The Most Beautiful Animal in the World

By José J. Veiga, translated by Thomas Mira y Lopez

I already know what I’ll do. If Cedil doesn’t come back by the end of the year, I’ll go to my grandmother’s sitio. I’ll get a heifer, raise its calves, and ride around on my horse. Each day there’ll be plenty to do, and that’s better than hanging around here like a fool, dreaming about the island the rest of my life, remembering the games we used to play there, the things Cedil and Tenisão said, even the times we were terrified, like the day the raft almost sank with the three of us on it.

Camilinho still follows me around. I don’t know if it’s because Tenisão hates him so much, but I can’t stand him anymore. He cries over everything and, if we do anything half- reckless, he runs and tattles on us. Now I understand how Tenisão felt; Camilinho was always a rat, always a snitch.

Whenever we wanted to go somewhere, we met in secret so we could leave without Camilinho noticing us. Sometimes it didn’t even matter; we’d be far away and Camilinho came running behind us, crying for us to wait up. Tenisão cursed and threw rocks at him, but it didn’t work and we had no choice but to stop. When we played games, Camilinho sucked the fun out of them since he was so small and couldn’t keep up. If he steppped on a thorn, he hurt his foot and spent the rest of the day in tears. And there were these little superstitions he had that made him afraid of everything. He didn’t swallow genipap seeds because they turned into cockroaches in your stomach. He didn’t eat roasted pigeon because it made you rabid. He didn’t throw stones at João Benedito’s house since the old man would stick a needle in an egg and turn us all blind (I only threw a stone at his house once, and from far away; everyone said João Benedito was an actual witch). One of us always ended up in trouble because of Camilinho and his fantasies.

From May to August, the months without ‘r,’ nobody swam in the river because they thought it caused fever. Cedil, Tenisão and I still went in secret, Camilinho on our heels, giving us his advice and trying to scare us. Once Tenisão punched him in the head and told him to stop, but it made no difference. Camilinho continued whining and crying, claiming the three of us would die. It pained me to see the little porker upset at the thought of our deaths, so I told him all these dangers were his imagination playing tricks on him. Tenisão got angry at this, saying nobody had tricked Camilinho, that we’d end up with a lashing if Camilinho went back home and gossiped about what we did. Tenisão was so rough with Camilinho, he didn’t stop crying until I promised to play burro with him and let him win every hand I dealt. Camilinho cheered up, but he snitched anyway. When he got home, he followed his mom around the house, refusing to go play when she ordered him outside. She asked him what he wanted, and he said she needed to make a strong cup of tea for Tenisão since he’d swum in the river. Camilinho’s mom told Dona Zipa and Dona Zipa became nervous. She called Tenisão over and spanked him, then forced the poor guy to drink his tea. Next she went to tell everyone at my house, but luckily I was at my grandmother’s and no one beat me there.

The idea of playing on the island began the day Cedil ran away from home because of Zoaldo, his sister Milila’s boyfriend. Cedil had it rough. Every guy who dated Milila liked to boss him around and keep a close eye on him.

When Milila started dating Zoaldo, Cedil’s life got worse. Zoaldo was a brute, someone who always shouted when he spoke. Not even Pedro Arcanjo, who’d fought in the army, had the guts to challenge him. One time there was a fight in Candido’s bar, and when Pedro Arcanjo pulled a pistol, everyone cleared out, except Zoaldo. Pedro yelled at him to run, but Zoaldo wouldn’t budge. He even joked about Pedro’s pistol, calling it ancient, a cheesemonger’s weapon, and told Pedro that people normally used a Smith & Wesson or Luger nowadays.

