Later, when they sat eating by the sea, the woman said, “You are from far away.”
“We’re from Michigan,” Ross volunteered.
She nodded.
“Ma’am,” Jimmy said, “I don’t really understand what’s going on...”
He held up a remaining bit of fish and bit into it.
“I love it, but I don’t understand what’s going on. I don’t even know who Yemaya is.”
“You do,” Ross said. “You do, a little.”
“Yemaya is the Mother of all the Seas and all that is in them,” said the woman.
“She is the great wide water from which we came. She is our Mother.”
“Mother of God.”
“Mother of the Gods.”
“Mary.”
“Mary is part of her,” said the woman. “Or the other way around. It doesn’t do too much to talk about these things. Better to live them.”
Yemaya Assessu Assessu
yemaya Yemaya Assessu
Assessu yemaya
Yemaya olodo Olodo yemaya
Yemaya olodo Olodo yemaya
“How do you feel?” the woman asked, and she looked like Anigel, no, she looked like Caroline, She had that motherly thing, same as Caroline Balusik, and she said, “What is happening to you, James?”
And Jimmy did not even wonder how she knew his name.
He said, “It’s like someone reached in and told all the bullshit to shut up, told all the noise to be still.”
She nodded.
“Will it last?”
“It will last for the night,” she said.
Jimmy Nespres woke up hot and sticky with the sun in his eyes and Ross Allan holding a beer out to him.
“Hair of the dog, my friend,” he said.
“What, the….”
There was still a purple edge to things and Jimmy, who never wore his glasses, thought everything looked the way it did when you put them on for the first time, oddly focused and strangely clear. He took the beer and drank the fizzy goodness, refreshed, not even thinking of the taste, and looked at a poster on the wall, trying to read it, but the words turned fiery gold and rolled away.
“I’m still tripping.”
“A little,” Ross said. “So am I.”
Ross sipped his own beer.
“My glasses have been talking to me.”
“The fuck?”
“I know it’s not real, but, they keep singing”
“What are they singing.”
“Fshhsususupsusssuus.” Ross said, very seriously, and Jimmy spritzed his beer all over himself, laughing.
The toilet flushed, water ran, and Flipper came out of the bathroom, drying his hands on his linen pants. his black hair a mess.
“He’s up!”
“I’m up,” Jimmy agreed. And then he said, “Where the fuck are we? I don’t remember us getting a room.”
“We’re in Carlos’s house.”
“Who the fuck is Carlos?”
“He was with us all last night. At the Candomblé thing. I thought it was Santeria, but it was Candomblé. We drank all this fermented liquor and—”
“Ouch!” Jimmy shouted. “My arm!”
“Oh, that’s right,” Flipper said. “You don’t remember?”
Jimmy touched the bandage on his right arm.
“Remember what?”
“You got a tattoo, my friend,” a handsome brown man said, coming into the room.
“Carlos?” Jimmy said.
“Yah! You got yourself a tattoo. You took it like a fucking pro.”
Jimmy’s eyes widened. He’d never wanted a tattoo in his life. There was a mirror in the room and he got up and looked at his bandaged arm.
“Take a look,” Carlos said. “You might as well clean it. It’s time for that after care stuff they gave you.”
Ross, who had wondered, but been in no position to stop him, if Jimmy should get a tattoo or not, came forward and helped his friend with the bandage. Jimmy’s eyes widened as Carlos brought back bandages and the package of liquids.
There was a woman, Virgin Mary like, but with no veil, in a blue dress standing on the waters, her black hair hanging over her shoulders, hands extended. She wore a starry crown on her head and Carlos said,
“Mama Yemanja. Yemaya, Lady of the Sea.”
She was beautiful, though evry line of her was rimmed in the red of his irritated skin, and she burned. She was beautiful, and unlike the other women he had known, she was there for good, and people would always be asking him questions or commenting on the quality of the work. He was dismayed by her, but at the same time amazed by the Lady’s beauty, and amazed that he had somehow endured the coloring, and all that made this art on his arm.
“You like it, yes?” Carlos said, and Jimmy realized he must have been the one who had done it.
“I love it,” said Jimmy.
Jimmy was mostly Irish, but not his name. That went back to his father’s father and those before him who had been Portuguese fishermen. Somewhere in the Nespres household was an old faded print of Mary, veiled, with a halo of stars, walking across the stormy waves to rescue a ship, and printed beneath it was the title OUR LADY OF THE SEA.
Jimmy remembered everything from the last night…. No. it must have been the day too, but in no order. And some of the things he remembered may have not actually happened. Some of the things he saw he might have only seen with the benefit of acid. He remembered coming to Carlos’s large house which was part of a temple or some sort. He remembered a great pillar covered in beads, and eating sweet and sour plantain, and spicy hot meat. He remembered the sea full of stars and the sky full of the sea, and he remembered Anigel Reyes or Caroline Reyes rising up out of the water in a white gown, water dripping from her hands, and holding one little candlelit boat in the palm of her massive hand while she looked down in love at all on the beach, and the little paper boats floating on the night dark ocean.
