He who leaves, takes his memory, his way of being river, of being air, of being goodbye and never. Love, Rosario Castellanos
When Josefa heard that bird camouflaged among the trunks, she remembered when mother had run away from home. She visualized her hurriedly gathering what clothes she could with one hand, while she stopped the bleeding from her forehead with the other. She said goodbye to Josefa with a kiss on the brow. “Forgive me,” she said. It was nighttime. Josefa recalled running after her mother’s steps, but the darkness blurred her vision and did not let her see the footprints. She could only hear a bird wailing.
From that day on, Mr. Cándido and Josefa lived alone in their improvised hut with its sheet metal roof on the outskirts of the city near the River of Birds.
“It’s over,” Mr. Cándido said one day after returning from fishing. When two Sábalo fish had slipped out of his bucket, he didn’t stop them either, just watched them flail their way down and land on the riverbank. Then he picked up his fishing rod and walked away.
They drank a white bone broth and gathered their belongings in bundles and loaded everything into the wooden cart. The horse cart was stubborn at first, but it managed to move through the mud that kept trying to wobble the wheels. After traveling for six hours, they arrived at a pahuichi with a motacu roof near some crops. The rain was falling and the moon flickered on the surface of the puddles. Cándido hurriedly lowered the hand-woven parichis and taris hanging from the horses’ necks.
“Go, bring the bags!” he shouted to Josefa, who, with her short legs, could barely get down from the cart.
They sheltered under the roof after gathering their bags and tying up the animals. Cándido sat on the parichi next to the girl, who was untangling her wet hair. “Even if it is raining, Josefa, people still work. Only animals hide,” he said. “Tomorrow, we have to work, rain or shine,” he added, and drank some of the water drops that dripped from the hole in the tari.
Josefa listened in silence and focused on the rain falling on the leaves, varnishing them.
Cándido started working in the sugarcane fields that were kilometers away from the pahuichi. Each passing year, they bought two or three egg-laying hens with the money he earned. They ended up having twenty-five, plus Nicolás, the rooster who used to wake Josefa up at five in the morning to prepare rice bread. Because of her work around the house, her young hands became strong and skillful. She learned from her father how to wring the hen’s necks, grabbing them firmly to spare them unnecessary pain. She also learned to chop wood with precise and swift axe blows.
Sometimes she missed the River of Birds, where the plumage shouted in many colors, and the beaks, some long, others short, squawked and sang, pushing out cheerful and playful sounds. She missed the melodies hidden in the breeze, all the feelings she felt seeing the birds shining in the air.
Sometimes she imagined her mother, bigger than her and not so far away, hanging Josefa from her neck, showing her the flight of those birds.
For her fifteenth birthday, Cándido asked her what she wanted as a gift. “I want to eat a fried fish,” she said, showing her best, most optimistic smile. Her father held his breath for a moment before replying suddenly: “Bah! You keep saying you want to eat fish!” Chicken meat, gizzards and beef no longer satisfied Josefa. She longed for that taste of the river on her palate, that crystalline murmur. Its loss made her feel as if she were being punished for a crime she did not commit. Only her father should have to pay for it, not her.
Time had taken away Cándido’s nightly guitar songs. It had also expanded his forehead by taking his hair away and vanishing the dreams from the back of his neck, dreams that only returned at five in the afternoon, when he sank into the hammock after a day’s work. But when it became dark, his eyes kept glowing like two guapurus, and they remained that way all night long. That’s just how Cándido was.
Josefa’s birthday was no exception. They ate roasted beef pulp that a landowner had sold to Cándido at a very good price. Josefa paired it with rice dyed with urucú and some bananas they had hacked from the backwoods with machetes. She received a hug and some money to buy clothes. Like a cow against the wind, Josefa angrily endured the festive protocol, as she had done for every birthday, and thanked her father for the gifts. But at the last moment before saying goodnight, a genuine complaint burst from her: “I wanted fish!” That night, they both shared the discomfort and the sleeplessness in that place where only the jungle sang.
Since they had arrived in the jungle, Cándido, the night owl, fought with everyone, even with the flies. In the absence of neighbors, he quarreled with Josefa, but even more with the choirs the night brought.
“Damn those frogs, I’d like to punch them! I’d kill those crickets with one slap. What a nuisance these damn mosquitos are!” he would mutter, as if in an endless conversation with himself.
Josefa was used to it, she swore she heard him in her dreams, challenging even the moon for being round, threatening to slice it up with his machete. Yet, that night Cándido was silent.
He sounded like a secret, like a frozen tomb.
And Josefa thought that, perhaps, he was reflecting on things.
She wondered if he was thinking about going to the river with a rod and hanging a hempen thread from it with pieces of meat pierced by a hook, so he could catch fifteen fish for each year of life lived by the most beautiful woman he had ever known. That’s what he would surely say, she murmured to herself: “My daughter, the most beautiful woman in these lands.”
