The Jaguar Who Spoke to the Rain

The Jaguar Who Spoke To The Rain

"The Tupi belong to the jungle and the jungle belongs to them."

– Oath of the Land, Year 2081

Part 1: Jaguar

Brazil, Year 2179

The jaguar padded down the neighborhood path, her glance flickering between the transparent casings of houses on either side. Some homes had their shades pulled down already for night. Others were glowing like bioluminescent beetles, full of the quiet, cozy clinking of glasses and laughter. The jaguar’s ears oscillated but she paid little heed. Her yellow eyes – like two summer moons – saw everything on or near her path. The tiny frog that plopped from one tree trunk to the next, the bat that darted above, the humans who gathered close after sunset. She was queen there.

In one of the dome-shaped houses, a woman watched the jaguar. She stood silently, but the jaguar had already seen her. Expected her. Smelled her. Recognized her.

Neither the woman nor the jaguar had forgotten what they needed protection from. Even with the peace that came with the Oath, memory seeped through the generations.

The jaguar disappeared into the shadows, becoming one with the falling night.

Part 2: Amana

“When you speak to the jungle in reverence, it speaks back to you in gratitude.” – Tupi proverb

“Help will come in the name of rain.” – Tupi prophecy during the Great Drought of 2043-2046

She woke with the world rimmed in sunrise. Her mind was still teeming with the dreams of the night. Dreams of the jaguar. Last night, the jaguar had seemed to speak her name with the sounds it didn’t emit. Silent steps, silent breathing, silent heartbeat. Sounds she knew she could only hear if she was pressed up against the jaguar’s glistening fur. But she was not so close to the jaguar in body or spirit. Not yet. It was just her imagination that the forest and the creatures of it called her name – AmanaAmanaAmana. They didn’t know her like that, not yet, not by name. Perhaps they would know her daughter by name, or her granddaughter. With the Oath, many things were mending.

Her grandfather had laughed that, when the Elders prophesied the rain during the Great Drought over a century ago, that really they were prophesying her birth, because Amana was the Tupi word for rain. “To fall swift and healing,” her mother had said. But Amana wanted to be like the jaguar, silent and fierce and sure beyond any shadow of question. Long ago in the yesterdays, the jungle had waited for rain. But would the jungle ever really know her? Did it see her? Her ancestors had been displaced and had lived in cities. It would be generations before her descendants would again be one with the jungle in spirit as well as body. But all things were mending.

––––––––––

A tarantula scuttled under the decomposing leaves of a banana tree. Amana chuckled to herself, remembering the last visit time the Delegates had visited from São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. It would be a few more years before people like them accepted all the crawling things of the ground. The cities were covered in trees and green things, true to the Oath, but many still shut their doors and windows in fear of things with multiple legs or no legs at all. All of the earth was in process. It took time. Like a Wasai tree reaching its red rooty fingers into the ground. Fear had dug in and settled for most of the time people had been alive, and it was hard to uproot.

Human feet now scurried along the path towards her. It was her secretary and his aid.

“The southern delegates have reported false air travel sensor data!” the secretary shouted. Above them, two spider monkeys hurried along the branches to find a less-disturbing spot.

“In what way?” asked the rain.

“They are allowing old world non-electric planes to land and reporting clean entries.”

“It gets worse,” said the other man. “The reason the planes are coming in is to buy cheap lumber.”

“Exportation?”

“To at least two foreign nations.”

“The prophecies said there would be Oath-Breakers,” said the aged secretary. “History always repeats itself.”

“Thank you. I will contact the other Delegates.” She stood firm and stoic as she watched the messengers retreat and even later as she sat alone at her desk to solemnly speak with the leaders of both the Indigenous and Urban land regions.

But when her hologram flipped off, she raised her hands like an araucária. Crying for help from anyone who would hear. Such a breach of the Oath had not happened since her father’s early years as the Tupi leader. She felt the thud of the trees felled without license or conscience. As her mind tended to do, she rushed forward about fifty terrible steps. She imagined the jaguars once again dwindling and displaced as her ancestors had mourned them.

The rain fell in tears.

Part 3: Jaguar

“The law forbids the ranching of cattle, the exportation of beef, and any unauthorized sale or trade of bovine products.” – New Official Agriculture and Horticulture Handbook, published 2082, Brazil.

