Rodrigo Lerbier and the Cameo

Rodrigo Lerbier’s relationship with the cameo is a struggle between the power he hopes to command and the danger he comes to fear. As a babalao and jeweler, he first reads the stone as a possible source of extraordinary spiritual force; after encountering it at close range and consulting the orishas, he confines it in a place of worship, then flees with it. His eventual intention to return it to Loïc reverses that earlier ambition, but a break-in makes the intended transfer impossible.

Discovery and Initial Interpretation

The cameo enters Rodrigo’s possession in Cárdenas, where it has been found on the ground. When he bends to pick it up, its heat makes him cry out and drop it. A priest explains that Ana Maria fears the stone as the devil’s eye and wants it thrown into the sea. Rodrigo’s first encounter is therefore not with a neutral jewel but with an object already surrounded by dread, which his own physical reaction confirms.

Rodrigo’s interest is not only spiritual. He earns his living as a jeweler, and the cameo is a precious object whose value he can recognize professionally. But he also interprets it through Santería: the stone, he says, concentrates harmful forces circulating in the air, like a lightning rod drawing and focusing malignant energy. He proposes that it be quarantined. This language gives the cameo a double character—valuable jewel and dangerous spiritual conductor—and makes containment, rather than ordinary possession, the immediate problem.

The danger does not prevent Rodrigo from imagining the stone’s power as useful. By the time the cameo is wrapped in a handkerchief in his pocket, it has begun to cool, yet he still senses its negative energies. He murmurs cabalistic formulas intended to calm irritated spirits and considers whether Santería might turn the exceptional force to the benefit of its devotees. In his conception, the stone concentrates Ashé, the Cosmic Spiritual Energy; if kept in a sacred place devoted to Yoruba worship, it might become a source of supernatural power. His interest is thus both devotional and instrumental: the cameo might serve the faith, but it might also confer power on the person able to master it.

Divination and Confinement

Before displaying the cameo as a votive offering in his Havana temple, Rodrigo seeks guidance. He places the jewel on a table, sets palm nuts on his divination tray, closes his eyes, and asks the orishas for an answer through the oracle of Ifá. The vision unsettles him more than anything he has previously experienced as a babalao. Chango appears amid infernal flames and reveals the danger Rodrigo had hoped to understand: the stone belongs to the forces of evil and can either grant immense power to someone who knows how to use it or destroy someone who does not.

The vision also gives Rodrigo a condition for keeping the cameo in a Yoruba place of worship. Offerings must always be nearby, ideally human, or at least animal, to appease the spiritual appetite housed in the stone. Chango disappears in a flash, leaving Rodrigo with an alarming implication: the cameo is not a passive instrument that can simply be put to use. Its power carries demands and risks that even religious observance may not make safe.

Rodrigo’s residence and workshop in Cuba make that conflict tangible. He crafts necklaces, bracelets, brooches, and other tourist ornaments from shells and small stones, while a separate room serves as a Yoruba place of worship. There, chickens and pigeons wait in cages for sacrifices planned for that evening. He places the cameo high on the back wall, in a golden monstrance among images of the orishas and offerings, keeping it deliberately out of reach. He describes this arrangement as a kind of sanitary quarantine, a practical response to the danger he believes he has discovered.

The arrangement does not reassure him. When the stone glows like an ember and gives off smoke, Rodrigo is overcome by terror. Though he is a Yoruba priest, he instinctively makes the sign of the cross, drawing on his Catholic identity to ward off what he takes to be an evil spirit common to all religions and belonging to none. The gesture exposes the limits of his attempt to manage the cameo: the sacred setting and ritual precautions have not made its presence feel controllable.

Flight and Intended Return

Rodrigo’s response is to leave with the cameo. After the encounter in which Loïc comes to recognize an unexpected cousin in Cuba, Rodrigo remains behind, looks uneasily around, and returns to his place of worship. He has begun to sense danger and judges the stone too perilous to keep. Someone seems to be following him, and he decides to get rid of the cameo at the first opportunity. He has not yet worked out how; he first needs to get away from Havana. His earlier hope of mastering the stone has given way to urgent flight.

Later, Rodrigo tells Loïc that he had wanted to give him the cameo so he could take it back to Montréal. He calls it Loïc’s family cameo, but Loïc questions how Rodrigo can know that it belongs to his family. Their exchange makes the intended return a point of connection and uncertainty at once: Rodrigo is no longer presenting himself as the stone’s would-be master, yet Loïc has not been given an explanation sufficient to establish its identity.

The transfer fails before Rodrigo can complete it. The cameo, which he had temporarily hung on the wall as he had in Havana, has disappeared from the Yoruba place of worship. The break-in appears to have had one purpose: taking the jewel, since nothing else was stolen or damaged. Rodrigo’s declaration that it has vanished again marks the repetition of a pattern he cannot arrest. The object moves from Cárdenas into his custody, from concealment to ritual display, and then out of his hands once more.

The Meaning of the Relationship

The shifts in Rodrigo’s handling of the cameo define their relationship more clearly than a stable claim of ownership would. His jeweler’s eye recognizes a valuable object; his religious understanding identifies a concentration of dangerous forces; his divination suggests a power with a terrible price. He first imagines a sacred use for the stone, then confines it, then escapes with it, and finally means to pass it back to Loïc. Each change is prompted by a new encounter with what he believes the cameo can do.

The stone also unsettles the boundaries between Rodrigo’s roles. In his workshop he makes jewelry for tourists; in the adjacent sacred room he guards an object he regards as spiritually perilous. The golden monstrance, the caged animals, the smoke, and his involuntary sign of the cross place craft, Yoruba worship, and Catholic reflex in the same charged space. Rodrigo’s relation to the cameo is therefore not simply possession or fear. It is an effort to interpret and contain an object whose power he first hopes to direct, then recognizes as beyond his dependable control.