Adventure Divas Page 7

  The Black Madonna represents the melding of Catholicism and Santería. She is Catholic Cuba’s patron saint of charity, and she parallels Santería’s deity Ochún, that vibrant goddess of sensuality I first saw represented in Gloria’s film. My eyes and mind linger on the small sparkling gold burst of energy that commands the room. This icon of faith, who is a draw and a comfort to so many, is complex and real: She is a vortex that represents the melding of Europe and Africa, lover and mother, saint and warrior. A powerful, biracial diva.

  Back outside, Cheryl and I buy a Black Madonna tchotchke made out of scrap metal from a group of young entrepreneurs, and sit down across the street from a nearby schoolyard. The solace of church and a few ibuprofen have lifted my spirits considerably.

  I reach in my canvas shoulder bag and take out Sky Prancer, our own lucky, nine-inch deity given to me by my friend Inga. The doll is quickly becoming the show’s mascot and we hope to give her a cameo in every episode. Sky Prancer’s tutu is a bit wrinkled but her blue wings and blue hair and brown skin sparkle with vitality. Cheryl and I walk across the street to launch her with some girls playing hopscotch in the schoolyard. I demonstrate how to pull the string out of her base and send her shooting into the air, arm-wings a-twirl. Cheryl manages the difficult task of capturing on film the doll flying through the air, as well as the laughter of the girls who are setting her off into the bright blue equatorial sky.

  That evening, back in Santiago, we walk into a dollars-only paladar. We find a family of four half-watching a tiny black-and-white TV flickering one of el Jefe’s fist-waving speeches. The mother, in green housedress, stands and takes us to a windowless back room with two tiny wooden tables covered with red-checkered tablecloths. Over six plates of crispy fried chicken, fluffy white rice, and what might be a kilo of beans, we bat around ideas about how the show, in theory, might end now that we don’t have the captain to sail off into the sunset. The magic and challenge of both travel and documentary is that neither can be scripted. The story is built from the nuggets—or, nutgrabs, as Jeannie would say—that are revealed along the way.

  I pass on the dessert of farm cheese and guava paste, excuse myself, and step outside to mull. I lean against a powder-blue cement wall. But an American can’t loiter around urban Cuba very long without getting chatted up, and within two minutes a man named Pablo has introduced himself, in near-perfect English.

  “We’re a film crew, with nobody to film,” I say, after the usual pleasantries. I tell him that our last contact has fallen through and that we’re scrambling. We need one more woman, I tell him, to help bring Cuba’s story to life. I jabber on about our visit to El Cobre, and he simply nods, not interrupting me. Then I pause. I hate it when people pour confessional minutiae onto strangers, and now I am doing it to this guy.

  Then he turns to me and says, “Why don’t you go see my godmother in Cardenas? Her name is Emilia Machado. She’s a Santera.”

  A Yoruban high priestess! That’s exactly who we need to bring this show home. I don’t know who to thank. The Black Madonna? Sky Prancer? Or Pablo? I cover my bases and run back to the paladar. We drive all night, most of the way back to Havana, and reach Cardenas at dawn, just in time to be comforted by the roosters’ first crows.

  Cardenas is a town where horse-drawn carriages share the streets with Edsels. We wend our way through cobblestone labyrinths, and despite the all-nighter, I am tingling with the knowledge that this is where the show is supposed to end. Soon we find Emilia Machado’s home. Catherine and I bang on the giant, weather-worn wooden doors. On one a single rusty nail dangles a piece of paper with EMILIA 312 handwritten in black ink. The door opens slowly. Emilia is very tall, and thin, and wears a purple floral dress and red and white dangly earrings. She has big, black, stiff hair with a few shocks of gray pulsing through it. We sent word asking if we could see her, so she is not surprised. We take in her simple home in a single glance: tile floors and stark white walls, a single bulb hanging from the ceiling. In the corner, an altar with only one identifiable item: a gun encrusted in some sort of molasses and twig recipe.

  Note to self: Investigate priestess’s handgun.

  Emilia Machado was a Communist Party official for many years. “When I was twenty-five, I became very sick. Through that I discovered Santería,” Emilia tells me of her change of life.

