BY ANDREA FERRARI KRISTELLER
Copyright is held by the author.
THE GHOST of the cat did not appear at first. It was only after a week had passed that he realized something was there at the side of the road where it had all happened, and it was just by chance, because he glanced sideways as he drove late at night towards Iguazú airport with a fabulous cumbia as background music to a very still and very warm night.
He had not meant any harm of course, one never does. He had just been very late to pick up some passengers back from the Falls, and the speed limit was laughable for local drivers. He later recalled it was one of those late afternoons in which the day never seems to end, and the night will not take away the heat. Like many other times, the road to the National Park was a just a green wall for him, a blur, a wall paper that only charmed the tourists. He had been speeding as usual; no one but a taxi driver in that area of the country will ever understand how overworked and perpetually late one can be: on a day like that one, in full summer season, one will end up making ten trips to the Park at least. The 17 km that separate the hotels from the natural attraction become a nothingness, a grey line alternating with polite comments and, with luck, just silent foreigners sitting on the back seat in awe.
On that day in particular he couldn’t remember how many times he had taken that road; at the end, it sufficed he would count his pesos and take them home to Wanda to his little brick house and its veranda. Half of it would go to his mother, with leg problems and in-and-out of hospital routines; the other half his wife would make do. In a good season like that one, perhaps there would even be a chance of saving for a new musical instrument. Oscar played the bass in a cumbia band which performed every now and then in small provincial high-sounding festivals, such as ‘Garuhapé’s Packaging Festival’.
He had been alone, he remembered well, and the road had been deserted when it happened. Racing ahead, glancing at the car´s blue clock ticking his lateness, he saw a figure like a dot in the middle of the route he knew so well. The dot became larger, and stayed motionless. As he got closer, he didn’t brake because he knew it would move away; they always do, these creatures. Animals either dart from one side of the road to the other like shadows and you can barely guess what species you had seen to the disappointment of any passenger, or they stare for an instant from the sides. Mostly all you could see was a deer’s whitish tail, or the quick glance of the anta’s big brown monumental wild-pigness, disappearing. Some tourists presupposed one an expert in local wildlife and filled one with questions, or required dutifully invented anecdotes of wildlife encounters. The truth is for any taxi driver in Iguazú, you mostly saw wildlife because either you had gone hunting in your childhood, or you noticed them as they lay run down, at the side of the routes you used daily. In the last case, Oscar could name more than a few sightings, and the usual sequences of local forces retiring the dead bodies quickly, before the vultures came to the side of the road to become eventual new victims to the unsightly affair. If the animal was very lucky, it would be taken to Güira Oga, a local wildlife shelter, and end its maimed days there for the delight of tourists who paid to see the creatures they never saw at the Park because they were too noisy, or too busy taking photos of the omnipresent butterflies or coatis. In the last few years, there had appeared many a bothersome campaign against speeding along the Park roads. Ecologists always blamed the local bus and taxi drivers, but it never occurred to them that even in that remote area of green wilderness and roaring waters, time still was money.
Oscar had waited for the dot to become larger in the diminishing distance and disappear, but with a mixture of surprise and annoyance, it had not, and he had realized a bus was coming in the opposite direction making it impossible to dodge.
He had noticed in the last seconds it was one of those wild cats with mottled coats that he could never really remember the names and shapes of distinctly enough. One of those distant minor relatives of the jaguar, now a National Monument and don’t you ever dare to think what would happen if you had the bad luck of running over one of those. The last time it had happened, and the guy had been caught on route 19, the fine had been as high as the price of Oscar’s car.
In those last seconds he became certain the cat was mad, as it had not even moved an inch to avoid the hit, that came with that harsh metallic thud Oscar knew so well. The bus was already past him, so he decided it was safe to stop at the side and check if the creature was still alive. He had no time, he knew, but he was afraid anyone on the bus had taken his license plate and realized what had happened; it was safer to stop and later excuse oneself in case the authorities inquired.
As he descended from the car, he could feel the intense heat like a wall, impenetrable, suffocating, dense as the jungle all around the grey asphalt and his car, blinking its lights in the darkness, and he remembered how angered he had been at that moment for losing both precious minutes and the cool musical quiet inside the car.
There was no dead cat, though. Neither under the car, nor at the sides, nothing. He checked and rechecked, unbelieving the bleeding spotted fur wasn’t somewhere there nearby, so he could gently prod it with his feet towards the higher grass close to the trees, and leave quickly. Baffled, he inspected the place for the valuable expanse of five full minutes, but there was nothing there. He jumped back into his car, swore under his breath a satisfying Guarani bad word, and speeded away. Oscar picked up his passengers, mumbled an apology, and forgot all about the incident for what he thought would be forever.
