Chantel Acevedo
They say our myths are born in the rivers and valleys, in the mist-cloaked mogotes of Viñales and the cold caves of Matanzas.
They say our myths are open-mouthed screams, rows of jagged teeth, fiery balls of light, and mothers in mourning.
Our myths are also this: A whispered “Te veo,” when nobody is around. A giggle in the night. A dirty rag around your throat.
Whatever the campesinos tell you about our myths, you’d better believe them, for they are formed of blood and sacrifice, torment and star-crossed love.
But be warned, this story is both a lesson and a curse. Most stories are.
Pebbles struck the window. My heart flickered like a flame at the sound.
I checked the door to my bedroom, making sure it was still locked. Outside, I could hear the noise of relatives gathered to celebrate both my fifteenth birthday and my first hunt. I’d told them I was still getting ready, and they’d left me alone for a few blessed moments. Just enough time for . . .
Tap, tap, tap.
The window again. Julio.
Julio Capó was here, and I could not ask for a better birthday present.
I opened the window quietly, slowly. There he stood in a shaft of moonlight, like a dream. Julio’s dark hair was slicked back and stylish. He looked like a Cuban James Dean, and he’d chosen me, me, as his novia. It was a cold night, probably the chilliest of the year. Julio’s breath came out in little clouds.
“Buenas noches, caballero,” I whispered. He put his hand over his heart and sighed. I laughed at the dramatic gesture.
“I like when you laugh, Rosa.” He shoved his hands in his pockets. “Have you thought what your birthday wish might be?”
I rested my elbow on the windowsill, set my chin on my hand. “If only birthday wishes really came true, I’d wish for Papá to let you come inside.”
“He really doesn’t like me.” It was an understatement. The first time I’d invited Julio over, Papá had clapped him on the shoulder and taken him outside “for a talk.” When they returned, Julio left without another word.
“It’s not you,” I said. “Not really.”
Julio nodded. The Capós and the Monteagudos had never gotten along. The feud went back nearly a century, when Cuba had gone to war with Spain for its independence. The years of war had changed the island. By day, the Spanish butchers fought the rebels, the force of an empire coming down on our island. By night, other forces lurked, feeding off our suffering. “Where there is war,” Papá always said, “there are monsters. They are drawn to the violence, seduced by the evil on display in humans. And when monsters slip into a place, they never go away.”
During the war, the Monteagudos became monster hunters, while the Capós sheltered the ones they could find. They argued that the vampires, werewolves, cagüeiros—all of them—were people in pain, people who could be rescued, made good again. The specifics of our families’ ancient grudge were lost to time. Papá always told me that the Capós had once sheltered a vampire so vicious that it had killed every man, woman, and child in the entire village of Santa Damiana. The Capós claimed no such being ever existed, though it was true that even today, Santa Damiana is a village ringed like a fortress by sharpened stakes and festooned with garlic wreaths on every door. Meanwhile, the Capós said that the Monteagudos had once shot every animal in the Valle del Silencio for fear that the valley was overrun with cagüeiros. We vowed we didn’t, but the valley remains eerily silent, bereft of birdsong or the whistling of jutías in the treetops. Whatever the truth was, somehow everything came to a head between the families, and a pact was made. Monteagudos could not step on Capó property, and the monsters the Capós were trying to rehabilitate were only safe within the bounds of Capó territory.
As far as I knew, the pact had never been broken by either side, but tensions lingered. Capós and Monteagudos didn’t socialize, didn’t meet one another’s gaze in the street. They attended different churches, shopped in different stores, and they absolutely, definitely did not fall in love with each other.
Yet somehow, against the odds, Julio was here at my window.
Except, he wasn’t quite himself the night of my birthday. His eyes were as they always had been—brown with pools of green in them, like swirling galaxies—but there were dark circles beneath them and the corners of his mouth were turned down. I suspected the reason. “How’s Marcelo?” I asked. His brother, who was two years older than Julio, had been ill.
“Better,” he said. “Sleeping less than before.”
“Ah, that’s good.”
“One day you’ll meet him,” Julio said, brightening. “He’s funny and brave. More handsome than I am, too.” He stopped and his lip curled in that delicious smirk I so loved. “Never mind. You’ll fall in love with him and leave me behind. Pretend I don’t have a brother.”
