North of the Paranaiba
Flash-fiction - by Paul Iasevoli
My cousin’s wedding was an all-day, all-night party that gave our favela a reason to eat and drink too much—an excuse to add color into the narrow, dusty, one-way streets of downtown Jardim Olinda. Fueled by bottles of homemade aguardente uncorked directly after the “I-do’s” in the Paróquia de Santa Luzinha—the celebration continued into the consummation reveal the next afternoon, where my family and a few hundred townsfolk squeezed into the rectangular courtyard at the center of my aunt’s house.
My mother and her sister appeared at the upstairs window of my cousin’s bedroom. The crowd drew closer, as the two unfurled the nuptial bed sheet over the narrow balcony railing. Shouts of viva and the clinking of glasses rose when the rust-red spot became visible—offset on the sheet’s pure-white background, it flapped against the gray-green stucco of the house. I stood on a stool to get a better view of the bloody stain, but as much as I strained to see, I couldn’t figure out what all the fuss was about. To my twelve-year-old eyes it didn’t look much different from the sun setting in the steamy mist over the Paraná.
I climbed down from the stool and searched for my father in the crowd. He’d already settled back at the table reserved for our family—a bottle of aguardente in his hand. He poured a drink for himself and my older brother. I sat across from them ready to ask why the stain on the sheet was so important, and that’s when I noticed something in my father’s eyes—a tinge of yellow around his pupils, making them seem as if they were polished onyx finely ringed with gold. He and my brother knocked back their aguardente, and my father poured three more shots—one for me this time. Although I was only twelve, I was allowed a sip or two of strong spirits on special occasions.
“Tim-tim.” My father clinked his glass with mine and grinned. “To that vial of fake blood I slipped into your cousin’s pocket at church yesterday,” he said. “Now he can claim his wife’s as chaste as the rest of the women in this town.”
“Tim-tim,” I replied, although I didn’t understand what fake blood had to do with the wedding ceremony. I gulped the shot, put down my glass, and swallowed hard as the drink burned its way into my stomach.
It might have been the heat rising through my body’s core, but the moment the aguardente hit my gut the whites of my father’s eyes showed more yellow than they had before, and his hair seemed to take on hues of blue intertwined with its usual jet black. I wanted to write it off to the spirits, but something about my father was different, and stories reverberated in my head—stories I’d heard from my friends about their fathers who’d disappeared or “transformed,” as folks in our favela called it.
My classmate Paulinho said his father had turned into a river dolphin. Paulinho told me that, just weeks after his father disappeared, a fisherman swore he saw him breach not far from the point where the Paraná and Paranaíba flow together. But that angler was known to exaggerate, as fishermen often do, even more so than other folks in Jardim Olinda.
And there was Carlinho, an older boy from our favela, who told me his father transformed into a brightly feathered quetzal that his mother kept in a cage in their kitchen. She claimed she talked to him every morning as she worked the dough for the family’s breakfast of pão de queijo. She said she and the bird had conversations about how best to run the household and discipline their nine children. But Carlinho said he’d never heard the bird talk and, when he was alone in the kitchen, he would try to start conversations with his quetzal-father, but it…he...the bird…wouldn’t answer. Nonetheless, his mother was certain the quetzal was her husband, just in bird form.
My mother came up behind me, clasped her hands on my shoulders, and kneaded her way from my collarbones to my neck, breaking me from my reverie. “Are you tired, Son?”
I shook my head, although I was exhausted after two days of festivities—and I didn’t dare tell her what I thought I saw in my father’s eyes.
“And you, Husband?” My mother ran her fingers through my father’s hair. “Drunk again?”
My father shook his head, but his hair—now blue-black—stood on end.
“Did you wash that mop today?” she asked.
My father raked his fingers over his scalp, but that only made his hair more stagy, like the fur on a capybara’s back.
Mother said, “You’ve had too much to drink,” and shot back the dregs from his glass.
Father stuck his tongue out in exasperation, but as it slipped between his lips, it appeared yellow-pink and pointed like a crow’s.
“It’s not the aguardente,” Father said in a voice that was a shrill semblance of his bravado baritone—as if a hummingbird were caught in his throat, or a chorus of frogs were singing from his lungs. Then he uttered something I couldn’t understand, something that sounded more like the groans he’d make in his daily toil shaking araucaria trees to gather pinhõ nuts. It wasn’t the sound of pain or fear, but rather it held a sense of mystery—like the creak a door makes as it opens slowly, or the screech of an owl that pierces the dark of night.
Then my father disappeared—as if in the flick of a shaman’s stick he evaporated.
My mother gasped.
My brother jumped up, the pale light filling the courtyard intensifying the horror on his face.
I peered under the table. On the seat of the chair where my father had sat, the crumpled clothes he was wearing came alive.
My mother and brother took two steps back, but I walked around the table and reached into the writhing pile on the chair.
Beneath the fine linen fabric of the jacket something wriggled. I fished around in the layers of flax and soft cotton of the shirt, and something warm and supple tickled my hand. It wiggled out from the wrist opening in the suit jacket’s arm and let out a caw. It was him—now less man than bird—blue-black, with yellow eyes and pinprick onyx irises.
A face still shaped like my father’s stared back at me, but a beak protruded where there should have been a nose and mouth. My father’s body had shrunk to the size of a young bantam cock—covered with blue feathers, not yet fully formed, but burgeoning as he hopped away.
Mother shoved me. “Chase him,” she said. “He trusts you and will let you bring him back to us.”
I turned to her and hesitated. What if he doesn’t want to come back to us, to this dusty town full of fear for what other people will say? I shook off those thoughts as quickly as they came and strode after him.
My Father—now more bird than man—leapt around my aunt’s courtyard looking up the skirts of the town’s women who screamed in terror. Or was it delight in knowing that the man they’d fantasized about during their love making sessions in their arranged marriages had turned bird but was still interested in them?
Another caw, and I scampered to the wall where my bird-father was in his final phase of transformation. His face no longer human but completely bird-like. His arms, now wings, covered in flight feathers. His legs thinned to yellow stems with five pointed toes topped with pearl-white claws.
Caw, caw.
“Calma, Pai,” I said, as I boxed him into a corner of the courtyard.
Caw, caw.
I reached my hands around my bird-father’s newly formed feathered body. His wing feathers coarse and stiff, his underbelly soft with down.
Caw, caw.
“Don’t be afraid,” I said, my voice cracking into that of an adult’s.
A clamor from behind distracted me. I turned, and my mother, aunt, older brother, and most of Jardim Olinda stared back at me waiting to see what I’d do next with the blue-crow bird who had been my father. I studied his bird eyes, searching for an explanation of why he’d transformed? Why he picked this moment to change? Then I recalled the stories from my friends, their fathers’ transformations, the one-way streets of Jardim Olinda, my cousin’s fake-blood-stained sheet, and I knew what he wanted me to do.
I released him.
He flew over the courtyard wall and let out a call that echoed até logo. But that promise of until later never came, as he soared out of sight somewhere north of the Paranaíba.