The sun slipped behind the mountains as silently as her footsteps fell on the jungle floor. But while the sun itself could slip away quietly, nightfall in the jungle was never quiet. Perhaps in the refrosted regions of the Arctic, or the sanctuaries of Ushuaia, the sunset was silent like a painting. But here, the day’s ending was the loudest part. Insects you never thought existed sung the songs of their lives. Birds recounted the day’s dealings with all the fervor of just waking up. Monkeys howled at the joke of going to bed.

From the dense jungle all the way to the Pantanal, her species now padded again like kings and queens in their kingdoms. In the expanding Amazon jungle, they hunted giant anteaters, tapir, capivara, sometimes monkeys. In the wetlands, they sunk teeth into the deer that had once dwindled to a handful, and crocodiles who fought – like the jaguar – with all the resolve and resilience of creatures who were once endangered.

In the interior of São Paulo, the jaguars hunted wild cattle who roamed the re-grown and restored old farming fields. In a few places, lonely barbed wire still could be found making harsh and rusted tangles in the tall grasses. The jaguar and her kin passed carefully over these markers of the yesteryears, shivering with the ghost of a fear they had never been forced to experience. A fear that their ancestors felt with every breath. A fear of chainsaws cutting down their homes, and guns when they ventured desperately out of their felled homes for food.

Now, on these wide lands that curved like rustling waves over the hills, the jaguars crouched, their spots hiding them among the shadows of young trees and old grasses. Their yellow-moon eyes didn’t take a second glance at the centuries past, but stared straight ahead at their targets. Shaggy cows whose ancestral memory still felt the spectral sensations long abolished from these hills – the piercing of ear tags, the mockingly sweet smell of blood in the slaughterhouses, and the clamp of cold metal to extract milk.

Part 4: Onça

“It is illegal for companies to operate, force, or encourage manual human labor – including the sending of any form of message, goggle-ping, AR notice, hologram, or any other form of communication – between the hours of 12:00 and 14:00 on any day of the week within the Indigenous and Urban regions of the Sustainable Democratic Shared-Nation of Brazil.” – National Decree of Rest and Restoration, Brazil, 2092.

Onça leaped from one section of the sidewalk to another like the jungle cat she was named after. And she could leap far, leaving a whole section of the ancient concrete untouched. Onça liked this street, it seemed so old, like something out of a story. The street was made of asphalt – a thing only seen on the oldest of leftover streets – and that made it seem like she could smell hundreds of years that had been pounded in under her feet. Some of the houses here were small museums, or shops that people came to for the charm of something that didn’t exist anymore. Some were still houses for people to live in, although you could see where the old concrete had crumbled in some areas and been replaced with green-mix blocks that matched many of the newer buildings in the city.

A red frog leaped ahead of her, startled by her game. Onça was only nine. But she remembered when red frogs only lived in eco-reserves.

When she got to the end of the two-hundred-year-old street, she stopped to look for buses or bicycles. But as she expected, the cross streets were empty. It was the daily Offering – the afternoon rest time – in São Paulo. Even the sleek-roofed solar trains were nowhere to be seen on their high tracks that haloed the city.

She was at that age where naps were about the worst thing she could be sentenced to and also the same age that meant she could choose many things for herself. So normally she took the long way to her aunt’s house after school. She knew that by the time she arrived, her aunt Ana would be stirring from her afternoon nap. Then, yawning like a teenager even though she was forty-two, Ana would putter into the kitchen in her bamboo silk pajamas and make coffee for two, expecting her wildcat niece to burst through the door any moment. Then Onça would sip coffee from a small ceramic cup and tell her aunt about her day so far. She would try on some of her aunt’s jewelry while Ana got dressed back into her work clothes for the rest of the day’s meetings and reports. Sometimes Onça would go play in the rooftop garden of her aunt’s apartment building, sneaking a strawberry or two from the neat rows. Or she might stop at the floor where the building’s mushrooms grew in quiet, dark rows. Or peak in to see the worms wiggling under the clear viewing glass on the compost floor. Or she might sit eating cookies while her aunt gave presentations in Tupi, Portuguese, and English to nodding hologram faces.

––––––––––

At 4:30 pm, her aunt turned off her screens with the sure gesture of habit. Together, they walked to Onça’s father’s house for afternoon juice and cake.

“Amor, It’s 5:02! Why are you working so late?” Ana said to her brother.

“It’s the Amazonas convention, they keep changing my schedule and so I have to rearrange meetings,” said Onça’s father.

“Sounds like an emergency,” said Ana, rolling her eyes.

“I have to make that meeting with the Lima firm,” said Onça’s father, but then when he thought his daughter couldn’t hear, he whispered to his sister “I've spent all day talking to the attorneys.”