  Illness, and a divine cure, led Emilia to leave her job as a party official to follow a life of devotion during an era when religion was banned. We have heard she was persecuted during that time, but this is not something she acknowledges.

  “I have no contradiction between being a Santera and being a revolutionary,” is all she says on the matter, and I steal a glance at the gun. Eight days ago I would have considered that a party line. But I’m developing a deeper understanding of how things live together here, and I remind myself that paradoxes seemingly contradict, but in reality express a truth.

  Emilia walks toward an altar. Not the one with the gun, but a different one that features a red and white drum, a red crown with a line of seashells decorating its perimeter, and a red baseball bat. Of the baseball bat, she says: “Changó is a warrior who goes to battle. Instead of me going to battle, I give him the attribute—in the form of a bat—and let him do it for me.”

  Makes sense.

  Every Santería worshipper has a guardian orisha. Emilia’s is Changó. Changó’s colors are red and white.

  “I am the daughter of Changó. My religious name is Obbadele,” she says.

  “Changó was born with a crown. He is the only saint born with a crown and that is why they call him Obba—King,” Emilia says, explaining the altar to me.

  Emilia picks up an ache, a red and white gourd filled with seeds, and begins to shake it vigorously.

  “You must call him with the ache. Everything you say to him, you say with the maraca, so that he will hear,” she says as she shakes the maraca. “Changó gives his initiates the power of divination. Some people say this in jest, but it happens. His initiates are divine by nature.”

  “Do you have a goat?” Emilia asks me as she puts down the maraca.

  “Uh, a goat? No, we don’t have a goat,” I say, looking at Catherine quizzically. Catherine explains that we have been invited to participate in a very secretive several-day-long ceremony that would include dancing, music, and trance possession. The ceremony would culminate in the sacrificial slaughter of the goat. Blood sacrifice is de rigueur for the more complex rituals and is the seminal act toward tapping into an individual’s personal spiritual power, or asé.

  We are once again bound by our schedule. I explain that we have a flight out of Havana in twenty-four hours. I don’t explain that we are down to the lone crumpled Jackson in my pocket, with no way to get more cash. We could afford the goat—it’s only a few dollars—but we cannot afford the time.

  “Do you want me to call Changó?” Emilia asks.

  I nod. Even though the Communist Party stopped peddling atheism in 1992 (and thus, ceasing to persecute religious practitioners), Santerían beliefs are well-kept secrets among the faithful. Cameras and recording devices are often forbidden during rituals, so I’m relieved she’s willing to do this for us.

  Emilia leads me by the hand over to the altar that sits in the corner of her front room (the one with the gun), which is now ringed by burning candles, wax seeping free-form onto her tile floors. Emilia begins a complicated ritual by blowing cigar smoke onto gourds with creaturelike faces. She salutes the ancestors and orishas and asks their permission to perform the divination. Ancestor worship is a way to connect with the wisdom and knowledge of the collective past via the power of our dead relatives. She tosses coconut rinds, and begins to divine.

  “Lucumi, imbaye . . . bayen tunu, guabami gua . . . imbaye, bayen unig guabami gua.”

  Okay, here’s what I know. This complex system of divination, ifa, is said to be a sort of cosmic Google search to provide a way into humankind’s answers to fundamental questions. Put another w
ay, through divination the will of the ancestors (wisdom, power) and the orishas (energy) is discerned. With the Santera (or Santero) as a go-between, a devotee asks questions and receives impartial answers, which lead the devotee to informed decisions and appropriate action. Fate is not set. Santería strikes me as an interactive faith, in which an individual wields a significant amount of power in destiny.

  “Each of us is born with a path,” Emilia says. “The goal is to travel it. Divination provides the roadmap to our potential.”

  “The Santera is the interpreter of the roadmap,” whispers Catherine, who is translating.

  Emilia is a “godmother” to dozens, like Pablo, who sent us to her. She has an essential role in the community as a sanctioned third party who protects the interests of the orisha, the community, and the devotee. (In this case, me.)