“So you come, you all come to the feast today,” Carlos said. “Get food in you. It starts soon.”
“Feast.”
“Yes, indeed, Music and food and everything.
“But you stink, Man. You stink,” said Carlos, who was dark brown with bright black eyes and thick curly hair.
“Take a bath.”
They were in no hurry. They showered in the large glass shower upstairs and didn’t care if anyone came in. They were exhausted from their trip and used to each other, so they touched a little, washed each others backs, and dressed in nearly clean clothes.
Downstairs, a round old woman with gold teeth offered them a cold milky drink, and Ross took red juice that tasted like strawberries. He passed Jimmy a plate of rice and eggs. The house was filled with the smell of food, and Ross didn’t ask what it was, but Flipper, not daunted by his time in the store in Chicago did. There was red snapper and all kinds of fish. Crab, lobster even, and there were dishes of tamales, but the woman who looked like Anigel said, “That is acaca. It is the food that is always given, the sacrifice of corn that must always be made. This here is acaca for Oxosi, and this here for Exu. This, this is for Yemanya.”
Yemanya, or Yemaya, burned on Jimmy’s arm. He couldn’t wait to take off the bandage and see her again, to wear her proudly every day, and another part of him couldn’t wait to be rid of her, envisioned rubbing the whole tattoo away. She would have her way. She would have her way. She wanted this was all he could think. And no proper God had ever wanted him before. No, Jesus wanted him, the crooked one, the Jesus no one ever talked about. He knew it without vanity, but didn’t know how it made him feel.
“In Rio they toss the food out onto the streets after they make it,” said Isabella who was young and pretty, black and big bottomed.
“What do you do here?”
She looked at Jimmy and smiled.
“We eat it.”
A few times in his life he had seen processions to the Virgin Mary. Back home, in his neighborhood, at Our Lady of the Sea, they were trying to revive old traditions, get new asses into those old wooden pews under those cream colored walls. Trumpets played poorly, blank faced white folks lined up, The priests put on their birettas, and they took they rosaries. There was a wan statue of Mary, often our Lady of Fatima, a reminder of hr dire warnings about the sins of the world. They would be reminded to pray for an end to abortion, and then she was be hefted up on a litter.
Immaculate Mary
Your praises we sing
You reign no in splendor
with Jesus our king
Ave, ave, ave Maria!
Ave, ave, ave Maria!
There she stood, hands outspread on a great canopied platform with ornate gold painted pillars, and she was all in blues and white, and over her beautiful brown face was a great veil and a crown. As the drums beat, and they raised her onto their shoulders, the gathering crowd chanted:
Yemaya oh, ako, ako yo yemaya
Yemaya oh, ako, ako yo yemaya
In heaven the blessed your glory proclaim;
On earth we your children invoke your fair name.
Ave, ave, ave Maria!
Ave, ave, ave Maria!
“We eat it,” she explained,
“It is a sin to waste food, to waste the good things people need by throwing them out on the street so no one but birds can make use of it. The effort is for the orixas, the smell is for them, the offering of life. But we are crowned in them. We are them and they are us. The only way they can consume it is through us. We eat it.”
Trumpets and dancing accompanied Yemanja down the streets, to the corner, toward the beach where the crowd in white grew larger, where the music never became irreverent though it did become raucous, and like madmen, though the sea approached, those bearing its Mother did not stop, but kept walking into the water, the Lady born on their shoulders.
Yemaya Assessu Assessu
yemaya Yemaya Assessu
Assessu yemaya
Yemaya olodo Olodo yemaya
Yemaya olodo Olodo yemaya
Virgin Marys and glass beaded rosaries shook in the brown and beige hands of the faithful, Ross went to the sandy ground on all fours, unable to grip sand, shaken by an orgasm of reverence. The men stood chest deep in the water and dunked the Lady and her canopy in once, twice, three times.
“There’s this girl I’m looking for,” Jimmy had told the woman with gold teeth.
“Girl?” the woman smiled at him. “Oh, well, alright?”
“She was with us last night.”
He described the woman who looked this Caroline, this Anigel. He did not say that she grew to be tall as the sky with small boats in her hand.
The woman only said, “I have seen…. No such girl.”
Iemaya came out of the Atlantic, dripping water, the way Ross had dripped water.
Immaculate Mary your praises we sing
You reign no in splendor with Jesus our King
Yemaya olodo Olodo yemaya
Yemaya olodo Olodo yemaya
Blue glass beads, small and shining, rounded and blinking, like the water dripping from a Goddess, like the water dripping off Ross in the early morning.
There would be a feast tonight… no, this day, lasting into the night, a feast, and then they would drive to Miami. But how could Miami match this?
