1914-1988) became famous in french occult world when he published, in 1964, his famous 'Journal d'un Sorcier' (A Wizard Diary). He was relating in this book his astonishing adventures in Brazil, just after World War II, when he plunged into the world of the 'Quimbanda', the darker side of Macumba. Contrary to the pious kardecism of most Macumba branches, the Quimbanda looks like some kind of sexmagick hard-flavoured enough to scare a lot of 'sane' occultists (that is emasculated practitioners of so-called 'white magic').

Paul published the same year the 'Lettre d'un Sorcier au Pape' (A Wizard's Letter to the Pope)… some other books had been printed by the famous french publisher Julliard : 'Le Saut dans le Soleil' (1960), 'Le Cloître Vert' (1959), 'Le Pistoleiro' (1962), 'Brésil Embrasé' (1963)… He was a great writer, with an unique style, and even his thrillers are full of magickal significance.

Three works at least are somewhat famous amongst the english-speaking audience : 'Amazon Fortune Hunter' (Souvenir Press, London, 1962), 'The Jump into the Sun' (Berkley's, N.Y.), and 'Sex + Magic = Religion ?' (P. Sebescen, London, 1980).

I began a correspondence with him in 1985, which lasted until his death - I also met him at London in 1986, a nice memory. In the course of this correspondence, he sent me a copy of an unfinished 'novel' : 'Circe's Island'. I suppose Lady Death didn't allow him to achieve this work. That copy remained in my Archives for some 15 years. I think it's time now for english-speaking people to (re)discover what a strong-minded and original adventurer Paul was : that's the very reason of the electronic edition of such a witty jewel - totally unpublished. Of course, for sure, we'll never know what would have been the final missing facets…

I wonder sometimes which way he now experiences extasy, on another plane, embracing his loved one, or ones, the grin of Exù - like some kind of mystical sado-masochistic Cheshire Cat - floating over them!

Philippe Pissier, january 2003 e.v.

***

Legend : first page of typescript (Philippe Pissier's Archives : section 666 Network : subsection Paul Gregor : item # 74) : the handwriting says : "First thing : read this. Pissier : there is in this 1/3 of a future novel more MAGICAL REALITY than in all the 'occult' literature. Absolutely historic : two of three little stylizations : for exemple, Gregor never fought in the french maquis".

CIRCE'S ISLAND

Paul Gregor, 14, Elm Park Lane, London S.W.3. Tel. 352-4197.

French writer, born in Yugoslavia, 1914. Eight books published in Paris, four of them at : R. Julliard, Editeur. Two plays performed in Paris theatres. Wrote and directed two French feature-films. Shot seven documentaries in Brazil. Since 1969 : seventeen plays for Radio France (former O.R.T.F.). Enclosed : three reviews out of about fifty, published in Paris newspapers. Translated into English : 'Amazon Fortune Hunter', Souvenir Press, London and 'The Jump into the Sun', Berkley 's, N.Y. Sporadically wrote in Yugoslav and Portuguese. His acquaintance with the English language dates from his childhood.

ANALYSIS OF THE NOVEL 'CIRCE'S ISLAND'.

PRINCIPAL THEMES, knotted into a picaresque, satirically high-lighted action.

1/ Brazilian Black Magic. Particularly its most hermetic Satanic sect : the Quimbanda.

2/ The connection of Quimbanda's eroticism and its sadistic ritual with other mystical currents - the atmosphere of blood-sacrifices being (more or less overtly) the very source of all religions, of all striving towards non-Euclidian Universes of the spirit.

3/ Quimbanda's weird erotic 'technique', 'the love of the Orixas', which focuses sexual energies into burning points of fulfillment, rejuvenescence and the unfolding of creative energies.

THE SETTING OF THIS METAPHYSICAL (TRAGl) COMEDY OF (BURLESQUE) ERRORS.

Brazil, 1947. A wholly surrealistic country that has vanished, unnoticed by History, just like other less ephemeral Atlantises did. Socially : a blend of feudal, Victorian and modern elements. Emotionally : determined by the aphrodisiac of a hot and moist climate, characterized by a maniacal sexuality and boundless imagination - impregnated by the omnipresent spells of Black Magic - Iberian courtesy cohabiting with murderous instincts - calling to mind the Marquis de Sade's elucubrations rewritten by Swift - this unique world of schizophrenic poetry was swallowed years ago by the blessings of industrial progress. But not before having attained, in the 31 days of July 1947, the dramatic climax of our dubious hero's comically intertwined, basely financial and loftily esoteric pursuits.

THE PROTAGONIST'S TWISTED (IF NOT CROOKED) CHARACTER

Paul Gordan, 34, a Frenchman born in a Balkan country, with a 'solid' Byzantine (or Odyssean?) atavism in his veins has lived in Brazil since the end of the war. Ex-lawyer, ex-Davis Cup man, ex-playwright of a stage-hit in Paris before the war, ex-captain in both partisan and regular armies, polyglot, publisher, culture official in the French Embassy, he conceals behind this glittering facade the personality of an unscrupulous adventurer close to gangsterism. So he quickly becomes popular, not only with Rio's male and female snobs, but also with underworld figures and sorcerers. Being a naturally gifted hypnotist, he turns into an influential member of a particularly disquieting occult cell of the Quimbanda sect. His inborn peasant distrust and a coarse humorousness prevent this rather Rabelaisian nature from playing the part of a pompous prophet. Nevertheless his central passion is 'psychical research'. He seeks palpable proof of life beyond the grave. Quimbanda's Dionysian mysticism seems to him a path leading towards the solution of that ancient enigma. As always, his theoretical and practical interests coincide. He wants his publishing firm to become, through a considerable increase of its investment capital, a research-instrument. Teams of explorers will comb Brazil's immense territory for the countless mediumnistic phenomena, disseminated in the savage 'interior' - analysing them, writing about them and eventually finding the 'true prophet', the link between material and non-material life, in whose existence, 'somewhere in the jungle' Gordan firmly believes.

The hunch that he might himself be this extraordinary thaumaturge, brings him - through intoxication and collective hallucinations - to the verge of certifiable madness. His robustness eventually rescues him.

But from the novel's (necessarily gradual, and slow) introduction onward, he assumes the mental attitude of many a historical high-priest. He is half-seduced by his own teaching but at the same time cornered by the necessity of being an outright charlatan.

For Rio's elegant establishment is incredibly stingy. The increase of Gordan's assets requires the weaving of an intricate cobweb of spiritualist intrigue amongst the superstitious and often unbalanced members of this elite. It is this mawkish endeavour that brings about the kaleidoscopally flashing action and the hilarious counterpoint of nightmarish scenes developed in the second and third part of the narrative, as well as in the short epilogue.

(N.B. There will be 90,000 words of what could be called: 'the flight', after the first 60,000 words which assemble the plane's complex engine and describe its exploratory taxi-ing around the airport terrains. Total : about 150,000 words, of which about 50,000 are enclosed. The author is a 'fast breeder' and hopes to finish 'Circe ...' by the end of this year.)

1/ A convent of Benedictine nuns possessed by the inordinately mischievous and lascivious Chief Devil of the Quimbanda : Exu-of-the-Seven-Crossroads. A rather unorthodox exorcism, with the participation of Monsieur Anatole, a superb Alsatian dog with an abnormally high I.Q. who is a student of applied sociology.

2/ Two overwrought and frustrated lesbian ladies, desirous of changing - by the virtue of Quimbanda sacrifices - their personalities and partners: with unpleasant results which, however, lead eventually to the restoration of their friendship and 'lasting happiness', after the reversal of the all-important, 'mistress-slave' relationship between them.

3/ 'et ad infinitum'. The Swiss prophetess of the 'Two Cemetery Island' and her two guests : a monocled ex-colonel of the Habsburg-Dragoons and his equally eccentric chum, a Bavarian Baron, who fled Munich University just before the war because of a scandal in the Amphitheatre of Anatomy. Both are practitioners of an astounding genre of necrophilic homosexuality which is that much more disturbing on an Island where the 'resuscitation' of zombie-slaves from their sepulchres is a part of every day routine.

Furthermore we shall observe bi-sexual triangles (nay hexagons), compelled to alter their shapes.

There is also a motor - and racing - crazy Abbot, a scholastic philosopher who demonstrates the inspiration of the Holy Ghost by blowing into the spray nozzle of a carburetor and who commands the Benedictines' considerable fortunes.

Last but not least : Padre Walden Pereira, a midgetópriest in a greasy cassock, whose charismatic authority menaces governments, but who is nevertheless humorous and unprejudiced - ('looking over the fiery fence into the competitor's yard, trying to steal his tricks') and who helps the atheist Gordan to thwart the machinations of the 'Nunciatura' and the 'Banco dello Spirito Santo di Roma' which aim at placing the gadget-loving Abbot under a trusteeship quite contrary to the interests of these two odd cronies.

And there are so many other persons and so many quests through remote jungle hide-outs for miraculous mandragora-roots and their hanged producers - such a diversity of descents into the caves of ghosts from Atlantis, such weird creations of 'homunculi' condensed from the ectoplasm of ecstatic virgins, such an accumulation of psychical tension up to its final dissolution in a cosmic guffaw (which however leaves all the hypotheses wide open) - that the author feels as if a minute 'blueprint' of the whole novel would represent a task equal to the composition of a small epic in its own right.

Gordan's mystico-Chaplinesque failure seems to imply banal conclusions in the style of Voltaire's 'cultiver son jardin'. Much can be divined but little can be known about parallel Universes. And anyway : humanity's demeanour would be modified by such knowledge to a much lesser degree than our exotic fellow-traveller's romantic idealism (genuine, in spite of his cunning Byzantinism) had hoped for.

However, facing the sea - so similar to the 'wine-dark' one, that carried the Argonauts - philosophizing with Monsieur Anatole and holding hands with an (at last!) unsophisticated Brazilian country-girl - he still has the feeling that he will - maybe in a distant future - embark yet again on a raid after his own, personal, unperishing Golden Fleece.

***

Paul Gregor

CIRCE'S ISLAND

Epigraph :

Bibet miscet

Ill cum illa

Miscet servus

Cum ancilla

Miscet coqua

Cum factore

Miscet Abbas

Cum Priore

Et pro Rege

Et pro Papa

Bibent vinum

Sine aqua

Et pro Papa

Et pro Rege

Miscent omnes

Sine lege

Bibent miscent

Sic in - fundo

Donec nihil

Sit in mundo

(Unfortunately, the author has forgotten this mediaeval poet's name. Jacopo di Something??).

***

For the benefit of their (much) less objective compatriots I'm busy writing (simultaneously with other incorruptible experts) a scientific monograph proving beyond any reasonable doubt :

1/ That since Brazil occupies the peak of economic, financial and social achievement - envied by the rest of our Planet - it would be redundant and even misleading if that country's foreign propaganda emphasized, or even mentioned, the natural artistic genius of its people.

2/ That Brazil's climate is moderate, almost Nordic, unfavourable to snakes, crocodiles and coloured people - no specimens of which have ever been sighted on the territories ruled by the green and yellow banner.

3/ That internal administration in the 'Realm of the Southern Cross' has attained such a degree of salutary perfection that no devil in his right mind would dare set foot on those partly Manhattanized but still breathtakingly beautiful shores.

The author.

N.B. Possible resemblances to (still!) living characters can be explained (but not excused!) by the pernicious influence of my learned friend, Exù-Of-The-Seven-Crossroads, whose identity will be forthwith disclosed.

