The Thread

By Andrea Ferrari Kristeller

 When she first saw the thread she dismissed it, as she was guiding a troublesome teenage group through the Park. But the sight troubled her mind, and after a few days, she returned to the spot on the Macuco trail where she thought she’d seen it. She remembered believing it was an illusion, a trick of the light in the jungle’s dappled games. She started the trail on her own in the early morning, before visitors came into Iguazú Falls National Park, in waves that resembled tsunamis of a slow kind.

There was nothing she liked more than being alone in the rainforest. Perhaps because her job as a guide meant being surrounded by people for most of the day, and going along the central paths to the waterfalls: The Bosetti Fall, the Two Sisters, and, after the long metal bridges, the highlight: The Devil’s Throat. Yet, she had become a guide to be close to nature, not to sluggish pensioners, or families with wailing children too young for the heat and the long circuits. People were afraid of insects, of snakes, of the usual coati gangs trying to steal a sandwich, of the water’s roar itself. This all seemed to repeat endlessly, with only slight variations. It never stopped surprising her that a place where people went to connect with nature ended up being a crowded view of the waterfalls, blocked by so backpacks and heads. All for a photo that would end up in a remote corner of social media. People even pushed each other at the climax of the visit: The Devil’s Throat merited a full photo, something hard to get with so many tourists aiming at the same image at the same time.

True, at some point they all surrendered to the power of the waters. She could see their faces, and by then, had developed an intuitive perception that told her exactly when a visitor was dumbstruck by it all: the water’s rumble, the vapour filling the air, the rainbows inside it, and the essential butterfly on the metal railing. It never failed. They turned around, almost dazed, and spoke to their loved ones or group companions as if their hearts were somewhere else; and they were. The force of the water seems to erase human hubris with precision, but this is not an experience easily digested. By the end of the visit, as they headed exhausted towards the car park, most visitors had regained a more common form of humanity that was calculating what they’d eat at their hotel, and if they’d take a drink as well, at the side of the tamer swimming pool waters.

She had studied for three years to become a Park Guide. Sometimes, after a long day with temperatures over 35 °C, she regretted it. But on days like this, along a trail without a soul in sight, she did not. God bless dappled light, she thought, and as she walked she touched a small bush with red flowers, without noticing she did. The soil at the sides was filled with that layer of leaves in varied states of decomposition, multi-coloured, and the silent threat of a slim snake under them. She preferred to find mushroom heads, and a group of violet fritillaries made her stop for a few minutes and forget what she was looking for: a white thread she had seen a week ago, starting from the right side of the trail and entering the depths of the forest. She had not commented on it to the park rangers she waved at every day. Better check on it before looking like a fool, she thought, and she smirked remembering their remarks on her desire to be alone with the park all to herself.

There it was: a thin white thread, a bit like her gym shoelaces, or the lighter ropes used at schools for outdoor activities. Not a cord really, not plastic; it seemed made of cotton. At some parts, it was already reddish brown, tinged by parts of the soil it lay on, as if covered in blood. It wasn’t hanging tense but loosely in mid-air, at times resting on the ground. She decided that although one should never leave the path—how many times she’d repeated this in her young life! —this thread merited her curiosity. And then again, no one would see her entering the jungle at a point where palo rosa trees and heart-of-palms provided their spotted light.

There were no tracks, no path to accompany the thread. She was used, every now and then, to finding subtle Mbya Guaraní paths that spoke of how they came into the park for their own mysterious reasons. The Mbya people do not usually visit the Falls, even if they have inhabited the area for thousands of years. They avoid it, for they believe the Ijas or Guardians of places with stones and water falls are the fiercest and might harm the ignorant passer-by. They do not allow their children to visit the place on the typical field trip until they are at least six. Yet she knew they still used the park in some way or another; perhaps to collect their medicinal plants or the ones that offered tinctures for their crafts. In any case, she never told on them. Let them be. Too much had already been taken away from them to add the impossibility of entering this preserved forest, such a small percentage of the Atlantic wilderness they had lost to white people.

The person who had laid the thread must have done so a while ago, as there were no footprints as she went alongside it, setting apart bush after bush, in the slow walk of one who knows you don’t t hurry in the jungle, or it might be deadly. She had rain boots anyway; regulations enforced that guides wore them at all times, after a tragic accident with a snake around ten years ago.

