My mother was the first one to tell me about the river. When we arrived in this town, she went to a bookstore and bought herself a little book about the place’s history—as we were so strangers to Southern culture, and the way my mother tried to make herself acquainted to something was through books.
The house we lived in, at a dead end street, didn’t provide us many neighbors; our gate was mostly visited by capybaras, who would stretch on the sidewalks during days of mild temperature, and then disappear during the days of long, crushing heat—into the creek that ran at the dead end of the street, a long arm of the main river.
How hot that place was, how merciless summer imposed itself upon the town—that was something the immigrants who built their first houses here didn’t know about. And they didn’t know about the river, also. Coming from Germany, trying to escape poverty, trying to find rich lands they could name after themselves, not knowing that these lands already had owners, natives, the bugres—as my mother’s book called them—who were killed and chased away, as if they were weeds; as if they were the invaders, they, the ones who understood that earth, that river, that sun burning over their heads every day—and not the newcomers, arriving with guns and a strange language, a language that never meant to speak of peace. As the German immigrants settled, they thought the river a blessing—one could easily reach other parts of the whole region by boat. Goods would come in, goods would come out. They’d have water, water would never be in need anymore. They raised their houses with the wood from the trees they brought down, massive trees you wouldn’t have found in Germany; they saw the spectacle of monkeys jumping tree from tree, monkeys baring their teeth at them, at their presence, monkeys they shot at for both fear and fun. But they didn’t know about the river: that the river was anything but kind, and that the river was hungry and that what man wanted, what man built—those things meant nothing to the fury of the waters.
Natives had tried to warn them—before being fired at and having their villages burned down by the German immigrants. They’d tried to warn them that the river was no friend; they knew well enough to stay away from those waters; they knew that the river gulped men down when the floods came, took bodies to the deep of those dark waters, where they’d be lost forever.
“So, a killer river?” I asked, as I opened boxes and took our clothes out—mine and my mother’s. We shared the same body type, giving or taking a few pounds, and we shared too a lot of the clothes we had. Our new house wasn’t big, but it was more than enough for two uprooted women.
“There were great floods, so they had to make up something. Make up intention to what is just nature.” My mother flipped through the book. “Did you know they hid nazis in here? After World War II ended?”
“Oh, that’s great. That’s just great. Nazis and a killer river.”
We came to this town because my aunt had been living here for a few years; she said we should stay until we could get back to our feet. Now, imagine us: creatures with no feet; water creatures, shaking our fins and tails, trying to get out of dry land and back into the water. My mother, unable to stand after surviving cancer; me, after surviving divorce.
My aunt worked with native tribes; she worked at a Xokleng reservation not that far from the town whose founders had shot and burned the ancestors of those same Xokleng, only to claim their land, to claim the river. She’d would sometimes ring in; wearing her khaki shorts, her dirty boots; her white skin—as white as ours—now perpetually tanned, to have coffee with my mother and take us to little tours around the town. She was the one to show us the square where they had built a mausoleum—for the first immigrants families, for the town’s founder.
“Funny thing. He actually lived in here for most of his life, but then went to die on Germany. It was quite a struggle—between the Brazilian government at the time and the German government, to have his body shipped back, buried in Brazilian soil.”
That mausoleum, that building made of modern lines, grey granite—that was the first place I ever felt cold since arriving in town. I had my arms around me as we walked through the decorative tombs that bore names engraved in gold, of the founder and his family; his wife, his sons, a daughter that died at young age. “Oh, don’t worry. They’re not actually buried at this level; they’re deep in the ground,” my aunt had said, as if she’d sensed something just by looking at my face. My mother had described the river as thing of haunt—but at the mausoleum, that was the first time I actually felt spooked, thinking about the corpses hidden under the floor I so casually stepped on. Outside the mausoleum, a bronze monument had been raised as another memento mori: also to those first white immigrants, not the the natives, not to the Xokleng. A list of German names, lives taken by the first great flood they had to endure.
“And did that stop them? No. They went and rebuild the whole settlement again,” my aunt said, dryly.
“How many great floods so far?” I asked.
“I think five. Five catastrophic floods, I mean. If we were to number every little flood, every time the river rises . . . well, we’d be counting forever.”
We stopped to eat some cake—cuca, as they said in here. My aunt went on:
“So, before all of that, everything in here was named after some big-time German. But now everything has native names. Itajaí, Itoupava,” she used her fork to emphasize the names. “Or they’re named after dead presidents.” I asked what she meant by “before all of that” and she said: “World War II, of course.”