***

PART ONE

CHAPTER I

Gordan mused, facing the dawn, above the masses of greyish water. His terrace stood three hundred metres behind the fort. (Precisely on the extension of a four-kilometre-long imaginary line that connected two granitic rocks. The jaws of some giant Cerberus. They looked threateningly ready to bite, to close this strait which linked the South Atlantic to the dark gullet, landward.)

A few tiny fires were now reddening, here and there, at the edges of the liquid steppe. (Reflections from the summits. For the Wagnerian mountains in the background flared up.) Not enough, though, to brighten the landscape. The opposite shore could scarcely be made out through the slowly dissolving mist. The far end of the bay was nowhere. The whole thing suggested the presence of a big dangerous-looking river's mouth. Styx. Styx. Styx.

"One sticks here", mumbled Gordan in his bad English. But how could this reality grip a man and hold him so tightly ? Was it some fascination, radiated by the more or less Black Masses held in honour of the god-devil, of Exù the King? What night was it he had attended the Dark Lord's latest gala? (Scattered about on the ground: smooth dark torsos, stripped to the waist, gleaming with ecstatic sweat. Girls lying on their faces, at the feet of the sorcerer-in-chief).

(The nervous dance of the torches amidst the bush. Ghosts and reptiles swarmed there. Not too far from here. Under that plateau called the Emperor's Table. That Emperor must have been three times the size of the Eiffel Tower.)

Those torches. Whirling sparks above and around creeping bodies. When was it? Last night? The night before? (Even time got mixed up, under this lunatic sky.) Crazed fingers: furtive shadows plucking red strings. Long, narrow lines, drawn with razor-blades on necks, breasts and hips as delicate as quivering silk. A dark dew seeped surreptitiously lightward. Just as surreptitiously as the sadistic emotion rose in the nerves of the witness. Or of the peeper? So what? Rather a peeper than blind.

That murky sensation had nothing to do with magic spells. What held him there was his own burning curiosity. He suspected this land of hiding (behind its clouds of butterflies and bacteria-breeding swamps) a thing as important as the philosopher's stone. The clear, easily-understandable answer to ancient riddles.

Did the various gods of history exist? Which ones and where? Is there a life beyond the grave? In what form? Mineral? Vegetable? Animal? Astral? Nature, here, seemed inhabited by a strength (or wisdom? or wealth?) far above anything imagined anywhere else in past centuries. The gods of this land did not demand servile credulity from their faithful. They offered them tangible proofs. They allowed them to lift a corner of the veil that conceals other universes.

The telluric currents? They existed. They regenerated. And the splitting of body and soul? Under certain conditions the astral life was able to leave the inertly slumbering material body. One could see the latter, from outside, from above. One could float away from it. Far away.

Such were the facts, shown to the believers by the virgin land. Unfortunately, it was also mischievous, just like its children the wistity-monkeys. The elusive fairy of the sombre forest loved to play tricks on intruders. She juggled with realities and optical illusions so vertiginously that you had to look sharply into things and learn, before anything else, how to discern.

2

The vice-admiral had never managed to learn that. He, too, had had before him the scene Gordan now gazed on. His caravel's masts must have been about the height of this roof. It surrounded the penthouse, recently built on the top of a two-storey shanty, dated 1900 or so.

But the caravels had arrived here early in the morning of January 20th (St. Sebastian's day) 1520. The sharp eyes of the gallant naval officer scanned the bay. Then and there he decided it was nothing of the sort. Having allowed a life-boat to dabble for an hour in the depressing lukewarm water, all the experts agreed. This was the estuary of a huge river. They had previously found similar ones on this coast. The ocean's salt water penetrated a long way up-stream, into the sleeping countryside. Right and left : dark green walls. The tropical forest. As the sun rose, a thousand birds and apes woke up and rejoiced noisily in being discovered. The depth being right, a procession of barges was formed and, rocked by the morning breeze (which carried a thousand scents) drew into one of the white beaches. The vice-admiral disembarked, amidst other glistening suits of armour, defying the first fury of the sun. He was a fine-looking man with a blond full-beard, inherited from remote gothic ancestors. They called him Mem de Sa. The Portuguese names were almost as melodious as the Indian designations of places, plants and animals. Those have survived up to now. The bay too has kept its ancient Indian name. Guanabara.

Of course the Franciscan monk, indispensable for correct navigation, arrived in a hurry and had no sooner set foot on shore than he ordered a huge cross to be planted at the entry of Copacabana Beach. The curious Indians who gathered around in the meantime were not quite sure what to think about it. However, the Mass, celebrated on the spot by the man of God, reassured them entirely.

These strange strangers were human after all, in spite of their silly clothes and the cadaverous pallor of their faces. All the Guarani and Tupi tribes knew, liked and practiced comical pantomimes, accompanied by songs. The sense of this one, as well as the gestures of the pious Father and his playmates, were somewhat obscure, but after all, no man would ever think of more than three subjects. Eating, drinking and making love. The satisfaction felt by the good savages was deep. It was the feeling of human identification. Their joy exploded. Showing their teeth, they began gambolling, rolling themselves in the sand, jumping merrily around and slapping their own thighs, not unlike certain figures in Tyrolian dances. The Padre Vicente De Something or Other did not fail to underline in his diary the fact that these heathen were by no means insensible to sacred things.

Naturally he noted also the name of the town that would be built in the future, around the implanted cross. Taking date and topography into account, he could not have baptised it anything but : St. Sebastian of the January-River. After a few centuries St. Sebastian got lost in the National Archives, but Rio de Janeiro is still there, reminding us of an exclusively Portuguese glory. And this would never have come about without a very glorious miracle.

3

For as it happened, and contrary to appearances, the brave Vice-Admiral and his gang hadn't discovered anything at all. Further, up the bay there was already a French colony, founded a few years earlier, and named (with touching optimism) 'Antarctic France'. It was peopled with two shiploads of noblemen, very proud of their blue blood. Most of them were descendants of the Albigeois, inspired by an uncompromising, hereditary puritanism. Their chief, the Admiral de Villegaignon maintained iron discipline among his peers, as well as among the subdued Indians. He strictly prohibited swearing, drinking and making love outside of the narrow limits meticulously circumscribed in the Bible. The French represented the elite of the white race. They were exemplary colonisers.

And their Portuguese competitors? An unbelievable jumble of races. Nobody knows who lived in their country before the Celts overran it. And after the Celts came the Romans. And the Goths. And the Arabs. And last of all came crowds of black African slaves. Besides they had long years of voyages, full of hardships and growing anarchy behind them. Hapless gypsies, broken bastards, they did not stand a chance in a thousand against the French. However, it was the odd logic of those antipodes that dealt the cards. Therefore the Portuguese triumphed and the Empire-builders were eaten.

Here is why. As soon as the light of their first morning began (just as here and now) pouring glistening cataracts into the dead sea, filling it with trillions of blazing aquamarines, emeralds, topazes and rubies, those bold sea-tramps had two illuminations. The first one was about hammocks and their usefulness. Woven of lianas, these swung lazily under exotic trees: flying carpets of long-repressed dreams. The Portuguese expressed them immediately. For here came the second illumination. These lovely, delightfully smiling brownish girls had not yet read the Bible. They were entranced by the little mirrors and coloured glass-pearls. The male autochtones were happy and proud about the success of their girlfriends. Nor were the monks over-scandalised. During these voyages their flock had accustomed them to astonishing shows, under the light of queerly glittering oceanic colours. The priests did not object to the private lives of their black sheep from the Tejo and the Alentejo, as long as the flock did not forget to confess its sins now and then. Then the repentant could swiftly regain the state of grace and their hammocks, to produce (among other things) the most spectacular girls of that hemisphere. The 'entente' could not have been more 'cordiale'.

Within days the vassals of the French deserted to the last man. The Portuguese were really chummy, easy-going fellows. The Indians felt they were something like cousins-in-law. The French had never treated them as equals. And the natives saw nothing wrong with participating in the pantomimes of their ultramarine in-laws. The ecclesiastical authorities were gratified. They did not hurry things, but evangelised these new converts slowly, gradually.

There was no point in attacking cannibalism frontally. They just analysed it from the point of view of its usefulness and pleasantness.

The Indian brethren, newly born to spiritual life, quickly assimilated the wise teachings lavished on them. It was quite obvious that the flesh of the gypsyish Portuguese, stunted by deprivations, would have been found lamentably lacking in flavour and nutritive values. On the other hand it was equally self-evident that the temperate, clean living of the aristocratic (and so white!) neighbours designated them an exquisite culinary substance,

The children of nature are often open to sound argument. Thus disappeared the defenders of virtue, and only ephemeral traces of them were left behind Brazilian bushes.

4

A sky-blue half-sheet of some fairy newspaper flapped clumsily in the air, over the terrace. A displaced elephant amongst butterflies. It most have come from the undergrowth, behind the cragged slopes of the first hills. These followed from afar the graceful lines of the beaches, like some green fortification.

Gordan stretched himself, twisting his muscles. The first warm rays caressed his heavy bulk.

He entered the half-dark of his dwelling. Unlike the shutters, all the doors of the three rooms were wide-open. Absent-mindedly he felt his way among the ancient colonial-style curios, mostly picked up in the attics of Brazilian friends.

Still naked, except for the espadrilles he had just put on, he came back to the terrace, carrying a rope for jumping, two dumb-bells, two dossiers, pencils and yesterday's newspaper.

His office - a kitchen table and two crude chairs - still stood at the shadow-side. Disregarding the rules, once more, he lit his first cigarette. Feeling a pleasant, almost imperceptible dizziness, he noticed the world around him had changed.

The Styx was nowhere to be seen. The sea was sky-blue. The sky: indigo. Before him: the fort's promontory, at the intersection of two wide-flung, graceful curves. One of them, to his left, embraced a six-kilometre breadth of azur space. At his right, the other, somewhat larger one, opened to the blazing Atlantic. The beaches of Copacabana and Ipanema.

Behind them, landward, spreading toward the hillsides, rows of merry gardens, enclosing secluded villas. One look at them would have scared any impenitent boozer. There was something of everything. Mosques. Chinese pavilions. Indian temples. Serails. Medieval castles with miniature drawbridges. Scaled-down gothic cathedrals. Down here, a few paces to the left: an unprecedented marvel. Seeing it, Gordan grinned again.

From above, the house looked very much like a huge cylinder lying on the ground. But down in the street, looking at the entrance, you understood that the whole house exactly reproduced the form of the facade, which was a monumental, awe-inspiring keyhole. These people enjoyed any kind of fun, anytime, anywhere.

In the gardens: red and yellow flowers, big as babies' heads. Dozens of euphoric monkeys and beautifully coloured but cantankerous parrots, all in unrestricted liberty. It was too dreamily playful. A cocktail of the nineteenth century, the crazy twenties and Walt Disney. It couldn't last. Neither this, here, nor anything of the kind. Real estate speculation was stirring. The price of these square metres was soaring. Concrete-nightmares were soon to overgrow everything.

In the city's centre, twenty-five kilometres from here, one could already see a couple of real, inhabited sky-scrapers. And there were others which had been hurriedly evacuated because they threatened to collapse. The Brazilians, always fond of a joke, would say: "Have you noticed the superiority of our architects? The foreign ones, the 'Gringos', are only able to figure out how long it will take to finish their buildings. Ours are much more far-sighted. They'll tell you the day and the precise hour that their masterpiece will come down on your skull." (So many things were to come down, so soon, on so many skulls.)

In a couple of years a new-born vulgarity would crush all these castles from Alice's Wonderland. Unless he, Gordan, in his imagined capacity as an ambassador of a foreign planet - having attained a much higher degree of evolution than poor little Earth - could deflect the course of events toward some more pleasant cosmic alternative. (Which seemed to him a very plausible idea!)

