The Mystery of Rio by Alberto Mussa

Author:Alberto Mussa
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Europa Editions
Published: 2013-08-04T16:00:00+00:00

It was not the first time Baeta had been draw into a world of fantastic realities, of esoteric knowledge, and of magic. His mother, a laundress, had been permeated by the supernatural in her daily life. She liked to recite supernatural incidents, mostly crimes, which she had heard from neighbors at the grocery store and at street fairs.

In Catumbi, Baeta’s birthplace, they had lived next to a fortune-teller, Mrs. Zeze, who took in an old man who channeled the spirits of dead African slaves, a preto velho de quimbanda. Young Sebastião had been with that old man, Father Cristóvão das Almas, only once, secretly taken there by an aunt when they said he had rabies after a dog bit him.

He never forgot that scene: Mrs. Zeze, possessed by the spirit, wrinkled skin, her body all bent with age, contorted, sitting on her adductor muscles, her legs folded back, a position that in theory should have been unbearable for anyone her age. And Father Cristóvão, with his ancient and pentatonic voice, channeling chilling melodies while wielding a machete and knife, puffing bitter smoke from his pipe, exploding huge fundanga wheels, drinking liters of cachaça, and staying clearheaded all the while.

The washerwoman’s son was healed and heard even more stories, about people who died on the day and in the manner predicted by the old man; about messages from beyond the grave, with details so precise and so intimate that they could not be mere coincidence; about diagnosed diseases, which were later confirmed by medical doctors; plus many other wonders.

But he never paid much heed to any of these things. His father had been an engineer who, even from a distance, had instilled in him the illusion that everyone who came out of this universe was a failure. The engineer, seeing the boy’s extraordinary intelligence, invested heavily in his formal education and inculcated in him a mindset we might call “scientific.”

Perhaps this was why Baeta had never given any credence to the more heterodox strands of science. His vehement rejection of Lombroso’s criminal anthropology, for example, stemmed not only from numerous counterproofs collected in Baeta’s own work, but also because the Italian doctor had studied spiritualism, having attested to the veracity of the mesmeric and magnetic experiments that were all the rage in Europe at the time. The expert found such an interest incompatible with the scientific mentality, and therefore disqualified it as theoretical.

The babalaô Antonio the Mina was both a disturbing and conciliatory element for Baeta. First, because Baeta realized that magical thinking surprisingly sought support in numbers theory, and second, because the expert now had no doubt whatsoever that Aniceto’s seductive power had been obtained supernaturally. The testimonies of Antonio the Mina, and of the Portuguese landlady, and of Miroslav Zmuda himself confirmed that those feats were recent, and that they coincided with the date of the services rendered by Rufino at the English Cemetery.

We know that great mathematical minds have a great propensity toward mysticism: Baeta was the son of an engineer, and he had grown up on supernatural stories from the laundress.

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