Pedro Arcanjo yelled again, warning Zoaldo that he’d kill him if he didn’t run. Cândido got between them, asking Zoaldo to leave for a minute, so that he wouldn’t anger Pedro any further. Zoaldo said he would leave only for those who deserved it, and, even then, only when he felt like it. Pedro Arcanjo kept yelling until he’d shouted himself hoarse, then looked at the pistol in his hand as if he didn’t know what to do with it. Everyone went back to the bar, laughing and no longer afraid. It was only then that Zoaldo got up close to Pedro. He spoke gently, like a friend: Pedro, you’ve played with your toy enough already, now let me hold onto it. Without waiting, he grabbed the pistol and pushed Pedro outside, and if Pedro hadn’t run, Zoaldo would have whipped him into the ground. When Pedro was far away, Zoaldo walked back in and told the bar he was going to raffle the pistol off for 1000 reais and buy himself a pair of cashmere boots with the money. He asked Cândido for paper, wrote some raffle numbers, and the crowd put their paymetns down then and there.

The first time Zoaldo beat Cedil, he and Milila had just started dating. Cedil and some other boys were playing in the ravine by his house, when Milila went to the window and called him inside. Cedil said he was on his way, but didn’t come. Milila called him again and he told her to quit nagging. Zoaldo left the house and headed down the sidewalk as if walking away. But when he passed Cedil, he lunged, grabbed the boy by the scruff of his neck, and slapped him again and again as he carried him inside. There he pulled out his belt.

When Cedil told us this, Tenisão interrupted and called him a coward, saying Cedil was just going to wind up with more beatings until he stopped being such a fool.

“If it were me,” he said, “I’d plant my fist in that guy’s face.”
“You only talk that way because your father will fight for you,” Cedil said.
“And your mom, why doesn’t she?”
Cedil became sad. He told us his mom was in the kitchen grinding coffee beans when she

heard the commotion. She went to see what was happening but didn’t do anything, only saying my son, my son, my poor little son. After Zoaldo drank his coffee and left, she comforted Cedil, rubbed tincture on his cuts, made him beiju with milk, and put him to bed. But she wanted no part in any confrontation. Early the next day, she went to the store and bought him a steel pocketknife as a surprise, the gift Cedil wanted the most.

When Cedil said this about his mom, Tenisão was a little embarassed. But he explained his mom was a good person, it was just that she was nervous and didn’t like to argue.

Afterwards, Zoaldo never let Cedil have a moment’s rest. He made Cedil run his errands and take Zoaldo’s horse out to the pasture and back. Now and then, he’d beat Cedil with his belt, saying it was to teach him a lesson.

On the day the horse fled, Cedil suffered his worst beating yet. He took the horse to the pasture early, but didn’t return until after lunch. His hands were shaking. He told Zoaldo the horse had coupled with a drover’s mare and both bolted for the hill above the pasture, refusing to let Cedil anywhere near them. Zoaldo hopped around with rage and accused Cedil of letting the horse get away on purpose, so that Zoaldo would lose the money he was going to make on a trip with the land surveyor. He snatched the halter from Cedil’s hand and whipped him, in such a frenzy he didn’t bother to see where the blows landed. Cedil ran to his mom and begged for help, Zoaldo closing in on him, wielding the halter. Cedil’s mom ran to the bedroom, shut the door, and hid, praying so loudly that passers-by heard her from the street.

When I came home from school, I found Cedil in tears, sitting on the parapet behind the church. His legs were covered in lashes and he was scratching the stone with a piece of charcoal. He didn’t write or draw anything, he was just scribbling. I asked him why he wasn’t at school. He told me he wasn’t going anymore, he never would again, and then he told me the story about the horse. He was planning to run away. He didn’t know where, but he’d escape any way he could, now he was just waiting to jump onto the back of a passing truck. I said if he did that, he would travel near the Indians.

“What Indians?” he asked.

I told him every truck passing through here went north, and my father warned me that, in the north, there were tons of ferocious Indians. Cedil looked dismayed, stuck in thought, and then he asked a foolish thing, something that only someone truly desperate would ask: He wanted to know if drowning hurt, if people panicked, the way you do when you dive into a deep pool and your breath runs out. I said drowning was horrible, that on my grandmother’s sitio a boy named Zuzezinho drowned and that when they pulled his body out, his eyes were bulging like a frog’s. I was so afraid after I saw him that I couldn’t sleep for a week. It was horrible. Cedil thought about this, then asked whether Tenisão and I would visit after school each day and play with him if he went to live in the jungle. I said we’d bring a machete, chop wood, and build a house, carry rations, and hunt with a shotgun whose barrel we made from an umbrella shaft. In fact, Tenisão was already working on one, we only needed bullets, which we’d make once we found a way to melt lead without Tenisão’s mom catching us.

