Harry Dean drummed his flat pink nails against the plastic of the only chair in the Afro-Brazilian Religious Authority. He was a grave, scrawny man, with a brittle frame held together only by the force of his eyes, black and suspicious. The equatorial heat still held him hostage after three days in Salvador da Bahia; here it poured in through a door that opened straight onto the street. The room doubled as a currency exchange and the rates of dollars and euros flashed on a small electronic board.

“What do you have for me?” he asked the man in front of him. He had started to suspect that coming was a waste of time.

A mulatto with a sleepy left eye raised his head from a list with scribbled times and addresses, sucking on a stick of corn ice cream.

“We don’t see many foreigners such as the Senhor asking for the candomblé temples,” he said. “Even the Brazilians from out of town prefer the beach.”

In the oven of January, Dean stood out in his long black pants and a shirt buttoned to his throat. He didn’t care that it revealed him as an outsider: long ago he had concluded that exposing his fragile limbs sabotaged the aura of might he wore like a mink coat.   

“My first wife was from Salvador,” he said. “Our son played for the Vitoria juniors.” He spoke Portuguese he had learned from books, but he spoke it well. 

“I should know him then,” the mulatto said.

“He killed himself before he could make the first team.”

The mulatto smiled; he was a submissive grinner. “I am sorry,” he said.

“It’s in the past now,” Dean shrugged.

“We have an excellent ceremony on Thursday. Maybe the Senhor will be interested?”

“Thursday is too late.” 

“But Tuesday is almost over,” the mulatto smiled. “It is practically only a day away.”

Dean could smell the fried palm oil on the man’s shirt. He had not slept since he had arrived in Salvador and had forgotten to eat for days. The thick odor made him nauseous. Gabriela, the call girl he had picked up in Sao Paulo, stood behind him, he presumed to underline her disapproval of the pagan ritual he sought to see. There was something erotic about a woman so conventionally catholic.

“He has a brain tumor,” Gabriela said to the mulatto, as if that explained something. A dark thought ran across Dean’s face but he let it pass.  

“I heard there is a terreiro today,” he said. “In Rio Vermelho.”

“Indeed,” the mulatto said. “You have to cross the entire city. But you should go today. Give me your hotel name, I will send someone to pick you up at six-thirty.”

“Six,” Dean said. “I know how you people are with the time.”

The mulatto glanced at Gabriela. Dean caught a spark of pity in the man’s eyes. “Of course,” the mulatto said, “you will need to wear white. And you cannot take pictures.”

Dean stepped onto the street in a rotten mood, and more relaxed because of it. Anger and irritation gave him confidence, made him feel alert, on the edge. Satisfaction was an anomaly that scared him; he used it to predict his failures: botched deals, lost investments, unpredictable marriages, vengeful children.      

“I don’t know why they call it a Religious Authority,” he said. “He didn’t have a clue.”

“He got us into a terreiro, didn’t he?” Gabriela said.

“Did you notice that smile? I hope they don’t take us to a favela and shoot us.”

“Do you prefer to take a cab?”

“Cabs are not safe in this town.”

She sighed, “Let’s get you some capoeira pants. You need white clothes.”

He had found her in a hotel bar in Sao Paulo on the night he arrived from Miami. Her face broke into a hundred joyful dimples when she talked and her hair smelled of coffee. Her dialect was lithe, from the Northeast of Brazil: Pernambuco or maybe Pará. She was six inches taller than he and spoke with a disregard for his self-importance he had not experienced since childhood. There had been no reason to bring her to Salvador, but he had spent hours pleading and had offered her an astronomical daily rate fit for a movie star. I am starting to dread loneliness, he thought as he tried on pants, but he knew there was more: her eyes radiated compassion for which he had started to yearn.

“I don’t know why you need to watch this voodoo,” Gabriela said. “Their bodies are taken over by the orixás and their faces look like demons. I’ll have nightmares.”

“Make up your mind!” Dean snapped at her. “I don’t need you there!”

“I’m curious,” she said.  

It was exasperating that the mulatto knew about Dean’s disease because of her. Reminders that his lifetime of work would be cut, cruelly, before he had left a transcendent legacy filled him with frustration. Gabriela’s conviction that his cancer was the reason for the terreiro visit was suitable, but a vague fear was more to blame for his return to Salvador. He had left something incomplete here; he could not put his finger on it but the wariness was eating at him like the cancer in his head.