“Oh, the hidden nazis.”
“Much more than that,” my aunt said. “They actually had nazi parades. Even after many generations, they didn’t think of themselves as Brazilians—they wouldn’t even speak Portuguese. An act of defiance. Imagine that. Well, then the war ends, Germany loses and the government decides it needs to do something about this place—make an example out of them. So they forbid German names—the streets need to be renamed, and fast; the squares, public parks, everything . . . ” She squinted her eyes for a moment—and just like that, I realized how much she looked like my mom. “Actually, one of the great floods—one of the big ones—hit just a little after the war ended.”
“Maybe the river demanded a cleanse,” I suggested.
“Maybe,” my aunt said.
“Oh, God. I can’t take this talk about nazis anymore,” my mom whispered. She was trying to drink her coffee, but the cup was trembling in her hands. “I can’t believe you made us come to this place.”
“Oh, the town is fine now, Leila. It’s not like there are nazis walking around today,” my aunt said, and smiled at me. I smiled back, but my lips felt tense, forcing to put out that smile—to show my mother that, somehow, things would be OK. At night, I’d check her breathing. The way her chest would slowly rise, slowly fall. I’d gently caress her hair, just the few inches of it that had grown since chemo ended. I’d go back to my room and try to sleep. But behind our dead end street, the creek would keep me awake. I thought I could hear it, even from the distance: the water rising fast, hungry for another cleansing.
My boss would video-call me most mornings. She wanted to know how I was doing.
“Barely making it,” I’d say. “The heat is unbearable.”
“Really? I thought the South was supposed to be cold.”
“Not this South. It’s like living inside a pressure cooker.” I was fortunate enough to be able to work remote. But as much as I liked my boss, as much as she liked me, the money just wasn’t enough to allow me to keep living in São Paulo and looking after my mom with one solid income only. Here we were, then: Naziland.
“You know, the people who live in there probably wouldn’t like you to call their town Naziland,” my boss said.
“I know. It’s just between the two of us.”
Right after we moved in, we had to deal with our first house-problem. Not a nazi invasion, but a cockroach infestation. When the sun went down, the heat still burning the streets brought the cockroaches out: out and right into our garage, into our kitchen; I had to squash them against the floor, broom in hands, while my mother screamed in panic much like the Final Girl in a horror movie. Finally, I had to call a pest control exterminator. The guy who showed up identified the nests with surprising easiness. After he had sprayed the poison, I asked what else should I be on the lookout for. Snakes? Rats?
“November,” said the man, simply. He couldn’t have been much older than I was. Certainly not forty yet. But his face had been deeply marked by the sun. He carried the wrinkles of those who rarely ever took shelter and knew they ways of a certain land; so I took that advice, as cryptically as may have been, as a piece of wisdom. November, I kept repeating inside my head. November.
My mother wanted more books about the town, so I took her back to the bookstore and she browsed thoughtfully the short story section, a finger lifted, as if she was about to call someone’s attention at any minute—a child, maybe, were she a teacher. But the finger meant only to help her to guide her eyes, and so it levitated above the spines; she’d pick a book, read a bit, put it back. Outside, the sun was scorching. Even with the air-conditioner of the bookstore on full blow, I felt the nape of my neck sweaty and sticky. I made a quick pony-tail. A young man at the cashier stared at me with no particular expression. There were only three costumers inside the bookstore, my mother and I accounted, and I could sense the young man’s boredom from afar. When my mother finally picked her book, he registered it, I paid for it and he put the book inside a smelly plastic bag. “Thank you. Have a nice day,” the young man said. Just as we stepped outside, it started raining—as if the boy had unconsciously cursed us. We took a cab home.
Night descended, and once I was sure my mother was sleeping, breathing in a good rhythm, I’d do the work I’d been pushing back through the whole day; or I’d scroll my ex-husband’s Instagram profile, grit my teeth at the picture of every new restaurant he was going to—back in São Paulo, our city—and trying to guess which of the many smiley girls that appeared on his posts he was banging now. Had I the power of foresight, I should have known our marriage was doomed to end. I’d insulted him on the very first day we met. That rarely bodes well to a blissful union.
“That’s not really a job,” I’d told him, when he informed me he worked as a marketing consultant.
But he was paying his bills. He could afford a big apartment, in the city we’d loved, and I could not, not alone. And being a designer was better than being a consultant, in the end? I’d started wanting to be an artist—to draw, to paint. And I did that; digital pieces I’d make for my boss, who ran an advertisement agency. I’d sold out, but selling out didn’t pay enough, in the end. Selling out was just surviving.