“And we’ll install lookouts and invent signals, and no one can enter unless they give the right signal,” he said, as excited as if he’d already forgotten the beating.

I said we didn’t need signals or lookouts, those were only necessary when it was dark, like during the rebellions, and Tenisão and I couldn’t be there at night. Cedil asked if my mom would get mad and punish me if we were caught on the island, and told me I should flee as well; I said she might get mad, but I’d have to think about it.

Tenisão showed up rolling an old tire, stopping it in front of us with his foot. We told him our plan and he thought the best place to do it was the island. No one went there, the brush was thick at the water’s edge, but once we cleared it the rest of the island would be in good shape, and there were plenty of yams and sangue-de-cristo flowers growing there. We didn’t have a canoe, the one Tenisão used had been taken away, most likely to prevent precisely what we were planning to do. But we could still make a raft out of the wood from a banana tree.

Building the raft was easy, but navigating the thing took all our brilliance. We messed up the design, placing the thickest ends of the logs on one side only, and even though it was an obvious mistake, no one felt like fixing it. I think we were all in a hurry to get in the water. Once we were afloat, the back of the raft kept sinking, so we moved to the front, which also sank but evened us out. We arrived at the island sopping wet, soaked from belt to shoe.

On our first day, we dug stakes for the house, hammered planks, and cut an armload of sticks to thatch the walls. Cedil wanted to build the house right away, he’d use shrubs if he had to, so he could sleep there the first night. While he swept the floor of the house vigorously, Tenisão and I stepped outside. We agreed we had to stop Cedil from making such a spur of the moment escape. First, we’d build him a nice little house, with a pallet, and everything ready for him to spend the night, and then he could move in if he wanted to.

Cedil had forgotten about the fight at home. He laughed and played, even ran after Tenisão with a snake hanging off the end of a stick, threatening to chuck it at him. But when we told him it was time to go home, that there was no way he should stay, his spirits fell again. He could hardly bring himself to walk or move, and slumped about like we did when we had to rehearse for the school festival.

After the house was ready, all we did was hang out on the island. I stopped eating lunch when I came home from school, instead making myself a snack in secret and taking it with me. My mom didn’t know this and scolded me to eat more, but my dad didn’t care, saying that when your stomach is full, even guavas have bugs. My mom said if I carried on like this, I’d end up sick, that my dad should buy me some medicine to increase my appetite. My dad answered that the only medicine I needed was long and smelled like leather. They kept arguing and didn’t notice me sneak out a little while later.

I liked the island, but I liked it even more for Cedil’s sake. He stopped talking about drowning or running away, in part because Zoaldo was traveling, helping Senhor Zaco install telephone lines. There was a rumor Milila wanted to break up with him when he returned, but when I asked my mom if this was true, she scolded me. Still, Cedil didn’t seem the same. He invented a new game everyday. We built a water scoop from a mulberry tree, its wood easy to cut and drill, and we spent the whole day whittling it, so that, when we left, we had rigged up a real scoop. We built a dam and turbine, then installed posts up and down the hill and made an insulator cup, wires and all, out of two spools of line, so we had our very own power plant.

The island didn’t have a name. We just called it the island. Tenisão said we had to name it, but we couldn’t think of anything that stuck. I’d come up with one thing, Tenisão would call it stupid; Cedil would suggest something else, but we’d already thought of it, and so on. One day we got to talking about animals and I said, in my opinion, the most perfect animal in existence was the guinea pig. Its little hairy body and singed fur, its cute little eyes swinging around nervously, its mustache quivering whenever it saw someone—I loved them and wanted to raise them in our yard. I only hadn’t worked up the courage to catch one, because I was afraid it would die of fright when I did. Tenisão said the most beautiful animal in the whole world, and the most expensive, was the rainspotted cat. There were even some who had golden spots and these weren’t even worth dreaming about. I didn’t know such a creature existed, neither did Cedil, butthe idea grabbed hold of us. Cedil said we should sell bananas from each of our yards and pool our money together, that maybe we’d have enough to buy a couple and raise them on the island. Tenisão said our chances were so small we wouldn’t find one, much less two. From then on, we called the island the Island of Rainspotted Cats.