“Don’t ever mention that I’m sick!” he hissed at her. “Or I’m putting you on the next flight to Sao Paulo.”

“And that would be bad, wouldn’t it” she joked. He wanted to hurl an insult at her but held it in.

He took his time walking back to the hotel. Gabriela was surprised to see him smiling. Carnaval was approaching, its smell of ecstasy seeped from the sweaty streets, timely and inevitable like a monsoon downpour. The neighborhoods he chose to cross pounded with the festive drumming of Blessed Tuesday. Pickpockets in flip-flops and soccer shorts made their living among the tourists. Ancient black women and shirtless vagabonds grinned and gawked from the entrances of the Portuguese cathedrals, enjoying the sporadic whiff of breeze. He waved at them: they looked eternal, like the heat and the smell of the sea.

In front of the hotel, an enormous Bahian woman in starched white lace had set up an acarajé stand. She was kneading the bean paste into spoon shapes as big as her palms and dropping them into sizzling red palm oil. Her daughter was digging in a bag with salted shrimp and pulling off their heads.  Dean was a vegetarian and watched with innate revulsion as the daughter minced the shrimp into a bowl of cooked okra. Without a worry in the world, he thought. I wish I knew how to be this primitive.  

Upstairs he turned on the ceiling fan and stepped out on the terrace. He listened to the shower thumping against Gabriela’s body. That morning, she had convinced him to take a public bus along the Orla to Ondina and on to the beach at Stella Maris and he imagined the salt and the sand washing from her body.

She came out wearing only the ebony necklace he had bought her from a beach vendor. Tan lines crossed along her nipples and the mound where her pubic hair had been shaved. He waited for her to kiss him first. It was like that with every woman in his life: the smallest act of intimacy became a test to see if he would receive the affection he never truly believed he deserved.

He was inside her when his pants began to buzz on top of the small fridge by the bed. He carried five cell phones which vibrated incessantly. He never failed to check who was calling but seldom picked up.

“Who was it?” Gabriela asked.

“My wife.”

She slid off him and lay with her legs open, catching her breath. “You never told me about your son,” she said.

“There is nothing to say,” Dean said. “He was a failure and a parasite. I gave him everything, I planned his entire life, but he refused to let me help him. I pulled him from college, I locked away his car, stopped his money. I made him break up with his girlfriend and his friends in Miami and sent him back here to start learning the world. He killed himself and blamed me for everything, as if I was a murderer. It was just like him, to refuse any responsibility. But this is none of your business.”   

He rolled on top of her and entered her again.   

“Maybe it was an emergency,” she said. “Isn’t your wife in Miami?”

He stood up with a jerk so she could see his irritation. It took three redials before the call went through.

“Where are you?” his wife said. Her voice was apologetic. A stab cut through him whenever he noticed that he inspired fear in those he had set out to protect. Pity and guilt rose in him and he let them run uninhibited; if he stopped paying attention, they could almost be mistaken for love.

“I’ll be home in a couple of days,” he said. “Is everything fine?”

“I am interrupting you. I can call later.”

“Tell me, Katherine, I have time.”

She hesitated. “The man from the Jaguar dealership called. My car arrived. You promised he’d have the money by today.”

“Ask him to wait a few days. I’ll take care of it.”

“It is not necessary for you to be here. I just need the money.”

A hot flush washed over him. He covered his naked genitals with a corner of the bed sheet: his shame inevitably awoke from suspicions that he was loved solely for his money.

“Did you finish what I asked?” he said.

“The bookkeeping? I am almost done. It should be ready by tomorrow morning.”

“E-mail it to me to review it. Then we can talk about the money.”

“But the deadline…” she began and stopped herself. “Where are you?”

“In Salvador, Bahia,” he said. He could hear her despair.

“Are you back in that hotel room?” she said. He filled his gut with anger so his tears wouldn’t pour out. “Let that boy rest in peace,” she said. “They’ve changed the sheets and they’ve changed the bed. What can you hope to find there?”

“Katherine,” he ignored her, “You should know I was diagnosed with brain cancer. Send me that e-mail if you want the money.”

