Carau

Just after the sun drops behind the reed beds, a sound comes up off the water that nobody raised in the Litoral ever needs explained. Two or three hoarse notes first, low and cracked, the way a voice goes when it has been used too hard. Then a long falling wail that can run on for minutes and carries much further than a bird that size should manage. The Guaraní word for the bird is karãu, and the word is simply the noise. Everything else is the story of how the noise got there.

He was the best dancer in the district, and he knew it. He lived with his mother and looked after her properly, by every telling, right up until the night that undid him. She fell ill. He tried what there was to try at home, the boiled remedies and the patience, and when none of it moved her he set out at dusk for the town to fetch something stronger. He did not get there. On the road he came across a dance, and inside the dance there was a woman, and the errand went out of his head as completely as if it had never been given to him.

Someone came for him in the middle of it. A friend pushed through the floor to tell him his mother had died. He did not stop dancing. What he said has been carried down more faithfully than anything else in the legend, because it is the line that damns him: there is time to cry later. Hay tiempo para llorar. He danced until the musicians gave out.

At dawn he stood in front of the body and understood what he had bought with a night. The tellings put the change on the day of the burial and into the afternoon, his lament spreading out through the air around him while his clothes stopped being clothes. The black of mourning went to the roots and came back as feathers. What walked into the marsh at the end of that day was not a man in grief. It was a bird, and it was already crying, and it was already saying its own name.

Where the versions part company is on who did it to him. In many Paraguayan tellings the change is a sentence handed down by Tupã, angered by the boy’s indifference, condemning him to the wetlands dressed in mourning to weep for good. In the Correntino tellings nobody hands anything down. Remorse is sufficient. Some versions add that the woman who held him on the dance floor was transformed alongside him into a smaller water bird that shares his marshes, which is either justice or company, depending on who is telling it.

There is no version in which he is forgiven.

The body he ended up in is a real one and a strange one: the only living member of its family, a wader that looks assembled from spare parts, tall and brown and spotted, with legs like wet sticks and a long bill that carries a slight sideways bend near the tip. Georg Marcgrave drew it in Brazil and published the plate in 1648 under the name guarauna, so the bird has been on paper almost as long as the legend has been in mouths. In flight it is unmistakable and faintly ridiculous, wings beating slowly and deliberately, legs left hanging, bill thrust well out in front as though it is being towed somewhere against its will.

It feeds almost entirely on apple snails. That sideways kink in the lower mandible is a tool: the bird works the tip in past the shell lip and cuts the columellar muscle that anchors the animal, and if the snail will not come loose it hammers the shell against something hard until it does. A carau walking the floating vegetation at dusk, stepping carefully across mats of camalote, stopping, listening, striking, is doing the only thing it does apart from mourn.

The other names it carries all circle the same idea. In Argentina it is the Viuda, the Bruja, the Bobo, and most often the Viuda Loca, the mad widow. Among the Toba of the western Chaco it is the viuda de agua, the water widow. The Paraguayan writer Girala Yampey was careful to point out that the legend belongs to the karãu guasú, the big solitary one that turns up alone or in pairs and throws that grief-stricken call across the water at sundown, and not to the karãu’i, the small ones that fly over in tidy flocks and are usually called bandurrias instead.

The story has kept moving. In 1937 the first recording of the motif went onto disc in Argentina as “Bicho Feo / El Carau”, credited to Luis Sauret González, and by the 1940s Emilio Chamorro had it; after him Mauricio Valenzuela, Zito Segovia, Mario Bofill and a long line of others, and the opening bars of “El Carau” still pull sapucays out of the crowd at the Fiesta Nacional del Chamamé. The Correntino writer Saturnino Muniagurria took it somewhere else entirely, finishing a folk drama called Carau in 1938 and publishing it in 1949 with a letter-study by Eudoro Vargas Gómez as a prologue. Muniagurria’s Carau is a labourer in the quebracho camps of northern Santa Fe who stands up to a foreign company on behalf of the other workers, loses himself over a woman, dances while his mother dies, and walks into the estero rather than be taken. The wail stays; what it is protesting changes.

His power is small and total. He has one sound, it carries for a kilometre over open water, and he cannot stop making it. Nothing in the record gives him more than that: no shape-changing back, no bargain, no intercession, no night of the year when the sentence lifts. He kept the body he was punished with and the wetlands he was punished in, and every evening he tells anyone within earshot exactly who he is.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Carau in Guaraní legend?

Carau was a young man, famous as a dancer, who was transformed into a marsh bird as punishment for staying at a dance while his mother died. The legend is told across Paraguay and the Argentine Litoral, especially Corrientes, and it explains the mournful night cry of the bird the Guaraní call karãu.

Why does the carau bird cry?

In the legend the cry is Carau weeping for his mother, and the bird is saying its own name as it does so. The sound is a series of low hoarse notes followed by a long falling wail that can carry for minutes over open water at dusk.

What did Carau say when he was told his mother had died?

He said there is time to cry later, and carried on dancing until dawn. That line is the hinge of the whole legend and the reason his punishment is remembered as deserved rather than cruel.

Who punished Carau?

The tellings disagree. Many Paraguayan versions have Tupã pass the sentence and condemn him to the wetlands in mourning dress, while Correntino versions need no god at all and let remorse alone turn his clothes into black plumage.

What kind of bird is the carau?

It is Aramus guarauna, the limpkin, a tall brown wading bird streaked with white, the only living member of its family, found in wetlands from the southern United States down to Argentina. It feeds almost entirely on apple snails and is known in Spanish by folk names including Viuda Loca, the mad widow, and pájaro llorón, the weeping bird.

Related Entries

Urutaú (Kakuy), Tupã, Pombero, Kurupi, Jasy Jatere, Ao Ao, Teju Jagua, Mbói Tu’ĩ, Moñái, Luison, Karai, Jasy, Abaangui, Iara