The name worked, but only if we had the cats. But since none of us could think of anything better, we kept it for the time being.

Camilinho suspected we had some hiding place just to ourselves. He followed us around, fawning over us and offering up his toys. He gave me a magnifying glass so strong it lit paper on fire when the sun shone through it. Sometimes, I felt a twinge of guilt when I saw that little beast playing by himself. His games lacked all joy. He placed matchboxes on beetles’ backs, built sleds that didn’t slide, gathered leaves together to make a bigger leaf. When I told Tenisão we should bring Camilinho to the island at least once, Tenisão refused. He said he wouldn’t do it even for a magnifying glass, that hearing Camilinho whine was like listening to the grinding of a mill.

Camilinho must have followed us one day and seen us take the raft from the brush and cross over to the island. Outside the church doors that night, he asked me where we’d gone. The next day, Estogildo, the grossest boy at school, boasted that he too was going to build a raft and take it downriver. Later on, I saw Camilinho playing with a bamboo pistol, the kind we used to shoot fireworks. I’d seen Estogildo carrying the same one around as well. I didn’t tell Tenisão, because I didn’t want him to hurt Camilinho; of the three of us, he disliked Estogildo the most. But from then on, I suspected our games on the island were about to end.

We didn’t have to wait long. It seemed Camilinho and Estogildo were just waiting for their chance. For a couple of days, we didn’t go to the island because Tenisão hurt his toe and it became so swollen and infected he had to have it drained. Playing on the island wasn’t as much fun without him, so instead we walked to the river’s edge and stared out at it. It looked even more beautiful, even more important from far away. When we saw the smoke, Cedil and I rushed over; Tenisão still couldn’t.

Everything was in ruins. The house, the dam, the posts ripped out, the water mill overturned. Cedil sobbed and rushed around to check the damage, crying out against such wickedness. I almost cried too, seeing him this sad. For us, the island was a game; but for him, it was his rescue.

When we told Tenisão, he acted like he didn’t care and said he’d find a better place, one more hidden, though he never worked up the energy to do so. If Cedil or I asked him about it, he said there was still time. So things went until Dona Zipa sent Tenisão off to Catholic school in Bonfim. Around then, Zoaldo returned from his trip and started dating Milila again. He beat Cedil even more; I think it was his way of making up for lost time. My family went to my grandma’s sitio for the holidays. I wanted to take Cedil with me, but Zoaldo told him we might as well stop kidding ourselves and take the horse out of the rain.

When we returned a month later, everyone was talking about Cedil—one morning he disappeared and no one knew where. He left me his pocketknife, knowing I would have wanted it. I realize he did this to make me happy, but it made things worse, because then I spent the whole day thinking about him. My mom kept lecturing me, saying it was better to try and forget what had happened. This made me even sadder. What good did forgetting do? If I tried to forget, then one day I would wake up and discover I’d forgotten Cedil completely, him so young and the world already so cruel. I think there are certain things people should never forget, certain things that are a duty. If it were up to me, I would never forget the island of rainspotted cats.


About the author and translator:

José J. Veiga (1915-1999) was one of the most celebrated Brazilian fiction writers of the 20th century. Known for his often surreal, regionalized stories that featured the distinct landscape and culture of Brazil’s interior, he was awarded the Prêmio Machado de Assis in 1997 for lifetime achievement. “The Most Beautiful Animal in the World” appears in Veiga’s first book, Os Cavalinhos de Platiplanto (1959), published when the author was 43.

Thomas Mira y Lopez is a nonfiction writer and translator. He is the author of the essay collection The Book of Resting Places (Counterpoint Press) and a fiction editor at DIAGRAM. He currently lives in Iowa City, where he is pursuing an MFA in Literary Translation at the University of Iowa.