"There are certain countries, the names of which fire the popular imagination.  Brazil is one of them; an amalgam of primitive and sophisticated, jungle and elegance, beating drums and luscious jazz harmonics -- there's no other place like it in the world.  And while Rio, or its fame anyway, tends toward the elegant and sophisticated end of the spectrum, Bahia tends toward the other.  Bahia is the land of the drum..."

The Phantoms of Pelourinho

Adapted, folded, spindled and mutilated from our novel Once Upon a Night in Brazil

Beneath and to the right of (as one exits) the Igreja de Nossa Senhora do Rosário dos Pretos (Church of Our Lady of the Rosary of the Black Men), at the bottom of the Largo do Pelourinho, there is a confluence of streets. A right-hand turn will take one to the Baixa dos Sapateiros (sung in the almost eponymously entitled 1930s Ary Barroso song which was for some reason singularized to Na Baixa do Sapateiro, per the clip below), where stands the Mercado Santa Barbara, of fundamental importance to the yearly Festa de Santa Barbara/Iansã. Alternatively, bearing to the right will bring one into the narrow Rua das Flores where Ahuna, a Nagô and one of the leaders of the 1835 Malê Revolt lived. Straight on and one is climbing the Ladeira do Carmo, where composer/singer/sambista Dorival Caymmi* gamboled as a child (he lived in no. 35, to the right). Forward a bit and to the left will put one on the Rua do Paço, where one will pass the Casa das Sete Mortes (House of the Seven Deaths, so called for homicides occurring in 1755) at the point where the street bends ninety degrees to the right, from where it continues on past the Igreja do Paço (central to the film which won the 1964 Palm d'Or at Cannes: Pagador de Promessas (Payer of Promises)...

* I went looking for an English-language article on Sr. Caymmi to link to and there are quite a few, but really!...if one doesn't feel what one is talking about then one really shouldn't explicate/obituate! What faint-praise nonsense is "...helped lay the foundations of bossa nova...", and the rest of it, anyway! Dorival Caymmi was a supremely gifted songwriter/singer who contained within his art like no other the savory saliences of Bahian life...the candomblé, the fishing villages, the pungent food, the arcing nights, the sly sensuality... He was one of the towering figures of a country where the music towers! But I digress; returning to the subject at hand...

If however, one turns to the left, one is on the Ladeiro do Taboão. Descending, the street some hundred meters or so down makes a slow turn to the left while concomitantly a smaller artery (the Ladeira de Julião) breaks off to the right. It was down this latter ladeira (sloping street) that Carnival entity Filhos de Gandhy (Sons of Gandhi, as in Mahatma) was founded in 1949...

Addresses in Bahia can be an infuriating source of confusion, at some point in the past undergoing a reorganization (presumably the idea anyway) assigning new numbers to houses and buildings upon which, given that there often was no easy way to find out what a new address might be (telephones were expensive and rare until recently), the old number continued posted (alongside the new) on any particular house or building in question. There is some semblance of order; numbers will generally for some stretch continue to, for example, rise, or fall. But then for no apparent reason a string of numbers will flip from even to odd (correspondingly flipping on the other side of the street, of course)...or a numerical gap will appear, a jump between numbers apparently completely random if not calculated by a fiendish ingenuity beyond the reach of Fields Medal winners but within the grasp of the Salvador Post Office. And street names are constantly changed by successive city "managers" apparently having nothing better to do than to make an already confusing city even more so.

But the address of Salvador's Most Unusual Bar is different. It is Ladeira do Taboão, 42, and by day it may be found by noting number 38 on your way down and then skipping the unnumbered building next door. The number is glazed in blue on a set of azulejos (Portuguese tiles) also bearing the establishment's name: Estrella da Noite (Night Star), these centered over the two doors to the right (the door to the left leads upstairs), the name being something of a play on the owner's name: Estella.

Estella does not open every night...in fact she hardly ever seems to be open, and there if there's a pattern to when the bar functions then it is probably beyond even the grasp of the Salvador Post Office. And sorry, in the previous paragraph I left a gap worthy of Salvador's street-numbering system: No. 42, Estrella da Noite, is only visible, only there, when the bar is open. By day and most nights the building is abandoned. But oh on those rare nights when Estella's is open the interior of the place on the slanting cobbled street shines through the two doors to the right with a luminosity beyond that of the whale-oil lanterns on the walls...it surges almost literally on samba played within and danced to upon a floor of beaten clay/earth, fueled by cachaça taken -- in fired-clay drinking cups and flavored with cajú or lime -- at the wood-planked bar.

If you're thinking about checking out Estella's place though, there's a catch...you have to be taken there by somebody who's already been there, and these people are not easy to meet...