Onça paused from pouring maracujá juice into three bamboo cups. When she was out in the city, she could pretend that the divorce wasn’t really happening. She could pretend that she was tall and beautiful and strong, like the Tupi princess she had seen on TV. The woman whose name meant rain. Or that she was, true to her own name, something wild in the forest. She could pretend that she made it worth it for people to make peace.

“Your dad works too much, that’s why he has so many wrinkles,” Ana said, laughing. It was as if they all felt the need to change even the almost-silent subject.

Onça’s father made a mocking laugh sound. Then he sighed, and typed something quickly before shutting off the keyboard that had been projecting onto the table. Underneath, the smooth eucalyptus wood looked glad to be relieved of the LED markings that had patterned it like a temporary tattoo.

Part 5: Toucan

“The acquisition of any new product for personal use requires the trade-in of a similar product or carbon equivalent that can be recycled.” – Decree Against Wasteful Consumption, Brazil, 2095

The toucan flew over the river that cut a deep ravine along the major highways of the city. The river glimmered, tricking her eyes that the glittering curvatures were fish. But she knew better than to use her energy darting down from this height. She wasn’t an eagle after all. Her ancestral memory told her that this river had once been polluted and full of trash. That her kin had not lived or hunted here for many generations before her. For much of the last few centuries, only capivaras had eaten trash from this river. But now the capivaras had migrated back to the valleys and wild fields of the interior where their original sources of food had lain in the days before the clogging of rivers with waste.

A pink dolphin curved in the water, the dorsal fin distracting the toucan for only a moment. Something stirred in the toucan’s ancestral memory as she stopped to rest on the blossoming branches of a jenipapo tree. In the old days, pink dolphins had only been found in the Amazon basin. But now it was all connecting again, the Amazon was growing, and its creatures were finding their ways to other rivers and other forests instead of retreating into the wild places that once dwindled. The roots of the Mata Atlantica and the Amazon were intertwined again after years of being separated by the blow of ax, saw, and flame.

Along the river, gleaming vertical farm-gardens rose to match the tall buildings where people worked and lived.

The toucan had tried many to snatch acerolas and strawberries from these buildings but thin screens and glass blocked her and other birds from snacking. Instead, she ate something lodged in her ancestral memory – jenipapo. She pecked into the small fruit, and with her feather-like tongue she sucked up seed, skin, and pulp.

Before long, smaller birds arrived in a frenzy, thinking the toucan was there to eat eggs from their nests – as toucans were known to do. They noisily drove her off in a clatter of disapproval. Stopping to rest from tree to tree along the way, she made her way to Parque Ibirapuera where the jenipapo seeds passed from her body to the ground to where at least one new tiny tree would push through the soil in two months.

Part 6: Onça

“The first version of the Oath of the Land was made after the Great Drought of 2043 – 2046, after increased legal and illegal deforestation of the Amazon reduced water in the atmosphere. Over 200,000 people died in the drought, and over 300 combined animal and plant species went extinct. There hasn’t been another drought in Brazil since the Amazon Rainforest was given back into the care and control of the Indigenous peoples who have lived there before the Portuguese colonization of Brazil and the Great Robbing of Land. ” – History and Social Sciences for 4th Grade, Teacher’s Guide, São Paulo School District, 2179

Onça wrote her answers quickly, her pen clicking against her screen louder than the other students around her. She was sure and determined, her restless legs moving up and down impatiently under her desk. She circled the answer for “Tallest Greenhouse Skyscraper in the World” knowing that that option “B” was there to trick her. The tallest greenhouse had been the height of the Central Park Tower in New York. But now there was a taller one, in London. She quickly scrawled the date of the signing of the Native Alaskan Declaration of Rights and Restoration, stopping only to bite her lip for a second while she thought to make sure she wasn’t mixing up that date with the New Land Care Act of Aboriginal Australia. She felt excitement rising in her as she hurriedly read through her answers one more time and then clicked “submit” with her pen. Ms. Silva saw her submission come through and nodded that Onça could be dismissed.

The wildcat girl picked up her screen and her pen and rushed for the door. Down the glass hallway, she could see a grass-topped e-bus stopped outside the school. If it was going to Ibirapuera, she needed to run as fast as a free-tailed bat to make it on time. She pushed open the glass doors, but the yellow letters on the bus said it was going to Luz instead. Hopping from one foot to the other she waited for another bus to pull up. She watched at least fifty people whiz by on bicycles and she was jealous of them.