He hung up and turned off the phone.

“You were wrong,” he said to Gabriela. “I shouldn’t have called her back.”

Another one of his phones began to vibrate and crawl over the fridge. He ignored it and walked into the bathroom.

Gazing at the running shower Dean thought of the first time he had stayed in this hotel room, eleven years before, and slept in the bed where his son had swallowed sixteen codeine capsules. The first night had been filled with ghosts but he had repeated his stay twice more over the years and by now the room carried a nostalgic comfort, like visiting a childhood home.

The act of his son had been a selfish crime committed against Dean himself. How could the boy have convinced himself that his father wanted to destroy him? That groundless fear and the accusation inherent in the suicide had borne the poison that flowed through Dean. In that incident and since then, he had begun to think of himself and the love which occasionally grew in him as manure: useful and efficient to those who benefited from it but carrying a stench nobody wanted to get too close to.  

His chest rang hollow when he revisited these thoughts; he felt that he could suck in his ribs until they touched his spine. But a man cannot stay empty, he thought; anger and contempt grow like weeds where love has been pulled out. He turned off the shower and stepped back into the room. Gabriela was hanging up one of his phones. She tried to hold back a mysterious grin as she put on her panties.

“It was your doctor from Miami,” Gabriela said. “I didn’t understand all of it and he refused to tell me. I said that you don’t pick up, so he mentioned about a mistake and that everything is fine, and to call him when you can.”

He was overwhelmed by an urge to urinate, right there on the carpet. How prosaic the idea of normalcy appeared after the drama of total loss had been tasted. His face flooded with blood.

“Who said that you can pick up my phone?”

He struck her. Her head jerked from the hit, but her body remained steady. She was beautiful and strong, her eyes brimming with tears of contempt. Her smile hurt like a slap. “You are too cowardly to call him,” she said. “If you lose your sickness you will have to justify your anger.”

He wanted to say something hateful but he was too tired, and fatigue turns a man into a pragmatist.

“Wait for me downstairs!” Dean said.

He locked the door after her. There were times when he despised himself with a power that threatened to suffocate, but he had the right to hate her. What was her entitlement, a trip’s diversion, to play a messenger of destiny. He made the bed with meticulous care and smoothened the sheets: his wife had been mistaken, it was the same bed in which his son had died. The cell phones flashed like radars from the top of the fridge. He would call in the morning, he decided, but he didn’t care what that conversation would bring. Life goes on, he thought with the resentment of someone forced to cancel his vacation in the last moment. He had been cheated out of his peace. The disease was gone, as fast as it had arrived, but the vague fear that had lived in him for years remained.  

He walked onto the terrace and gulped the thick air. Rain had moved in over The Bay of All Saints; it lifted the heat off the streets as it approached. The drumming across the neighborhood had intensified with the arrival of the storm. For a few moments, the smoldering dread in his gut subsided and ecstasy rushed into its place. Salvador, he thought with a welcome pleasure, can seduce anyone with its insatiable thirst for exuberance. It can even bring a dead man back to life.

His watch, his wallet and his passport stayed in the hotel safe. Before he exited the room, he left the light and the fan on and shut the terrace door so the mosquitoes wouldn’t come in. In the lobby, he kissed Gabriela as if nothing had occurred and slung a white shirt he had pulled from her suitcase over her shoulders. Apologies were an embarrassment he could only perform by masking them as forgiveness for those he had abused.

“You still want to go?” she asked. “Why?”

“I don’t know,” he said. She pretended to believe him.

Darkness fell fast as the rain left. They were picked up half an hour late by Romulo, a racial brew with a beautiful Roman face and skin the color of pecans.

“Oba!” he greeted them as they entered his miniature car. He wore a cotton-lace tunic and pants that shushed as he moved. His large belly took Dean by surprise. 

“Do you know where you are going?” Dean said.

“We’ll take a shortcut, the main boulevards will add an hour.”

His voice was soft like a poet’s, but he never smiled. Almost at once, he drove them into a massive traffic jam. Dean tried to suppress his irritation by blowing air into his fist.

“Today,” Romulo said blind to the madness outside, “is the feast of Omolu, the doctor of the sick, the master of the underworld. He wears a straw mask, because he has bad skin and he is ashamed of his appearance. Do you know Omolu?”