I muffled my laughter behind my hands. I wanted to tell Julio that what he’d described could never be. That there was only one person for me, and he was it. But I wasn’t brave enough to do that just yet. “I wish I had a brother or sister,” I said instead. “Maybe then my parents wouldn’t ask so much of me. I could be their lazy, useless child.”
“You could never be that, Rosa. You always give everything your all.”
Before I knew it, the words had left my mouth: “I’d give you my all.”
Time stopped. I wished it would go in reverse, wished I could take the words back even if they were true. But Julio only blushed.
Good Julio, kind and gentle Julio, oh!
“You’re going to go hunting tonight, aren’t you?” he asked. He crept closer as he spoke, making me feel like I was being hunted. My stomach flipped in anticipation.
“I am,” I said, not hiding the pride in my voice. I’d trained all my life for my first hunt. I wasn’t ashamed, even if it was Julio, a Capó full of Capó convictions and self-righteousness, looking at me like that. Monsters were monsters, and the people of Dos Ríos depended on my family to keep them safe.
“Do you know your target?” Julio asked. He spoke very slowly, and I know he was trying to keep an edge of criticism out of his tone.
I shook my head. “Vampire, maybe? Chupacabra perhaps. I know someone reported a horse on Calle Maestra drained of blood and still attached to a wagon.”
Julio took a very deep breath. He stepped closer. “Promise me you’ll be careful, Rosa.”
“I promise,” I whispered. “And you be careful, too.” Julio frowned at that but didn’t argue with me. Whenever the papers printed an obituary for a member of the Capó family, everyone just assumed they’d died violently, betrayed by the monsters they were trying to help.
My family was getting louder on the other side of my bedroom door. Soon, they’d knock, demanding I come out for cake and presents.
“My rose. My sweet-smelling rose,” Julio whispered, urgency driving him to my window, his elbows crowding mine on the sill. He pulled my hand out from under my chin. His breath was on my face. “Promise me you’ll be merciful.”
I swallowed. I wasn’t trained to be merciful. I was trained to be brutal and quick. Perhaps that’s the humane way to do it, but it wasn’t mercy.
“Rosa! Come out!” my mother called.
“Ya voy, ya voy,” I shouted in return. “Julio. I have to go.”
“You didn’t promise,” he insisted.
“I can’t promise that.”
“Then promise you’ll look them in the eyes before you kill them, Rosa.” He swallowed hard, and my heart felt like it was shattering in pieces.
“I swear it. I swear by the moon above.”
Julio’s left eyebrow went up. “The moon? She’s a fickle thing to swear by.”
Outside, my relatives were chanting my name, “Rosa! Rosa! Rosa!” I know they were only teasing, insisting that I come out and join the party, but it felt like they were cheering me on.
Julio laughed softly. “Rosa, Rosa,” he whispered, mimicking them.
Impulsively, I leaned over and kissed him. I tried to capture all of the sensations at once—the press of his lips, the sweetness of his breath, the way the stubble on his cheek felt under my hand. Our mouths parted and then everything fell away and I thought for one wild moment that we would be able to do this one thing forever and ever.
A snapping sound behind Julio startled us both. The top of my head banged against the window, rattling the frame. I turned toward the source of the sound. Julio gripped one of my hands fiercely. For a second, we stared into the night. I knew where Papá kept his machete and his gun. The muscles in my legs tensed, ready to run for the weapons if needed. We watched for a few moments before a calico cat jumped out of the avocado tree in my yard. It peered at us intently. A star-shaped patch of fur was set over its eyes. It meowed loudly, then leaped away.
“Maldito gato,” we both swore at the same time.
Relief made me giggle, but Julio was still staring out into the darkness. Gently, I turned his face so that we were looking at one another again. But he was distracted, his eyes darting behind me, watching the door to my bedroom.
“Julio, stay with me.” I meant in the moment. I meant to focus on us. But if he’d misunderstood, if he’d crawled through the window to hide under my bed until I returned, I wouldn’t have protested.
“How’s your head?”
“Fine,” I said. “Stay with me.”
“I’ll come tomorrow after dark.”
“ROSA! Por Dios!” my mother shouted, right at my door.
“Coming!” I said. Our time was up, and it felt like being robbed.
Julio squeezed my hand again and gave it one last kiss, then he was gone.
My relatives cheered when I finally left my bedroom and entered the living room. “Al fin” and “Felicidades,” they said, wishing me all manner of good things.
