Teyú Yaguá vs. the Dragon
Ashley Bevilacqua Anglin
The red core of a quebracho colorado smolders, laid bare by brutal claws. Like severed ribs, the stumps of palm fronds drip a slow rain of sparks. The monster’s breath has charred the heavy teardrop shape of a samu’u trunk to ruin. It runs with black streaks, the branches above now reduced to smoking veins, arteries, and aorta: a fiery heart, extinguished.
Slow steps swirl through the smoke, crossing the sudden wasteland in purposeful quiet. But when the ancient guardian of this place stands firm and opens seven fierce mouths to fight back, the seven voices of Teyú Yaguá roar loud enough to break a dragon’s will.
Mariposa—Asunción, Paraguay, 27 jun. 2057
At least no human casualties are on display in this current episode of rainforest devastation. Mari sighs to herself, lowering her head back toward the latest installment of her favorite artist Irupé’s graphic novel, on her armrest-desk. No one, least of all her, needs any more of those images burned into her mind.
She’s not even sure why Dr. Bowen would share this footage with today’s class. Before Mari’s attention wandered back to the fantastic new book, they’d planned to connect to the professor’s old friend in Ywy-Mará-Ey, a tenuous oasis of Indigenous forest stewardship. She’s supposed to demonstrate how Amazonian biochar techniques have improved their agroforestry, now Paraguay’s people are learning to put them into practice.
“Must’ve entered the wrong coordinates,” Dr. Bowen is saying, disconnecting then re-trying the link. A murmur rises among the temporarily distracted students.
“Aren’t you kinda young to be in senior seminar?” asks someone two chairs over from Mari in the back row of the darkened lecture hall.
Mari drags her eyes up, taking in the locs pulled elegantly back from the speaker’s fine features, the lashes long enough to brush his cool glasses.
She smiles, reluctance gone. “Doctora Bowen’s my mom.” And Mari is built like her, small and slight enough not to look thirteen, which of course is still too young. “Got a dentist appointment, after.”
“Aha. Op, mini-Bowen. I’m Zain.”
She scoff-laughs. “Mariposa Guerrera.”
“Really. Like the singer from Serafina?”
“Exactly.” Actually, first Mariposa was named for her, then the rock singer was named for Mari, but that’s a long, strange story.
He raises shapely brows, intrigued. “Okay. And—is that Guaraníadas you’re reading? Which episode?”
She tips her reading pane his way. “3.4.”
“It’s out already? Haven’t even gotten 3.3 yet.”
“Yeah, no. Papá, uh, knows Irupé and might’ve said I’m a massive fan...”
“Guau.” Zain grins, taking the offered device to pore over the first few stylish dark pages: black and red, deep greens and grays, illuminated with strokes of white.
“This is gonna be Luisón, huh,” he says after a minute. “Dark shit for dark times.”
The Guaraní version of werewolf lore was Mari’s near-immediate guess, too, when she started to read earlier. “Or,” she teases, “is that just what she wants you to think?”
With a short, low-pitched laugh, Zain moves the reading pane out of her reach. Laughing too, she lets him. Obviously, he’s way too old for her; but he’s also nice, and smart enough he can afford to let his attention wander in Dr. Bowen’s senior seminar.
Before Mari realizes it, people around them are buzzing, quiet conversations and the moving of backpacks and class supplies, like the lecture and discussion are ending. Was she that distracted by a cute guy? She checks the time, confirming they shouldn’t be done for more than an hour. Mami is more the type to keep people a few minutes late, not let them go early. But when Mari looks up, she’s dismissed her students and walked away from the lectern; she’s facing a front corner of the lecture hall, already talking intensely on her wearable device.
Zain hands Mari back the device, which she stuffs into her messenger bag as she makes her way upstream.
“Dios mío,” Mami is saying as Mari gets close enough to hear. “I wasn’t sure I’d get you. You’re okay?... Yeah, I don’t doubt you can smell it. Where—”
She pauses, listening.
“Nahániri—the wildfire’s still likely to spread your way. I said no. You’d better get everyone up to the caverns.” Another pause. “Jerutí—I’m telling you, no jodas with this.” Pause. “Because no number of pombero is enough to go up against this dragon.”
