Learning the Banda: Overture
Overture
You go to your first hounfor when you're seven and you won't realise exactly what's happened until you are sixteen, sprawled out on the grass behind your mother's house, reading her dog-eared copy of Foucault's Pendulum with the beat of the banda pulsing in your blood. You get to the Brazil section, read Casaubon's feelings about the agogo, and can't help laughing. In this, in the way of the celebration and the umbanda, you have never been Amparo, so skeptical, so fierce, but something about her touches something in you. No, it's the pendulum itself which speaks to you, which mirrors the arcs of your life: hanging from a point that cannot move and under forces it cannot control, drawing out the pattern of a mystic rose onto ground it never touches.
Your mother looks over, eyes glinting, and smiles at you.
Your story is not the pendulum's, though; you have a fixed beginning and end, you've had the chance to stop the trajectory of your life's orbit, you are faith, rather than science. You're also a Texas boy, born and raised, and for the first six years of your childhood, everything was perfect. You had friends and played with them until dusk. There was a wild crowd of you who invaded each other's homes and lives and families until you were all as close as siblings -- fought like them, too, with broken noses and sprained ankles to show for it. In the summer, you drank pitchers of lemonade and spat watermelon seeds that landed yards from your bare toes; in the winter, in the damp chill, you snuggled under an afghan on the couch while your mother read to you and stroked her fingers through your hair.
There are things you should remember, as well, that you don't, that you assume now you've just forgotten -- either that or Papa's taken them away for his own reasons. There must have been fights, sometimes; your parents divorced after you left the house, so the cracks in their marriage must have started showing much earlier. You have siblings but don't really remember being a brother to them, just possess disjointed ideas of nighttime squalling, bruised knees, stolen toys. You don't remember school, though you must have gone, and your mother has given you a box of photographs and drawings from your childhood that you look at with blank eyes and an empty memory.
Memory is a fickle thing and yours more than most; your mind has always been prone to flights of fancy. Before the banda and even after, you were always a romantic -- it wouldn't be a surprise, honestly, to be told that you were born with rose-tinted glasses pushed askew onto your freckled nose. Those glasses, Papa's help, Ezili's influence, who can say which has molded your childhood memories into a thousand acres of rosebushes?
Roses have thorns, though -- and the very first thorn you prick your thumb on, the very first thorn that bleeds you, came your way at seven, in that hounfor.
Act One