Her turning into a forest

Words by Andrea Ferrari Kristeller | Cover Image by Pablo Ferrari

He said his mother had grown leaves for fingers before she entered the forest but I did not believe it then. Now, after so many years, on rainy evenings as this one when the jungle looks like a moving green engraving, I indulge in doubt and think of her.

I used to enjoy my job as a mixed grade teacher in a remote corner of rainforest in Misiones. Even if I came from Posadas, the capital city, I knew very well the quiet colonizer’s mind from my own grandparents’, and had adjusted to the small village of Cabureí as if I had lived in the middle of a distant nowhere all my life. This is what I had studied for, I repeated herself each afternoon, as I walked back the twisting jungle path, sweating under the sun and the dust started to settle on roads for the evening. This and the faces of those dark-skinned children, their smiles winning over any resistance I may have had to this piece of wilderness. Slowly, the unevenly teethed farmers had come to greet me in their silent nod as I walked around the two-street village, and perhaps the highest distinction, other than the supervisor’s once-a-year-smile, had been the fact most people in Cabureí called me by my name. “Good afternoon, Miss Martha; how is your roof taking this rain?” they would ask, and in their question I understood there was the implicit offer of repair, which eventually I took, with those rains.

The people in the area had adjusted to the 30x30 Governmental plan quite straight away, with the silent resignation of farmers in Misiones: the word of the whiter ones in Buenos Aires was accepted as the word of the god in any of the Pentecostal or Evangelical churches that seemed to pop like white or blue mushrooms every now and then in the only grey asphalted highway (a secondary one, of course).The 30x30 Law had forced every farmer around for years now into leaving 30% of their land unsown, untended, and wild. I understood it had been a last desperate move in a battle against biodiversity loss, and had come much further away from the 2030 deadline that had given a name to the Law. Yet now, after being implemented for 20 years, no one dared even to ask if it was working: they just resented the wild greenness of the Atlantic rainforest reclaiming part of their land but they perhaps also understood it as some sort of justice for what their forefathers had taken from it. The bigger logging trees were all gone, except for the occasional Palo Rosa sentinel in a cattle field; what had advanced was the “capoeira” with its loose assembly of colonizer trees which slowly was being replaced by harder forest woods, and vines, and the whole array of life between canopy and undergrowth that mystified most people in that part of the world, except the Mbya Guarani.

I had a couple of Mbya children in her school, those whose parents were less reluctant to intermingle with the white. But most of the inhabitants of the distant Mbya villages were still educated their own way, and came to the village only in life threatening situations that their shaman could not solve. Curiously, every now and then the people in the village consulted on their shaman when they were afflicted by those things white medicine has not solved yet, and thus, the exchanges remained courteous and distant.

Tomás was not a Mbya child, though for certain there was native blood in his eyes and hair, the same as with his mother: a beauty of a dark woman, with hair in a long thick braid as black as her child’s eyes. I learnt from him, and a few comments from his companions, that they had come from Paraguay a few years before he was born, had settled on an abandoned farm (nobody asked questions on land titles much here anyway) and had lived quietly off the land with some tobacco, corn and cabbage -like so many other families around. That was until Tomás’ father had died. I heard different accounts on his death, and even a rumour suggesting it had been her fault in some way I cannot remember, but in all the accounts, his death was barely commented upon, for immediately came the gossip about HER. I have always been well aware of the cruelty of children, having myself been subject to some degree of bullying due to my young good marks and glasses. Tomás was alternatively called “the orphan”, “the tiny teju” (lizard in Guaraní) and, worst of all, “the crazy woman’s son”, the only insult he could not resist and ended in some sort of physical confrontation I always hurried to smooth down and reprimand. I couldn’t help having a soft spot for him: he had luminous eyes and a big smile that transcended his harelip. I had considered getting him into those provincial schemes for facial surgery with volunteer doctors. I think I would have paid for any travel expenses myself, but they never seemed to go further than the province’s capital, and that meant a 2-day trip on a weekday I could not afford: I was the only teacher in charge of this small school; no replacement whatsoever. When I went down with the flu or the time I sprained my ankle over a vine, the school was deserted and empty until I had the strength to recover and return. I didn’t want to build on the children’s jeering at Tomás by adding an expensive trip alone with their teacher. And I needed his mother’s permission, which I was very unsure about, considering the talk around her.