5

Leaving the panorama, his green, almost Mongolian eyes shifted to the table and the newspaper. So yesterday was July 3rd, 1947. His thirty-fourth birthday. He kept it from everyone. That was one of his little superstitions. Or rather, a prejudice, taken over from his late father. (Danubian landowner, old giant, brisk to the end.) He would heap his vast catalogue of Yugoslav curses on his only son whenever Gordan dared to congratulate him on such occasions. "The imbecility of people! They make a song and dance about getting older!"

So "Vasco de Cama" has thrashed "Flamingo" three to one. In the Maracana-Stadium, the largest in the world. Planned and built with amazing bravado by Brazilian architects. It stood firm as a rock. ("There are just two things we take seriously. Football, and the Carnaval.") Three hundred thousand spectators could follow the game there without any difficulty. Anti-tank ditches protected the referees, as much as possible, from lynching.

The stock exchange seemed quiet. Shares in papermills were slowly climbing. Would that influence the price of paper? He had bought some, open. One of the two dossiers had CORCOVADO printed on it. The name of that ex-volcano, up there to the left, above the hills of Copacabana. He had used it as the trade-name of his publishing firm. Well, the bank had accepted these two bills. They were due quite soon. But this was unlikely to cause any kind of Brazilian tragedy. He wouldn't even have to go to town about them. Two days before they were due, he would just ring up the bank manager at home, in the morning. "Hi, Ramos (or Silveira or something like that). How do? Nice dreams? It's about those two bills of mine. What? Nothing special. I'm not going to pay. No, nor will my customer. Not this month, anyway. No, I'm telling you in good Portuguese: the Academic Bookshops won't pay either." Then, the sleepy voice: "Would you mind my asking a modest question? When in the devil's name are you going to fork out, you and the other one? In thirty days, I imagine?" "Have you seen the Merchant of Venice in the Municipal? That's you! Couldn't you give me a breather? What about ninety days?" "Ah ... that would be a little more complicated." Which meant, in terms of Brazilian courtesy: "Don't dream of such a thing!"

But they protested only exceptionally. Nobody turned the screw on anyone, and almost everyone paid up in the end. The number of bankruptcies was trifling. They were rather decent chaps. (Yes? Oh yes. Up to a certain point.)

He closed the dossier, and then sighted a brown speck, very far away, but standing out clearly on the still-deserted sand, close to the water line,

Here came what he had been waiting for all this time with a feeling of unavowed anxiety.

***

CHAPTER II

Suppressing a slight shiver he bent over the balustrade and glanced landward. He had guessed right. There were still other remarkable things around. Right down there. Quite an exhibition. The demon's device must have been set, where it had to be, during the night. At the side of the pavement, in the grass, lay a white cock. Its throat was cut. Around it: crossed cigar-butts, candle-ends, bottles half-filled with cachaça: with cane brandy. The banquet of the spirits. Only - of the bad ones. The good souls had been cordially invited to stay away.

They had absolutely nothing to do there at the corner of the alley which led to the "palacete", to the little palace (worse than baroque) of his friend Pedro. (Charming, old, millionaire, post-impressionist painter, refined, degenerate.)

He was the party chiefly concerned by the "trabalho", the work that should be initiated with the shortest delay, by the incubi and succubi who busied themselves day and night.

To be precise: a spell was to be directed against two women, each of them being - in her own way - fatal to the unfortunate post-impressionist's aspirations. They were not only lesbians but also over-excited characters, often agitated by inexplicable, disconcerting rages.

From this point on, Gordan's intricate business life took on a highly surrealistic aspect. In other words, it depended mostly on the good-will and understanding shown by cohorts of werewolves and headless mules, all of them spitting fire and cantering through the forests of the night. ("I should begin to draw a genealogical tree of my cabals, just to keep in mind how they are interrelated, lest I get mixed up in them myself.") But his Byzantine nature felt quite at home in the labyrinth of his mercantile machinations and his fanatical, haunted searching.

Had the distant brownish speck stirred? He knew it was the kernel of a cloud. Soon it would spread in all directions, becoming a black thunder cloud, dimming, abolishing the present reality. ("Easy. Easy. Wait. Wait.") It looked like some half-dead insect coming wearily back to life. At this pace more than thirty minutes would pass before the climax was reached - before the divine serpent soared up into the air, far above the receding beach. A phosphorescent tunnel would dig itself through the darkness. That would be the highway of the nightmarish being: there it would advance, twisting its rings, swimming, up there, towards the palacete of the petrified lovers.

He guessed that there would not be just the two of them waiting for the apparition. Their thighs were locked (did Gordan see it or imagine it?) around a lethargic, asexual adolescent. One of those living-dead zombies, abducted from his grave? The reincarnated soul of a slave, martyred after the great uprising? Or just a poor idiot, picked up one day in the street because he lent himself so innocently to aberrant games?

Too early for the spirits, he told himself, leaving the world of pre-fabricated dreams. An energetic contraction of the diaphragm brought him back to earth.

2

The rope lashed the cement -under his espadrilles. One, two, forward, backward. A flying circle surrounded him like a lasso thrown by himself to catch his own body. Double leaps made the cord whistle around him. Magic was something like this. This and nothing else. A disciplined dance. (Of the thoughts? Of states of mind? Of sexual pulsations?)

He let the rope go and took the dumbbells. (His first love had been boxing. A little later: tennis. Sixteen, fifteen, fourteen years before he had been Davis Cup man for his first country, the smaller one. He still played now and then, just for the fun of it.)

Of course, spirit and body were accomplices. Sorcery was (among other things) close to acrobatics. Quite: the acrobatics of one's beliefs. One had to learn how to believe firmly, manifestly contradictory ideas. It was all very well to accept, in a corner of his brain, all the flying serpents of this chimerical sky. But a quite different Gordan had to stay in the background, observing, shrugging his shoulders. For on that condition he could venture further, dive deeper into the obsessions which were inseparable from his plan. If he kept his head there was no danger for him. There would be no fall into the snake-pit. He would not howl day and night, wallowing in the horror that everybody carried around with him, inside him, under the smooth skin. (The entrails, knots of coloured sticky reptiles creeping out of torn bellies, animated by their own horrifying life.) Nor would there be whitish worms before his eyes. Nothing of the nauseating, secret world unveiled by flying steel fragments. (Ah, those incandescent pink roses of hell!) No army had ever decorated such an absolute coward. (That accursed force of imagination! Luckily it could be disconnected. Or perhaps, from a certain point on, it disconnected itself. Then: an imperturbable robot took over.)

In other words he promised himself not to go crazy. Which was more than could be said about the surrounding multitudes. Of course, that was the point. One had to be practical and use the present, extravagant reality. Anything capable of producing tangible effects was in some way real. It would be stupid not to make it serve one's own aims. Many tools had been given. The elixirs. The witches' sabbaths. The lucid drunkenness. The power of sex increased tenfold, transfigured. This sort of sexual urge he was even now feeling, as it radiated around him, hotter than the tropical air. The one that (sweet anxiety and slumbering wildness) now throbbed in his throat. The rapture which had begun to reveal to him an astral life, probably imperishable.

And why should one throw away a useful camera, just because it sometimes gave blurred pictures? Moreover, there was a way to clarify them. Statistics. Even for science, several concordant probabilities gave a result close to certitude.

And then that most convincing weapon of the mind: induction. Finding small proofs from which vast laws could be built. Trigonometry could be used to measure a chicken-yard. Astronomers applied it to measure the Universe. From quite banal events, far-reaching conclusions could be drawn. As for instance .....

3

Inside a bus. The nape of a woman's neck. An insistent gaze resting on it. The patient begins chasing non-existent flies around her neck and eventually flashes a furious look backward,

An invisible bond of little account, but just as inexplicable as the Newtonian gravity that reaches out to the stars, whirling them, screwing them into terrifying bottomless abysses.

(Terror? It could be converted into rage. The rage into cruelty. Then into frenzy. Into passion. Emotions were transmutable. The alchemy of emotions: that is the spring from which flow the powers of midnight.)

Now, back to that bus (arriving on a direct line from Plato's dialogues). Was the reaction, the nervousness of the lady at the receiving end, not in direct proportion to the weight, to the passional charge that launched the emitter's look?

So those "impenetrable" barriers of the other world had all the same a few weaker points where probes could sink in. Especially the hypnotic experiences.

He glanced toward the beach. The situation was almost unchanged. But it was in vain that he tried to remove from his mind the thing that was approaching. Memory showed him that phenomenon's origin as well as the way it had come to life. It had happened two nights before. A couple of hours after the baptism of the newborn devils. As soon as the ritual orgies were done with.

***

Obscurity. A few tentative beams amidst it. Scarcely discernible : a large trunk metamorphosed into a phallic totem. Idols such as: over-sized octopuses, crucified bats, flayed goats - Madame Tussaud's museum re-styled by the Quimbanda sect.

Alone with his ally. They were the only beings alive there. The two prostrated women were not wholly alive.

Drugs? Trance? Hard to decide which predominates. Arrows of living flesh vibrate and brush: half-open, thirsty membrane-mouths. They penetrate, they retire, they come again slowly to caress mucous lips, to recede, but so little that the heat of their lives keep mingling. Their electricity keeps connecting currents alive with unceasing spasms, foretokens of a lightning that will never strike.

The "little murder" of the Quimbanda demanded an odd sort of nerves. But it crushed the medium's opposition as infallibly as the terror did. Neither did the terror miss this coming-together. The flickering light came from three holes. Very narrow, very deep. Just under the wide-open eyes of the Saint's slaves. There, under the trembling light of candles, lived, gazed, creatures more blood-freezing than the dreams of all the forest's damned put together.

***

That was the recipe. Paralysing frustration, terror, drugs, cachaça, hypnotism. It opened the subconscious, making it as docile as a fainting body. Then the hypnotic orders transfixed them with the icy sweetness of rape. These girls were programmed like computers. For weeks in advance, if necessary. But especially for this morning's prospective events. The experience was promising. But who knew exactly the secret working of this mechanism? And who was manipulated? who was programmed, after all?

4

He decided not to watch the beach any more for fifteen minutes. That would dam up and condense fluxes of energy: it would favour the blossoming of ... the blossoming of what the hell? Of the "supernatural"? An eloquent noise without any meaning! He admired science. Without it, Earth would still be the kingdom of melancholy orangutans. And then, science did not spring from sermons, phoned from burning bushes. (Not to speak of what came out of whales' tummies!) And if some people chose to call this "poetry", well then, it must be said that humanity has known fairy tales of a less dubious quality.

Science calculated, experimented, verified. But did it not also deduce? And as to life and its mystery: had science as yet worked through every riddle? Could there not be unknown elements, energies rays?

What was really known about the states of split consciousness? (Split into two quite dissimilar lives.) For it was feasible to pass from one level of being to another one. To juggle with oneself. As he did. To play with his wishes and his fears. The coins he threw and caught were: hunger, cold, nightmares, everything he loathed. By no means with the purpose of settling in them or getting used to them. Just to dismantle his own engine and examine its working,

(The ardour of this search was like the humming of a very distant music that followed him everywhere.) But always and everywhere he had tried to avoid inspired madmen like the pox. And now he was living in the very midst of an endless lunatic asylum. And most worrying of all, he didn't feel the faintest desire to escape from it.

What was he doing there? Spying on the frontiers of madness and immortality. Yes, but when all was said and done, what essential knowledge had he won, for instance, by learning the art of the god Ogun, the hypnosis that struck as suddenly as lightning? What did all these experiments do to unravel the enigma of that phosphorence which had once shone on him? Had it been a product of the spirit? Of the brain? Of the nerves? Or was it related to the true light that flashes through endless spaces, long after the native star's extinction?

