Cobra Norato

At three in the morning the dance in the river-house would still be going, and the best partner in the room would make his excuses and leave. He was always a stranger, always dressed head to foot in white, white jacket, white shirt, white trousers, and black shoes below them, and he was always gone before the sun came up. The girls talked about him for years. In the interior of Pará, on the Tocantins and the lower Amazon, everyone knew where he went. Down the bank, into the water, and back into the body he had left there.

His mother had been taken by a Cobra Grande, one of the great serpents that live at the bottom of the Amazon’s rivers, and when her time came she gave birth to two small snakes instead of two children. They went into the river. One of the earliest people to put the story on paper, Ignácio Baptista de Moura, writing in 1910 about a journey up the Tocantins, remembered it from childhood as the tale of a mestiça girl who bore two little snakes, one of which grew so prodigiously that it was seen throughout the district of Cametá. Câmara Cascudo recorded a different father. In his telling the woman was made pregnant by the Boto, the pink river dolphin who comes ashore at night as a man in white and dances until dawn, which would explain a good deal about how his son turned out.

The other snake was his sister, Maria Caninana, and she was everything he was not. She overturned canoes, harried fishermen, and took pleasure in it, while he swam beneath the same boats keeping them upright. It could not last. She took up with a wild snake from the deep water, an unenchanted thing, and the two of them began working the rivers together. He killed them both. Accounts of that fight are scattered across half the state. Some put it in the Moju, some at Alenquer, some out where the Amazon meets the Atlantic and say it went on for six days. What they agree on is the price: he came out of it blind in one eye, and he has been one-eyed ever since.

He is enormous. The people who have seen him in the wrong room describe a coil that fills it from the floor to the roof beams, black and slow-moving, taking up the whole space where a sleeping man had been. Bullets are no use. A woman from Marixá, near Monte Alegre, told her daughter what her own mother had told her: one night around 1953 the men at a dance grew jealous enough to surround him, and one of them fired, and the shot wounded him but did not go in, because nothing goes into those scales. He slid down the bank into the water. What was left on the ground was his outfit coming apart into the river it was made from. The black shoes were two black fish. The belt was a puraqué, an electric eel. The hat was a stingray. People said afterwards that it must have been a boto, but the woman was clear that it was not.

What he wants is to stop. An encantado can be disenchanted, and Norato spent decades at riverside parties looking for someone with the stomach for it. He would name a place, a date, and an hour, tell them he would come as an immense snake, and give them the instructions: strike him with a terçado that has never been used, a virgin blade, and then throw breast milk over the wound. If they lost their nerve and did not come, the enchantment doubled. That was the arrangement, and he made it over and over.

Mostly it went badly. In the oldest written version, printed at Belém in 1900 by the Paraense writer who signed himself Hygama, the terms are gentler and the outcome is worse. A handsome young man arrives at a Santo Antônio festival on Marajó, asks the host’s eighteen-year-old daughter Joaninha to lock him in a bedroom from the outside, keep the key, and call him through the keyhole at four in the morning, and warns her not to be frightened by anything she sees. She oversleeps. The cock crows three times. She opens the door instead of calling through it, finds an enormous coil of snake where the young man should be, and screams, and the house comes down. In the version told at Abaetetuba about the island of Pacoca, the snake lifts its head as the roof gives way and says, you have lost yourself and condemned me. Elsewhere the collapse leaves a lake behind it. That is one way a lake gets made in the Amazon.

Once, at Cametá, it worked. A soldier did what he was asked and the enchantment broke, and Norato came out of the snake for good. The skin was burned and reduced to ashes. He enlisted, served, and died in that same municipality years later, an ordinary man with an extraordinary discharge record. Bragança tells a crueller version in which the soldier is drunk, meant to take only the tip of the tail, cuts through to the spine, and kills the encantado instead of freeing him.

His powers are the powers of a thing that belongs to the water and visits the land on sufferance. He changes shape, he cannot be shot, he can hold a boat up in a current that should have rolled it, and he can pass an entire night in a crowded room without anyone guessing. His limits come from the same place. He cannot take the sun. He has to be back in the river by three or four in the morning, and if he is not, the shape goes on him whether he likes it or not. And the one thing he wants most he is not permitted to do for himself. It has to be given to him by a frightened stranger holding a knife.

The story is not as old as it sounds. José Carvalho, who collected it in the twentieth century, called it relatively modern and pointed out that the great nineteenth-century writers on the Amazon do not mention it at all. The written record starts with Hygama in 1900 and Moura in 1910, and Moura found the whole thing faintly ridiculous, a fable that impressed what he called the fetishism of ignorant people. Cascudo, who took it more seriously, called Norato’s cycle one of the most popular Paraense traditions of the Tocantins region and said it had spread across the whole Amazon, and elsewhere called it the most Brazilian thing there is, before adding the honest qualification that it is national only if you ignore the near-identical episodes in every other folklore in the world. He pointed at two of them himself: the serpent myths brought across the Atlantic by enslaved Africans, and the Mouras Encantadas of Portugal, the enchanted women who become snakes and go looking for someone to break the spell. The name travelled further than the tale. Raul Bopp’s 1931 poem Cobra Norato made him famous the length of Brazil, though anyone reading it for the legend should know that Bopp wrote something else: his narrator strangles Cobra Norato in the first poem and puts on his skin to go through the forest after the daughter of a queen named Luzia. The riverbank version is still being told. In 2021 a woman born at Marixá recited it into her daughter’s phone while frying fish, exactly as her own mother had told it to her.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Cobra Norato?

Cobra Norato, also called Honorato, is an enchanted serpent from the folklore of the Brazilian Amazon, especially the state of Pará. He was born a snake to a human mother and can take the form of a young man to attend dances on the riverbank. Unlike most Amazonian river monsters he is harmless to people and is remembered mainly for wanting his enchantment broken.

Who is Maria Caninana?

Maria Caninana is Cobra Norato’s twin sister, born a snake in the same birth. She capsized boats and tormented fishermen while he protected them, and when she took up with a wild serpent from the deep water he fought and killed them both. He lost the sight of one eye in that fight.

How is Cobra Norato disenchanted?

In the best-known version he asks a person to meet him at a stated place and hour, wound him with a terçado that has never been used before, and pour breast milk over the wound. Anyone who agrees and then loses their nerve doubles the enchantment instead of breaking it. The tradition says only one person, a soldier at Cametá, ever went through with it.

Is Cobra Norato the same as the Boiúna?

He is a Cobra Grande, the same class of giant Amazonian river serpent as the Boiúna, but he is a specific individual with a name, a sister, and a story of his own. Câmara Cascudo also records a version in which his father is not a serpent at all but the Boto, the pink river dolphin who comes ashore as a man in white.

How old is the legend of Cobra Norato?

The written record of Cobra Norato only begins in 1900, with a story by the Pará writer Hygama, followed by a dismissive mention by Ignácio Baptista de Moura in 1910. The folklorist José Carvalho called the legend relatively modern and noted that the major nineteenth-century writers on the Amazon do not mention it. Raul Bopp’s modernist poem of 1931 carried the name to the rest of Brazil.

Related Entries

Boiúna, Encantado, Iara, Curupira, Caipora, Mapinguari, Boi-tatá, Jurupari, Saci, Sachamama, Yacumama, Amaru, Melusine, Selkie