The problem with Tomás was you could never be very sure of his phrasing: he never lied, but sometimes you had to guess what he had meant to say. When he started telling me bits and pieces of his life in that lonely ranch with his mother, and I started to get alarmed, on many nights I convinced myself I had misunderstood, or misinterpreted, or both.

For example, I would ask their children about their dinner the previous night and Tomás would say his mother had brought home a red macaw, and everyone would laugh. Or say, we were discussing farm animals and he would insist they had three peccaries as pets, as well as an ocelot living inside the house with them. When I asked him what they fed them with, he simply smiled with his invincible crooked smile and said “Mother gives them moonshine in pots every night”. Those things didn’t help his reputation, and for a long while, I just dismissed them as a product of his imagination and a desire to call our attention, even if just to be laughed at.

Things changed the time he was absent for school for about four days, and he returned to school thinner, and with a cloth around his arm. I examined him with my meagre knowledge and detected the elbow was twisted in an angle that was not quite right. This time I wrote his mother a note, appointing Tomás to the doctor who came over from Andresito once a week for routine controls and vaccinations. Needless to say, there was no hospital in Cabureí, and I feared, no money for the gas or the will of a neighbour to take him up there.

In any case, I set myself to have a good talk with this woman, once and for all, and tackle the delicate subject matter of his harelip as well as his evident thinness.

She came all right on that Saturday morning, walking leisurely with Tomás by her side. I could see them coming in the distance, as in a haze due to the morning heat, and for a moment I could swear there was an animal walking along with them, a feline, but I could not affirm it. They came up to the school’s shaded gallery and remained silent. I offered a chair and a cold tereré mate, and we settled into an uncomfortable breaking of the silence until the doctor arrived. Her beauty was threatening.

“Tomás is a very nice child”, I put forward, appealingly. This woman had a silence around her as if the dark hair were a crown, and she reigned supreme queen of that silence amongst us.

“Yes”, she answered briefly “he has learnt that from the trees”, she offered.

I disregarded the comment and insisted.

“It would be great for Tomás to get a city doctor to fix his hare lip, if you allow me to say”, I tried. “I could perhaps take him to Posadas myself”.

She stared at me with eyes as dark as his, and as dark as a cave in which there are secrets apart from darkness.

“That is a mark from the Ija, the owner of the forest”, she explained as if to a child. “It is a privilege to bear this mark, and all the creatures in the forest know this”, she sentenced, as if it were an obvious universal truth I was the only one unaware of.

“I see”, I said, wordless for an instant, “But how come he is so thin and he had this accident on his arm?” I was determined not to let this lady get away with what by now was obvious neglect.

“He insisted on following me to where I was going”, she only said. “I had told him not to.”

Now fearing this was an acceptance of child violence, I went red on the face and inquired:

“And why can’t he follow his mother if he wants or needs to?

“He cannot go where I am going to,” she answered and shrugged, looking down on her hands while she seemed to braid her fingers into each other as if they were water.

“And where are you going to?” I demanded, as I waved a fly away.

“I go into the forest to find what I am looking for and it finds me”, was all her answer. And with this she seemed to have said all she had meant to, and reassumed this silent air she had all around her. The doctor arrived before I could continue, but I decided I would not let this one go so easily away with it with only some plain dotty mysterious explanations.

Tomas’ arm was not broken, but twisted out of place. He did explain how he had fallen due to a monkey’s ladder, a common vine in the rainforest that seems to form a perfect ladder, and grows as hard as wood. I eyed his mother as he retold this to the doctor, who distracted the child into the snap that set the arm back in its place without him even winking. “Thank God for that”, I said, but his mother made no comment and turned away to go almost as soon as the thing was over with a muttered “Thank you”, while Tomas was throwing us one of his happiest smiles. His face had smudges as if he had been eating forest fruits, I thought.

“The man in the forest says I cannot follow Mom”, he admitted to the three of us, “but I wanted to see his eyes”. I glanced at her quickly and only found her gaze on the trees beyond the school roof. I was starting to imagine a violence thread of a new couple, a Brazilian poacher, one of those who usually cross into Misiones because our jungle is recovering better than theirs. My mind’s picture was formed, and I could not let her go without saying something, or threatening this woman in some way, with whatever justice may hold to frighten a villager in these lands.