  “Ay Eleggua! Here I am, I am your daughter to ask you five one three . . . in this day, what for? Imbaye, baye tuni five one six . . . happier than Lucumi, inbaye, bayen, oudule, Machado, to my father, to my brother, guabami gua, bayen, five three two.”

  Emilia is tossing coconut rinds and chanting and interpreting their omens and, apparently, receiving from them answers to yes-no questions. Despite the yes-no dichotomy, there is no concept of good versus evil in Santería; everything is seen in terms of fluctuating polarity. Shades of dark and light. All things are said to possess opposing yet complementary powers.

  The scene is mesmerizing but wholly confusing. I feel like I’m being handed the funny underwear in the secret ceremonies of the Mormon Tabernacle without having even gotten the lesson about Joe and the Tablets. I feel slightly disingenuous dabbling in another’s spirit world, but I’m completely drawn in.

  What I do understand is that Emilia’s beliefs combine divine direction and individual empowerment in a way that is refreshing, especially when set next to the lightning-bolt edicts of most orthodox religion. And her gutsy decision to deny the secular powers that be (in her case, the Communist Party) and devote herself to Santería, which led the way for a community to reclaim its original faith, defines courage. I admire anyone who lives in that squishy ether of faith; anyone who gives it up for the intangible.

  Somewhere in all that divination is a conclusion. Emilia tells me, in sum, that I am on the right track, but that I’ve got a looong way to go. I choose to take that as both an affirmation and a warning about what lies ahead on the Adventure Divas path.

  “Next time, the goat,” she says quietly, and kisses me on the cheeks as we are leaving. I vaguely wonder what destiny could require blood sacrifice.

  We pass a billboard of José Martí when we enter the airport that bears his name. Martí, a poet, nationalist, and martyr, wrote the “Fundamental and Secret Guidelines of the Cuban Revolutionary Party,” although most of his prose was decidedly more flowery than that. His poetry speaks of the zeal of a free human spirit and the redemptive powers of love. Is the billboard an homage to Martí the nationalist or Martí the poet? Either way, it’s an apt final image in this country where music, love, and magic sit right alongside ration cards and dark irony.

  Caribbean energy and communist rigidity are certainly odd bedfellows, but Emilia Machado, and many of the people we met, seem to soften this giant paradox through spiritual grounding. And Gloria Rolando, the filmmaker back in Havana, crystalized this sentiment when I asked her what a diva was: “For me, a diva is not something that lives in the sky. It is a woman who lives on the earth. It is a woman who suffers, is a woman who dreams, is a woman who wants to struggle. If you ask me if I am a diva, I don’t know; but I am a warrior. And the main quality of the diva-warrior is not to be scared of life. Not to be scared of the difficulties. Whether you have support or not, whether you have money or not, you need to have a spirit.”

  Sky Prancer is in my brown Filson shoulder bag as we approach the customs agent in Dallas International Airport, our entry point back into the United States. We push the seven carts of equipment and shot film up to him. I will myself to not care. The agent rolls his slightly bored eyes. I know without looking, but with mymothermyself sureness, that Jeannie is also holding her breath. The agent does not even ask where we have been, or what is in the massive pile of shiny metal boxes. He simply waves us through.

  2.

  HEAD GAMES AND BOAR HUNTS

  Psychiatrists, politicians, tyrants are forever assuring us that the wandering life is an aberrant form of behaviour; a neurosis; a form of unfulfilled sexual longing; a sickness which, in the interests of civilisation, must be suppressed. . . . Yet, in the East, they still preserve the once universal concept: that wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe.

  —BRUCE CHATWIN, THE SONGLINES

  I am a voodoo doll for a sadistic nurse who is probably suffering from Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), an affliction endemic to the United States’ Northwest and to certain Scandinavian countries. Forty degrees. A cold, relentless drizzle has fallen for two months straight; the gray ceiling of the Northwest is closing in like a dreaded inevitability. I am in the travel inoculation ward of Group Health Cooperative and it is a dark February day in Seattle. As the sixth silver needle plunges into my already throbbing arm, I think, Why am I doing this?