But a week later, as he was heading towards the airport along that same road to fetch some very late arriving passengers to take them to a hotel, he was reminded of the running over because of the shine of the speed limit road sign at the place. Smirking, he glanced sideways. At the side of the road, in a fleck of an instant, he could have sworn he saw a small mottled cat sitting at the side of the road, as he saw the reflection of two turquoise eyes of that approximate size and height. He dismissed the sighting, of course, lit a cigarette, and continued his way in the middle of the silent night, this time with no music on. As he returned with the sleepy passengers, he paid special attention to the exact place on the other side of the road now, and thought he saw a slight movement, but nothing more, on the place where he had run over (?) the small cat a week ago.
Then it became like bad joke or an obsession to accompany the innumerable trips to and from the Park or the airport and the town of Iguazú: staring from some metres before the spot where it had all happened, and staring back from the rear-view mirror. Invariably, either in the hard sun of middays or the dense night-quiet, there was either a movement, a speck of mottled skin, a clear-cut figure even, or the staring eyes of what he now had cared to confirm was an ocelot.
He had not told anyone when it happened, of course, and even less was he to tell anyone at home or at work now. Yet he noticed himself paying closer attention to job anecdotes of his companions at work if they implied wild animals, and now he turned serious if the news showed one more animal run over along provincial routes. Technically, he repeated to himself over and over, he had not run over any wild cat.
As the days turned into weeks, he became sombre and quieter, and his companions used to joke about him being in love, of left by a lover. He felt it in himself too, and his wife started eyeing him with the mistrust of a deceived wife. But no one ever imagined what it was to go over that spot of the road several times a day, in any weather or time of day, knowing there would be that ghost cat waiting for him in that exact spot of the road, in infinitesimal apparition variants but unfailingly, persisting now in his mind like a bad memory that will not go away, and grows like mushrooms overnight, clear and white in the mind.
Because there were nightmares as well. In them, he was always driving too slowly and he was always too late, and he could not control his car, or the brakes did not work even if he pulled his foot into them as if he would step on a crushed spider. In all of the dreams, without exception, there was an ocelot in the middle of the road, only it grew larger and larger in size until it became like a jaguar, roseate and fierce, sitting, staring at him, in the middle of an empty road. In all of the dreams, he crashed into the animal as it roared at him, or both roared, or the noise became mixed up with the hit and the metallic sounds of the crash. He couldn´t help feeling it was ominous, and he decided, a bit urged by his wife, to take a leave of absence and go and visit some relatives in Paraguay. He felt he needed the distance from that road, and from the ghost of the wild cat.
The only person he ever told it to was to an old aunt of his wife, on a hot afternoon during those holidays in Ciudad del Este. In part, because he could bear it no more, and in part because she was a curandera, and knew about payés or spells. Perhaps somebody had cursed him, he thought, perhaps somebody envied him; but then again, who would? After he had told her of the recurring apparitions and the dreams, she looked at him, pondering, took his hand and uttered a prayer in old Mbya Guaraní that he could not understand. There was pity in her eyes, and he had felt like crying. She gave him a pink rosary, and the usual caburé feathers to carry with him, and said nothing more than a whispered blessing when they parted.
Oscar dreaded returning to his trips along that route when the two weeks were over. He noticed he started sweating profusely as he was approaching the spot, so he decided he simply would look ahead, and never again check sideways. This worked for the following couple of weeks, until the nightmares repeated themselves, and each time he passed that point on the road when awake, the ocelot appeared defiantly in the middle of the road. And each time he didn’t stop, and each time he felt the thud and the impact of the cat on his car, but he never stopped because he knew there would be no dead body in the rear window, and no marks on his bumper. As Oscar was in no position to resign to his job, and needed to get over this, he took the habit of directly closing his eyes when he passed the area. It was a bit of an audacious move, but he evaluated it was no risk neither for him nor for his passengers, as he knew the road by heart, and there were no curves in that area.
This went on for around a month, the nightmares, the sweating as he approached the area, the closing of his eyes, the relief of knowing the thud was not real, the cat was not real, the moment a simple trick of his imagination.
Except for that one time in which the bus had to swerve onto his lane due to an ocelot crossing the road, and crashed straight into Oscars’ car, killing him instantly but without any other victims to lament.
The ghost of the cat did not appear at first. It was only after a week had passed that he realized something was there at the side of the road where it had all happened, and it was just by chance, because he glanced sideways as he drove late at night towards Iguazú airport with a fabulous cumbia as background music to a very still and very warm night.