“Tan linda,” my cousin Berto said as he took my hand and gave me a twirl. My dress whirled around me. It had been sewn by my abuela Aris. She made it of turquoise taffeta and my shoes were dyed to match. Mamá played records while the family chatted. The Big Bopper and Richie Valens sang for a while, and then Mamá switched it out to a Sonora Matancera record, and everyone danced to the rumbas and Celia’s soaring voice. Every so often, a relative would pull me aside to give me a gift, urging me to open it at once. I received a second dress made by Abuela, this time in pink, a pair of saddle shoes from my tío Ernesto, and from my parents, tiny ruby earrings that glinted like drops of blood. There were other gifts, too—a necklace with an azabache to ward off evil, a knife with a mother-of-pearl handle, and the fang of a madre de aguas monster dangling from a chain.
It was tradition to display one’s gifts on their bed so that relatives might come in and admire them. I took a moment to lay them all out, the earrings beside the knife, the fang and azabache on their chains draped over the dress. Mamá came in to see how I was doing.
“My girl is getting so grown,” she said, and kissed the top of my head. Then she noticed my window. “You know better than to leave this open.” She latched it closed again. “Unspeakable things lurk in the night.”
I felt my cheeks burning. What would Mamá say if she knew Julio had been at my window earlier in the evening? What would she think if she could read the contents of my heart? All my life, I’d been told that the Capós were idiots, that their softness made them treacherous. Meanwhile, Julio had been taught that the Monteagudos were the real monsters in the story of our island. That we were bloodthirsty, battle-obsessed, and hard of heart.
I’d believed it, too, until the night of Asela Monteagudo’s wedding. The reception was held in a courtyard lit by paper lanterns. Guests were given paper masks to wear. The elders objected to the masks, saying that any stranger could hide behind them, but stylish Asela insisted. I was dancing to a bolero with a cousin of the groom’s, a boy named Tomás Robaina, who stepped on my shoes the whole time. Then Julio came along.
“I thought I knew what beauty was but then I saw you,” he said to me right over Tomás’s shoulder, bold as anything.
I stopped dancing. My heart hammered in my chest.
Tomás sputtered, but I gave him a small smile and slipped my hand out of his sweaty palm midsong, grateful for the excuse to get away. “You flirt by the book,” I told Julio once my former dance partner was out of earshot. He laughed. I liked the way his eyes crinkled closed. That was the start of everything. We only danced the one song together, and I wish that I remembered which song it was. The moment I saw those celestial eyes, I knew I was happily doomed.
I wished I could say all of this to Mamá.
Mamá ran her hands over my hair, smoothing it down. She arranged the ribbon in my ponytail so that the loops were even. “I’m so proud of you, Rosa,” she said when she was finished, leaning forward and touching the tip of her nose to mine. Her eyes watered. “Your first hunt. I can’t believe the night is already here.”
“I’ve worked hard, Mamá,” I said, worry in my stomach as I thought about the grisly work to come.
“I know. But you are a Monteagudo and you, mi vida, are ready. Are you scared?”
“A Monteagudo is never scared,” I said as bravely as I could manage, though I couldn’t help the hitch in my voice.
My mother smiled and kissed my cheek. “Así es. Let’s go, quinceañera. Wait until you see the cake your tía Carmen made!” We linked arms and returned to the party.
The party lasted long into the night. I’d gossiped with my cousins and posed for photographs with every member of the family behind the cake table. My tía Carmen had, indeed, baked a beautiful three-tiered cake and frosted it with lemon-yellow icing. On the back patio, the men played dominó while the women chatted inside. My little cousins wanted to dance with me, and I twirled them around like princesses.
And I endured the question “¿Tienes novio?” from everyone, only smiling demurely in response.
After midnight, once the last of the cousins had left and my house was quiet again, I sat on the couch and tugged my satin pumps off my swollen feet. Leaning back on the cushions and closing my eyes, I thought of Julio. He was there always, seared in my imagination. I envisioned him in my room, the two of us together at last. In my dreams, whenever the morning came, and the lark cried out, he would rise to leave, and I would urge him to stay, saying, “No, Julio, it is the nightingale you hear. The moon is still young in the sky.”
And Julio would loom over me, a smile turning his countenance into a blinding light, and he would stay.
Suddenly, I felt the sofa shift and I startled awake. Papá was sitting beside me.
“Happy birthday, sleepyhead,” he said, his voice a deep, gravelly thing. I leaned my head on his shoulder.
Papá. My strong, stubborn, Papá. Oh.