5

He recalled to mind the "terreiro", his friend's miraculous shed, the night of his taking those unholy orders.

A moon, as big as a football, the roof on poles, amidst the clearing, thundering tom-toms, a suffocating wall of shuddering bodies. On the soil: coppery reflections of dancing lights and two long, thin, black snakes crawling toward his feet.

They push before him a mulatto girl with an adolescent torso. He clenches her tender wrists. He knows he is being put to a test, but he is already too drunk to remember what is expected of him. Suddenly an absurd fury explodes in him. A painful cramp tears his muscles apart. A crazed effort seems to drive his eyes out of their sockets, to throw them toward the target known only to his boiling blood - toward all the voluptuous spasms of life rolled up, packed into a few seconds. From the alternating current of an orgasm that was tamed (provoked, repressed, resuscitated, transfigured) bursts the lightning of the god (a rage to live and to rule) and in front of him the slender figure collapses, struck down.

When he came to, he thought he saw, lying at his feet, the proof of bodyless life. There was blood on her face. (Her nose? Nobody had touched her.) Her eyes seemed swollen, her lips bruised. Her teeth were grinding unearthly seeds. Her chest, her muscles were shaken by unknown tides.

After a minute, standing between her open legs, he realised with awe the transfiguration of everything. A new meaning illuminated all of this. All the panting, the revulsions, the convulsions of this infantile belly.

First she had reincarnated Gordan's willed paroxysm. And now she received, from the distance of a metre - (even had it been from a million metres it would not have added to this evidence of an immaterial fluid streaming from one life into another) - the wave of his passion. He thought he saw (but of course he might have imagined it) a vaporous (or ethereal, you great Brazilian gods!) shaft extending his penis and plunging it into the hot, humid darkness of that reviving, gratified body. (Was it an alcoholic's dream after all? Alas, he'd never know for sure.)

However, in that moment, a well-known face materialised at his side. It belonged to the man he had, in his thoughts, laughingly christened the Great Golden Cat. With a half-smiling grimace around a feline moustache, the Cat spoke to Gordan: "If thou wilt, I can teach thee to do all the things I can do."

He did not become a real disciple. First, because years earlier he had already started to feel his way across "all these things". What was more exciting than to transmit thoughts deliberately, in the course of some everyday, indifferent conversation? To whisper them, voicelessly, into the interlocutor's ear? Or else, to modify instantaneously without altering in the least his own tone and attitude, the climate of some delicate discussion.

On the other hand, there was in Gordan's mind an incessant silent bantering which precluded the Big Cat from a masterly guru's role. The very idea that he might be swindled infuriated the Franco-Slav.

That was why he found the marvels of hypnosis revealing but questionable. A great part of humanity could have practiced it, but nobody knew its real nature.

The people who fell thunderstruck at the enchanter's order, did they not follow, after all, the deepest secret propensity of their natures? He knew all too well that most mediums cheat, particularly at the beginning of their acts. But how far did the theatre go? Sometimes it was impossible to distinguish excellent acting from reality. Especially because the illuminated mingled both. So how could he expect to discover the unquestionable truth he was searching for?

Why did he not, then, interview the dead? In this field he had never witnessed anything but stupid, transparent fakes. Besides, the Quimbanda (and a good thing it was) cared more for the living than for the dead. He would get in touch with the latter (very soon, probably) in his own way. Without transgressing the rules of common sense and of beyond-the-grave-savoir-vivre.

For the time being he would make do with other sorts of signs which gave away the secret of survival. They were modest, not in the least spectacular, but all the more convincing. He knew several of them.

CHAPTER III

He lifted the dumb-bells. A quite absurd idea came from nowhere. These solid globes would convey to him a message hidden in their bulk. Preposterous. Worse: mad.

(Five kilos each. Not the very best for the muscles. But better than nothing to fight this debilitating climate.) For a moment he left the iron spheres swinging lazily at the end of his arms. Abruptly the feeling of this absent-minded motion extended through his muscles, shoulders, motor nerves, travelling like a flying spark. And the message arrived. He held in his hand the proof of second sight, and thus of another way of existing.

This hand swung precisely as when (not so long ago) it clenched that unpinned grenade. The sun had been rising over the moon-scape of Montenegro's crevices. Unluckily, it had also been rising above the hole, where, between two rocks, he was waiting for a bit more light, cursing it in advance, not being quite sure what he should wish, pressing his belly against quite inhospitable stones.

That past came back to him. Just ahead (he thought at spitting distance, although it was more than that, but still uncomfortably close) frowned the breach of the cave with a heavy machine gun, manned by what was left of a Waffen SS-section. It was rather a narrow vertical slit in a wall of grey mineral. In a couple of minutes it would be dyed beautifully pink. From then on he had only seconds left. Whose eyes would prove quicker? That was the problem.

To reach this spot, he had crawled five or six hundred metres, coming from where the first dead lay. He had spent most of the night on this trip. Now and then he had stayed motionless, - it seemed for hours - hiding his face from the very lights. Then he went on creeping, winning metre by metre.

The previous afternoon's exercise had been called a mopping-up operation. A good third of the cleaners (of his own company) had been mopped up, there behind him. No mortars. These eight or ten Germans had done as they pleased. The bullets of their machine-gun had become shrapnels. They had flooded his chain of sharp-shooters under a deadly rain of quartz and limestone. At nightfall he had remained lying where he was, because of his panicky fear of the abysses. There were plenty of them behind, where his mountaineers had fled, leaping with the nimbleness of goats. Should he (he had wondered) go in for rock-scaling in the darkness? (Alone, without the assistance of his friendly Montenegrines who, however, secretly jeered at the clumsiness of this accidental commander who had stumbled into their midst, pushed by war's (bad) luck, coming right from his Big Plains, directly under the elephantine feet of the Black Mountains.) That kind of mountaineering would have been suicide.

So where was he? Could he stay there for ever, crouching under overhanging blocks of limestone? (He would have loved that!) But in the morning, the very first harassing shots would, he knew, bury him under the debris of these fossil-bearing-rocks. To avoid being fossilized, there was but one way. In front of him, the plateau leading toward the enemy was almost flat. So here he was, at the end of the road, which led to an idiocy or to a heroic deed (or both), just because he was so awfully scared of ravines and climbing.

Now he was so close he imagined the barrel of the machine-gun (which of course he couldn't yet see properly) to be pointing at the precise geometrical centre of his forehead. The black wall before him was becoming dark-blue. The vertical opening in it remained black. There were no large caves nearby. Just holes. That was good. The bad thing was that his timing had to be so precise. A little too much light and they would see him first. A touch too little and he would miss the mark. In that case he would never have a chance to throw a second grenade. Their plans in there? Short-dated, as everybody's in that phase of the war. They commanded the plateau from the cave. He thought he had never before seen such a narrow nor such a black hole. Something stirred in it. Fearful shadows: blacker than blackness.

Fortunately for him, in that very moment Gordan had been moved elsewhere. Into the centre of a void where thoughts could no longer penetrate. Dazed, unhooked from reality, without computing, without even a conscious will, he let the little iron pineapple fly straight over the machine-gun, disappear in the cave, transform the black split into a thundering volcano.

He would never have managed to do it in his normal state. Fear did it. An emotion strong enough to daze him, so that a stranger, coming from nowhere, could act in his stead. An absence of the spirit. But lucid, infallible. It had nothing to do with absent-mindedness or relaxation. Such a state would never come about without a man's mind having been previously stirred up, strongly shaken. That sort of unconscious but lightning and accurate Montenegrine reaction was not unknown to him. It had occurred even before that. ("Now look", he told himself with a clownish grimace, "you have so far packed into your thirty-four years enough to last a century in a normal man's life. Even so you want still more. You are thirsting after coming centuries, aren't you? But how can you hope to learn about secret life-energies nobody has ever known? Shouldn't you have your head examined?" But he denied the charge of megalomania. "Don't dramatise things", he protested. "I'm more than reasonable about this. I'm going ahead in the jungle of occultism, but I take my bearings principally by matter-of-fact, commonplace landmarks. This is my originality, if you don't mind my saying so. And as to that lucid void which gives birth to unerring actions: it indeed does happen. Just think of sleep-walkers.")

This state could be provoked, directed. Tiberio was a master at it. Gordan recalled the seance of the night before last. (Sure, that's when it was. The night - or at least a great part of it - he had spent with Livia. With the girl he used to call: My misfired St. Catherine!).

That baby swirling through the air! It had described a trajectory of almost ten metres. Certainly not less than the Montenegrine grenade.

There had been a crowd. It was the night of the baptism by Satan the King, by Exu-of-the-Seven-Crossroads in person. Tiberio, wearing a gleaming music-hall general's uniform, had been dancing like the devil incarnate (which he was) brandishing a heavy cavalry sword, showering blows on the soil, inches from the new-born's head. The golden skin of his face glistened. Holding the burning end of a cigar adroitly inside his mouth he blew - through its thinner end - dense clouds upward to the Irreconcilables. His leaping became more and more acrobatic, the flourishes of his sword more and more menacing. He should have been dead drunk. During the ceremony, he had put away a large bottle of cachaça. However, his movements were still controlled. Another sign of the different levels of existence. Once under this kind of tension you could drink with impunity. It was almost impossible to get drunk.

The wizard knew exactly what he was doing. Even when he grabbed the little one's ankles. (A cunning prophet: he would never have taken the slightest risk of losing face before his people.) He was settled inside his own interior void. (By the cachaça? By hypnotic exertions?) It was another, bolder, surer, miraculous Cat who threw the newborn little devil (to which dignity it had just been elevated) making him whirl like a boomerang above the heads of the faithful. But this boomerang did not come back. As if guided by an imperturbable hand it glided down to land in the arms of its quite unconcerned mother.

2

When he was bathed in perspiration, he ran under the shower. It was outdoors, beside a wall of the penthouse. Putting on the espadrilles again, he went back to the table. It was delicious to be dried by the breeze, (July: the beginning of winter. Temperature: the French Riviera's in May.)

From what impulse came the almost manic cleanliness of these people? They bathed two to four times a day. They washed only their bodies, rarely the tiles and flagstones of their more or less slovenly interiors. Was that because of the heat? But he had heard also about certain rather filthy tropical peoples. Could it have had something to do with the omnipresent sexual obsession? Be that as it may, forest-prospectors had told him about the impossibility of camping very far from one of the numberless watercourses. Deprived of their baths, their ragged woodsmen would have revolted.

The Corcovado Books weren't doing too badly. Not well enough to allow him to quit his job at the French Embassy. Anyway, for the time being, it would have been pointless. The French didn't overload him and the connection was by no means useless. Quite the contrary. Down there in the garden stood a sign of his relative prosperity. An old Studebaker was relaxing under the trees. He used it only rarely, for commuting to the city. It was almost as dubious a pleasure as driving his jeep too close to barrage-fire. Then, however, he had been able to find ditches to hide in. But here nothing protected the motorist from the natives' frenzy.

