An air of sadness rested on her, on, principally, a superiority anyone could see. Her fan opened and shut in a thin pointed hand. A maid, I told myself, reflecting the aristocracy of the closets of delicate clothes in her charge, scented from the gold-stoppered bottles of her mistress. She was another phase of what had been going on at such length through my mind—a different catastrophe, since she was denied the reward of the virtues in either of the races that had made her. In Boston she would have become a bluestocking, a poet singing in minor cadence to traditional abolitionists become dilettantes, but in Cuba, tormented by the strains of the danzon:
There, her flax burning in resentment and despair, she might be extinguished in the tide restlessly sweeping to the troubled coast of Birrajos: or, at Havana, carried into the secrets of the Ñañigos: in the black cabildo of that society, provision was made for a woman.
* * *
It was significant that the first organization of ñañiguismo in Cuba was purely African, for the hatred of its members, Carabalíes, for the white race made the admission of even mulattos impossible. This society—tierra or juego—was formed during the administration of General Tacón, in the village of Regla, and called Apapá Efí. It was, against the protests of its originators at sharing the secret with too many, enlarged, and spread through the outskirts of Havana. There the mulattos greatly outnumbered the blacks, and they formed a society of their own, its oath sworn in Ancha del Norte Street, named Ecobio Efó Macarará. They insisted on a common brotherhood and their right of entering the fambás, the ceremonial rooms; but there was a determined opposition, open battle and murder in Perserverancia and Lagunas Streets. After this there was a general meeting at Marianao, the early bar to color, as distinguished from black, removed, and the infusion of the dark ritual of Efi into white blood began. When, ten years after, an indiscriminate society, the Ecobio Efó, was terminated by the authorities, Spanish nobles and professional men were assisting in the rites.
What had started upon the African river Oldan as a tribal religion took on, in Havana, a debased version of Rome, and the veneration of Santa Barbara was added to the supreme worship of Ecue, a figure vaguely parallel to the Holy Ghost, created in the sounding of a sacred drum. And what, equally, in the Carabalíe Bricamó was Dibó, God, became in Cuba an organization of criminals and finally, when its more obvious aspects were stamped out, a corrupt political influence. There, in the clearest possible manner, was traced the eventual effect of so much heralded superiority, such enormous advantages, on native belief.
There could be no doubt, though, of the fact that, in any pretence of civilization, the ñañigos were detrimental; it was unavoidable that they should have degenerated into a savage menace, not only in overt acts, which were not lacking, but in practices of mental and emotional horror. Their ceremony, with its strange vocables and distortions of meaning; the obscene words that were but symbols for obscenities beyond imagination; the character of their dance, which gave them the name arrastrados, men who dragged themselves, reptilian, on the ground—all combined in a poison like a gas sweeping from the morass of the past. It held, beneath its refuge and defiance of society, the appeal of a portentous secret, bound in blood, the fascination, the fetishism, of orgiastic rituals, and, under that, stronger still, delirious barbarity.
Its legend was not different from the others which formed the primitive bases of subsequent elaborate beliefs: the miracle, with an attending baptism, was consummated by a woman, Sicanecua, who found a crying fish—the fish was a sacred Christian sign—in her jar of water. In recognition of this she was sacrificed and her blood put to a holy use, and the fish skinned for the drum, sounded by the fingers, used in his praise. Here Ecue, the divine, was baptized by Efó in the Oldan, who in turn signed his disciple. And about that tradition, guarded—with its instrument—in the altar, Ecue sese, the degenerate elements and characters of modern ñañíguismo gathered. There were, necessarily, changes in the Cuban form of worship—the skin of a goat was substituted for the unprocurable variety of fish, and the timbre of the original drum secured by an artifice. The need, as well, of finding another anointment than human blood, difficult to procure in Havana, led to the sacrifice of the rooster or a goat. This, now, had a crucifix, with the profession that God, Dibó, must be over everything, and a sacramental singing; but not the Te Deum or Laudes ... Efore sisí llamba, and the reply Ho Isueribó éngomo ... Mocongo! while the Empegó, the clerk of the service, shifted brightly colored curtains and enveloping handkerchiefs and marked with yellow chalk the head and body and palms of the initiates.
A diablito had in charge the offices of the catechism—Come with me; where did you leave your feet; where I left my head! Enter where Bongó is and cry with your brother! Look at your brother because they want to choke him. He conducted the sacrifice of the goat, which, in a memorial of Guinea, was eaten with pointed sticks, with the drink Mucuba, made from sugar-cane rum and bitter broom. A strange procession followed, led by the Insué, with a woman in a shift, Sicanecue, and the diablito skipping backward. The sese, a silver crucifix with four black feathers, was carried, and later the remains of the feast were thrown into a cemetery.
The effort to end ñañiguismo in Havana began in eighteen hundred and seventy-five, when its gatherings were forbidden; but, deeply traditional, it flourished in hidden places, in the jail where ñañigos were confined and the cellars of Jesús María. Long before that the poet Placido had been killed; within a few years the Llamba named Hand on the Ground was judicially executed; and following the assassinations during the carnival of eighteen hundred and sixty-five, sweeping deportations were enforced. In Maloja Street a juego, Acaniran Efó Primero, with officers drawn from reputable quarters, was surprised; the next year the Abacuá Efó was exterminated; a public clash of diablitos resulted in apprehensions; and twenty-five ñañigos were taken on Vista Hermosa Street.
It was, in reality, Africa in Havana, brought against its wish and to its tragic misfortune; and, planted in an alien soil, but among a common genus, the mysteries of religion, it grew into an aberration of all that gave it birth. Aside from this, its significance, for me, lay in its amazing language, an idiom, specifically, composed of the Carabalíe Bricamó and a Spanish without articles or conjunctions, equally incapable of exact images and the expression of abstract thought. But taking the place of its omissions, was a congealing power of suggestion, of creating, through, apparently, no more than the jumbling of common terms and sounds, sensations of abject dread. The four bishops of the ritual, in their order, were Insué, Illamba, Mocongo, Empegó. In ñañiguismo man was momban, an idiot was sansgueré, a knife icuá rebesine, a pistol etombre, immortality embigüí, the night erufie, war ochangana, the sun fansón, and worms cocorico. The language took short rigid forms, phrases; it had little if any plasticity: Amandido amanllurube, The day goes and the night comes. Efiquefi que buton efique Ename onton Ellego Efimeremo Iboito, Eurico sangacurici eurico sanga quimagua sanga ñampé, ñampé sanga mariba, The owl drinks the blood of the dead and flies to the sea.