Mami pressed ‘play’.
A drumbeat jumped up, collided with another one, and the two chased each other around and around — rhythm. Chabella laughed, gasped, held her belly against Tomás’s kick. ‘He likes that,’ she said, proud. Both of us were shaking our shoulders to the rhythm. Even Papi was stamping as he steadily caught Chabella on film — click, click, click. Inside my head a group of drummers played, swaying in unison with a flourish of hands. Their drums were in their laps, small but with tough heads. The drum talk was threaded through with fast, loud bembe singing, Yoruba patched up with Spanish. I couldn’t understand a word, but I understood that it was a story, and that the way Mami began to dance, she knew which story. Chabella was awkward at first, watching her step, trying to make a pattern, pulling faces as she touched the ground flat-footed and clumsy under the weight of Tomás. But then I saw the song come through her. It came because she didn’t give up. The drums came like
kata-kata-ka
kata-kata-ka
KA-TA
kata-kata-ka
kata-kata-ka
KA-TA
Mami became Yemaya Saramagua, a sure, slow swell in her arms and her hips like water after a long thirst, her arms calling down rain, her hands making secret signs, snatching hearts.
Kata-kata-ka
Kata-kata-ka
KA-TA
Water is an unhappy eye. Alone it lives, wishing it were blind. Look into water; it will look back at you, and it will tremble. Yemaya Saramagua is her father’s eye; she watches the earth for him. Her own eyes, though, are shy. Orisha of water, she could drown the world in a flood if she wanted to, but she has never been in love.
Kata-kata-ka
Oh, now she’s in love!
Kata-kata-ka
She’s in love with Ogun Arere; iron Aguanilli, handsome, strong, so cold that even in the midst of the flame he shrugs his shoulders. She shouldn’t love him, but she can’t help it. Come, come, Ogun Arere, come to your true love. But Ogun rejects her. Still she comes back. He would have to build a mighty dam to keep her love away.
KA-TA
the story went on. Mami stopped knowing that we were even there. Very quietly, Papi sat down.
Once the story had danced itself out, I waited for the goddess to be gone. Then, behind her back, I clapped until my hands hurt. Papi wolf-whistled. I felt winded. It was infinitely better than cartoons.
Mami didn’t dance out apataki again, which made me think that it must have been some kind of Tomás-related thing, like a craving.
Aya’s family is large. Each member of Aya’s family has aspects, and those aspects have aspects. That is why, with only a little pain, the family could afford to separate when there was great need for them to do so. They had to scatter. When it happened, it was not so bad for Aya, as she did not love her aspects:
Yemaya Ataramagwa was never still for a minute; light jumped in her hair and chased her so that she was confusing to look at. And she loved the Ogun river too well, annoying Aya by insisting every day that they two go to play there.
Yemaya Achabba was as cold and limp and quiet as a fish-scale coat.
Yemaya Oqqutte made eyes at men, and swung her hips lazily; her walk was a trail of sleepy invitation. The men and boys who came to her were the ones who did not know that they wanted to die.
Aya said goodbye to her aspects cheerfully, though they wept and said, ‘Do not forget us, Yemaya Saramagua.’
Besides, Aya’s family is a wild family. They do not need to speak to each other or eat together to know that they are family. They strike each other, curse each other, take fifty-year holidays, but, always, they love.
When Aya’s family came into Cuba on a ship, they brought along with them three young ones from a Dahomey branch of the family who got confused and thought they were invited. They weren’t invited, but it was too late. The Dahomeians had to stick with Aya’s family, and so they discovered their Cuba in the dark, hidden in bigger emergencies, cries of warning as patrol ships tried to intercept the cargo. On arrival, communications arrived from the others; word from Haiti, from Brazil, from Jamaica, from America. Even from England there were some whispers, and then all the talk stopped. The conversations had become too strange. The family’s aspects abroad had changed. It was hard to know what the difference was, but it was there. There were secrets.
When Papa left the Cuba family, he left absentmindedly, shunting a toothpick around his gums, leaving a partly spoken sentence in the air behind him. When he shut the door on his way out that day, the house trembled from roof to basement. Aya knew that Papa wasn’t coming back, not to that house. Aya’s Mama knew it and so did all of Aya’s uncles and aunts.
Mama’s friend Echun, with his matted hair and his red and yellow striped cap, he was disgusted at being mistaken by the Spanish for a harmless baby. The Holy Child of Atocha was rosy-cheeked and dimpled and couldn’t drink as much palm wine and aguardiente as Echun would have liked. Echun went to Mama in her room, and all the flames wavering in the eyeholes of her masks shrank for fear of mischief being made upon them. When Echun wanted to shout, he stood up very straight and half closed his eyes. The first thing he asked Aya’s Mama was: ‘Why am I now called Elegua?’ Mama had no answer.
Echun asked, ‘And why have those three jokers from Dahomey started to speak Spanish? Are they Spanish? Are they Cuban? I don’t want to see those chattering Dahomeians. Same faces, different talk — it smells bad to me. If I could, I would kill them. At least that would be a change.’
Mama said only, ‘Echun. You always say more than you mean.’
Echun embraced her before he uncorked a bottle of palm wine and swaggered out of the door. He went down to meet his friend Anansi, a recent acquaintance, a stick-man with a pot belly and a beady-eyed grin. Anansi kept forgetting and calling Echun ‘Elegua’, but that was all right as long as they were leaving.
Aya’s Uncle Iku laughed and clapped his hands to hear that Echun was gone — he had little love for Echun. Once, for a joke, Echun had cut Iku up and scattered him all over the universe. When Mama told Aya about this, Aya said, ‘Mama, are you lying?’
Her Mama would only say, ‘Yeye, what followed was the most important treasure hunt ever.’
Ochun was the most beautiful of Aya’s family, the one with the gentlest voice. She suffered secret agonies over the drab garb that her counterpart, Our Lady of Mercy, wore in portraits. Strangenesses came to Ochun: it seemed to her that Our Lady of Mercy came into her bedroom as the night breeze flapped her muslin curtains, and tried to throttle her while she slept. Ochun told no one of this. But she left the Regla house soon after Echun did, taking nothing but the short bubi she stood up in and the five bright silk scarves that criss-crossed her waist.
And the three Dahomeians, finding that no one would speak to them and that everyone disdained them, spoke amongst themselves in Spanish until they painstakingly relearned Yoruba. They were two males and a female, and there were no more of their kind since they came from a small, proud land whose borders were smudged away by time’s white thumb. The Dahomeians had no aspects abroad. They had learnt Spanish because they could not afford to forget or to stop speaking, but no one could see that. No one in Aya’s family, not even gentle Mama, remembered to pity the Dahomey folk. This the Dahomeians could not forgive. Once they had relearned Yoruba to their satisfaction, they left the house too.