Every morning, at both sides of the twenty-five kilometres long, picturesque run into Rio, you could admire at least a dozen new monuments to the dangerous life. All sorts of wrecks were to be seen: telescoped cars, others wrapped around the luxuriant vegetation and still others with their noses settled on the counters of shops and banks, the iron curtain fronts of which had proved too frail. Trophies telling of flat-spins and loops executed with amazing virtuosity. He preferred the "mini-buses". While riding in them, heroic participation in the struggle against traffic-lights was unnecessary. A little fatalism would do. The driver was always an artist. Fag-end stuck to the corner of his mouth (impassive, sombre face of an astronaut) he would make his vehicle dance like a hysterical rat between the borders of large avenues, overtaking on the wrong side, invading pavements and pedestrian islands, spreading heart ailments in his wake. Sometimes he would brake dramatically, creating zones of weightlessness where marvelling passengers fluttered. ("Go and complain to the goddess Yamandja! By the god Ogun, who is my guide: a word more and I'll ditch all of you! Caramba! Without intending to fail in the courtesy I owe your Lordships - what a bunch of clods and heathen! Did you expect me to run over that poor innocent dog who might well be one of my late relatives reincarnated, or for that matter even one of your own illustrious ancestors! Now kindly shut up, I beseech you, because I am a very sensitive and touchy person!"). In spite of certain hidden but quite bewildering features, it would have taken a frightful prig to dislike them.

3

He felt a kind of sweet anxiety inside his thorax. Like a hesitating bow, brushing lightly over strained strings: the nerves that connected lungs, heart, the abdominal region and its ruler: the diaphragm. He was anticipating the nervous effort. The three-dimensional colour film which auto-hypnosis would soon show him.

Later he would get back to the present less spooky world, although with the joyous feeling of having changed it just a little. And the source of this power was in him, somewhere around the spinal column. The brain emitted perceptible waves only when plugged to the battery of boiling sexual energies.

Often before, he had guessed the omnipresence of that secret. Sometimes he had felt its dark presence. Then again, he might have used it unconsciously. But it was only here, while dissecting the hermetic teaching of the Quimbanda, that he came to understand what it was really about, and to what heights it led. The Quimbanda was a numerically tiny sect, although cursed and feared by the multitude of spiritualist chapels, "Umbanda" clans and other theosophical boy-scouts of Brazil. Its fate was obviously : to overcome shallow wishy-washy rivals or to be diluted, dissolved in them.

Its Satan-King Exù-of-the-Seven-Crossroads was neither more nor less diabolic than the late Prometheus. The fire he brought (not to mankind: just to a few capable, chosen ones) was the idea of diverting the current of sexuality away from the production of gloomy generations destined to a cheerless future. The current had to be used otherwise. To infuse into this life's living blood the elixir of reconquered Paradise.

What gave birth to the ecstasies of the mystics? Why this breathless stammering whenever they tried to describe their visions of divinity? Had the firebrand of their passions been inflamed by the excellence of the principles laid down in the Ten Commandments? Was the Saint's delirium purely spiritual? Why not keep such tales for moderately bright children? When, he wondered, when will we be spared such purely (or dirtily) spiritual fables? The only motor of powerful imaginations - all the glorious visions - is nourished by an overflowing sexual current, be it sublimated or repressed. Therefore: glory to Exù the King, who may be a devil but certainly not a fool.

4

First and foremost: the Lord of the Lower Regions did not demand any asceticism of his initiate. They were free to eat, drink and waste their energies as they pleased. Now and then there were periods of Ascension. These began whenever the devil's disciples chose, and they could stop them as soon as they wished to do so. However, this source of power, this expansion of the senses, this unity with delightful beings, was so intoxicating that the privileged felt compelled to return to it more and more often. That is: the called and chosen ones reacted thus. As to the others: not even by sticking their noses into it could they have been made to see what it was all about.

It was also an exacting sport which demanded a great deal of self-control. However it had nothing to do with chastity and still less with coitus interruptus. For had the admission fee been as low as that, there would nowadays be more sorcerers than motor cars around, threatening the security of the public.

He thought back to Livia whom he had left just before dawn. She was a lovely girl, with a figure a shade too ripe for her twenty-four years. As a matter of fact she had been married for three years until the somewhat odd death of her lord and master, in the chair of an Argentine dentist they had both befriended.

Anyway, as a widow, she was outside the strict rules of Iberian modesty. Remnants of these still applied to young girls. But the quite numerous "desquitadas" - separated women (for only a sort of half-divorce existed under Brazilian law) - were free to follow all their inclinations. Rich as she was, Livia could scoff at the rules. She trampled merrily over the laws of this world and the next. Her fearless nature and her cutting, rather defiant mind had brought her, in ten years, from the benches of the Notre Dame de Sion's convent-school to the dignity of a "yalorixa", a chief priestess to the black cult. During the ritual she represented Pomba-Gira, the spouse of the six Exùs. (For this demonology was much more complicated than Catholic theology. Instead of a Holy Trinity, there was a ... what should it be called?... an Infernal Sevenness. Six male devils and their lawful wife - represented in the ceremonies by Gordan's woman - coexisted peacefully and democratically: seven persons with equal rights forming a unique Royal Satanity.)

Her skin's whiteness was one of the "terreiro's" sensations. Pure Whites and Blacks are relatively seldom seen in Brazil. A thousand and one shades of coffee-and-milk, of bronze and even brass (or gold?) are the usual colours. The red blobs splashed on her white skin (the blood of holocausts, not hers, oh no!) regrouped into astonishing abstract pictures when she danced. He would have found this disgusting as well as childish, but for his understanding the sense of it. The blood did not serve the purposes of sadistic or pornographic exhibition, but was meant to horrify the performer herself. Untouched depths had to tremble to enable her to soar up to visions which the eyes of an unperturbed spirit would never behold. For Livia was not just a priestess. Whenever the devil's spouse felt like it, she would "descend" on Livia to incarnate herself in that hospitable white body. And that was at least as credible as the Divinity's presence in a bakery product.

The burning and icy showers of lust and horror were the keys which set free the forces of the beyond.

Had he not, with his partner Tiberio, paid visits to specialised hags, known to be capable of causing sickness and even killing at a distance? (In this connection he had observed facts which seemed more or less convincing.) At one of those loathsome practitioners' places, he had discovered a revealing collection. Amongst other things, in a hole under flagstones: a very thick, remarkably ugly buffle-frog. Then a glass jar with purplish-blue leeches. There, swimming in a brownish liquid, was the mistreated statuette of the distant patient. And of course there were also idols and phallic objects. Seeing them and smelling the traces of ether and aphrodisiac incense, he guessed that all these instruments were rather harmless. Nor did the frog or the leeches, still less the statuette, transmit any kind of hertzian waves through the ether. It was the witch's nervous system that needed a corner of reality to hook her imagination onto, to excite herself, to hurl herself into a swirl of delirium. And that such delirium, such a maddened brain, had something in common with a fatal whirlwind that strikes from afar: that was a quite different kind of idea. That he could believe.

And then Gordan remembered his own experiences. He knew that whenever he dreamt passionately and clearly of a person, his message was received even at great distances.

Many questions remained unanswered. Why did the fusion of sweetness and cruelty release such tremendous energies from the spirit's nuclear reactor? Idle question. It had always been so. He had examples before his eyes. The most venerable ones? In any case, the most venerated ones. These, for instance.

5

He opened the second file, not without some hesitation taking from it one of the loose scraps covered with his most illegible scrawl. It was some sort of personal stenography which said: "I received a head in my hands and at the same moment I felt a joy, a sweetness which the heart could not have conceived nor the lips expressed."Who is this monster?

St. Catherine of Sienna wrote it, after the execution of a very young criminal to whose conversion that glorious soul had devoted the days previous. And in order to pre-empt the usual drivel about metaphorical phrases malevolently isolated from a purely ethereal, angelical context, note that she goes on raving:

"My soul relished such a deep peace in the perfume of his blood that I would not allow the least drop of those which had gushed on me from his wound to be removed."

The frenzy of morbid sensuality? Sure. But with the beatific vision at the other end.

And St. Theresa of Avila, in ecstasy under her little angel, belabouring her bosom with a sharp instrument, just as Bernini sculpted her, following the description of the happy victim? And St. John of the Cross, the sublime poet of the "Noche Oscura", is transfigured into a bride, poetically but also realistically raped on a perfumed bed of night-flowers. And the contemplation of imaginary floods of sacred blood (as it was practised around him during the three years of his adolescence, spent in a Jesuit school) depicted with frightful vividness. And the cross (simply a tool of Roman torture), adored for two thousand years. Not to speak of its by-products, such as the Inquisition and a dozen large-scale slaughters of all sorts of heretics. Well then, surveying all these sanguinary lunacies: two conclusions arose.

In the first place, the affirmations of the Holy Ghost's bureaucrats - that their history differs fundamentally from other magic tales, the Christian's having an absolute monopoly on divinity - is addressed to the united feeble-minded of the earth. The preachifying about the guaranteed spiritual purity of Christianity's champions spread such a pestilential smell of bad faith that only a string of well-chosen Yugoslav curses could answer them appropriately.

In the second place it became clear that the wrong-doings of the Quimbanda (or rather of one of its hidden cells) were Kindergarten-games compared to the ghoulish excesses camouflaged behind Glorious Churches.

As to Livia, in spite of her predilection for Black Masses, it must be noted that only goats' blood was being sprinkled over her and that so far, nobody had observed her playing basket-ball with the heads of decapitated friends. Of course she played extravagant games, but these were quite pleasant and never deadly.

6

He glanced at his waterproof wristwatch. It was a useful thing to have. Dampness penetrated everywhere. After a couple of days, stowed-away shoes and portmanteaus were covered with a thin, greenish layer of mould.

It was six. The fifteen minutes he had given to the spirits to be kind enough to state their exact purposes were over. That distant brown speck had grown. (Was it a bit of ectoplasm? The proton of a dead soul's substance? Or just the push-cart of an early-rising lemonade peddlar?)

He went for the cachaça bottle which stood waiting behind the door. (The scotch whiskey, also close at hand, was to be ignored. Exù preferred this infamous, burning, devastating poison.)

Sitting back, he took a couple of gulps. This was no pleasure. It had become a necessity. The drugs, the roots, the mushrooms were just for the messengers. The master's only fuel was cachaça. Heroic doses of it, naturally. The drink had little effect. In this the climate helped. Days and nights of perspiration eliminated toxins very quickly. Besides, Danubians were used to heavy drinking. Gordan lifted the bottle again.

Warmth spread through his empty stomach. He felt as if his eyes were widening in some weird way, absorbing much more light than a second before. The pub at the corner, facing the deceased cock, had opened in the meantime. Brownish fishermen with naked legs entered it in groups. They went there in order to "shut off their bodies" from the dangers of the sea. With cachaça, of course. This was really an alcoholic's land. "There's nothing wrong with that" muttered Gordan with a smug expression, as he squeezed and relaxed his diaphragm repeatedly, following a rhythm that would soon stun him. At the same time he began to paint, behind his closed eyelids, the moving picture which he would take with him into the depth of sleep.

But it was still too early, he thought, raising his head, which was becoming heavy. Was he not exaggerating, doing too much? There was no point in these mental acrobatics. Why should he lie to himself about that brown thing at the beach? It was useless to generate artificial curiosity, a feverish expectation of some unknown marvel. Why? One side of his head knew perfectly well what it was. No need to strain his energies. That thing on the beach was just a safety-device, a secondary relay. The big show would not be here and now. But it would take place within two hours, up there at Pedro's. It was minutely prepared and timed. Post-hypnotic orders are carried out with a precision recalling certain sleepers, able to wake up at any hour they choose before going to bed.

The best part of the work had been done the night before last, when, along with Tiberio, after that "baptism", they had magnetised the two dazed women.

