‘If you’re a devotee of voodoo, then you certainly know that it’s a very social religion. People bring their day to day problems to the temple, their financial difficulties, lovers’ quarrels. It’s only reasonable to assume they’re receiving some benefit, something more than a placebo of hope, that there are valid psychological and even physiological principles embedded in the rituals.’
‘Oh, my,’ said Otille, rolling her eyes. ‘I’d forgotten we were keeping company with an academic. Let me tell you a story, dear. There was a man in Warner’s Parish, a black man, who was on the parish council and who believed in voodoo, and his colleagues put pressure on him to disavow his beliefs publicly. It was an embarrassment to them, and they weren’t too happy about having a black on the council in any case. They threatened to block his re-election. Well, the man thought it was important to have a black on the council, and he made the disavowal. But that same night hundreds of men and women came into town all possessed by Papa Legba, who was the man’s patron loa. They were all dressed up as Legba, with moss for gray hair, canes, tattered coats and pipes, and they went to the man’s house and demanded he give them money. It was a mob of stiff-legged, entranced people, all calling out for money, and finally he gave it to them and they left. He said he’d done it to make them go away, which is true no matter how you interpret the story. The people of the parish put it off to a bunch of crazy backwoods niggers getting excited about nothing, but as a result the man kept his post and satisfied his god. And of course it hasn’t happened since. Why should it? The necessary had been accomplished. That’s the way Les Invisibles work. Singular, unquantifiable events. Impossible to treat statistically, define with theory.’
Otille smiled at Jocundra, and Jocundra thought of it as the smile of a poisoner, someone who has seen her victim sip.
‘Hardly anyone notices,’ said Otille.
Behind the house was a group of eight shotgun cabins, each having three rooms laid end to end, and here, said Otille, lived her ‘friends.’ Slatternly women peered out the windows and ducked away; slovenly men stood on the porches, scratched their bellies and spat. To the west of the cabins was a graveyard centered by a whitewashed crypt decorated with rada paintings - black figures holding bloody hearts, sailing in boats over seas of wavy blue lines - this being home to Valcours’ seven coffins. And at the rear of the graveyard, through a thicket of myrtle, was the bayou, a grassy bank littered with beer cans and bottles, a creosote-tarred dock, and moored to it, a black stern wheeler: an enormous, grim birthday cake of a boat with gingerbread railings and a smokestack for a candle. It had originally belonged to Clothilde, Otille’s grandmother.
‘It was to have been her funeral barge,’ said Otille. ‘She had planned to have it sailed down the Gulf carrying her body and a party of friends. My father used to let us play on it, but then he found out that she had booby-trapped it in some way, a surprise for her friends. We never could find out how.’
Jocuridra was beginning to think of Maravillosa as an evil theme park. First, the Black Castle studded all over with silvery arcana; then the Bacchanal of Lost Souls with a special appearance by the Grim Reaper; the Garden of Unholy Delights; the cabins, an evil Frontier-land where back porch demons drooled into their rum bottles and groped their slant-eyed floozies, leaving smoldering handprints on their haunches; and now this stygian riverboat which had the lumbering reality of a Mardi Gras float. Somewhere on the grounds, no doubt, they would find Uncle Death in a skeleton suit passing out tainted candy, black goat rides for the kiddies, robot beheadings. Perhaps, she thought, there had once been a real evil connected with the place, a real moment of brimstone and blood, but all she could currently discern were the workings of a pathetic irrationality: Otille’s. Yet, though Maravillosa reeked of an impotent dissolution rather than evil, Otille the actress could bring the past to life. Leaning against the pilot house, her black hair the same shade as the boards, making it seem she was an exotic bloom drooping from them, she told them another story.
‘Have you heard of Bayou Vert?’ she asked.
Donnell perked up.