He had not meant any harm of course, one never does. He had just been very late to pick up some passengers back from the Falls, and the speed limit was laughable for local drivers. He later recalled it was one of those late afternoons in which the day never seems to end, and the night will not take away the heat. Like many other times, the road to the National Park was a just a green wall for him, a blur, a wall paper that only charmed the tourists. He had been speeding as usual; no one but a taxi driver in that area of the country will ever understand how overworked and perpetually late one can be: on a day like that one, in full summer season, one will end up making ten trips to the Park at least. The 17 km that separate the hotels from the natural attraction become a nothingness, a grey line alternating with polite comments and, with luck, just silent foreigners sitting on the back seat in awe.
On that day in particular he couldn’t remember how many times he had taken that road; at the end, it sufficed he would count his pesos and take them home to Wanda to his little brick house and its veranda. Half of it would go to his mother, with leg problems and in-and-out of hospital routines; the other half his wife would make do. In a good season like that one, perhaps there would even be a chance of saving for a new musical instrument. Oscar played the bass in a cumbia band which performed every now and then in small provincial high-sounding festivals, such as ‘Garuhapé’s Packaging Festival’.
He had been alone, he remembered well, and the road had been deserted when it happened. Racing ahead, glancing at the car´s blue clock ticking his lateness, he saw a figure like a dot in the middle of the route he knew so well. The dot became larger, and stayed motionless. As he got closer, he didn’t brake because he knew it would move away; they always do, these creatures. Animals either dart from one side of the road to the other like shadows and you can barely guess what species you had seen to the disappointment of any passenger, or they stare for an instant from the sides. Mostly all you could see was a deer’s whitish tail, or the quick glance of the anta’s big brown monumental wild-pigness, disappearing. Some tourists presupposed one an expert in local wildlife and filled one with questions, or required dutifully invented anecdotes of wildlife encounters. The truth is for any taxi driver in Iguazú, you mostly saw wildlife because either you had gone hunting in your childhood, or you noticed them as they lay run down, at the side of the routes you used daily. In the last case, Oscar could name more than a few sightings, and the usual sequences of local forces retiring the dead bodies quickly, before the vultures came to the side of the road to become eventual new victims to the unsightly affair. If the animal was very lucky, it would be taken to Güira Oga, a local wildlife shelter, and end its maimed days there for the delight of tourists who paid to see the creatures they never saw at the Park because they were too noisy, or too busy taking photos of the omnipresent butterflies or coatis. In the last few years, there had appeared many a bothersome campaign against speeding along the Park roads. Ecologists always blamed the local bus and taxi drivers, but it never occurred to them that even in that remote area of green wilderness and roaring waters, time still was money.
Oscar had waited for the dot to become larger in the diminishing distance and disappear, but with a mixture of surprise and annoyance, it had not, and he had realized a bus was coming in the opposite direction making it impossible to dodge.
He had noticed in the last seconds it was one of those wild cats with mottled coats that he could never really remember the names and shapes of distinctly enough. One of those distant minor relatives of the jaguar, now a National Monument and don’t you ever dare to think what would happen if you had the bad luck of running over one of those. The last time it had happened, and the guy had been caught on route 19, the fine had been as high as the price of Oscar’s car.
In those last seconds he became certain the cat was mad, as it had not even moved an inch to avoid the hit, that came with that harsh metallic thud Oscar knew so well. The bus was already past him, so he decided it was safe to stop at the side and check if the creature was still alive. He had no time, he knew, but he was afraid anyone on the bus had taken his license plate and realized what had happened; it was safer to stop and later excuse oneself in case the authorities inquired.
As he descended from the car, he could feel the intense heat like a wall, impenetrable, suffocating, dense as the jungle all around the grey asphalt and his car, blinking its lights in the darkness, and he remembered how angered he had been at that moment for losing both precious minutes and the cool musical quiet inside the car.
There was no dead cat, though. Neither under the car, nor at the sides, nothing. He checked and rechecked, unbelieving the bleeding spotted fur wasn’t somewhere there nearby, so he could gently prod it with his feet towards the higher grass close to the trees, and leave quickly. Baffled, he inspected the place for the valuable expanse of five full minutes, but there was nothing there. He jumped back into his car, swore under his breath a satisfying Guarani bad word, and speeded away. Oscar picked up his passengers, mumbled an apology, and forgot all about the incident for what he thought would be forever.