And in those thoughts, she hadn’t noticed that Cándido was silent and none of the usual concert of crickets, toads and mosquitoes had reached her ears. The house had gone silent. When she realized it, she was so frightened that she thought she had gone deaf; she didn’t hear the rustle of the leaves whipping about or the hollow sound of the achachairús touching the ground as they were spat out by the branches of the guapomós. She didn’t feel the humidity on her face either, or the warm breeze that sometimes caressed her neck like silky fingers. It was as if the very air had stopped. She made sure she was still breathing and inhaled deeply, drawing some calm into her chest.
Suddenly, a sound broke through, as if the jungle had torn out its tongue to let this sound speak in all its greatness. It was a howl, but not that of a dog—it was like one Josefa had once heard after seeing Maroto Tomás’ body floating in the River of Birds.
That sound became sharper and entered her ears, scratching her eardrums, as if it meant to hurt her. And Josefa’s body filled with an overwhelming fear. She felt as if her soul dropped to her heels. As the sound grew larger and more terrifying, it felt like the lament of the forgotten, of the damp beings that become transparent after death. The howl overflowed her eardrums, like rivers bursting their banks. It resembled a scream, but no, no, it was a howl, from a bird crying out, high-pitched, beautiful and terrible at once, drawing out its lament in its final note, forming a word, something like: gua-jo-jó.
As the sound grew larger and more terrifying, it felt like the lament of the forgotten, of the damp beings that become transparent after death.
Josefa never asked Cándido about the sound that night. She was afraid he would answer: “You’re just dreaming, that’s all!”
Ever since then, she doubted her senses, her certainties.
“Maybe it was another dream,” she repeated to herself, hesitant, unconvinced. Perhaps it was like the times when her father threatened the moon.
She would have liked to see the being that howled, but the night allowed her nothing more than a small flash of light that, she remembered, pierced through the roof like a needle. The rest was silence. The cry of that bird, for a moment, reminded Josefa of her mother when she laughed and imitated the squawks of flamingos, pointing to the river where threaded legs hung from pink bodies that caught and released the breeze in flutters.
And at last she recognized that gua-jo-jó.
It came to her memory like a lightning bolt igniting the sky. It was when her mother had gone.
From Cándido’s sleepless nights, Josefa took about three of them and kept watch, by the light of the moon, for that howl. She even wondered if that sharp sound had been the result of a dream—she did not lack imagination—or of the real form of a bird. She wanted to know it, to see how that howl came from its throat, to know the reason for its sorrows, to follow it to find out where it kept its nest, to see if it might visit her one day and cry with her.
With these new inner thoughts, Josefa did not notice a change: Cándido was no longer complaining about the jungle’s small inhabitants, as though he had made a truce with his anger. His silence had become real since that night when Josefa, in her bed, felt that the world seemed to stop. When Cándido slowly turned his head and Josefa looked at him discreetly, she saw how his eyes gleamed with a brightness as intense as her own. He held a bit of air and exhaled forcefully, so she would notice that he was watching her.
“You need to be handled with a raised whip!” he said, but she ignored him, because the darkness hid her face and could not give her away. “Don’t act like you can’t talk.”
“Speak? And aren’t you sleepy?” Josefa immediately replied.
“I sleep lightly,” Cándido clarified. “I must keep watch, because you sleep like an anaconda.”
They both laughed.
Josefa fixed her gaze on her father’s dark eyes: they were two planets shining in a confusing and strangely desolate universe. She held back a soft cry because she would have liked to see him laugh; she always wanted to see him laugh. It was nighttime, the meddlesome darkness always kept her from being able to see important things.
“What does it mean to sleep shallowly?” she asked, to keep the conversation going.
“Sleeping lightly,” Cándido answered, raising his voice a bit because the rain kept splashing outside.
“So, I sleep heavily?” she wanted to mock. “I’m a heavy sleeper.”
“Yes, you do! You sleep like you are trying to catch the devil,” he said, laughing.
“And you, who are you trying to catch?” she asked.
Cándido’s silhouette froze for a moment and kept silent.
“There it is again!” He spoke slowly. “There it is!” he repeated, excitedly, and got up to take a look between the tables.
Josefa sat up suddenly as well, confused by her father’s movements. But she immediately froze when she heard that bird howl again.
“It’s him!” she said, “I didn’t dream it!”
But she was talking to herself, because Cándido, without her noticing, had gone out with his machete, an oil lamp and a parichi to cover himself from the rain.
Josefa ran, following the glow of the lamp, but her father’s steps were quicker and he left her behind. The storm clouds burst with fire and sharpened their raindrops more, which fell furiously on both of their bodies like spears. This did not matter to Cándido. He walked as if dazed, intoxicated.