“Wildfires Threaten Ysapy Reserve,” Associated Press (27.6.2057)
A so-called controlled burn spread widely enough today to breach the eastern border of the Refugio Silvestre Ysapy in Paraguay’s interior. Unseasonably dry conditions have fanned the blaze. Although wilderness management response teams arrived promptly with a supertanker, the wildfire is only partially contained at present.
The forest reserve (named in honor of the late Argentinean activist Rocío Silvestri, who in 2050 gave her life defending native people’s right to their territory here) has long been designated for Indigenous management of natural resources. Nonetheless, ongoing tensions remain as cattle farming and cash crops still press in, particularly from the reserve’s eastern side.
Spokesmen for international agricultural conglomerate Grancosur, whose employees initiated the burn, blame local pombero for its excessive spread. The Silvestri Foundation refutes this claim as baseless, citing its own workers’ decades of experience fighting wildfires alongside the people who call the reserve home.
Many rainforest dwellers of Brazil, Bolivia and Paraguay, faced with the loss of their native territories, have chosen to assimilate into an urban lifestyle for survival. Some few fight back, often with tragic results. This conservation area—nicknamed Ywy-Mará-Ey (Land-Without-Evil) by optimistic local believers in the traditional Guaraní ways—has become home to an estimated four thousand or more former refugees. Although speakers of Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese can generally communicate well based on the similarity of the two languages, the diverse community here uses their Guaraní dialects as a proud lingua franca.
Eco-photojournalist Sebastián Guerrera contributed to this report.
Jerutí—Paraguayan forest, 2022
The skinny, freckled girl delicately balance-walks the length of a fallen ceiba trunk on pale bare feet. She’s wearing blue morpho wings, painted on sheer fabric and strung on thin elastic straps around her bony shoulders. Thick glasses, also framed in iridescent greenish-blue, increase the insect-like impression. Jerutí crouches jaguar-quiet on her branch (at about the newcomer’s eye height in a nearby urunday) and waits to see if those dragonfly eyes will spot her.
When they do, flashing wider, the strange kid catches her breath and wobbles hard enough for her desperately gripping toes to dislodge some flakes of decaying bark, but she doesn’t fall off the log.
“Mba’etekoiko.” The sounds leave her mouth as haltingly as cautious balancing steps across a narrow, flexible length of deadwood.
“Iporã, ha nde,” Jerutí answers coolly. Then, eyeing the girl, she translates, “I’m good. And you... don’t really know much Guaraní, right?”
The kid answers Jerutí’s Spanish with a sheepish relieved expression, but earns her respect by soldiering on a short way. “Che sy, héê. Che, nahániri.” My mother, yes. Me, no. “Yet. In Argentina it’s not like here. Mostly only the indígenas know their own languages.”
It’s obvious to Jerutí that the butterfly kid belongs to Gil Bowen and Rocío Silvestri, the biologist-anthropologist husband and wife team who’ve led covert visits to help this community the past few years. Jerutí’s people know how to do what’s best for this forest, and caring for the forest is one of the best ways to heal the world. That’s what Rocío tells her. They don’t need saving; she and Gil are just here to help them stay safe.
So, they’ve done what they can to care for the carers—ensuring basic health and dental measures for the ones who’ve united here, out of uncharted wild places overrun and burned to the rich ground by rancheros desperate to make a few pesos (or cruzeiros, or bolivianos, or guaraníes)—with the blessing of their own governments, in too many cases. Trying to keep the same rancheros and governments from encroaching any further into the vulnerable beating heart of their own continent.
Rocío has mentioned a daughter Jerutí’s age, who’ll come to see them too when she’s old enough. This one looks no more than a spindly eight or nine, not eleven, but Rocío wouldn’t lie. She’s of Mapuche descent, not Guaraní. Still, Jerutí has trusted her implicitly ever since she pointed out the name Rocío means dew: the same as Ysapy, the great-grandmother who brought Jerutí and her grandmother deep into this part of the forest from their old home east of Concepción, when things got scary.
