For Cirilo Cabrera, in memoriam
Blinded by death, the albino deer made the color white appear against the black of the tank. The cold was pierced by a glassy stare, restored to the child who opened, startled, the lid to the perfect hiding place, but he fled. Red, the glass. Red, gray, yellow, black: the colors that death hadn’t ceded to decay.
The marmoset bit your finger when you brought it too close to the object of his jealousy, and the finger, red, shook. Now the marmoset was also still, in the moment just before the bite. There was no more trembling in it.
It was a German man who’d schooled him in the trade of taxidermy. My mentor, your grandfather called him. His own work soon joined the collections of natural history museums across the country. He knew animals in a specific way: he knew the consistency of their flesh, their muscles, the fragility of their skin, the resistance of their scales. He experimented with different means of preserving color, which abandoned its fidelity once the pulse was gone. He’d touched many dead hearts. All the organs of local fauna had met his fingers as they exercised this anachronistic art.
The taxidermist’s lessons involved assessing materials and interpreting how to preserve and prolong them; to conserve in time what’s been wounded by the blades of transience. From then on, in some way or other, the past has been submitted. Even when it hasn’t been defeated, decay goes on, like a blossoming compelled to persistence.
Now that the skin is far away, that the muscle has surrendered, the heartbeat silent, you’ll only have the matter of words to raise a monument. Words are what you’ll use to sketch your grandfather upright. You might say:
This is a man perched on a rough branch. He flaunts his extinction, completely still in the moment before flight.
Your grandfather told you, head wreathed in pipe smoke, the following story: As a teenager, he’d met his father, whom he knew only by name: your grandfather wasn’t given his surname, which was consistent with the distance between them. None belonged to him. But one day, he found himself in close proximity to his father’s name.
He turned up out of the blue, when the son was old enough to harness the strength required for a man’s work. The father was traveling to the yerba maté region, in Canindeyú, and needed an assistant. It was a unique opportunity. For the father, and also for the son. The son begged his mother to let him go, and she couldn’t refuse.
They slashed trails through the woods, and the paths sometimes closed again behind them. Anything could appear: an elusive feline, an orgy of vipers blocking their way back to camp. bellbirds pealed, never to be heard again.
Nights passed: a young man learned the struggle of keeping his eyes upright.
One evening, at last, the boy approached the father and asked for his surname.
The father considered the request in silence. Then he replied, “You’re a man. You don’t need anyone’s name to be someone in this world.”
The weight of his eyes grew unbearable, and the son lowered them, so low that
they noticed the destitution of his feet. (But his feet were very beautiful.)
The father added, “If you want my name even so, I’ll give it to you.”
But the son had made his decision. Vanity intruded and he mistook it for humiliation. And said no. He didn’t deserve to be condescended to, but as soon as he rejected the offer that his father’s words had spoiled, he realized that he’d already agreed to heed his bidding. The father had cheated him out of something as paltry as a surname. It’s just a word, he thought. Nothing more.
He had just one name, and the surname he’d inherited from a woman.
On the border, two boys become friends, one Paraguayan and the other Brazilian. Their contact is sparing, because their languages conceal what they might have in common, and the Paraguayan boy’s circumspection rests more comfortably in that shadow. Still, his shyness yields to the vivacity of the Brazilian boy, defter with the gifts of communication and movement. He has a motorboat.
Men nap, their exhaustion bunking under the trees or on the ground. The distant rumble of the motor approaches. Grows closer. He appears, smiling on the makeshift dock, a bunch of bananas de oro in hand, and they sit together to savor the sweetness in the ravine, much to the monkeys’ envy.
A man snores under a ygary cedar.
Time passes in such a way that their friendship, growing now, demands a still-uncertain space between them. And the sense of expansion isn’t strange when it comes to naming their bond, which has sparked, in their lives, a transformation of intensity and scale.
And so, one evening, the Brazilian boy invites the Paraguayan boy to come out. An ordinary ride in the motorboat, down the Paraná River. Tonight. Startled by the offer, the Paraguayan boy accepts, from the depths of his austerity, and feels the weight of his eyes seeking the floor, and hides his feet.
He adds that he’ll have to ask his father, who, unsurprisingly, refuses to let him go. And the Paraguayan boy has those eyes. Those feet.