One of them was precisely that brown thing down there. Nothing very sensational about that. It was the same medium, approaching, moving in a silly way, crawling, dragging half her body over the sand and the other half in the shallow water. Certainly the girl was even now sleeping with open eyes. She was coming to bring him (even in her present form as an unconscious puppet) that corner of reality which he needed - just like the witch - to embed his imagination in. She would also convey to him the help of those phantoms that arose from the brains of cataleptic dreamers. He searched his memory for her name. Teodora. A "crioula", a quadroon. Not a beauty: nor ugly. Sturdy, muscular, without an ounce of fat. He had seen her before that night at Tiberio's. But where? He could not yet discern her face, she was too far away. At the "terreiro" she had been just one blurred shadow among a lot of others.

7

Yet, she had been at the terreiro where they had prepared her for this. When? This confusion of time levels was irritating. He had to straighten it out. Well, of course, the prologue of today's show had been performed the night before last. ("More precision, please!") O.K. After the baby-satan's christening. (And?) And after a bit of witch-sabbath-recreation. ("Let's bet you don't remember the sequel too clearly.") Ah, but I do. Here.

***

She had been lying on her back half-covered by shadows, and the first things he became aware of were the still, naughty, massive breast. The eyes were gazing emptily, as they probably were now. Her long hair was knotted to someone else's, of a lighter shade. It belonged to Pedro's wife Lily. She must be anxiously waiting by now. Up there, behind the pub, under the cupolas and friezes of the stunning "palacete".

So, the two women were lying in the gloom, their heads together, their bodies forming a straight line.

Lily was tall. In tennis shoes she stood a little above Gordan's five feet ten. Very much an athlete she was, too. From her Danish father came the nose of some vikingish bird of prey, a broad face with a formidable jaw which clashed with the only contribution of her Brazilian mother: large black eyes of a suspicious sweetness.

***

Gordan's finger-tips waver around Teodora's temple. Sensing a motion in front of him, he peers through the flickering shadows. What he sees in his partner's hand gives him a start. He gets up. (He has always mistrusted the unannounced improvisations of his learned friend.) This looks worse than fishy.

An unusually long and thick hairpin materialises between Tiberio's fingers. Is the wizard stark crazy?

He seems to heat the pin-points at the flame of one of those candles, planted inside the holes of the Unnameable. He has no fear of poisonous bites.

When his hand with the silk handkerchief, holding the safe bit of the pin, reappears, the points are red.

The slender figure of the Hollywood-gigolo monkeys around, playful as ever, simulating a few steps of some grotesque dance. Then he stops and bends over the helpless dreamers at his feet. Gordan's legs are heavy, imprisoned in some non-existent swamp.

Is there an icy gleam of horror in the motionless eyes of the victim? Like a voiceless howl. Just a flash of rebellious life instinct, fading into the blindness of slavery.

The hell-points stab. The frozen eyes, are they pierced? No. It is a feint. Like lightning the pin plunges into the bushy knot of hair.

Is the commander of the underground forces performing the part of a mundane hair-stylist? He would be good at it. With the thick, glistening gold-chain and the heavy Swiss watch at his nimble wrist! He pushes and twists and turns the pin as if it were a hair-iron. He hops around the subdued heads, mumbling inept orders about snakes that have to change their skins.

Then Gordan holds his breath. The sight before him makes his cramped solar plexus sink. His cortex stops vibrating. The overly charming mulatto goes on with his conjuration by himself while his white partner is awe-struck.

To hell with his own sarcastic grimacing when confronted with preposterous rituals. If they are able to achieve this ... then they have ceased to be ridiculous. Gordan is eyewitness to an exchange of personalities. To the passage of two sensibilities - yes, of two spirits, from one body into another.

Tiberio pricks Teodora's thigh. She does not react. It is Lily who winces and whose untouched thigh contracts. The sorcerer belabours the soles of Lily's feet: it is Teodora who moans trying to free her ankle from nobody's grip.

There is more to come. Tiberio extends his palm over Lily like a saint blessing the waters. The Viking girl should dance like a puppet, attached to the wizard's magnetic strings. This time she doesn't react. But Teodora's belly dances, her hips twist in a frenzy.

Exù's ambassador shifts his hands over Teodora. Immediately she falls quietly asleep. Now it's the turn of Lily's belly and hips to jerk savagely, uncontrollably.

If nervous reactions, tactile sensation, motive energies, can be transfused into another living receptacle, then almost anything else must be possible as well. Lily can be freed of her aggressively mannish, maybe murderous nature. (Although the latter point was more likely than not, just a hysterical yarn, and she had probably never run a blade through the body of a peasant arsonist.) Anyhow, her wish could be fulfilled, she could be drained of her frustrated, unhappy character loaded with universal hate (as she complained herself) by injecting into her Teodora's docile femininity. If this could be done, it would be the unquestionable proof of the soul's independence from the body where it quite accidentally dwells. It would also mean a couple of bright years for Pedro.

Thus, nursing these two gratifying ideas, one of a possibly cosmic impact, the other less vertiginous, but still pleasant, Gordan gives himself up to the contemplation of nature's beauties. Shadows are becoming dark blue. Glow-worms glide through them like nut-sized burning emeralds. The scent of night-flowers (recalling a sort of super-jasmine) float over the clearing. Only Tiberio, whistling a gay samba under his breath, crouching beside his pupil like a black question mark, seems somehow to hinder the descent of absolute harmony.

It was possibly this presence which awakened dissonant thoughts in our exotic fellow-traveller's mulish head. Were these women really unable to see Tiberio's manipulations? How deep was their sleep? How far could hysterical mimicry go? Did the witches of the past sincerely believe they were flying through the air, riding on brooms?

Why should such people cheat - even themselves ? Because performing supernatural roles, high up in the kingdom of the spirits, must seem enormously attractive to conceited and oppressed people. Of course, states of genuine, complete catalepsy were also known. But there the investigation clashed with still more impervious problems.

***

He pulled himself together, trying to regain a more impartial view. Surely, exaggerated distrust must be as fruitless as ready credulity. He had to keep his too rigid controls under control. Otherwise he would never be able to oust monsters or crush dragons. (For even if these should prove entirely psychological dragons, they were nevertheless very nasty.)

Nor could he hope, if weakened by too much scepticism, to exorcise an entire convent of Benedictine nuns, in whose midst Exù-of-the-Seven-Crossroads (always the same!) has had the shocking idea of setting up his quarters.

Above all he had also to think of his urgent mystically financial (or financially mystical?) program. So he concentrated again on nature, glow-worms and flowers. He particularly admired the latter because they were invisible but still so manifestly present in the perfumed air.

CHAPTER IV

Six and a quarter hours. Still a lot of time left. Enough to think over his latest ups and downs. Too many incoherent lines crossed each other. Most came from vaudeville, but others recalled lugubrious Greek tragedies. ("Well, perhaps not Greek ones, but still ... ").

One of his impersonators, who might have been a success in a musical comedy, came from the alley-way and turned respectfully around the deceased white cock and its trimmings. Pedro de Azevedo Lima e Albuquerque was taking an early walk along the empty beach. Luckily he was heading away from Teodora who was wallowing still at a distance of five or six hundred metres.

Presumably, the post-impressionist was too impressed with the impending magic operation to protract his not entirely innocent dreams. How on earth had this marriage with the Danish girl come about at all? A still deeper mystery: how had it lasted almost seven years?

Lily had been just thirty, Pedro more than twice that age. This was not a disaster in itself. But then Pedro, when seen from afar at his wife's side, looked very much like a ten year old underdeveloped schoolboy. Still worse was the incompatibility of their characters.

The tiny painter, with his white goatee (which somehow recalled Don Quixote), with his sparkling, mischievous black eyes, had kept about him, along with its irremovable accessories (béret basque, pipe, espadrilles, slangy accentless French twang) something of the carelessness of the Montparnasse Bohemians in whose midst he had spent twenty of his best years.

("Modigliani? Yes. I knew him well. An Italian Jew, plastered most of the time. Nothing to write home about ... Except that ... well, he was a genius ... whereas me ... alas, a lamentable dauber ... yes, you understand: someone who smears daubs all over perfectly guiltless canvases ... right ... but then, I am still alive, which is something, just the same… Yet, if you knew… Gr-gr-great master of demons and tennis-cannon-balls ... my dear Paul Gordan, friend and protector of lonely Lears ...if you ... or anybody could understand what my life is like!").

And this fine old boy with his warm heart had daily to face the frosty contempt of the Monumental Danish Cow. (Gordan had invented this secret nickname following not only his inborn arrogance but also a highly logical deduction. Lily's father's profession makes it wholly clear. This respectable exile from northern pastures manufactured widely-known cheeses, appreciated all over Brazil. And his trade-mark as well as his ubiquitous labels, showed the features of a self-conscious, cultured European cow.) The too Nordic love-object answered Pedro's radiant cordiality with the stupid disdain of a particularly unsociable iceberg.

What was in her mind while listening to the wedding bells, seven years ago? Maybe she had begun, even then, to feel herself a spinster, isolated as she was by her secret loathing of men. Snobbery might have been another explanation. To leave the sphere of dairy production for the palace of one of the exceedingly rare (even if outdated and miniaturised) specimens of authentic Brazilian aristocracy must have flattered her. Nor was it unthinkable that her assessment of this sexagenarian's boiling vitality should have been altogether faulty. She would look forward to an easy-going conjugal life, followed (at not too long notice) by a distinguished widowhood. It would have been even more prosperous than her youth, spent under the sign of the cheese.

Few, if any, expectations had ever been more cruelly disappointed. Pedro's love of Lily could have been symbolically depicted as a volcano's fiery eruptions. Undoubtedly, there was also some kind of a Freudian fixation. For this noble but frustrated husband (who was of course thirsting for human sympathy) resumed, as often as circumstances would possibly permit, the same melancholy tale. His powerful virility, once enviable (here followed details worthy of an epic poet's harp) betrayed him everywhere outside the matrimonial chamber. Alas, he met, precisely at this privileged place, with a more than evasive reception.

("One evening, more than two years ago, she threw my clothes out into the corridor, thundering 'Get out of here, you dirty old depraved ape, and don't dare show your sickening, lewd face here again, if you don't want to swallow this! I'm keeping it specially for you!' Yes, believe it or not, she still always has within her reach one of those disgusting, long, thin butcher's knives which, in the country, they call 'mata porco' - swine-killer! Ever since I've been so scared that I live in the housekeeper's pavilion: little better than a kennel! In my own house! Oh well, in our house. Yes, because I have been such an idiot that I married her under the law of co-ownership! I assure you that up there, at my place, everybody has a much greater regard for Monsieur Anatole than for me!!").

2

At this very moment (much as if he had somehow, perhaps telepathically, read Gordan's thoughts) Monsieur Anatole in person emerged from the alley-way. With an unconcerned and sceptical look he examined the departed cock. The odour of the fag-ends, and particularly of the cachaça (for he was one of Brazil's few teetotallers) must have shocked him, for he proceeded to make one of his characteristic gestures, demonstrating a total disregard for public opinion. After short reflection, he began to piss attentively all over the magical display. Then, leaving the scene of his misdeed without haste he joined Pedro, who had stopped close at hand, brooding over something, puffing away nervously on his pipe. Having inspected the pockets of the painter's faded blue linen trousers, and having noticed the non-availability of peanuts (of which he could never get enough) Monsieur Anatole seated himself at the edge of the beach (concealing his disappointment, but marking his principled disapproval of all sorts of tobacco with an irritated sneeze), at Pedro's side, turning towards him his pointed ear, eager for gossip. This attitude was by no means a manifestation of friendship (his character being as stand-offish as an English peer's) but rather of the pleasure he felt whenever he had the opportunity of receiving confidential communications and listening to discourses about basic human problems. He did so with a lofty mien, although betraying glimmers of genuine scientific interest.