But a week later, as he was heading towards the airport along that same road to fetch some very late arriving passengers to take them to a hotel, he was reminded of the running over because of the shine of the speed limit road sign at the place. Smirking, he glanced sideways. At the side of the road, in a fleck of an instant, he could have sworn he saw a small mottled cat sitting at the side of the road, as he saw the reflection of two turquoise eyes of that approximate size and height. He dismissed the sighting, of course, lit a cigarette, and continued his way in the middle of the silent night, this time with no music on. As he returned with the sleepy passengers, he paid special attention to the exact place on the other side of the road now, and thought he saw a slight movement, but nothing more, on the place where he had run over (?) the small cat a week ago.
Then it became like bad joke or an obsession to accompany the innumerable trips to and from the Park or the airport and the town of Iguazú: staring from some metres before the spot where it had all happened, and staring back from the rear-view mirror. Invariably, either in the hard sun of middays or the dense night-quiet, there was either a movement, a speck of mottled skin, a clear-cut figure even, or the staring eyes of what he now had cared to confirm was an ocelot.
He had not told anyone when it happened, of course, and even less was he to tell anyone at home or at work now. Yet he noticed himself paying closer attention to job anecdotes of his companions at work if they implied wild animals, and now he turned serious if the news showed one more animal run over along provincial routes. Technically, he repeated to himself over and over, he had not run over any wild cat.
As the days turned into weeks, he became sombre and quieter, and his companions used to joke about him being in love, of left by a lover. He felt it in himself too, and his wife started eyeing him with the mistrust of a deceived wife. But no one ever imagined what it was to go over that spot of the road several times a day, in any weather or time of day, knowing there would be that ghost cat waiting for him in that exact spot of the road, in infinitesimal apparition variants but unfailingly, persisting now in his mind like a bad memory that will not go away, and grows like mushrooms overnight, clear and white in the mind.
Because there were nightmares as well. In them, he was always driving too slowly and he was always too late, and he could not control his car, or the brakes did not work even if he pulled his foot into them as if he would step on a crushed spider. In all of the dreams, without exception, there was an ocelot in the middle of the road, only it grew larger and larger in size until it became like a jaguar, roseate and fierce, sitting, staring at him, in the middle of an empty road. In all of the dreams, he crashed into the animal as it roared at him, or both roared, or the noise became mixed up with the hit and the metallic sounds of the crash. He couldn´t help feeling it was ominous, and he decided, a bit urged by his wife, to take a leave of absence and go and visit some relatives in Paraguay. He felt he needed the distance from that road, and from the ghost of the wild cat.
The only person he ever told it to was to an old aunt of his wife, on a hot afternoon during those holidays in Ciudad del Este. In part, because he could bear it no more, and in part because she was a curandera, and knew about payés or spells. Perhaps somebody had cursed him, he thought, perhaps somebody envied him; but then again, who would? After he had told her of the recurring apparitions and the dreams, she looked at him, pondering, took his hand and uttered a prayer in old Mbya Guaraní that he could not understand. There was pity in her eyes, and he had felt like crying. She gave him a pink rosary, and the usual caburé feathers to carry with him, and said nothing more than a whispered blessing when they parted.
Oscar dreaded returning to his trips along that route when the two weeks were over. He noticed he started sweating profusely as he was approaching the spot, so he decided he simply would look ahead, and never again check sideways. This worked for the following couple of weeks, until the nightmares repeated themselves, and each time he passed that point on the road when awake, the ocelot appeared defiantly in the middle of the road. And each time he didn’t stop, and each time he felt the thud and the impact of the cat on his car, but he never stopped because he knew there would be no dead body in the rear window, and no marks on his bumper. As Oscar was in no position to resign to his job, and needed to get over this, he took the habit of directly closing his eyes when he passed the area. It was a bit of an audacious move, but he evaluated it was no risk neither for him nor for his passengers, as he knew the road by heart, and there were no curves in that area.
This went on for around a month, the nightmares, the sweating as he approached the area, the closing of his eyes, the relief of knowing the thud was not real, the cat was not real, the moment a simple trick of his imagination.
Except for that one time in which the bus had to swerve onto his lane due to an ocelot crossing the road, and crashed straight into Oscars’ car, killing him instantly but without any other victims to lament.
***
Andrea Ferrari Kristeller is an Argentinean teacher, writer and naturalist. 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 programs, 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. Her poems have been published by The Weekly Avocet, The Avocet, The Dawntreader, Erbacce, an ASEI Arts anthology, Poetry Undressed, Braided Way, The Poppy Road Review. Her novella “The Land without You” was given an Honourable mention at Writers of the Future contest, 2018. Her short story “The Ghost at the Whites’ Hoté” has recently been published in the anthology Haus, by Culture Cult magazine. “Her turning into a forest” has been accepted for publication by Globally Rooted.
