Luna: New Moon

Adriana Maria do Céu Mão de Ferro Arena de Corta. Mary of Heaven. Our Lady of the Starry Skies. My mother worked for the Abrigo Cristo Redentor and sent us all to catechism and mass but she was very far from being a good Catholic. When we were sick she would light a candle and slip a holy medal under the pillow but she also bought herbs and prayers and icons from mãe-do-santo. Double insurance, she called it. The more deities on the case the better. We grew up with two invisible worlds overlapping us; saints and orixas. So I was named after a Catholic saint who was also Yemanja. I remember my mother taking us down to the beach at Barra for Reveillon. It was the one time of the year she would go to the beach. The ocean scared her. We spent the week after Christmas making costumes – blue and white, the holy colours. Mãe made fantastic head-dresses out of wire and old pairs of tights – Pai would spray-paint them in the back of the workshop. That for me is the smell of New Year – car paint. Mãe would dress all in white and everyone treated her with great respect as she walked down to the beach. I felt so proud – she was like a great ship. Millions went to Reveillon up at Rio but we weren’t so shabby down at Barra. This was our festival. Everyone hung out palm fronds on their balconies. Cars drove up and down Avenida Sernambetida playing music. There were so many people milling around they could only drive slowly so it was safe even for very small kids. There were DJs and lots of food. All the things that Yemanja loved. Weed. Flowers. White flowers, paper boats, candles. We went down to the edge of the water with the ocean at our toes. Even Mãe, ankle deep in the breaking waves, sand running out from under her toes. Flowers in our hair, candles in our hands. We were waiting for the moment the edge of the moon rose over the sea. And there it was – the tiniest edge of moon, as thin as a fingernail clipping. It seemed to bleed over the horizon. Huge. So huge. Then my perceptions moved and I saw that it wasn’t rising beyond the edge of the world; it was forming out of the water. The sea was boiling and breaking and the white of the waves were being pulled together into the moon. I couldn’t speak. None of us could. Still we stood, thousands of us. A line of white and blue along the edge of Brazil. Then the moon rose clear and full and a line of silver reached across the sea from it to me. The path of Yemanja. The road the Lady walked to reach our world. And I remember thinking, but roads lead both ways. I could walk out along that road to the moon. Then we threw our flowers into the water and the waves drew them out. We set our little tea-lights in the paper boats and put them in to follow the flowers. Most drowned but some were drawn out along the moon path to Yemanja. I have never forgotten the tiny boats bobbing out along the line of the moon.

Mãe never believed that people had walked there, up on the moon. It was inconceivable. The moon was a person, not a stone satellite. People could not walk like fleas on the skins of other people. She still did not believe that people were walking there, years later, before I left, when I took her down to the beach. By then she could hardly move. I hired a car and drove the couple of hundred metres to the beach. Pai had lost the dealership. We weren’t car people any more. We had the apartment because Pai had paid off the mortgage early. It was full of us again: Byron, Emerson, Elis, Luiz, Eden, Caio. Adriana. All the birds back to roost.

Mãe was huge as a moon by then, but all the people down for Reveillon paid her respect and the cars on the Avenida hooted their horns to her. She was great and holy. I took her by the hand down to the water and we saw the moon seem to form out of the sea and I said, I’ll be there soon. She laughed and could not believe it, but then she said, well, it’ll be easy for me to go on to the balcony and wave to you.