Names are of spiritual significance here, not just something your tía abuela liked from that Brazilian telenovela all the ladies at the salón de belleza couldn’t get enough of. Ysapy and Jerutí and their found-clan were named by shamans, who listened carefully to the spirits of this place to learn what each person should be called.
“So,” bug girl forges ahead, “mamá said Jerutí Vaira is the girl my age who doesn’t only speak Guaraní, and didn’t come here from Brazil.”
“Héê,” Jerutí agrees, surprised in turn.
“Figured. And she said you didn’t know we have the same name, but you might like that little surprise.”
Now Jerutí feels her own eyes protruding like a bug’s. “You’re also called Jerutí?”
The smaller girl smiles, revealing teeth decorated in fine metallic squares and wires. “Paloma.”
Jerutí tilts her head, regarding her. Both names do mean dove. It’s worth finding out if their spirits could be as much alike as their outsides are different.
Within a quarter hour, they’re tramping through the underbrush to the soundtrack of Paloma’s favorite dance tunes, pulsing from the rectangular glass-and-metal device in her back shorts pocket.
Paloma’s blue wings make her a fairy, not a bug, she quickly informs Jerutí. And that’s the kind of story she likes to pretend-play, so they do. As soon as Jerutí understands what a fairy is, exactly.
“So, sort of like panambi,” Jerutí says, then answers Paloma’s wide-eyed blank look, “When people’s spirits get reincarnated into butterflies?”
“Oh! That would be a cool way to think of it. But we have lots in common if you use your imagination a little,” Paloma chatters. “Like when we went to the Museo Mitológico Ramón Elías near Asunción, they definitely had a statue of a dragon. Tayuga or something?”
Jerutí sighs. “What’s a dragon...”
“Like a dinosaur, has wings, breathes fire? The Welsh one—papá’s family comes from Wales, it’s like their national symbol—it’s red and it’s called Y Ddraig Goch.”
“Is it supposed to be friendly, or will it eat you?”
Paloma considers. “Y Ddraig Goch is good, or they wouldn’t put him on their flag. But in some stories, they’re mean. Stealing everyone’s treasure. Setting people’s land on fire.”
“Well, we don’t have flags. Or—greedy dinosaurs.”
“This was totally a dragon.” Paloma has retrieved her device and flicks through stored photos, looking for proof. “At the museum. It had a lot of heads.”
“Wait. Seven heads. Like dogs’ heads?”
Paloma nods eagerly, holding up photographic evidence.
“Oh. Not Tayuga. That’s Teyú Yaguá. But he can’t fly… he’s not even very fast. And some people say he has fire coming out of his eyes, but never his breath. He’s the guardian of caverns like the ones near here, and all the trees that have fruit. He doesn’t steal. I bet if a dragon showed up here, Teyú Yaguá wouldn’t let it take any good stuff off the bakuri trees or mburukuyá vines.”
Paloma screws up her features a moment, thinking of the similar-sounding Spanish name she knows. “Maracuyá? Passionfruit grows here?”
“Oh yeah. Not right here, but I know how to get there. Closer to the river, because the vines like more sun, and to climb trees, and for you to feed them the parts of a fish that you don’t want to eat.”
Paloma looks unsure whether mburukuyá might also be a legendary spirit creature, a plant endowed with a life of its own, which Jerutí quite enjoys. “I can show you a cavern, too, on the way,” she offers, then grins. “Just, you know, watch out for fire-breathing monsters.”
By nightfall, the girls know they’ll be together for the rest of the three weeks Paloma’s family is here. She’s definitely going to study multicultures and other conservation measures she sees at work, and continue her parents’ mission. Maybe Jerutí will come to study too with Rocío in Asunción, one day. Either way, they’ll stay friends until they’re bent and gray and slow as Ysapy, and even longer.
Panambi, messages (27.6.2057)
ButterflyJr
Are you reading this newest
goddamn TRAVESTY?
Haven’t been able to reach
che sy. Trying not to lose
my shit
shes ok sorry
shes talking to my mami right now
im sure shell call you right after
Ok thank god/s
i heard ma say they could
hide in a cave
?
?
And Sebas?
Is he here or there?
…
here safe as of this morning but
we both know hell be on the next
helicopter over
if anything like this is happening
uyy :(((
It’ll be ok mariposita.