His legs tangled in the grass, and he stumbled but stood up, undaunted. His eyes aimed at the howl as if they were arrows, so as not to let it escape.
“Guaaaaa-jo-jo-jo-jo-jó,” the jungle let it speak again, accompanied by the chorus of the rain.
“Guaaaaa-jo-jo-jo-jo-jó,” it howled once more, and the darkness kept it hidden.
With swift movements, Cándido stopped and turned his body, pointing his oil lamp at the ashen trunk of what had once been a guapomó, and there he saw the one who had stolen his nighttime songs, his hair, and his dreams.
“There it is!” he said with a voice that seemed to swell with both tears and joy. “There it is!” he shouted so loudly that Josefa rushed to find him.
“There it is!”
But Josefa saw nothing.
Only a hollow, grayish trunk, scorched by time and the sun’s rays. Cándido handed her the lamp.
“Point it, dammit!” he ordered. “At the bird!”
But there was nothing, so Josefa aimed the lamp at the trunk her father was staring at.
Cándido moved closer, cautiously and silently, toward the lamp’s orange glow, though the raindrops still overpowered the birds’ sound. The rain baptized Josefa’s whole warm body, but she didn’t flinch—she wanted to see why her father had drawn the machete from its sheath, pulling it back as if to gather force for a strike. He was completely focused, as if nothing else existed beyond him and the trunk.
Suddenly, that wood came to life and began to look at them with two large, yellowish ovals, their black centers pulsing, swelling and contracting. From between the cracks in the bark, a small head appeared, and then two wings that blended into the night, like curtains of ash.
The bird watched them for an instant and seemed to freeze the air in Josefa’s lungs.
Then, in a smooth movement, it raised its beak toward its accomplice the moon and pushed out a howl that inflated its chest.
With each syllable it uttered, the beak gradually descended, as if tracing an invisible arc from the sky to the earth:
Guaaa-jo-jo-jo-jó.
And on the last “jo,” Josefa dropped the light, which blinded Cándido, who had struck the trunk with the machete by mistake. While he heard a set of wings flying away, he slipped from the force and crashed face-first into the guapomó.
Only the moon’s glow remained and, even as large as it was, it couldn’t shed enough light on Cándido’s laughter which slowly disintegrated and drowned in the rain of tears that flowed out of his wrinkled eyelids.
“Silly Josefa! Silly, silly!” he cried. “The bird should have taken you! For being silly!”
Josefa experienced her father crying for the first time in her life. Those heart-wrenching sounds entered her ears alongside the drops from the sky. The sound seemed to want to hurt her. She stared into nothingness, imagining that, in that black blanket, was a naked body in pain and wrapped in rain because it had nothing but water to embrace. From that body, howls rose toward the sky.
Once again, the meddlesome night wouldn’t let important things be seen.
The next day, when the sun was just peeking through the treetops, Josefa was rushing about, hunting a hen. Nicolás the rooster had given her back more sleep at dawn, as if he understood that something had changed. Cándido had gone out early with his machete and his tari, avoiding saying goodbye without a glance.
She finally caught the chicken and grabbed it by the neck, squeezing until it burst, bloody, and tearing the head from its body. The decapitated hen ran, showering the yard with blood in thick drops. She felt disgust for the first time, but she also felt a slight sense of calm in the spaces between her fingers. She took the chicken by the legs and dipped it in boiling water until its skin turned fragile like fabric. She plucked it, stripped it bare to finally see it as just meat.
She played for a while with the tips of the bare wings. She laughed, because they looked ridiculous and dull, completely unlike the majesty of the feathered and beautiful flanks Josefa remembered from the River of Birds. Suddenly she thrust her hand into the small body of the hen. From it, she pulled out the heart, the liver, the guts. She threw a heap of viscera into a bucket along with other bits of chopped meat from the animal she was hacking apart.
She took advantage of Cándido’s absence to sharpen a large knife he kept in a drawer. She sat on the ground, where rows of ants were crawling.
She took the tool and began peeling the layers from one end of a long wooden stick until a point emerged, which she lightly pressed into her index finger to see if it pricked. It hurt. She felt the texture and the splinters that pierced her finger. She smiled, admiring her work. It would be useful in case some animals swam around her feet.
She left a couple of loaves on the table, and covered them with banana leaves. Then she stuffed a pair into her pocket along with some fishhooks she had found buried among Cándido’s clothes, and some old hemp threads she had previously measured out with the stick. She let herself be enchanted by the orange of dawn that struggled to emerge. She saw a river of birds flying toward the sun; they sounded like early morning. She looked back for a moment, in case Cándido was approaching, but only the jungle was there: that green foam floating from trunks that were never silent, that would never be silent. She took her improvised fishing rod, her bucket, and she left.