Gold Mouth, an enigmatic black priestess of Saõ Salvador de Bahia, is a double-faced character. She is very good at candomblé and macumba, two Brazilian forms of Caribbean voodoo. She perfectly knows the secrets of these syncretisms resulting from the combination of African and American beliefs following the slave trade.
Gold Mouth, who is apparently ageless, claims to have lived in different historical ages and to have met Corto Maltese’s grand-grandfather in Queimada, Brazil. Moreover, she is a shrewd businesswoman, a real “grey eminence” who is well up on the main concerns of Corto’s time. She controls a shipping company, the Financière atlantique. In addition to her occult powers, she also uses this shipping company to oppose the US expansionism in Latin America and to put an end to the colonial domination by the European powers in Africa!
Gold Mouth feels settled in the Ghetto of Venice where “Corto Maltese in Siberia” starts as she was already there in 1300 with the cabbalist Marcello Giudeo. At that time they were both friends of Dante Alighieri…