Judging by the motions of the pipe and of the mouth where it stuck, the temptation of harping on his favourite topics (in front of a sympathetic audience) had once more proved irresistible to the playmate of Van Dongen and Kiki de Montparnasse.

He must have rambled on something like this: (all in beautiful French, because the newcomer seemed to have taken a fancy to this language) - "My compliments Monsieur Anatole! How nice to meet you so early in the morning. Ah, mais! Nom d'un nom d'un nom! What a pity.. ...I am telling you ... you know that I am free of racial prejudices... ...and say so with all the respect due to your national identity… However … what a pity you are a dog!"

At this point in the lecture, Monsieur Anatole must (as he often did) have given the orator a haughty and slightly ironical looking-over. He obviously preferred his own standing as a superb wolf-hound (entirely black, however, by some moral slip of his forefathers), his young, sturdy two-and-a-half year old manhood, as well as the general respect he enjoyed, to the existence of a talkative oldster, who was visibly mediocre in his art and, all told, a little grotesque.

Moreover, Monsieur Anatole was a genius amongst dogs. It is from this angle that we should observe his ulterior interventions in the field of parapsychology. They are fated to turn out even more spectacular than his above-depicted demonstration. Therefore, a short analysis of this far from banal personality appears useful and promises enlightenment.

Although bottle-fed, during his early childhood, by Pedro, Monsieur Anatole was nobody's dog. For instance: he refused doggedly to answer to his name when it was not preceded by the accustomed honorary title. He used to take his meals at the 'palacete', accepting the eager attentions of the servants with good grace, reserving himself, however, a total independence in organising his daily routine. His absences were sometimes a little enigmatic. It was assumed, however, that he dedicated most of his time to researches about the life-style of neighbours, beachcombers and even far-away city dwellers.

The essential point was that Monsieur Anatole knew how to speak. That is: he loved to participate in conversations, in the various neighbouring drawing-rooms he was accustomed to visit. His attitude there was invariably the same. Half-standing, his elbows on the back of a chair, he scanned everybody around him. As soon as one of the other guests opened his mouth he would meet the concentrated, sparkling gaze, longing for knowledge, of this dignified black intruder. His "gr-gr-gr" and his "hum-bum-nrum", articulated as polysyllabic words, were now and then bored (he sometimes yawned noisily), then again, they were approving or manifested doubts or a discreet hilarity. But as a rule these remarks were placed quite pertinently and fitted into the context of the discussion.

He seemed to be aware, undoubtedly due to his own deductions, of the advisability of ontological speculations. (Pedro: "A genuine philosopher, he!").

Thus he awaited, sitting in the centre of the courtyard (and having a manifest knowledge of the time-tables), the passing of the planes (in those times still infrequent) to and from Sao Paulo. His nose, aimed at the sky, slowly followed their flight. Afterwards he stayed there for a long time, his head hanging, lost in thought, obviously trying to define the essentials of these strange beings so distinct from lower-flying and less noisy birds.

Therefore Gordan was not particularly surprised to observe their departure from the stage, with Pedro wildly gesticulating and exposing the situation to Monsieur Anatole. He would scarcely have been astonished had he seen them walking, arm in arm, along the street.

3

Exeunt Pedro & Co. from left to right behind the house. What was it the old fellow so eagerly wanted to impress on his four-legged counsellor? Undoubtedly something out of the same limited repertoire (maybe with variations) which he used to recite for the benefit of his two-legged confidential agent.

("Can you believe it Paulo!? She settled that loathsome old kitchenmaid in the midst of my art collections! What? Yes ... right ...but what I'm talking about is her cultural level ... I don't mean her family background which is ... well ... tolerable ... To think that she's capable of worshipping such a repugnant monster!! Wanda! the boss of the Merry Crocodile! I'm sure she cast an evil spell ... do you agree? Well, of course, such things are less frequent in France than here ... but they are commonplace in our family histories ... look ... my own grand-uncle the Viscount of Djurudjuba had his member knotted ... yes, by the maleficence of a fiendish sorcerer ... and it has been rumoured that the same misfortune befell his Imperial Majesty ... whence, naturally, the decline of the dynasty ... Of course I'm sure ... These things are with us ... since a number of noteworthy, yes, even distinguished persons, vouch for them, how could there be any serious doubt whatsoever ... ah, but ... how stupid of me ... he-he-he-! I am explaining this ... to you ... he-he-he ... to you! I'm convinced: you must have been a Brazilian in a former life ... Everybody talks about your gifts... everybody knows everything about you ... à propos ....tell me, if you may ... how did you manage to cure the old lady Sampaio - don't try to bluff me, my dear boy ... you know her as well as I do ... The old girl who owns the Sampaio Café Ltd. ... how did you cure her of that persistent public incontinency ... such an awkward thing at solemn ceremonies... so? so? Tiberio did it alone? ... yes, but you with him ... you two form a single astral person ... a famous clairvoyante has told me so ... well then: what about my business? I do understand ... how well I understand ... that it is an intricate case ... by all means ... we must proceed by easy stages ... gradually ... sure, that makes sense... but could you not, after all ... since you are capable of charming even horses ... what? what? only Tiberio does that? Tiberio again... I don't believe you, you are too unassuming ... I'm asking you: who would ever touch Tiberio with a barge pole, were it not for your sponsorship… Who the hell is he anyway? Probably a retired "capanga", a professional killer, from Alagoas ... that's their principal trade, up there ... Bah, Alagoas is more than two thousand kilometres from here, so who cares ... but without you he would never be a regular visitor to the Jockey Club advising the sportsmen ... ha-ha-ha! How cynical you are mon cher gr-gr-grand maître ... I know he's some kind of father-confessor to the jockeys ... to the real ones I mean ... ha-ha-ha ... good, good ... so he has more inside information than the horses themselves ... ha-ha ... but you should not poke fun at such serious things… you should know that better than anybody ... but you two ... as you are Siamese twins in the Realm of the Spirits ... joining your powers .. ...why don't you do still another job, but a quick one, for me? Oh, if only you could change that execrable Wanda into a real crocodile... no! no! wait!... into something else ... into a cockroach! ... so I could crush her under my espadrilles... like this! like this! What do you think??").

4

Never, never would Gordan have done such a thing! He recalled Wanda Correa da Costa, a fortyish widow, petite and slender like Pedro, still attractive, with her Roman nose, her pale, somehow threatening face which resembled a certain portrait of Cesare Borgia (without the beard of course, but as to that there were some painful problems which will be elucidated, however, in the course of this report).

Remembering her, he felt a slight shudder, this time without metaphysical causes. It was just that this ... it was just that that… well, it was just that Wanda Correa de Costa also happened to be a customer of Gordan's. As well as Lily. This was one of the supernatural vaudeville's plots. ("One of these days I shall be caught in my own cobweb. Look out, Gordan! She needs to be microscopically analysed, she does, that worthy Wanda!").

She was planting sugar cane ("Comme tout Ie monde qui se respecte") and owned numerous stills. In them she manufactured a celebrated rotgut - the bottles of which were adorned with the portrait of the above-mentioned amphibious creature - while partaking of the joys of alcoholism.

However the "mother of the crocodile" (as Pedro used to call her in his endless indictments) by no means usurped or ever exercised the rights of a despotic pater familias over Lily. Nor was she the vile seductress, entirely fabricated by post-impressionist imagination. Wanda had some absolutely censurable propensities. In this case though, she was, for once, nothing but an innocent victim.

It was Lily who launched (after a couple of weary years at Pedro's side) the social attack that had turned their first meeting into a close friendship and quite soon into a fiery idyll, evoking that of Tristan and Isolde. (Although suggesting a somewhat less sublime version of it.)

***

There was a small and very dirty notebook in one of his dossiers that could have been - but fortunately was not - inscribed with a proud title like: Gordan's Aphorisms.

Somehow he felt he had wonderfully succeeded in clarifying Wanda's and Lily's case, capturing it in a few penetrating words, which were not devoid of his usual literary virtues. He was unaware of a heading, written with invisible ink, by a ghost coming from a future extension of the time-space continuum. Together with other mysteries, this one will also be unveiled in an appropriate paragraph of the present disclosures, The heading said:

But luckily Gordan could not see this denigration of his thoughts and of their elegant expression. So he went on revelling in his creations and in the light they shed on those complex customers:

"Alas, humans are unable to avoid the trap of contradictory longings. Their denials and self-delusions are vanity. The silent dilemma: Master? slave? - never stops flickering, like some diffuse, venomous phosphorenee, through the gloomy caverns where passions are born."

***

After two years filled with the most tumultuous effusions, Lily got tired of being relentlessly idolised. However, it was the natural bent of their relationship which had led to this state of things. Were the roots of their passion merely corporeal? Did they just come from the contrasts of Lily's majestic shape, towering over her partner's fragile figure which called to mind Tanagra statuettes? There were certainly more and deeper causes. (Wanda: "Oh, your magnificent hands! My beautiful mistress! You lovely girl with a man's hands! Oh!").

As often happens, Lily's titanic facade hid unexpected, discordant counterpoints. Within her dwelt, among other things, a meek, childish soul and its fervent wish for self-sacrifice, devotion, submission to an overpowering master.

Of course, the mind boggles trying to guess what such an overwhelming master would look like. Undoubtedly like some sort of youthful Jack Dempsey, but much bigger. Let us say he would measure - as it is easier to imagine them together along horizontal lines - at least two metres in length and not much less in breadth. Or else, maybe, Lily would put up with a merely spiritual superiority. In that case the Swiss sovereign of the Two Cemeteries Island would be a perfect solution. Homicidal mania was their common point of understanding. The only trouble with Ingrid Ehrhard (which was the name of the island-prophetess) was that this hobby could hardly be just the raving of a sick imagination. It really seemed to be more than that. Rumour had it that la Ehrhard had already - at least once - realised her heart's desire. But then she would certainly not harm a docile disciple. Therefore she could safely take her place as a link in the chain of Lily's transformations, at the end of which, Pedro's long wait might be rewarded.

In the meantime, Lily - surrounded by a sempiternal cloud of incense, burnt by a perpetually adoring Wanda - felt growing frustrations. She had senseless fits of anger. They worried her, and she was unable to grasp their real causes.

(The plasticity of these people had never ceased to stupefy "Paulo". Tastes and characters changed uncannily, like in some wild, raving version of the Midsummer Night's Dream. Contrary to indignant denials, bisexuality flourished. A glance at the carnival processions and at their many scabrous travesties banished any doubt about that.)

So, Wanda, all things considered, was by no means Tristan and still less Isolde. It was an altogether different play. Wanda did not lack energy, even aggressive drive. Yet not enough to stand up against the unleashed storms of a Viking temperament. Lily's jealousy was so ferocious that the inventress of enlivening drinks had begun to tremble secretly for her life. Her tastes were manifold. But she dared not follow them any more. To fulfill the multiplicity of her dreams, the only way still open to her was the contemplation of Pedro's lavish as well as spicy art collections, which surrounded her implacably, like the walls of some Amazon prison tower. Torn between an adoring devotion to Lily and the desire to get the hell out of her reach, one part of Wanda's aspirations was closer to Pedro's deepest wishes than either of them could have guessed. Here was a good point for Gordan.

And there was still another one. Lily herself had reached a stage in her "sado-maso" evolution where she was not so sure any more what she actually wanted.

***

(Is there a more confusing cruelty than the joke about the sadist and the masochist? The maso: "Oh please, torture me!" The sadist: "What an idea! I couldn't think of it!").

