The adherents of Santo Daime drove good cars: Scandinavians, Germans, high-end Japanese. They were parked ten deep around the private gym in Recreio dos Bandeirantes. Valets cleaned windows and vacuumed interiors; their fresh wax finishes hugging the yellow parking-lot lights to their streamlines. Private security with berets and their pants tucked into their boots patrolled in pairs, hands resting lightly on light automatic weapons. A woman with her blonde-streaked hair scraped painfully back beneath her green beret inspected Marcelina’s letter of introduction three times. Her cap badge carried a crest of a mailed fist clutching crossed lightning bolts. A little excessive, Marcelina thought. She took Marcelina’s PDA and cellular.

“No pictures.”

Her colleague, a shave-skull thug, harassed the taxi driver, checking his license plate against his hackney license, mumbling intimidating nothings into his collar-mike. Marcelina loathed security. They had bounced her our of too many and better gigs than this. But in the scented cool of the parking lot she heard the drums sway on the heavy air and felt the rhythms of the Green Saint begin to move her.

Her letter was again inspected in the lobby by an abiá with a white cloth wound around his head in a loose turban. He was a very young, very pure alva. Marcelina suspected it was so for most of the iaos of the Barquinha do Santo Daime. He had no idea what he was reading.

“This will get you into the terreiro. After that it’s up to you; my favors are all used up.”

Go somewhere once and you will go there again. For the second time that week Marcelina had arced out over Guanabara Bay to receive herbal tea in Feijão’s humid, scented bower. She had let the porcelain Japanese bowl sit untouched on the low plastic table before her. Did you drug me? did you feed me holy secrets? But she felt that Feijão might have been close for some time to the Barquinha; some fissure had taken place and he had called in an uncomfortable debt. Such intrigue for a disgraced goalkeeper.

Exu, Lord of the Crossings, stood on either side of the futsal court’s double doors; cheap poured concrete effigies of the deity in his malandro aspect: a grinning preto in a white suit and Panama hat and shoes, garishly painted. Marcelina pushed open the doors. The drumming leaped in her face.

Marcelina adored the frenzy of Rio’s homebrew religions; at New Year she loved to step out the front door of her apartment block and lose herself in the chaos of two million pressing souls on the Copacabana, throwing flowers into the waves as offerings to the Lady of the Sea. For a week after, the beach stank of the rotting petals cast up on the strand, but Marcelina would swing barefoot through them, sensing through her bare feet the water-memory of madness. The truest religions were the ones that most deeply kissed the irrational, the ecstatic, and in that Santo Daime was less ridiculous than many. The mood in the room was taut, breathless, alien. She knew that the worshipers had been drumming, dancing, spinning since early evening. It would not be long now. She only needed to be there for the third act.

She found a place at the low curving wall of the futsal court among the shuffling, hands-raising devotees. As a dancer in the center of the court spun back to the walls a worshiper, eyes closed, would spiral out to take his place, bare feet rucking up the carefully laid plastic sheeting.

Marcelina knew what that was for.

All the worshipers wore some measure of white; the headcloth as minimum for the abiás, a white shift in what looked to Marcelina like shiny, ugly, static-clingy polyester for the initiates. She would have felt conspicuous but that the worshipers had been spun so far out of themselves by two and a half hours of drum and dance that they would not have noticed Godzilla. Not so conspicuous, though, as an elderly, black ex-goalkeeper. She scanned the room. White meat, whiter even than her carioca-German DNA. She could understand the appeal of the shamanistic, the communal and unconstrained to the white middle classes behind their security fences and surveillance cameras and armed guards. The wilder world, the spirit of the deep forest, within reasonable limits and a twenty-minute commute-time every other Tuesday evening. Her eyebrows rose slightly at a handful of Nationally Recognizable Faces: two telenovela stars and a pop-ette famous for emulating everything Madonna did, but in a Brasileiro way. No wonder beret-girl had lifted her cameras. Marcelina entertained herself by calculating how much Caras maggazine would pay for shots of the worship’s inevitable conclusion.

The urn, covered with a white cloth, stood on a small altar beneath a garden sun canopy over the penalty area. The bateria was behind the goal line: they played as well as white people could be expected. A very spaced girl pounded on a hip-slung bass drum. A tall man with long, graying hair tied in a ponytail and a grayer Santa Claus beard could only be Bença Bento. An environmentalist, Marcelina knew from her research. Went up to protect the Roam and came back having met God. Or whatever Santo Daime believed ordered the universe. The divine. She wondered how many of the high-gloss SUVs parked outside ran on biofuel. Bença Bento was as relaxéd as if he were in his own front room, chatting amiably to the bateria’s alabé and the Barquinha’s ekediss, who all seemed to be postmenopausal women swathed in white, moving unconsciously but stiffly to the drums. In a momentary flash, Marcelina pictured her mother among them, imagined her bossa nova organ doubling with the bateria. Flash again: she momentarily locked eyes with a figure across the barracão. Its head was completely wrapped in white cloth so that only the eyes were exposed. Marcelina could not tell if it was man or woman, but the eyes were at once familiar and disturbing. She looked away; the rhythm changed, the dancers, loose-limbed and drenched with sweat, spun back to the edges of the court. Bença Bento stepped into the pavilion and removed the white cloth from the urn.

The communion was about to begin. The eguns stepped forward with supermarket tubes of disposable plastic cups, cafezinho sized. Not so ecofriendly that, either. Why are you mocking? Marcelina asked herself as the women filed past the urn, filling cups. What do you do up in that walled garden in Silvestre with your songs and your berimbaus that is so very different?

The music ended. Bença Bento raised his arms.

“In the name of Santo Daime, the Green Saint and Our Lady of the Veggetable Union, draw near, receive with love and unite with the order of the universe.”

He looks like Christopher Lee playing Saruman , Marcelina thought, and gigggled. Worshipers stepped forward, then broke into a run. Middle-class cariiocas mobbed the prim ladies of the egun; reaching, snatching, clawing for their cups of the ayahuasca tea. Marcelina noted that the abiás held back, as did the Head-Wrap Spooky Eyes. Her immediate neighbor, a lanky thirty-something man whose hair was receding patchily and unattractively, returned, eyes wide, pupils shrunk to pinpricks under the hallucinogenic tea. She saw him gag once, then stepped back neatly out of the arc of the projectile vomit that spattered onto the plastic sheeting.

True iâos held that the vomiting, a side effect of the mix of forest vines and shrubs that was the Green Saint, was as valuable in its purging, its purifying, as the hallucinations it whip-cracked across the frontal lobes. Now the bateria beat up again — Marcelina noticed that neither they nor the Bença took the Daime — and the worshipers danced and turned, self-absorbed in their hallucinations. Some rolled, spasming on the smeared plastic, the bolar, ridden by sprits from beyond the edge of physical reality. Teenagers in white, boys and girls both, in white turbans and T-shirts knelt with the tranced; they were the ekedis, protecting them from the trampling feet of the worshipers.