The thread went in further and further, and still she followed it. She hesitated when she was around fifteen metres away from the Park trail and could no longer see its cleared surface. But how intriguing to think anyone had walked this distance and laid a white thread that took … where? Was it a sign to mark a treasure of the ancient Jesuits? Was it yet another suicidal but doubtful tourist, walking their last steps on earth towards the cliff on Iguazú river, not wanting the spectacularity and trauma on other visitors? She still had nightmares on the woman who crossed the railings on a bright summer morning and sat on the stone edge of The Devil’s throat to disappear in the vapour and mist as if she were taking a giant slide ride. Could it be a poacher’s sign? Hunters never enter the park, she thought for a second. Unless the newly reduced staff of park rangers could not control their entrance? Fishermen? Ah, she then thought, and chuckled, it must be the birdwatchers. They came in all sizes and nationalities, but their binoculars and the complete oblivion of the waterfalls gave them away. They could well have marked the entrance to a watching spot for an extremely rare species. Though always respectful, she had come to dislike them: they always thought they knew more than one and never paid attention to recommendations. They seemed to her like children completing a sticker album.

She stopped for a moment, already sweating from the walk, even this early. With discomfort, she remembered the labyrinth and the name of a woman, then abandoned on an island. Adriana? Arianna? She was unsure, but she smiled, a bit perplexed at the situation and her full awareness, as a tourist guide, of the nature of the jungle as a maze, and how hard it was to distinguish enough landmarks to find your way among trees. Whatever their species, they looked all the same in their rough barks, ghostly lichens, and intertwined creepers resembling thin ladders. It was as if they created mirror landscapes. Well, she had her own white long piece of civilisation to guide her back. And the person or persons who had set the thread had the uncanny ability to place it along ways in which you could walk without crashing your face or arms with stinging nettles or impenetrable cane forests. They knew the forest well enough, only she wondered how or why would someone choose to create such an almost invisible way into it.

She had advanced for about two hundred meters into the green when she stopped at the thought of jaguars, or mountain lions. She’d always believed it was some kind of miracle that no visitors were ever attacked by any predator, even if camera traps and the roaring at night revealed their presence—she had heard those herself on late evenings in spring. But they were so endangered that only a few ever appeared. Leaving out the unfortunate case of the ranger’s child eaten by a mountain lion so many years ago, no jaguars had ever attacked people on this side of the park. Still, she had seen a few videos of them stalking fishermen in Brazil or other unidentified South American locations. The thought of going back became strong; but then again, she knew if she did, she’d stay for the rest of her days wondering where this white thread had been leading to. She went on.

The rainforest around her gradually grew darker, as larger trees filled the canopy. There was almost none of that speckled light that she loved, or perhaps it was her impression. Then she spotted what she believed was the ending of the thread.

She rushed forward, forgetting all previous caution. As she stood, panting, under a tall alecrín tree, the forest seemed hushed. She looked all around, but nothing seemed to move.

She felt as if something was watching her but it was as silent and frozen among the leaves as she was. In that quiet, she felt fear was the presence that choked her throat and made her sweat in the stillness.

And as she approached the end of the thread despite her misgivings, she could see it went into the ground, as if it had been buried down. Not recently, though. For a second she saw herself standing in the middle of the green nowhere and thought how the thread might look like an umbilical cord.

The crackling of dead leaves to her far right did not really startle her. Then, nothing but forest and a distant buzzing of native bees could be heard.

Until to the right of the thread’s end, among a group of tree ferns, she saw it. It sat in its magnitude as a king might sit; its presence was kingship. Its mottled roseate skin seemed as if the forest floor had gotten up vertically. She sensed the softness of the fur and its thick muscular strength even in a sitting position, as it stared at her with all the time in the world. It seemed as if the whole jungle had risen to look at her, its glare inscrutable.

She knew better than to run. Instead, she grabbed the thread firmly in her left hand and started to walk backwards, without lowering her gaze on the animal, who seemed more of a spirit than a jaguar.

Walking backwards, every step seemed to take hours of watching and being watched. The jungle was breathing the same air she shared with the beast: dense, damp, and very silent; but full of the electricity of predator facing predator.

She realised all of a sudden that the thread had ended. She had to look for a second to check. It had been cut somehow and its end lay on the ground like a thin white snake.

She didn’t want to turn round, and suddenly realised she might not leave the labyrinth, after all. She had time enough to wonder about who the monster at its centre was.