Would feel better knowing
they’ll have each other,
Right?
L. Guerrera, “Goblins of Paraguay,” Ecoforestry Journal (26.4.2044)
The world watched passively as the Amazon’s Indigenous people lost their homeland. With it, South American nations renounced the advantage these cultures afforded in our fight to preserve the green “lung” of an increasingly feverish planet. Now, someone in Paraguay is choosing to protect their own rainforest home: they have begun guerrilla strikes, sabotaging or stealing small and large equipment critical to deforestation work.
Local workers have some idea what to expect here. But early yesterday, a bulldozer operated by a Brazilian crew—unfamiliar with the poorly-mapped terrain—apparently toppled down a ravine overgrown with lianas. It is unknown whether the operator was attacked directly, or whether someone may have tampered with either the roadway or the heavy equipment the night before.
Villagers murmur about the interference of mischievous pombero, goblin-like spirit beings who protect trees, birds and other natural resources, according to the folklore still central to the beliefs of many indigenous people. A more plausible hypothesis—suggested in a doctoral dissertation recently completed by Paloma Bowen at the University of Asunción—is that flesh-and-blood individuals from elusive Guaraní-speaking groups are attempting to defend what forest remains.
Along with her mother and colleague, Dr. Rocío Silvestri, Bowen strongly emphasizes that previous agreements made on the local level, ceding this area to its native population, must be respected. Beyond the clear ecological justification, they advise that workers should not endanger themselves. Those not well acquainted with this wild terrain risk becoming disoriented, injured, vulnerable to further harm from the area’s insects, reptiles and other real-life animals.
Caption: bulldozer wrecked by pombero, 75 km east of Ciudad del Este.
Photo/video credit Sebastián Guerrera.
Paloma, Unofficial Guaraní territory, 2044
“You’re still going to say we’re not lost?” Lucas asks, yet again.
“We’re not,” Paloma says, through teeth set on edge. “It’s just dark.”
“Gonna get eaten by the damn pomberos.”
“They don’t eat humans, pendejo. Didn’t you do any research at all?”
His umber-skinned features blend with the night, so the dashboard faintly illuminates just his eye-roll. “Wasn’t that the whole point of this trip?”
The Jeep carrying one academic plus two journalists (the more helpful, better-looking one more asleep than awake right now, alas) really isn’t lost in the jungle, though it’s incredibly slow going. How can GPS tell the whole truth where there are no paved roads, and what paths there are shift around like folklore? And Paloma can hardly rely on memory—it’s been too long since she was anywhere near here.
“Watch out for Luisón, though,” she can’t resist adding, in an ominous soft tone she picked up from the childhood friend who taught her these tales. “He’s more of a scavenger, but I’ve heard of him making exceptions for live bodies with very little brain activity—”
Lucas’ dismissive “Ha” cuts short, from there erupting into profanity. The voice suddenly no longer snoring in the back seat joins in a dissonant, if colorful, harmony. Paloma’s arm instinctively flings across her belly—but her collarbone is more in danger, as her seat belt snaps her securely backwards.
They clamber out but can’t budge their tire from a deep swampy rut, the footprint of much heavier machinery; not even after a sweaty hour’s best attempt by the men, who won’t let Paloma contribute more than a steady stream of multilingual venting. Sebas insists it’s not her fault: it’s the brothers’ investigation that has brought them out here. More than likely, the corpse of the wounded monster that left this desperate trail is decomposing nearby. Hopefully, its predators are close, as well.
When they finally decide to kill the headlights and lock themselves, stinking and bone-weary, into the vehicle for the few hours remaining before dawn, a pearly green radiance reveals itself among the trees.
“Isondú,” Paloma tells the wondering men, her eyes already drifting closed against Sebastián’s shoulder. “You see glowworms, people here see reincarnated human spirits.”
“In the bodies of insect larvae... Lovely.” Lucas’ chuckle comes out not much more than an exhausted sigh.
“Hermosas,” Sebastián breathes against her hair, lovely, and seals it with a quiet kiss. He might really mean the glowworms he calls luciérnagas instead of isondú, but the same feminine plural ending applies just as well to herself and the tiny larva who’s come along on their latest wild ride.