“He knows them all,” Gabriela shrugged.

They were passing by a long lake with silver waters that gave off the smell of sulfur, but Dean did not close his window. He pointed to Gabriela the thirty-foot candomblé gods, regal and opulent, looking at them from among the date palms: Oba, the warrior queen, Oxum, the vain beauty, Oxala, the great heavenly father, Yansa, the mistress of the winds, Xango, the temperamental one, Yemanja, the great mother of the waters, and their innumerable legitimate and illegitimate offspring. The opportunism of the gods, it seemed, eased only when they made love; it had been so ever since they had arrived with the rattling chains of the slave ships.    

He held Gabriela’s hand and the human touch gave him comfort. From her stiff fingers he knew she was surprised by his gesture.

“I am worried,” he said.   

“What for? You’re not sick anymore, you can do anything you want.”

His unease increased when they parked and he recognized the baroque houses of the sugarcane plantation owners. The neighborhood carried the buoyant spirit of those original settlers: Dean smelled it in the frying codfish smoke escaping from the windows and the cachaça fumes evaporating from the street.  

The temple took the ground floor of a blue house on top of a hillside largo; it was an area he had habitually avoided while he had lived here. Out in front samba schools came to rehearse where disobedient slaves had been flogged for centuries. Once, workers had dug up the square to renovate the plumbing and had discovered the dried blood of those slaves. It had seeped through the stones and smeared their undersides across the square and along the streets of the neighborhood. It had formed age rings like those on trees; the candomblé priestesses had used them to determine the time of the deaths.

The temple itself struck him as a modest affair: a square room with white plastic chairs lined by whitewash walls and four thrones in the middle facing the four corners of the world. White paper strips covered the ceiling like jungle grass and fluttered en masse with each hint of breeze. Silver statues of the orixás stood along the walls, bouncing the fluorescent light through the open doors and across the square outside. At the opposite end of the room, a doorway led to a patio surrounded by wild jacarandas.  

Romulo whispered instructions. They were to separate, Gabriela to the women’s section on the right and Dean to the much smaller men’s section on the left. It amused him that people who would shortly offer their bodies to the gods would be so self-conscious about the mere proximity of the opposite sex.  

“Don’t forget to pick up some of the food they’ll be giving out,” he heard Romulo say. “You’ll need the energy.”  

It had been years since Dean had walked into the house of the orixás. He had arrived in search of their attention, but now the chance of being subjected to their erratic will weighed on him like a heavy meal. When the pounding drums announced the first calls for Xango, his mouth dried out. After days of starvation, he hoped he was sufficiently empty to receive any spirit without much pain.

“Maculelé,” the room chanted, “Oba, oba.” He chanted with them.

People continued to pour in; when no space remained inside, they swarmed around the windows on the street. Dean glanced for Gabriela and Romulo but his view was blocked by the emergence of the priestesses, black faces under white turbans, billowing lace dresses with splatters of color. They stomped in a wide circle around the thrones; in one of them now sat a man in a tunic. It took a moment before Dean recognized the mulatto from the Afro-Brazilian Religious Authority. He met Dean’s eyes, but the smile he offered was not submissive anymore. Dean knew what bothered him about the man: it was as if his own self-pity and his conceits were naked to the mulatto’s gaze.

Over and over, the congregation sat and stood up and called out in Yoruba. The weaker and the disabled lifted their canes when they could not stand on their legs. The priestesses circled the thrones and chanted, threw themselves on their bellies at the feet of elders and waved at faces in the crowd. Their stomping went on, lap after lap around the room, with the persistence of soldiers. Dean read their eyes and searched for a sign of the orixás. He was like an explorer: he did not know what lay ahead or why he was looking for it but he felt compelled to discover it. His search seemed to have no end, the drums and the chants and the grins charged from all sides, the air wrapped around his muscles and squeezed, white and silver numbed his eyes, exhaustion filtered his thoughts. Animal screams began to split the singing; those who had released them joined the circle with their mouths open, tongues hanging obscenely, eyes rolled into their heads. Their bodies were no longer theirs, the orixás had taken over. Dean envied them, they had received what they had come for and now were numb to the pain in their muscles.  