Be that as it may, the threads of the plot became tangled. All the actors would gladly have deserted the theatre. They were paralysed by the inertia of habits, by the fear of some shocking crisis and by an incapacity to grasp the meaning of what was happening to them. To end this deadlock, it seemed imperative to recommend to the spirits thorough and expeditious action.

6

But they are really taking their time, he said to himself, squinting at the beach. Teodora, their special envoy, had made little progress. As far as could be seen from this observatory, she propelled herself with both hands, beating the shallow dying waves with her feet. Like some slightly idiotic child, teaching herself, with stubborn zeal, how to swim.

(A good thing it was July. For the autochtons this was winter at its severest. The quicksilver would hardly climb above twenty-five centigrade. Even later, few people would venture to the beach.)

Her twisting was liturgically correct. That is, she obeyed the post-hypnotic orders. But something was wrong with Gordan himself. Why couldn't he get her into focus? What twinkled there, around her head? Was it a mirage? Quite possible. Blinding reflections came from everywhere.

(In front of him: a flock of white islets, emitting a silvery glow. At his right, on a small hill: three imperial palm trees - huge exclamation marks. They seemed to quiver. Masses of hot air streamed upwards. Also the bulky cones of the Twins, higher even than the Emperor's Table, swayed behind blueish vapours.)

Where did this muffled rumbling come from? Was it far off or inside his skull? Could it be, all of a sudden, the much-feared short-circuit of nerves, the clash of irreconcilable wishes and wills? Did he "Want to see and do what he did not want to see and do"? (if however he had grasped the correct meaning of that Jungian psychiatrist's foggy sentence.)

He recalled a face which reminded him of a horse. There was also a voice to it. Pompous, irresistibly grotesque. Both belonged to Silbermann, the psychiatrist. Well, it was just one of that man's aspects. An eloquent, dignified, preaching horse. Gordan's silent laughter chased away the clouds of new-born phantasms which were forming all around him. Let them wait for their turn. Just half an hour. Other, more disturbing thoughts, came to him.

7

Of course, our contemplative acquaintance began, thereupon, to think about the "coming of thoughts". He remembered having put down, for posterity's sake, some astonishingly deep idea related to the subject. So he opened the aforementioned slovenly notebook, finding immediately his aphorism but still unaware of its omnipresent, unearthly title. Consequently, from now on, whenever we detect traces of the above-deplored disrespectful remark, smuggled from outer space into this chronicle, we will disguise it, together with our deep indignation, under a practically unbreakable code, sealed to all save a few exceptionally shrewd decipherers. Like this:

THS SPK ZRTHSTR'S SS!

"Could we but measure the thought's speed! Swifter than the light, it flashes through worlds, within fractions of a second."

8

Why was the trade in fire-arms and daggers so widespread in this land? Not a security problem, though murders seemed no more frequent here than elsewhere. Gordan had seen less idyllic places. He dealt in arms himself, now and again. By means of the Chevrolet truck, co-owned with Tiberio (one of their various associations), they did some business with "fazendeiros" - planters - scattered over the endless surface of the "interior". Under the cover of harmless transports they swapped automatic guns, whisky and French perfume for jaguar - and ocelot - skins. (Of course, the driver-salesman skimmed the profits, but you couldn't do everything yourself.)

It was not this trade, nor the omnipresent guns which intrigued him. Was it perhaps the weird, almost amorous relationship of the Brazilians to their fire-crackers?

(Here: across the front page. The picture of the President getting into an aeroplane, waving graciously to his admirers. His jacket of Irish linen is unbuttoned, showing what he wears at his belt. It looks like (and obviously is) a Smith and Wesson, .38 long barrel, certainly loaded with "carga tripla" bullets - the popular name for the magnum. Nobody would have second thoughts about that. As little as about his tie or his wedding ring.)

Gordan grinned and whistled. It was really a miracle they didn't march around killing each other even more diligently. A murderer just had to take one of those motor-barges which crossed the bay every thirty minutes. On the other shore he stepped into a different Federal State. There he could enjoy absolute liberty up to the end of the often endless, convoluted extradition proceedings, demanded by the constitution. For this was a free country, inhabited and governed by punctilious lawyers.

All of this was rather comical, with slightly macabre undertones. The same could be said about their infatuation with guns. But there was something more intricate behind it. There was an old, confidential correlation between these people and killing which astonished the Franco-Slav. This attitude differed from the atmosphere of his war memories. Nor did it have anything in common with the natural aggressiveness of his native land.

It was something else. In spite of their radiant amiability and refined courtesy, cruel obsessions throbbed in the brains of these people. The ceremonies of the common magic cult, called "Macumba", literally swam in blood. Of course it came, as a rule, from harmless sacrifices. Now, as for the Quimbanda cell he manipulated (or did it manipulate him?) some of its aspects would have delighted the "divine marquis". Moreover, that hidden popular sadism had deep roots.

The verb "degolar" - that is, to slaughter - (to cut throats - with knives, with razors, with swords - with anything whatsoever, as long as they were sure to spurt: those lovely red fountains!) flickered through all the legends of the country. During the war with Paraguay this treatment had been successfully applied to thousands of prisoners. About the beginning of this century, diverse bands of rebellious mystics performed the same surgical intervention on crowds of adversaries and government soldiers. More recently, gangs of highway robbers followed the tradition actively, and some of them even passively. The latter is illustrated by the example of the celebrated "cangaceiro" Lampiao, Mrs. Lampiao and a dozen of the gang's male and female lieutenants. Their salted and stuffed heads can be admired during opening hours (9 - 12, 3 - 6 pm - Thursday clos. Entr. fee: Cruz. 0.70, Childr.: Cruz. 0.35) in the Salvador da Bahia Municipal Museum of Modern Art and Handicrafts.

9

The topic of the greatest modern Brazilian novel: "The Rock of the Kingdom" by Ariano Suassuna is a bewildering texture of blood-trickling archetypes. How much of it stems from authentic nineteenth-century accounts and how deep the author's macabre and irresistibly funny synthesis of folk traditions goes is irrelevant. The sado-comical story of the "King Dom Joao II the Execrable" springs, like every genuine work of art, from such a truthful atmosphere, from such psychological plausibility that it opens the Brazilian folk-psyche like a key.

The hero is (of course) the mad prophet of a mystical sect. He gathers a few hundred of his wretched, hungering believers around two phallic rocks hidden in a deserted grassland. Mounting these natural pulpits he imparts, with beautiful eloquence, the good news to everybody with ears to listen. He opens to them a new, royal road to total redemption. It is easy. They just have to "degolar" each other, thus curing their brethren and themselves from all spiritual and corporeal ailments.

The Execrable Sovereign (crowned by himself) demands priority treatment for women, children and dogs. This injunction appears kindly and thoughtful, once the advantages to be gained by this surgery are clearly understood. Within a few weeks, all the victims are to resurrect, rubbing their eyes. And rightly so, because they will find themselves young, immortal, beautiful and scandalously rich, since in the meantime the transformation of the rocks into pure gold and precious stones will have been accomplished. Nor will there be the least shortage of "Lebensraum", as the dogs, resuscitated and converted into dragons, will promptly exterminate all the rich land-owners. The prophet king must have been a champion of mass hypnosis for his success was sweeping. Thousands of new brethren in the true faith came running from near and far to profit from the sanctifying medication. There were other praiseworthy prescriptions, like for instance a new version of Catholicism, revised by the Monarch himself, instituting compulsive and universal polygamy as the first moral duty of the North-Brazilian Catholic Church. Being a remarkably pious man, the Ruler conformed his private life strictly to the new precepts, marrying, among others, his two young cousins.

Unfortunately he could only periodically profit by this pleasant arrangement, since he was unable to perform his conjugal duties without having satisfactory quantities of human blood before his eyes. So we can readily understand his bitter complaints, when in one of his last sermons he accused his flock, calling them "people of little faith that omit to irrigate the Sacred Rocks as abundantly as the Law stipulates".

So they obeyed and a general slaughter ended these mystical raptures, even before the unhurried arrival of the local militia. But beforehand this godly flock had enabled their good shepherd to participate fully in all the benefits of his curative methods.

Suassuna's literary glory is amply deserved. Now, as to his sweeping popular success (before a public that never stops repeating "We are the most humane race on earth … observe, ah but observe the delicacy of our feelings … our sensitivity … our songs … our love-romances …our easy compassion!" - which was also partly true), it reminded Gordan of what he called: "this double bottomed national character". And thinking it over, his expression became dreamy.

10

There were other royal dramas which deserved pondering over. So, for instance, he called to mind a legend of the XVIIth century still very much alive in the people's imagination. It was about the realm of the rebellious Negro slaves and their king Zumbi.

(This name had nothing to do with the zombies. Some of these were going to participate in Gordan's impending experiment. How many of them? The Quimbanda's quick metamorphoses hardly permitted precise enumeration. Teodora, there at the beach, was of course a zombie, for a few days. As well as Lily behind the balcony of Pedro's funny house. She was at least temporarily "zombized". Not so her too clear-headed playmate, Wanda. And in what shape was Chico, the third participant of that weird gathering in the "palacete". Was he just a feeble-minded boy, or the reincarnation of a young warrior from Palmares, the capital of the revolutionary Negro monarchy? Be that as it may, since we are talking about the "living dead", let's repeat that there is a great difference between a zombie whose "corpse" has been stolen from his grave, then resurrected and converted into cheap manpower or by some other method deprived of his free will - and King Zumbi who had kept his own to such an extent that all the white masters trembled at his approach.

Everything was equivocal hereabouts. Including relations with African slaves. During this rational exploitation, which all the Christian Churches approved, the Portuguese didn't at all behave like little angels. (Their methods were not inferior to those of more enlightened nations.) They even succeeded (owing to their own contrivance) in improving greatly upon the already known devices of torture and mutilation.

In most houses, engravings could be seen representing "capitaes do mato" ("forest-captains"). The pictures (kept because of a likeable sentimental attachment to the past) portrayed the said officers going about their business - dragging after their horses at rope-end, amidst blood-hounds - strings of half dead niggers.

There was only one difference between the Portuguese and peoples with a greater racial consciousness. The Portuguese didn't have any. Traditional promiscuity and the begetting of brownish generations went on busily. Whence the comparative rarity of immaculately white or black Brazilians. According to Gilberto Freyre - whose work is the lone summit of Brazil's modern sociological history - there is no Afro-Brazilian - be he black as blacking - without a few drops of Caucasian blood in his veins, and vice-versa.

In this matter, however, the celebrated Brazilian sentimentalism eventually showed up. Liberation of illegitimate children became almost the rule. They were often sent to school and university. Following the quoted authority, the rural clergy's contribution to this manner of cultural progress was astounding. Which was one good point for the rural clergy's activity.

But the other side of the coin was less idyllic. There's no denying it. Too many accounts have survived. (Abolition of slavery came only by the end of the nineteenth century.)

Girlfriends of planters escaped mysteriously, now and again, in spite of their enviable standard of living. Even the most competent "capitaes do mato" pursued them in vain. Then the distressed master's legitimate spouse began serving him new little dishes, lovingly concocted, with the obvious purpose of consoling him and changing his ideas. The sauces - maybe a little too spicy, even for Iberian palates - disguised perfectly the provenance of the fat chunks of meat in the diverse ragouts and pot-au-feu. These were the most unexpected anatomical parts of the absent beauty. (Or would it be more appropriate to say: present but incognita?).

11

Redoubts hidden in inaccessible mountains, like the one in Palmares, which protected King Zumbi's realm, appeared several times in Brazil's four hundred year history. The African citizens indulged to their hearts' content in their favourite sport, which was hunting down and catching Whites so that they might contribute usefu