The Boitatá: The Fire Serpent Made of Stolen Eyes
The oldest monster in Brazilian letters entered the written record in 1560, in a Latin letter from the Jesuit missionary José de Anchieta, who reported — with the careful tone of a man describing something his readers would not believe and his neighbors would not doubt — a thing the Indians of the coast called mbaê-tata : "the fire thing," a blazing apparition that ran along the beaches and marshes at night and killed those it touched. Four and a half centuries later the same being still runs the night fields of Brazil under the softened name Boitatá — from the Tupi mboî-tatá , the fire serpent — and it remains what Anchieta's informants already knew it to be: a great snake made entirely of fire, or of light, rolling across the campo in the dark like a burning wheel, coiling along fencelines, pouring itself over the wet grass without consuming a single blade — because the Boitatá's fire is not the kind that burns grass. It is the kind that burns those who burn . For...