“¿Lista?” he asked.
The piece of cake I’d eaten was still sweet in my mouth and the dream in my head lingered, so real it felt I might reach out and touch it. “Yes, Papá.”
That was all he needed to hear. He shoved his hand into his pocket and leaned forward. “This is how you prepare the bala,” Papá instructed, holding a bullet up for me to see. He brought it to his mouth, placed it between his incisors and bit it hard, leaving a mark. Then he turned la bala and bit again, so that the second mark formed a cross on the metal. “You need silver bullets to kill a werewolf, but any kind will do for a cagüeiro as long as it’s marked with a cross. Here,” he said, and handed me another one from his pocket.
“We’re hunting cagüeiro tonight?”
Papá nodded. “There’s been one spotted near the Ortiz family’s finca.”
I put the bullet in my mouth and bit hard, feeling the metal give way under my teeth. It tasted coppery, like blood. So we proceeded, taking turns marking the bullets until Papá’s gun was loaded. With each bite, I thought of the promise I’d made to Julio—to try to remember that the monsters were human underneath. The truth was I didn’t know if I could do it.
I’d been preparing for this night since I could walk. As a little girl, I had practiced handling the machete against the thick trunk of a flamboyán in our backyard; I understood the mechanics of a gun; I knew how to get bloodstains out of fabric. For years, I’d sat and listened to the campesinos and their monster stories, unafraid. Only one monster frightened me. The cagüeiro. The cagüeiro always wrapped a rag around its neck, a trapo, one the monster knotted tightly against its throat, which gave it the ability to transform. A cagüeiro could be anyone or anything—a rat, a hound, a panther—and then it would do the devil’s work. The worst of them would change into a different person, resembling somebody’s abuelo, or little sister, or mamá. Once, Papá had a killed a cagüeiro in Santiago who had shifted into his estranged wife’s mother and stabbed her when they embraced. The cagüeiro had told my father, “Tempt not a desperate man,” and then shifted into Papá. When my father fired the bullet that killed the monster, he had seen his own death played out before him. Some nights, Papá wakes up in a cold sweat, dreaming of that moment. Mamá always makes him some tilo and stays up with him until the terror passes.
Because the cagüeiros are capable of such deception, our family had a code to prove our identity when in doubt. When we answered the door, we greeted each other with, “Tempt not a desperate man” as a reminder of how dangerous cagüeiros could be.
Cagüeiros weren’t unlucky victims of a bite, like werewolves and vampires. They weren’t ghosts who had been betrayed in life, or zombies infected by a disease that couldn’t be helped. Cagüeiros could not be forced to wear their trapo. They elected to wear them. At best, the creatures were thieves, using their powers to steal from the campesinos, many of whom had very little to begin with. At worst, they were murderers. Either way, as long as cagüeiros were around, every creature out there could be one.
“Why would a person choose this life?” I’d asked my father once, and he told me that wickedness calls to certain hearts, but that the Monteagudo family exists to stamp it out. Papá and I were the latest in a long line of cagüeiro hunters, and we would do what needed to be done to keep Dos Ríos safe from monsters.
Of course, my first hunt would be a cagüeiro.
The night was cold, bitterly so for a Cuban winter, and Mamá had made me wear a bufanda wrapped three times around my neck. “Like a little cagüeiro,” she’d joked, and Papá had sucked his teeth in disapproval. The scarf didn’t help. My nose ran as we tracked the creature, and I couldn’t feel my lips. We tramped through the Ortiz finca, where it had last been seen in the shape of an enormous land crab, stealing bottles of milk.
“Just a few days ago,” Papá explained, “the cagüeiro we are hunting was spotted in the sky transformed as a wyvern. It was setting the roof of the Avilas’ house on fire.”
“Was everyone okay?”
“Yes, but Leticia Avila is still coughing up smoke. Pay attention, Rosa. The cagüeiro always escapes,” Papá whispered. “That is, unless he’s facing off with a member of the Monteagudo family. Then the beast is ours.” It was his way of bolstering my confidence. A crackling noise behind a wooden shed caught our attention. Creeping silently, we walked past an oak that had been lightning-splintered. Our breath puffed out before us, faster now that we could hear a rustling ahead.
