Jaspin waited, He fidgeted. At least in a doctor’s office they gave you an old magazine to read, a cube to play with, something. Here, nothing. He was very frightened and trying hard not to admit that to himself.
This is a field trip, he thought. This is like you’re going for your doctorate and you have to have an interview with the high priest, the mumbo man. That’s all it is. You are doing anthropological research today.
Which was true, sort of. He knew why he wanted to see Senhor Papamacer. But why, for God’s sake, did Senhor Papamacer want to see him?
One of the tumbondé men came back into the room. Jaspin couldn’t tell which one: they all looked alike to him, very bad technique for someone who purported to be an anthropologist. In his narrow black-and-red leggings, his silver jacket, his high-heeled boots, the tumbondé man could have been a bullfighter. His face was the face of an Aztec god, cold, inscrutable, cheekbones like knives. Jaspin wondered if he was one of the top eleven apostles, the Inner Host. “Senhor Papamacer, he almost ready for you,” he told Jaspin. “You stand up, come over here.”
The tumbondé man patted him down for weapons, missing no part of him. Jaspin smelled the fragrance of some sweet oil in the tumbondé man’s thick dark high-piled hair, oil of wintergreen, essence of citrus, something like that. He tried not to tremble as the tumbondé man explored his clothing.
They had stopped him after the rites when he and Jill were leaving two weeks ago. Five of them, surrounding him smoothly, while his head was still full of visions of Maguali-ga. This is it, he thought then, half dazed: they are on to human sacrifice, now, and they have noticed the scholarly-looking Jewboy with the skinny shiksa girlfriend, the wrong kind of ethnics in this very ethnic crowd, and in five minutes we are going to be up in the blood-hut next to the white bull and the three of us, Jill and the bull and me, will have our throats cut. Blood running together in a single chalice. But that wasn’t it. “The Senhor, he has words for you,” they said “When the time is here, man, he wishes speak to you.” For two weeks Jaspin had worried himself crazy with what this thing was all about. Now the time was here.
“You go in now,” the tumbondé man said. “You very lucky, face on face with the Senhor.”
Two more toreros in full costume came into the room. One stationed himself in front of Jaspin, one behind, and they led him down a dark hallway that smelled of dry rot or mildew. It didn’t seem likely that they meant to kill him, but he couldn’t shake off his fear. He had told Jill to call the police if he wasn’t back by four that afternoon. Fat lot of good that would do him, most likely; but he could at least threaten the tumbondé men with it if things turned scary.
“This is the room. Very holy it is here. You go in.”
“Thank you,” Jaspin said.
The room was absolutely square, lit only by candles, heavy brocaded draperies covering the windows. When Jaspin’s eyes adjusted he saw a rug on the floor, jagged patterns of red and green, and a man sitting crosslegged, utterly motionless, on the rug. To the right of him was a small figure of the horned god Chungirá-He-Will-Come carved from some exotic wood. Maguali-ga, squat and nightmarish with one great bulging eye, stood on the man’s left. There was no furniture at all. The man looked up very slowly and speared Jaspin with a look. His skin was very dark but his features were not exactly Negroid, and his unblinking gaze was the most ferocious thing Jaspin had ever seen. It was the ebony face of Senhor Papamacer, no doubt of it. But Senhor Papamacer was a giant, at least when he was looming on the top of the tumbondé hill at the place of communion, and this man, so far as Jaspin could tell, considering that he was sitting down, seemed very compact. Well, they can do illusions extremely well, he thought. They probably put stilt-shoes on him and dress him big. Jaspin began to feel a little calmer.
“Chungirá-He-Will-Come, he will come,” said Senhor Papamacer in the familiar subterranean voice, three registers below basso. When he spoke, nothing moved except his lips, and those not very much.
“Maguali-ga, Maguali-ga,” Jaspin responded.
A glacial smile. “You are Jaspeen? You sit. Por favor. ”
Jaspin felt a cold wind sweeping through the room. Sure, he thought, a cold wind in a closed room without windows, in San Diego, in August. The wind wasn’t real, he knew; the chill that he felt was. He maneuvered himself down to the red-and-green rug, creakily managing a lotus position to match Senhor Papamacer’s. It seemed to him that something might be about to pop loose in one of his hips, but he forced himself to hold the position. He was frightened again in a very calm way.
Senhor Papamacer said, “Why you come to us in tumbondé?”
Jaspin hesitated. “Because this has been a dark and troubled time in my soul,” he said. “And it seemed to me that through Maguali-ga I might be able to find the right path.”
That sounds pretty good, he told himself.
Senhor Papamacer regarded him in silence. His obsidian eyes, dark and glossy, searched him remorselessly.
“Is shit, what you say,” he told Jaspin after a bit, laying the words out quietly, without malice or rancor, almost gently. “What you say, it is what you think I want to hear. No. Now you tell me why white professor comes to tumbondé.”
“Forgive me,” Jaspin said.
“Is not to forgive anything,” said Senhor Papamacer. “You pray to Rei Ceupassear, he give forgive. Me you just give truth. Why do you come to us?”
“Because I’m not a professor any more.”
“Ah. Good. Truth!”
“I was. UCLA. That’s in Los Angeles.”
“I know UCLA, yes.” It was like speaking to a stone idol. The man was utterly unyielding, the most formidable presence Jaspin had ever encountered. Out of some stinking brawling hillside favela near Rio de Janeiro, they said, came to California when the Argentinians dusted Brazil, now worshipped by multitudes. Sitting on the opposite side of this little green-and-red rug, almost within reach. “You leave UCLA when?”
“Early last year.”
“They fire you?”
“Yes.”
“We know. We know about you. Why they do that, hey?”
“I wasn’t coming to my classes. I was doing a lot of funny things. I don’t know. A dark and troubled time in my soul. Truly.”
“Truly, yes. And tumbondé, why?”
“Curiosity,” Jaspin blurted, and when the word came out of him it was like the breaking of a rope around his chest. “I’m an anthropologist. Was. You know what that is, anthropology?”
The chilly stare told him he had made a bad mistake.
Jaspin said, “Sometimes I don’t know whether you understand my words. I’m sorry. An anthropologist. Years of training. Even if I wasn’t a professor, I still thought of myself like one.” Color was flooding to his cheeks. Go on, just tell him the real stuff, he thought. He’s got your number anyway. “So I wanted to study you. Your movement. To understand what this tumbondé thing really was.”
“Ah. The truth. It feels good, the truth?”