In green-filtered sunlight a few hours later, Paloma emerges first from their fogged-up cocoon and heads a little way off into the trees, prodded by her increasingly high-maintenance bladder. Before her pants are pulled all the way back up, she feels eyes on her. She looks around, ready to snap something at Lucas about respecting boundaries.
But it’s the memory of a muscular, copper-brown child who is watching her. This girl squatting on a nearby branch has the same features, the same long brown-black hair. Except the brownish eyes she narrows at Paloma glint with the mossy green of their surroundings, rather than being uniformly dark.
Paloma staggers back a step on the soft, uneven ground.
“Hey,” Sebastián says, behind her. “Sorry, I was trying to give you space… Did you get up too fast? I thought the vertigo went away after eight weeks or so…”
He doesn’t notice the child. Maybe she’s not really there?
“No,” Paloma stammers. “But I might have just seen an actual ghost.”
“Mba’etekoiko,” the ghost says cheerfully, making a near-soundless landing close to them both; Sebas jumps and swears softly.
“Bien, ¿y tú?” Paloma answers, but the kid only cocks her jaguar-sleek head.
Paloma catches the fullest breath she can, and asks in Guaraní to meet the child’s mother--although the long-ago girl she remembers is surely the last enemy-of-her-enemy Paloma had expected to encounter today.
All along a path visible mostly only to herself, the hazel-eyed girl sings (maybe to them, maybe not) in a clear birdlike octave.
Sitting in the doorway of her extended family’s thatched-roof house, Jerutí Vaira offers them a horn cup of cold ka’ay and flat mandi’o cakes. Before long, her daughter (still without a word of Spanish) drags Lucas and Sebas across the clearing to show off her handiwork: multicultures of pigeon pea and passionfruit, planted at the base of melia trees, which she and her smaller dark-eyed siblings have been helping to tend.
Jerutí just raises a brow when Paloma asks for water instead of a refill on the strong tea. Rather than ask questions, she explains why their meeting again twelve years after a definite farewell was less surprising to her.
“When she was born and the shaman called her Panambi, I thought… of this amazing girl with butterfly wings and funny bug eyes, who considered me a friend. So I’ve known all this time, the spirits still saw us as connected.”
It’s the steady hint of smile in her mahogany eyes: that calm, guileless gravity has always drawn people to her, including an odd kid running around her forest in fairy wings once upon a time. Later it stole gorgeous, green-eyed Manolo Ortiz, during Jerutí’s dramatically shortened stint at the Mbo'ehaovusu Tetãgua Paraguaygua (the Universidad Nacional de Asunción, to Paloma). The big Pachamama energy, Manolo had reliably enraged Paloma by calling it.
“I mean… I know he was already my ex,” she finds herself relenting.
“Again,” Jerutí says.
“Okay, yes. Three or four times over, by that point. He was a shit boyfriend, in case you didn’t find out for yourself.”
Jerutí laughs softly. First silver threads glint like bioluminescence amid her loose dark hair as she shakes her head. “That wasn’t what I wanted him for. And he wasn’t interested either—the day I called to tell him was the last time we talked. I needed the stronger roots I have here... Panambi wasn’t even out of her chrysalis before I came up with a way to fight for the forest like if I’d had my degree, only from this side of the mirror.”
“What—Mirror?”
“Your weird stories, not mine. Going down the rabbit hole or through the mirror to where the creatures you thought were imaginary were real, and real life was a dream?”
Lucas laughs suddenly aloud; Jerutí’s bright gaze lifts over Paloma’s shoulder to where Sebastián now has Panambi—big as she is—clambering up on his shoulders to point out how high the mburukuyá tendrils climb. “Anyway. It was about time you pulled your head out of your trasero and realized who else was there in your real life, waiting.”
“Oh.” Paloma laughs too, in spite of herself. “So, aguyje, then.” Thanks.
“De nada.” The flash of grin fades a little slower than it appeared. “Sebastián Guerrera, eco-photojournalist, hmm? Looks like Panambi is choosing her friends as wisely as I ever did.”
He’s set her back on the ground now, and produces slightly squashed Bon-o-Bon candies from his pocket for the kids to unwrap and sniff.