The gas lamp dazes the insects. Kissing bugs assemble their colonies on the cabin ceiling. The Paraguayan boy is awake, face-up, when the motor makes its audible appearance, advancing decisively over the water, which also roars. The father is asleep. So he softens his footsteps and sneaks out, flees in the middle of the night, abandons the underbrush, the yerba maté fields, the camp, and makes his way down the slope, clutching his thinness to the vines; he uses his bodyweight to test their strength and reaches the rocks at the bottom. The smiling one waits in the dark, standing in his boat. The Brazilian boy.
The metal slips over the waves of the Paraná River. The Paraguayan boy glances twice toward the lights of the camp he’s abandoned. The moon repeats its radiant disc onto the water, in the sky. The current is strong in the channel, and the rumble curls upward, forming whirlpools hungry for misfortune.
And the Brazilian boy smiles, pleased to convey his friend to one of his domains. The other boy also smiles, but he isn’t happy. He clutches the edge of the prow with both hands.
“Não tenha medo, Xiru,” says his friend, but the Paraguayan boy has caught the taste of something that inhibits his presence in the moment: anticipation. Because time has darted ahead and sketched an alert onto the experience, infecting any possible image of future time.
*
The river, broad, proceeds, and its powerful monotony distracts the Paraguayan boy from his thoughts. He settles into studying the Brazilian boy, and a sense of pride coheres in him at the sight of his friend at the stern, maneuvering the engine, exposing his solitude to an overwhelming energy.
The wind strikes him in the chest.
The Brazilian boy picks up a bottle of cane liquor and uncorks it. He takes a swig and hands it to the Paraguayan boy, who also drinks. And they talk. They laugh at the particularities of their languages, the tripwires of deceptive cognates that language teachers call false friends. And suddenly they’re both standing up, gripping the edge of the shuddering boat for balance. They surrender: they offer themselves to a force the likes of which will never be seen again. The Guairá cascade thunders a few kilometers out.
Taking the last sip of liquor, the Brazilian boy lets out a long, sharp howl of joy that the Paraguayan boy, more discreet, finds excessive. The Rapái extends his arm and flings the bottle, which rises in a steep curve and sounds as things sound when they hit water: like a cane liquor bottle uncorking. And that small, ridiculous sound returns them to the fact that it’s getting late. At this point of the river, the only audible manifestation of life is the water.
To make their way back, the Brazilian boy tries to rev the motor, but it doesn’t go. Unworried, he smiles, drunk now, and tries once, twice, many times, but he can’t start it. He seizes the only oar—the smile stays—and cleaves it into the water, not fast enough to overcome the river’s friction and resistance.
When he sees that they aren’t advancing, but quite the opposite, the Paraguayan boy does what he can with his hands on one side of the boat. The same could be said of his hands as of the oars: not strong enough against the speed.
There they are, one night on the border, two friends, the Paraguayan boy and the Brazilian boy, the Xiru and the Rapái. Abruptly, they find themselves dragged along by the current of the falls, the rapids of the Paraná.
The river is unruly, and another river runs inside: there are two cycles of breath, two hearts pumping blood where there once was calm, and now panic can steal the air. And the falls have been described as “seven stampedes of oxen made of water / seven white bulls / of billions of white bulls inside them.” An inevitable energy that keeps them like this for hours, struggling against what tries to wrest them away. They’re awake all night.
And then, nearing dawn, when they catch sight of the river’s foamy edge, and they get close enough to clutch the stony sand, they crumple onto it. Sprawled, the Paraguayan boy exhales with a pathetic snort of tears and exhaustion.
Behind them, the snarl of plants, black and green, heralds a tortuous return to camp. The delay, the distance, assert themselves as intensifiers of a verdict: the punishment will be severe. There will be time for that, they think, and they stop, shyly, to take in the day breaking over the river they’ve survived together. They’re drenched. The damp comes from beyond them, but also inside. They sweat despite the cold. The dense mist disperses here and there in the heat of the sun.
The Paraguayan boy glances at his friend. “The current was stronger than us,” he says, and falls back, spent, on the rocky sand. Supporting himself on both hands, the Brazilian boy looks at him. He lies down, too.