“I hope nothing happens again to Tomás”, I said, and was aware all my face had turned into a menace. “Or I would be forced into calling in government agents to take your child”.

She looked at me as when someone looks at a group of monkeys, squealing on the top of trees, talking to each other in monkey language, and only answered:

“It is not the child what the forest wants”. With this she turned, and left both the doctor and me looking at each other, baffled and irritated.

From that day onwards, I made it a point to ask Tomás every morning what his afternoon had been like, what he had had for dinner, if they had received any visitors, or if he had slept well.

And from his answers, a picture started growing in my mind, that was both haunting and hard to believe, and in my teacher’s mind, simple stories Tomás told to himself in order to excuse his mother. He spoke of her with a fascination that was moving.

They had stopped growing corn or cabbages the previous year, he mostly supped fruits from the rainforest that had been left to loom over their little house, a small wooden shack like many others belonging to farmers in the north of Misiones. They bathed and took water from a nearby brook, where Tomás got a fish or two every now and then, but they didn’t cook them because his mother told him the lady in the water had gifted him that fish as it was, and thus it had to be eaten. They slept out in the open whenever it was not raining, not even in hammocks, but on the dust that grew fresh by night even after a heated summer day. They had some bananas in their backyard, but their backyard and all that land had been given back to the forest by her mother, he explained. She did not believe in the 30x30 Law, but went for the 100% back. He loved to hear her sing songs to the owls at night, and they answered her back, he said, and sometimes a jaguar roared, and she roared back, and they did not fear them at all, as his mother affirmed, they were the forest itself, roaming.

They ate tree leaves, and vine leaves and flowers, too, and picked jatei honey in a few secret bee hives only they knew of, and had been gifted by the Ija. The repetition of that word set me going, and I finally found out, from a Mbya young student, it meant owner or protector. According to her, there were many Ijas in the jungle, and they had to be treated with utmost respect as some of them could be nasty.

I started dreaming of Tomás mother, disturbing dreams. In one she was naked and her body was fully covered in slugs, yet the slugs shone as if in a fluorescent light, and it was strangely beautiful. In others, I followed her into the jungle without her realizing, and every time I could hear her talking in a watery voice, in whispers. I could never make out what they said, and when I was about to reach a clearing in the forest in which a light shone as from a spider web, I woke up.

Tomás said what he loved the most was looking at the stars at night with her on the nights she didn’t leave, and how she would tell him stories of the men who travelled in luminous boats in the sky, and the tale of the twin brothers and the mother of the jaguars was his favourite fairy tale. “When it rains”- he said, wide eyed and dreamily- “the forest comes to our door and licks our feet”.

I contacted my supervisor on this, by now a worrying case, and was determined the state would intervene in some way rescuing Tomas. I even commented the case to the village superintendent, and he just scoffed at me “That´s the Benitez widow”, he said. “Nothing we can do about her. Lost it when her husband died. That ranch is a disgrace but also a victim to the ridiculous 30x30 Law”. And he would pass on to comment on the next spring festival, Cabureí’s Sausage Provincial Festival, and the school’s participation in the village parade.

But once, after a huge storm which prevented most of my 16 students from attending school, I got specially worried over Tomás. I knew there was nothing special in that storm, and yet as I lay awake at night, I couldn’t help imagining probably he was out in it with his lunatic irresponsible mother.

As the school was empty of students, except for the Villar brother who lived next to it, I ushered them home with an excuse and decided to take the long path to the Benitez farm. I told myself it was just my duty to check on that boy, and that was it: if there was anyone who could do anything for him, it was me.

The path winded over a low hill, covered in the 30x30 forests of most of their neighbours, as many had decided the best way to keep to the law was to leave aside for the forest those areas which were uphill, as anyway they would not have worked them. The path got progressively harder, and by the second km I was panting for breath. My city sneakers were red with mud, and the darkness of the trees above me eased the heat but not the mosquito bites.