“Hopefully she’ll do a better job keeping hers,” Jerutí says, softer.
Paloma sighs, offering an empty hand that feels newly light, now she’s released what bitterness was left. “Looks like you’ve kept yours, anyway, doesn’t it.”
Jerutí clasps it warmly. “Aguyje, Doctora Bowen.”
Paloma smiles, lightly clears her throat. “Uh. So have you, by chance, seen any pombero running around out here?”
Jerutí smiles again too, but smaller this time, lingering, dangerous. “Maybe. Seen any dragons?”
“Not yet, have you?”
“Oh yeah. Big ugly hijo de la gran puta, trying to burn this whole place down. We’re pretty sure his lair is somewhere in Brasilia. Then again, we don’t think he’s working alone. Who knows how many others, or where they might be lurking.”
Panambi, messages (28.6.2057)
ButterflyJr
can you sleep?
Pfft no
sy is ok though right
Yes, whole clan stayed
safe, w/friends right now
in Villarica, she’s just
seriously jodidamente
PISSED
My grrlz are here
Working on new
pachamama song
It’s relevant as hell
suddenly
no way
i had almost the same idea
Really?
was thinking how can we
get the band in touch with
like all papas media contacts
could you sing for ywy-mara-ey
they need a louder voice
Synchronicity!
I swear Arandu said the
same thing this afternoon
Gotta talk to Sebastián
YES you should collab
It needs to happen!
it needs to happen
Children of Serafina
and Tau
haha
or
Serafina, Child of Tau
(Is this sacrilege?!)
heheheh
or come up with a new
name for all of you together
maybe not tau but some
other monster
We’re not the monster
We fight the monster.
RRAWRRR
Mariposa—Asuncion, 19.7.2057
Seven musicians appear silhouetted before a shifting rainforest photomontage on a giant screen, in a chevron pointing toward the audience: drummer, bass, guitar, a rainstick-style takuapú, mbaraká dance rattles, keyboard, and a Paraguayan harp connected to another electric guitar pedal.
The tall, lithe woman holding the rainstick thumps it in a compelling primal rhythm against the stage, eliciting the audience’s eager response. Stage lights rise on her while the other six remain shadowed. Watching from the VIP seats, Mari bites back a gasp. She’s used to the urban godsister in wisps of bohemian dresses, glam makeup, and big combat boots who has lived here, near her family, for almost as long as Mari can remember. This earth-hued warrior—rocking beads, feathers, bold face paint stripes, and sleek hair flowing to her slightly swaying hips—is someone more.
“Op, Asunción… Hola, mi Planeta Tierra.” She waits a moment for the audience to yell return greetings. “So... I think a lot of you here, if you know me, it’s probably as “la mariposa guerrera” from Serafina.”
The crowd loudly agrees.
Chuckling low, she holds up a benignly authoritative hand. “But… But. Everyone might not know I stole my stage name from a friend of mine, because I liked what it stood for. Maybe you can’t imagine a battle butterfly... but where I come from, all nature is full of spirits. The kind that if you attack whatever or whoever they’re protecting, they will fight back.
“So for the international community watching this live, or seeing the video later... I was born Panambi Vaira—Panambi means “mariposa”—in a place that’s not on your maps, somewhere west of the border between Paraguay, my home, and Brazil. Back then, it was an intact forest. More recently it became a poorly managed cattle pasture. As of tonight, it’s nothing but an ugly wildfire scar.”
Anger flares, roughening and strengthening her tone, raising hairs on the backs of Mari’s arms. “And... to whoever thinks my home belongs to them because they drew imaginary lines through it—My people were here a thousand years before the conquistadores, before the jesuitas. Not only is mine still one of two official languages in this country—it’s so mixed with yours, you’ll never eradicate it. Your almighty currency has my people’s name on it. This land has never been yours.” She fairly roars the next sentence, punctuating it with her takuapú against the stage. “Even if you take it, my forest will never be yours.”
Her listeners roar back.
“In dangerous times,” her shout floats atop theirs, “my people stand together and sing for hours, as long as it takes, for strength to reach our gods and ask their help. That’s why Laz, Arandu, Jimena, and Yoel invited Thainá, Kauane, and me here.”