We rounded the shed and spotted the cagüeiro in the moment of transformation, shifting into a man. He had his back to us, but I watched as his limbs shortened, his fur fell away, his tail disappeared. He was a young man with dark hair, with a trapo hung around his neck. He held a small torch. The cagüeiro was unclothed, and he shivered so hard I thought his flame would go out. As we snuck forward, I stepped on a branch, snapping it. The cagüeiro must have heard us because he quickly began to retie the trapo.
“¡Diablo!” Papá cried, rushing forward to snatch the creature. I followed right behind my father, my hand on my machete, still in its sheath. Every muscle in my body tensed. I was clenching my back teeth together so hard my jaw ached. This was the moment I had trained for. “Te tengo,” Papá said, grabbing the cagüeiro just as it transformed back into a thrashing calico cat.
The cat’s squeals pierced my ears. Had this been the same cat that had spied on me and Julio? I drew closer. It was! I recognized the star-shaped patch over its eyes. Julio and I had been spied on by a cagüeiro. My hands tingled and I felt cold all over. What did it want? In that moment, I remembered my promise. I had to look at the cagüeiro in its eyes. “Stop, Papá!”
My father threw the cat on the ground and quickly stepped on its back, avoiding the claws. Looking up at me, he smiled. “That’s my girl,” he said, and handed me the gun with the marked bullets.
I took it shakily in hand as I drew closer.
“Cuidado, Rosa,” Papá warned.
The cat was mewling now, his limbs weakening, striking my father’s legs without effect. I knelt down and peered into its eyes, wondering what it was Julio hoped I’d see.
The gun fell from my hand.
I stumbled back.
Faster and faster I fled, never losing sight of the cat, until I lost my footing and was on the ground, too.
Galaxies. Galaxies in its eyes.
It couldn’t be. It couldn’t.
The crack of gunfire snapped me back to myself. My father held fast to the smoking gun still pointed at the cat, though the creature was finally motionless. Beside him, a small fire grew where the cagüeiro had dropped the torch. My father stomped it out with his foot.
“Tears, Rosa? For a cagüeiro?” my father sneered.
Julio. It was Julio’s eyes I’d seen. The cat in the tree! Julio must have remembered that moment with me as he transformed. Dios mío, his last thoughts were of us! Of us! And my father had just murdered him! Smoke swirled around my father’s ankles, and the world felt like it was tilting beneath me.
“I think he was just cold, Papá,” I said, trying to compose myself even as it felt as if the world were crushing me down to nothing.
“La cabeza,” Papá said softly, indicating the cagüeiro’s head. He unsheathed his machete and tried to hand it to me, but I shook all over.
My brain felt like it was stretching, tearing. Julio, ¡un cagüeiro! my mind screamed at me, but I kept drawing a blank, forgetting where I was, or what was happening, unable to complete the thought.
Julio. Dead.
The odor of gunfire, sulfurous and rotten, filled the air between Papá and me and what was left of the cagüeiro. I watched in horror as my father squared his shoulders and held his machete firmly in both hands. Papá pointed to the cat’s slender neck, and without wanting to, I calculated how much force one would need to cut through the muscle and bone, severing the head from its body.
Papá counted off. “Uno, dos . . .”
I closed my eyes and screamed, so I couldn’t hear the sick crunch.
“Weak. Like a Capó,” I heard my father mutter under his breath as he watched me cry. His words sliced through me, and my stomach twisted in revolt. How I wished I’d been a Capó then! Julio might have looked at me as a cousin or a sister and left me alone. Then his lost face wouldn’t be swimming before my eyes, making me want to hurl myself against a tree and forget everything.
“Next time, you’ll do better,” Papá said after I’d gone quiet. “Get the trapo.”
I crawled over to where the cagüeiro—no, Julio—lay. Trembling, I petted the soft fur. “Perdóname,” I begged, then I picked up the trapo and held it to my heart.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with her,” I could hear Papá saying from the other side of my bedroom door. My mother was sweeping the house, taking down birthday decorations, while my abuela snored on her rocking chair, a duster still in her hand. I ran to my bedroom, locked the door, and opened the window. I could hear the River Cauto in the distance, crying out on my behalf because I couldn’t bear to make any sound at all.
Galaxies had once swirled in my beloved’s eyes.
I saw them in my head all night long.
Papá knocked on my door just before dawn. “Mi niña,” he said softly. “Talk to me. Tell me what happened.”
But I couldn’t tell him because he wouldn’t understand. Not now. Not anymore. Once, when I was seven years old, I had a run-in with a baby chupacabra. The pup, cornered against a fence. . .
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