When I finally got to their wooden cabin, roofed in rusty metal, I was dismayed at the level of encroachment the jungle had on this piece of land. The rainforest had, as it does when left to itself, advanced almost up to the very door, and you could not see any of the usual hens and the red dusty patio around the house. It seemed as if the house was on a cliff, and the precipice was the jungle. I have always wondered how it must feel to live in one of those small cabins beside a hight dense forest, that looks dark from the outside, giving way to all those stories village people have on mythical creatures, based on Mbya mythology. But there is always a space of cleared land around a house, a respite from the hunger of the forest, or so it seems, a place that is flat and ordered, and some cows even add to the feeling that, after all, the jungle can be controlled. Here I felt the opposite.

When I knocked on the door, it gave in, and as I opened or almost fell in, I noticed there was no one inside. The house smelt musty and damp, no smoke from the wood stove, nothing to make it smell of a home. Instead, it smelt exactly as it all smelt outside. I advanced, unsure if I could trespass on this woman’s mysteries, but emboldened by the feeling this would help Tomás in some way. There was one small mattress near a window, with only a dirty sheet on it which I assumed was Tomás’. The other larger bed was completely covered in leaves. Literally. There were no sheets but forest leaves, disordered but creating like a tree canopy as when looked from below: an assortment of different shapes and colours of green, a cascade, a den like a wild animal’s. I turned on my tracks as I heard a noise outside the door and there, on its opening, like the figure of a small deer, stood Tomás, alone it seemed. He was crying, and came to me silently, and I embraced him, feeling I had come just in time to save him of who knows what ignominy.

The only thing he said to me, and the last thing I ever heard him say, was:

“Her fingers turned into leaves and she turned into the forest and has left forever”, he said, and his eyes held the shine of sad stars. From the corner of my eye, I saw an ocelot, as clear as I saw Tomás, pass along the door towards the other side. There were a myriad voices on that morning of after storm, so many birds it was deafening, and the only thing I could do was to embrace Tomás and take him with me.

What the authorities did do for Tomás was to send him that same day to a distant relative in Caraguatá, a father’s aunt, they told me. I never saw him again after that day which ended in the small military post three km away. I was dismissed by the brisk military there, who said they would see to Tomás now. All I could do was to embrace him goodbye, and assure him he would be alright as he stayed in silence, and looked at the trees behind me. I wish I could have been sure.

Many years later, once I had already moved to Puerto Libertad and was a headmistress, and had a family of my own, I crossed an old ex-student of mine who was visiting a relative, and inquired after Tomás. This girl, now a woman in her twenties, told me Tomás had returned to live in Cabureí for a while, residing in the forest like a poacher, and then had left or so it seemed as no one ever saw him again. He had not grown into a man of many words, she said with a quiet sneer. I asked her also about the mother and the farm, but she simply said the land had remained as it had been, only that you could not even see the house now, that it had all been swallowed up by the green. On the mother, she just shrugged.

On nights when a storm makes the trees shine in a strange shade of white-green, I always remember her. And it’s not perhaps her turning into a forest that stings inside still, or the crooked brilliant smile of that child. It’s the moment in which I allow myself for an instant, knowing what maternity and marriage mean, to dream of what it would be to walk into the wild paths of red soil until there are no more paths, and one becomes one with mysteries.

Andrea Ferrari Kristeller is an Argentinean teacher, writer and naturalist (who knows in which order). She travels to the Atlantic rainforest every year in the north of her country, near Iguazu Falls. She intermingles her teaching practice with volunteer work translation for conservation programmes, and has participated in the building of the First Mbyá-Guaraní/Spanish- Spanish Mbyá Guaraní Dictionary (Rodas/Benitez, 2018) in its Penta translator section, for the English language. She is learning Mbyá Guaraní and translating their sacred text, the Ayvu Rapyta, into English. Some of her poems have been published by The Weekly Avocet, The Avocet, The Dawntreader, Erbacce, an ASEI Arts anthology, Poetry Undressed, Braided Way. Her nouvelle “The Land without You” was given an Honourable mention at Writers of the Future contest, 2018, and her short story “The Ghost at the Whites’ Hoté has recently been published in the anthology Haus, by Culture Cult magazine.

Pablo Ferrari is a Georgia-based photographer. His portfolio can be found at www.pabloferrariart.com