More stage lights come up: not on black leather, denim, or chrome hardware, but on unbound hair, fiercely painted brown faces, bare feet, adornments of feather, reed, and bone. Arandu makes the mbaraká hiss like a snake for the crowd; Jimena’s nails coax a raptor’s screeching glissando from across the electrified harpstrings.
“We’ve been blessed to open for Children of Tau many times, but tonight, I really had a lot to—”
Beside her, Arandu starts laughing.
“Okay. Even more to say than usual. Aguyje, amigos. So—we’re starting with some new songs. They’re a little raw, put together mostly for tonight… but I hope you feel them as deep as we do. Let’s get really loud so the gods of this time and place, the corporations and lobbies and governments, can’t help but hear us.”
Smoke machines at each stage corner activate in sync with Panambi’s gesture, flinging a heavy handful of copal resin into a burner. The incense will take a while to drift back over the crowd, but Mari grins up at Sebastián as both inhale.
When Panambi shakes the takuapú, gentle rainfall washes over the giant screen. The forest images dissolve into a series of illustrations from Guaraníada 3.4: fourteen baleful eyes still aflame, seven savagely serrated mouths. Beneath the supporting crescendo of percussion and her defiant voice, growing again to a shout, pulsating bass and dark electric strings feedback build.
“For tonight, we seven are one. We’re Teyú Yaguá, the Guardian. And this one’s for you, che sy, up there guarding the beating heart.”
Panambi leads in her heart language, her voice piercing in quality and in volume—a timbre far removed from her usual punk-kitten purr and growl. Guitarist Kauane echoes her in Spanish.
“Ysapy (Rocío).
Jerutí (Paloma).
Panambi (Mariposa).”
Around the powerful necks of the onscreen beast, vines twine upward through rain rivulets; fruits emerge from each blossom, growing fat; in the ponderous footprints, water lilies sprout, starlike. A collective chant begins, insistent upon one tight chord.
“Nourishing one another,
At peace in one another’s shade,
Helping each other climb higher.”
The crowd’s screams of encouragement can’t drown out the mythical guardian’s seven mighty voices as they explode outward across octaves: they only carry them further aloft.
“Strongest all together.
Strong like my homeland,
Strong like oré sy,
One spirit, unafraid.”
“Ysapy’s Heart Beats Louder than Ever,” La Nación (24.7.2057)
Last week’s benefit concert by pop-up rock band Teyú Yaguá (Asunción’s metal favorites Children of Tau, featuring feminist folk-punk protegées Serafina) continues to surpass expectations. (Sebastián Guerrera, who frequently contributes to this publication, helped coordinate the project.)
Clips from “Seven Voices, One Forest” have become a raucous rallying cry for protesters worldwide. First-run companion prints of graphic novelist Irupé’s bespoke background images sold out within hours. New donations are pouring into the Refugio Silvestre Ysapy, heavily damaged by last month’s wildfires. The Silvestri Foundation reports overwhelming public support for its civil action against Grancosur’s environmentally unsound practices, which caused the devastation; expert testimony by conservationist Paloma Bowen (Guerrera’s wife) is planned. And Nature itself seems to be listening, with a much-needed rainy pattern finally setting in.
Communications devices lit up around the convention center, evocative of these young creatives’ ancestors returning in glowworm shape to urge their collective imagination onward, as Teyú Yaguá roared out the evening’s concluding (and now fastest-trending) song: “Our continent’s wild heart has not stopped, will never stop beating.”
About the Author
Ashley Bevilacqua Anglin thanks Brazilian band Arandu Arakuaa for helping to inspire this story. Ashley is a World Languages professor, mom, and amateur performing artist who can't keep mythical creatures out of her cli fi or climate concerns out of her fantasy. Her work has previously appeared in Miniskirt, Minison, and Full Mood magazines, and anthologies Everything Change Vol. 1 and Panthology. Her debut novel, Undiscovered, releases in February 2023. Find her on Twitter @dalyashleydrH2o.
© Teyú Yaguá vs. the Dragon by Ashley Bevilacqua Anglin. 2022. All rights reserved.
