Kardec’s philosophy was enthusiastically embraced in Brazil, where it was assimilated by the less educated classes into the various ‘umbanda’ sects, which recognise not only the saints of the Catholic Church, but the old Amerindian spirits, and the trickster Yoruba spirits. ‘Pure’ Kardecism seems to be mostly a middle-class phenomenon, and its followers, aware of the marginalised status of Portuguese among European languages, actively promote Esperanto as an excellent vehicle for promoting their beliefs. A key text for the Spiritists is John 10:16: ‘And other sheep I have, which are not of this fold: them also must I bring, and they shall hear my voice; and there shall be one fold, and one shepherd’, meaning, to the Spiritists, that there will be not only religious but linguistic unity when the word of God is fulfilled. For, as we read in the first verse of John, ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the word was with God, and the Word was God’; and Esperanto is a means of salvation from the curse of Babel.
In 1958 the Brazilian medium Yvonne Pereira published a novel, Memórias de um Suicida (Memoirs of a Suicide), which she claimed was dictated to her by the spirit of Camilo Castelo Branco, one of the greatest Portuguese prose writers of the nineteenth century. It is not a literary work, said Branco, but rather fulfils a sacred duty of warning against suicide by revealing the truth about the abyss that the suicide will find himself in after death; and Branco did indeed commit suicide in 1890. However, this abyss, unlike the conventional Christian hell, is not forever: one can escape it through enlightenment in the other world, and eventual reincarnation; and one of the chief instruments of enlightenment is Esperanto, which Branco learns by graduating through successive levels before enrolling in the celestial Embaixada Esperantista, the Esperanto Embassy.
Castelo Branco was only one of many spirits who made themselves known to Yvonne Pereira. In her work Devassando o Invisível (Penetrating the Invisible) she recalls that one of the ‘better dressed’ and most beautiful spirits she observed as a medium was that of Zamenhof, who appeared to her clad in his characteristic wool suit. He bore a halo of concentric waves, highlighted by a jet of brilliant green light. As I write to you, Nina, I recall the green star of my father’s Esperanto lapel badge, and I cast my eyes towards the portrait of Zamenhof which still hangs in my study where my father hung it when I was a child, opposite the crucifix. In Hoc Signo Vinces.
And you, Nina, will see the pattern in all of this. You are a Gemini. Your dual nature enables you to be a skilful gatherer and disseminator of information. You are a good communicator. You were in New York at the behest — the invitation — of the Irish Embassy, which was entertaining a group of American-Irish businessmen, some of whom were known to be financially implicated with the IRA. It was July, the marching season in Northern Ireland, when sectarian tensions rise to a predictable annual pitch, and when you suggested that I join you in New York, I was glad to get out of Belfast. By then I had as good an idea as I ever had as to what it was you did for a living. I’m a communicator, you said that first night in Eglantine Avenue, don’t you know that’s what Geminis are good at? You might call me a diplomatic aide, but I’m not. But what’s your job title? I asked. Oh, technically I’m called a Field Officer, but there are quite a few of us, and we all have different areas of expertise, you said. When I first got the job I duly reported in at nine o’clock sharp in the morning. The only person in the building was the receptionist, who was doing her nails and reading a Mills & Boon novel. The title stuck in my mind: Ask Me No Questions, it was called. Eventually some of the other staff straggled in, and by maybe eleven o’clock there were seven of us there, all of us in separate rooms. I was given a room with a desk, a chair, and a filing cabinet in it, you said, and when I was asked what I was supposed to do they looked at me with some surprise, and they said, Well, how on earth should we know? You’re the expert. That’s what we hired you for.
So what did you do? I said. Oh, first of all I got myself a phone, you said. Or rather, I spent four weeks getting a phone. They weren’t too stuck on phones. Face to face is what we want, they said. You’re a Field Officer, after all. So I went into the field. I met people. Got myself invited to exhibition openings, that kind of thing. Privately I call myself a style consultant, you said.
So there you were in New York, Nina, in your role as style consultant, and we were at this reception with the Irish mafia when the news came in that four Ulster Defence Regiment soldiers had been killed in Tyrone by an IRA landmine. It was the 13th of July 1983. You remember. We’d drunk a lot of champagne. You were wearing a pale green linen suit and a jade pendant, I remember, with green amber earrings. We talked about the Troubles and we drank some more champagne and it was then that I told you that my mother had been killed in 1975 as she was driving to her school on the Antrim Road. She had stopped at traffic lights when a white laundry van drew up beside her and the bomb it was carrying, intended for God knows what target, exploded prematurely.
You were silent for a while, and then you said, I know what it’s like to lose a mother for no good reason. My mother took her own life in 1965. She was forty-eight. I was fifteen. I won’t go into the reasons now as to why I think she did it. But for months afterwards I used to dream that she wrote to me. Letters from beyond the grave. They came in pale blue envelopes addressed to Miranda. I would open the envelope excitedly, thinking she must be still alive, but then the letter would say something like, I am happy where I am now, and I am still watching over you, that kind of thing, you said. And I remember again, Nina, how I burned your letters in 1984, hoping that by so doing I would expunge all memory of you from my system, and as I watched their ashes snow upwards into the grey July sky I wanted you to be dead for me, I wanted that part of me that loved you to be dead.
But there was something else in the dream that made me feel that she was indeed watching over me from somewhere, you said, for the letters bore something else beyond the clichéd words, something more immediate and tangible, her perfume. The perfume that she wore the morning she kissed me for the last time, as she went her way and I mine. In the dream I’d bury my face in the pages of her letter and I would wake with my eyes full of tears. And every year on her anniversary I open a bottle of that perfume. You were silent again. What was it? I said. What was what? you said. Her perfume, I said. Après l’Ondée, you said, After the Rain-shower. A warm musky base, almond top-note. Then you get the scent of hawthorn and violets doused in rain, cold and shivery.