After doom scrolling for a while, I finally turned my phone off and tried to get some sleep. I closed my eyes.
I woke in a wild panic some time later—maybe hours later—to my mother’s screaming. She was sitting on her bed, her eyes shut, her fists clenched and half-raised.
“Mom. Mom,” I shook her for a moment—and then she opened her eyes, saw me and grew immediately relieved. She hugged me, grasped at my old t-shirt with her bony fingers.
“Oh, Luísa. It’s you. Thank God.” She could breathe now.
“What happened?”
“A nightmare. I saw him. I saw that man.”
“What man?”
Her hands rushed to her nightstand. She grabbed her most recently purchased book, opened and then stabbed a finger over one page: the page had the reproduction of a centuries-old photography of a white-bearded man, skinny and with hollow cheeks, thick dark eyebrows.
“That’s him. The founder,” my mother said. “I dreamt he was rising from that mausoleum—and I knew he was coming for us, coming to this very house . . . ”
“Mom . . . ”
“I know. It’s silly. I sorry I woke you up.” She closed her book, put it on the nightstand again. But her heart was racing. I could feel it through her camisole, through her frail body. How could such a man—such a benign-looking man, dead for more than a century now—cause that much fear?, I wondered. Eventually, she calmed down enough to get back to sleep. I was the one who couldn’t rest.
A few mornings later, I went to a walk with my aunt. She asked about my mother and I told her the truth—my mother spent most of her time in bed. Not sick, but reading. And, occasionally, having nightmares that jolted me out of my bed.
“She’s just very . . .” My aunt tried to find a word. She settled for something else: “Well, it’s part of the recovery.”
I wanted to say I didn’t think that was the case, but the heat over our heads was so strong that I had trouble formulating sentences.
“No more nazi stories,” I told her, and my aunt laughed.
Without realizing, we had wandered to the square the mausoleum was located. I put my arms around my body—for all the heat I felt, a cold draft still seemingly came out of the mausoleum. On another occasion, I would have welcomed the cold. Now, however, it sent chills through my spine.
“It’s haunted, you know,” said my aunt. “Or so they believed.”
I remained silent. The news, even if just silly superstition, didn’t shock me.
“Why didn’t he want to be buried here? The founder.” I asked, after a while. From my mother’s book, I’d learned the founder had once written a letter to one of his brothers, begging him not to let them take his body back to Brazil—not to let them bury him and his family in that land. That same land that had made him a rich man, had made a home for his compatriots—the town that proudly bore his name. I imagined him, the face I’d seen in that same book, even thinner than before; I imagined him scrawling the letter, feverish, knowing there was nothing he himself could do; that, once death came and took him, his body would be of other people’s concern—and he couldn’t, simply couldn’t let them take him back.
“Damn if I know,” said my aunt. “Maybe he regretted. All the blood he had on his hands.”
I chuckled at the though of any man of his time regretting his crimes. My aunt was looking at the sky. The sun had been quickly covered by a giant cloud of a terrible grey. It happened, I’d already come to learn; in that town, the sun could be out for a moment, and then the dark clouds rolled over the sky and a storm announced itself. That’s the price you pay for that much heat, that was nature trying to balance things, make everything even. For every drop of water evaporated, another was sure to fall.
“It’s going to be bad,” my aunt said.
And rain was bad—rain was as bad as the heat.
For days, my mother and I would stare at the windows as the rain fell down and the sound of thunders stifled the rest of the world. We drank coffee, we talked, mother read. I tried to work. I slept badly; even with the rain pouring outside, the heat was still oppressive, and I’d wake up during nights soaked in my own sweat. I had started having my own nightmares. Lively nightmares about the muddy water of the river enclosing me and taking me under. I would scream, and only water would get inside my mouth; I could taste it—the mud, the dirt, the flesh of other bodies . . .
There was the night I woke up trembling, sweating, and saw him: the skinny man from my mother’s book, standing right there, on one corner of my bedroom. He opened his mouth. Just a black hole that made no sound, and yet: the sorrow, the fear I could feel, the horror . . . as if I could listen to him only inside my head.
I screamed. I took a pillow and I threw it on the apparition, but there was nothing there. Only shadows, and my coat hanging from a rack.
Rain came for days, rain went away. And then the sun would come out and punish us again. When November arrived, the rains intensified.