  Questions like this usually don’t arise until I am two days from anywhere, one Snickers bar left, trying to suction thick-as-syrup muddy river water through a filter that falsely claims to remove all scents, tastes, protozoa, and bacteria. But this time, the reservations have hit me in the jab lab. I’ve become a junkie, weak in the face of my drug: adventure.

  Peg, the nurse, tosses her modified Dorothy Hamill haircut slightly before saying, with a titch of admonishment, “You’ve come in too late to be protected for dengue fever and Japanese encephalitis. Here are the malaria pills. They’ll kill all your natural flora and fauna—”

  “Um, fauna?” I gently interject, to no response.

  “—so start taking acidophilus now. A small number of people get psychotic episodes from them, but I think you’ll be fine.

  “Most importantly,” says Peg, unwrapping the final syringe, “if something goes very wrong, and things break or tear or get severely punctured”—she pauses and looks me in the eye—“beg for an air-evac with an IV. Don’t get a transfusion.

  “Have fun,” she concludes cheerfully, throwing the used needle into a bin that somehow hermetically seals itself, combining Andromeda Strain style with HIV reality.

  I tell myself it is Peg’s job to overreact. She is, after all, wearing incredibly sensible shoes.

  It all started with a phone call.

  “’Allo there, Holly. Ian Cross from Pilot Productions ’ere,” boomed a congenial Australian voice over the phone from London. “How’d you like to go talk to some headhunters for us, in Borneo? Yaaaaaeh.”

  Several months ago, Ian had read about Adventure Divas in Blue: The Adventure Lifestyle magazine, asked to see some tape, and then offered me work hosting some of the Lonely Planet and Globe Trekkers travel and trekking documentaries. In the cracks of time we weren’t doing postproduction on the Cuba show (that frenetic phase of writing, editing, and penny-pinching that takes place after shoots), I’d crisscrossed the United States and done a dozen programs for Ian. On these shoots I’d received a vital crash course on how to make television and how to lasso charging cattle, evade a posse of pregnant tiger sharks, rapel down cliffs, sweat through a sundance, run class-five rapids, and milk everything from emotional moments to smelly goats to interviews. I’d been bit on, shit on, and hit on—all the while paying attention, and learning as much as possible about this new business. I’d asked for adventure and I’d gotten it; some days the new lifestyle teased out the fetal stirrings of my own inner diva; other days I just happily collected the paychecks that helped support my primary passion: Adventure Divas. On the Pilot programs, unlike the Adventure Divas series, my creative role was limited to being the on-air “talent,” a role I had mixed feelings about.
In any case, my publishing days were a quickly fading memory and I was now headlong into this new medium.

  “This is the first episode in our new Treks in a Wild World series—all international,” said Ian. “So it must be good; you gotta let it all hang out.” He explained that the program would culminate in a hunt for a wild boar with the indigenous Penan people who lived in the deep interior of the jungle, and he asked about my aim with a poison blow dart. In addition to the Penan, he said, we would film at a longhouse with a river-dwelling Dayak tribe (former headhunters), and also report on the lives of the island’s endangered orangutan population.

  “Sure, I’ll do it, Ian,” I said confidently, though I wasn’t so sure about my facility with a blow dart.

  I was keen to continue to widen my global perspective, and had become nearly inured to my dog’s lack of eye contact once the backpack got pulled out. My boyfriend’s justifiable grumblings were hardly registering on my domestic Richter scale. All this made it a good time to leave, especially since the wait to find out the future of Adventure Divas had become excruciating.

  “Taking off again?” asked Jeannie after I hung up the phone.

  “Yep,” I responded.

  Jeannie and I were recently back from Alexandria, Virginia, where we’d met with Mary Jane McKinven, head of Science and Exploration at PBS. We’d sent her our Cuba pilot, and she had invited us to national headquarters. We were nervous and arrived one torturous hour early to the meeting, so as not to be late. We sat in the building’s coffee shop, picking lint off of each other’s blazers, trying to anticipate questions, and dreaming of the empire to come. At two minutes to two o’clock, we went upstairs and were admitted to a big, empty conference room. Mary Jane walked in, introduced herself, and sat down.