What is a spirit, a ghost, a phantom, anyway? Would such be defined in part by ephemerality? To a physicist, something (a person, for example) constructed of "solid" matter -- the perceived solidity of which is a consequence of utterly ephemeral electromagnetic fields -- is no more "solid" than an idea. So why shan't the ephemeral be as substantial as we? Why can't, in other words, a phantom be a solid as a man? Or a woman? Should a phantom's tread of necessity not fall as trippingly? Hand not grasp as warmly? Fist not strike as hard and coldly? Then, of course, there are the practical matters of the phantoms of Pelourinho, and although you won't be told as much should you ask, these, so far as possible, are handled by the Sociedade Protectora dos Desvalidos (Society for the Protection of the Forlorn), an organization which began life in the Igreja dos Quinze Mistérios (Church of the Fifteen Mysteries*) in Barbalho but which is now located (since 1883) several blocks away at Largo do Cruzeiro de São Francisco, 17 (formerly 82), in Pelourinho, where you can go yourself.

* The Igreja dos Quinze Mistérios was built by the lay society Irmandade da Nossa Senhora dos Quinze Mistérios (Brotherhood of Our Lady of the Fifteen Mysteries), but there have been and are those who claim that the origin of the mysteries lies not in the Rosary but in the cult of the Egungun rather (ancestral spirits) centered in the Terreiro de Vera Cruz on the island of Itaparica, across the bay from Salvador, in the community of Ponto de Areia.

Given the difficulties inherent in Estella's place, one with an interest in placing oneself in the vicinity of these personages might consider the one appointment they regularly make, and that is the vespers Mass held Tuesdays in the Igreja de Nossa Senhora do Rosário dos Homens Pretos (Black Mens' Church of Our Lady of the Rosary, on the Largo do Pelourinho, a church built by slaves and men who had been slaves, some of whose freedom was gained through the offices of the Sociedade Protectora), a liturgical service sung in both Portuguese and Yoruba, to church organ and drums. But then another difficulty presents itself: How is one to determine who is who? How shall one know the nature of the beheld? One suggestion might be to observe the comportment of two with whom the gentlemen and ladies in question seem to get on well and with whom they tend to share close proximity and whispered conversations inside the church, queer fellows (in the sense that Chesterton would have used the adjective, surely) who stand out among the crowd of worshippers. These are Tony Luck of Shanghai, Zhong Guo, and Tabasco Jack of New Iberia, Lousiana, Mei Guo (a man who exhales not the hot peppered condiment that made his hometown famous but rather the vapors of the place in which he spent the larger part of a long life: New Orleans). When Mr. Luck's face is not animated his head -- with long black hair wound and bound behind -- could be that of a purposefully inscrutable Mandarin magician from the golden age of stage magic in the 1930s. When it is animated -- which is usually -- it looks like an attenuated version of that on a laughing Chinese Buddha, the quality for which "Luck" was appended to the anglicized version of the Chinaman's name during the period that Tony did work as a professional magician. Tabasco Jack's head, by contrast, is as round as a weeble's and punctuated by two bright blue eyes as scrutable as they come, while from it emanates constant conversation revolving recalling New Orleans' Congo Square, music scene, and some kind of hoodoo link to Salvador, Tony Luck echoing the latter claim in respect of a lost Shanghai neighborhood, the name of which I can never get my brain around, let alone remember.

Tony Luck

Tabasco Jack

These guys were bound to meet somewhere along the line, weren't they? As was I, with them, also, perhaps. The first time I laid eyes on the pair was as they performed the classic Second Sight in the Terreiro de Jesus -- an act ancient when the churches on the square were being built centuries ago -- street performers trying to get their evening drinking money together. They put their own twist on the effect though...somebody in the small crowd gathered around them being asked to put into Tabasco Jack's outstretched hand several small objects gathered from a pocket/pockets...coins, pebbles, maybe a finger or toenail clipper, prophylactic...whatever, and Tabasco Jack showed the objects around with as much drama as possible in so arcane and glorious a display. Tony Luck had been blindfolded by this time and was standing several paces away, facing away from Tabasco Jack, an agogô (rhythm bell; usually having two "mouths") and striker in his hand, beating out an ijexá (a candomblé rhythm commonly used outside of houses of candomblé, during Carnival, for instance, named for a Yoruba subgoup).

He didn't play it all that well and in a rather pathetic bid to up the ante and build excitement after the objects were shown 'round he played the rhythm faster and faster, and faster, with less and less fidelity to its magistral Afro-Brazilian swing, until: He halted!...and with a dramatic flourish, raising his hands to the heavens, beat the agogô slowly, the number of strikes corresponding to the number of objects held in Tabasco Jack's hand. Wow...

There were maybe a few murmurs of amazement amongst the more innocent, but these were far (so far as possible, in that small crowd) outnumbered by snickers, snide asides, I-don't-believe-it head-swinging, casually disparaging remarks, people drifting away...

Tabasco Jack's doffed and proffered-around cap remained as empty as when it was firmly upon his head (no offense to your intelligence meant, TJ!).

But neither he nor Tony Luck were finished yet...not by a long shot.

(To be continued)