November. I remembered the man’s warning.
“Flood season,” my aunt called to tell us—as if we couldn’t read the signs. “Stay put for the next week. If necessary, we’ll come down and get you.”
“I think we should pack a few things,” I told my mother. “Just in case.”
But my mother was adamant about not leaving the house.
“We’re going to drown, Luísa.”
“Mom, nobody is going to drown. Aunt Eliane will be here before the water starts to rise.” I made my best to keep my mom calm and put. I packed her few clothes, the few jewelries she still had, my father’s wedding ring, which she kept with her even after his death; I made her bed, for reasons I can’t even explain; if water was to take all of it, or to keep the house unreachable for a few days, who would have known? About tussled sheets, about pillows mounting over each other? But I did her bed anyway—and then I got to the book. The book with that man hiding on one of the pages. I tossed it inside a garbage can. I didn’t tell my mother. We watched, for the next few days, the TV informing us that the river was reaching an alarming level; we switched for stupid cartoons. During the nights, I’d observe our street through the window and register the lack of sound. A few neighbours had already packed and leaved, but the silence of the animals was the one that struck me the most. I couldn’t hear the birds singing; I couldn’t spot the capybaras.
“Capybaras are water creatures,” my mother assured me. “They know how to survive floods.”
“Half-water creatures,” I said, in a low voice. But, again, weren’t we all, in a way? Didn’t we spend the first nine months of our life floating in liquid, and wasn’t our first breath, our first cry outside our mother’s womb the sound of loss? Loss of a home, the warm of the liquid, our lungs having to adjust to the land of the dry. We had once belonged to that darkness, we had once been creatures of water, too.
My aunt came the day the stream behind our house rose enough to start flooding the street. She came with a jeep, a young woman of darker skin and big, black eyes driving it. Sonia, said my aunt, introducing us. A Xokleng woman who worked with her.
“C’mon, we don’t have much time,” Sonia said, as we put our things inside the jeep. I could sense her uneasiness near the water, the way she was sweating not from the heat, but because of some ancestral fear of the floods.
I carried my mother on my arms to the jeep. She hid her face under her cardigan, as if ashamed to find herself in that position. She felt light and little, more so than a child probably would. She sat on the jeep and cried silent tears, and I put my hand over hers. The main street of the town had become a river of its on, the brown water running furiously, covering everything knee-length. Can we make it?, I remember asking. And Sonia saying, yes, yes, her hands tense on the wheel. But when we passed through the mausoleum, she stopped. At first, caught in a panic, I didn’t understand what she was looking at—but I followed her stern gaze, and then my aunt’s petrified look.
Out of the mausoleum doors, the dead came.
The founder, the skinny man with the long beard—who had haunted my mother’s dreams and my own. The other dead followed him—women with centuries-old dresses, with lace bonnets, a young girl holding what I presume to be her mother’s hands, their skin blueish and veiny. What an ugly parade they made, coming down the mausoleum steps as if in a daze, walking into the water and—into the arms that stretched out of that muddy water, dark arms that pulled then down, that grabbed their trousers, their skirts. And the dead opened their mouth to scream, but they had no voice—as the man didn’t have in my nightmare; all they had was the option of going under, of disappearing in the violence of the water, in the arms that wanted revenge. My mother had covered her eyes, whimpering in fear. To say I was horrified would be a lie: I simply had no reaction.
Once the dead had been dragged into the river, Sonia, without a word, pressed the pedal again. If she was satisfied, her face, immovable as stone, showed me nothing. But her eyes, the shine inside them, almost as if tears were about to drop . . .
My aunt had been right; I could now understand why that man didn’t want to be buried here. Not in a mausoleum built on a land he had never really owned. He must have imagined the price to pay—the price of the blood he had shed and that others had shed in his name. He must have imagined the river would take him again and again, the hands of his victims pulling him down every time.
My mother and I didn’t stay in town for much longer after that first flood, after what we’d witnessed—and what we refused to speak about. But sometimes, during the nights, safely tucked in my bed, back in São Paulo—in a smaller apartment, but far away from the water—I would still feel the cold of that mausoleum creeping under my skin. I’d still wake up and search my room for the man’s pale face. But there would be nothing there to see. That dead man—those dead people and their sins—belonged to another place.
Originally published in Professor Charlatan Bardot’s Travel Anthology to the Most (Fictional) Haunted Buildings in the Weird, Wild World, edited by Charlatan Bardot and Eric J. Guignard.