Every few minutes fireworks exploded on the terrace with a violent rattle. It was hours later, two or maybe three, when after one eruption the congregation filed to the patio until it overflowed. The knot in Dean’s belly had relaxed. The heat had increased by the hour until it spread through his system like a drag of opium. He sat amidst the crowd, listening to the blood in his head chase the drums. The congregation had mixed with the priestesses; the gender bashfulness of the beginning had departed with the oxygen in the air. Muscular young men handed out palm leaves covered with fried manioc flower, chicken and shrimp. They bypassed him at first. The food was given out slowly and at random but more and more people around him paused to eat by the minute. They looked blissful with their fingers and lips glistening with oil.

Fireworks exploded again and Dean laughed. It felt good to give up the control over thoughts and fears. A voracious hunger had overtaken him. He reached instinctively for a leaf-full of food and scooped two fingers of meat as he listened to the growls of the entranced ones. It tasted strong but he welcomed the jolt. Gabriela waved at him from somewhere. She was so beautiful and so gentle, and he had been a monster to her. He tried to cut a path to her, pushing with his shoulders while his hands stuffed food into his mouth. He knocked into someone and almost fell. The mulatto held him steady and grinned.

“You came to see if you will live?” the mulatto asked.

A vicious fire had started to burn through Dean’s guts. He was glad; it was needed to torch the poison inside.

“I am not sick,” he said.

“You were cured fast,” the mulatto said and disappeared before a reply.

There was no reason for it, but Dean felt short of breath. His stomach contracted around his insides. Cold sweat broke across his face and his scalp hurt. There had been so much contempt in that voice. This morning he had me written off, he thought, and now he hates that I don’t need his witchcraft. A razor cut across his bowels; he gave out a bark and dropped to his knees. The stones beneath the floor were trying to suck out his blood, like they had done with those slaves. He wished he had never come to this city of ghosts, had never seen that hotel room, had never revealed himself to that horrible smile.

“Omolu, atoto, abaluaye,” the crowd chanted.

The batucada pummeled on. Figures rushed through the crowd, covered in wood and straw. They waved short spears and thrust them with menace. Someone stepped in front of Dean and he forced himself to look up; it was Omolu, the diseased one. His body was covered with a wig of straw trailing down to his feet and concealing all sides. It was impossible to know the face from the back. He stood like a strict parent waiting for an explanation. Dean’s eyes burned but he was ashamed to cry. I am rotting and everything I touch rots with me, he thought. I destroy those who reject my love and those who love me back I hate because I think they want to use me. I am afraid all the time and of everyone.

A hand came from under the straw and touched Dean’s face. It was kind and firm, he felt safe behind it. The orixá took off his straw cover and the mulatto from the religious authority stood in his place. Where there used to be a grin now stood an expression of great pity. He put the mask over Dean’s head. Dean could see nothing. Bodies danced and chanted around him, embraced him, feet thumped on the floor, drums beat like judges’ gavels. He had diagnosed his disease and it brought a discharge of anguish, like the reading of a verdict.

“Thank you!” he repeated. “Thank you!”

***

He came to himself in Romulo’s car. The night outside was a black darkness. “What are you thinking!” Gabriela said. “Eating fried meat! Your stomach cannot handle this!”

Romulo dropped them in front of the hotel; he had not spoken during the drive back. Gabriela headed inside, but Dean pulled her by the hand. He did not want to see that room again; it was time to leave his boy alone. Later he would ask Gabriela to bring down his things and tomorrow he would move to another hotel. He would wire the money to his wife, even if she had not finished the bookkeeping; but he did not anticipate going back to Miami soon.

New air and the smell of salt drifted from the bay. He led Gabriela toward the old neighborhoods, towards the tipsy crowds, the relentless drumming, the cacophony of life. The baiana he had seen in the afternoon still fried acarajé on the sidewalk. He ordered one and took a bite. The peppers shot fire through his body.  

“Are you trying to kill yourself?” Gabriela laughed. “You just got sick!”

The top button of his shirt pressed against his throat; it had been choking him the entire night. He opened it and took a breath, then removed his shirt altogether. A couple of vagabonds walked by and looked at him but he ignored his instinctive shame.

“I like this,” he said.

With his mouth full, he paced on down the sidewalk, his weak and naked body exposed to the gaze of the street.