It was the first time that her parents were giving a presentation together since the rumors of divorce had begun. She’d heard them rehearse it at least twenty times – separately of course. Her dad would talk about making recycled building bricks from the old landfills that still “made ugly splotches on our land, and also powerful reminders that nothing can be wasted.” He was famous for using recycled and disassembled vehicle batteries in his construction materials. And her mother would talk about the cleanest renewable paints to use in construction – like paint made from wild-harvested jenipapo. Onça buzzed with the importance of it all, but mostly because she thirsted to see them together, in the same room again, not in hologram but in person. She wanted to see if there was any chance left. And like she read in the historical-fiction book for kids about the Great Drought, thirsty people were always looking – and praying – to the sky for any suggestion of a rain cloud.

––––––––––

On and off the bus she leaped like it was just a tree she must bypass to get on with her hunt.

The auditorium was already hushed when an usher found Onça’s name on a list and handed her a bracelet that glowed with the correct VIP seating section.

When her parents gave their presentation, a lot of people applauded. But they weren’t looking for the same things Onça had been looking for. There seemed to be no chance of rain on the horizon.

––––––––––

While crowds lingered under the shade outside, Onça’s father told her to wait a little longer, he had one more person to talk to. He disappeared in a cluster of people in suits who were scrawling notes on their screens. Her mother was nowhere to be seen. Onça sat down on the centuries-old steps of the grand auditorium entrance and waited, wishing she could slink off like a wildcat.

In a flutter of ceremonial wear and suits, Onça saw a woman walking towards her. Onça knew who she was. She knew her name. The woman wore high heels and a flowing business suit that seemed to move like she did – like water. Her long black hair was braided and on her face were red markings. She was poised, strong, capable of anything. Onça wanted to be exactly like her.

Amana, the Tupi leader, stopped in front of the small cat-girl.

“Your parents have impressive ideas. Ideas that can heal a lot of things, make a lot of things whole,” said Amana.

“They’re getting divorced,” said Onça, surprised that she said it. But she was never one to be tamed by convention. “Even though they promised that we’d always stay together.”

Amana sighed and sat down beside the girl who called to her spirit. “I too am here because of a broken oath.”

“You are?”

“People who want to ruin the good things we have.”

“Are you fixing it like they say you do on TV?”

“I am trying. But it takes many people to mend something.”

“I like your name. It means rain. I’m in year-two Tupi classes in school.”

The women descended from warriors smiled.

“What is your name?”

“Onça.”

The rain’s brown eyes opened wide and her mouth gaped as if to say something unspeakable. “Onça,” she whispered, as if to herself. Then, regaining her composure, she said, “That’s Portuguese for Îagûara who is the queen of the jungle.” Jaguar.

“Aren’t you the queen of the jungle?” asked Onça. It was something the Tupi leader had been called on TV.

“I am only the guardian,” said Amana.

Part 7: Amana

“The Tupi must become one with the jungle. When your spirit is truly in harmony with nature, the whole jungle will speak your name – from the call of the bird, to the song of the insects, even the jaguar will pant your name as it treads the jungle floor or leaps among the treetops.” – Tupi folktale

The conference and the delegate meetings were over. There was much still to be done, but the only way to keep going was to understand the patterns of light and darkness. To rest with the night, and rise again with the new sun. Amana’s bare feet moved softly over the smooth wood floor to her window. The jaguar padded through the neighborhood path, sending a moon-gaze glance to the cozy rustlings of Amana’s corner of the Tupi dwellings. Amana listened for her name as always, and smiled, remembering the small girl in São Paulo. Onça, the Îagûara, the jaguar – the girl who’d called out her name. All things were mending.

Part 8: Toucan

Brazil, 2200

“We use the Great Drought of the 21st century as a way to symbolize ‘never again.’ We want rain to keep falling during our lives. But we must ensure that our lives keep the rain falling for the generations to come. The abundance of biodiversity that we have restored should never cause us to grow lazy. The Tupi have a folk tale that says that the jungle speaks the names of its true guardians. But we must speak the jungle’s name too – and the names of all the parts of the ecosystem that give us our land and our planet. We must speak them as we swear to protect them.” – Onça Medeiros, Delegate of São Paulo, Inaugural Address, 2200

The toucan flew high above the city. High enough to notice something gathering on the horizon. Rain. Rain for the city, rain for the jungle, rain for the rivers, rain for the Pantanal. Rain for the generations to come. Landing on a branch safe inside a jenipapo tree, the toucan tucked her beak under her warm feathers and went to sleep.

END