Cuca

Also Known As: Brazilian Portuguese; the Brazilian form of the Portuguese Coca and the Iberian Coco, a family of words that also means “head” or “skull”
Region/Culture: South America
Mythos: Brazilian Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: The Cuca comes by night for children who will not sleep, and in her modern form she is an alligator-faced witch who brews potions and can turn a child to stone.
Role in Mythos: She is the best-known child-snatching bogey of Brazil, the threat that closes the country’s most familiar lullaby.
Relation to Humans: Parents and grandmothers invoke her at bedtime to hurry small children into silence and sleep. Nobody prays to her or bargains with her; she exists to be feared for a few years and then outgrown.

The house is dark, the lamp turned low, and somewhere a hammock creaks on its hooks. A woman is singing, slowly, the same few notes over and over. The song tells the baby to sleep, because the father is out in the fields, the mother is away at work, and the Cuca is on her way to fetch whoever is still awake. It is the most famous lullaby in Brazil. It is also a threat.

For most of her history the Cuca had no face to speak of. Luís da Câmara Cascudo, who mapped the country’s legends in his Geografia dos Mitos Brasileiros in 1947 and again in his Dicionário do Folclore Brasileiro in 1954, found her in cradle songs from one end of Brazil to the other and found very little agreement on what she was. In some mouths she was a shapeless thing of the night, more a dread than a body. In others she was a woman: ancient, wrinkled, painfully thin, bent at the back, white-haired, and hungry for any child who made noise after dark. Her whole work was to arrive. She came to the house where a child was still awake, and she took that child away, into a sack or into her mouth, depending on who was telling it. No ending was recorded, because nobody ever told the story past that point. The child was asleep by then.

She is not native to Brazil. She came across the Atlantic with the Portuguese, whose own children were hushed with the Coco and the Coca, cousins of the Spanish Coco. The word is an old Iberian one for a head or a skull, the same word sailors gave to the coconut because of its three dark dents. In the north of Portugal a coca was also a hollowed gourd with a candle burning inside it, set out to scare people on dark roads, and in the town of Monção the Coca is a dragon who still fights Saint George in the street every year at Corpus Christi. Somewhere in the crossing the masculine and feminine forms blurred into the Brazilian Cuca, and she settled into the new country as a she. Cascudo also heard other languages in the name, an Angolan word for a grandparent and a Tupi word for swallowing whole. The stories of the word disagree, and the lullaby never cared.

Then, in 1921, a writer gave her a body. José Bento Monteiro Lobato put the Cuca into O Saci, one of the books that grew into his Sítio do Picapau Amarelo series for children, and described the old hag with an alligator’s face and fingernails as long as a hawk’s talons. He gave her a cave, a fire, and a taste for dark magic. He also gave her a rule. Lobato’s Cuca sleeps only one night in every seven years.

That rule is the hinge of his tale. The Cuca turns the girl Narizinho to stone, and her cousin Pedrinho sets out through the forest at night with the saci, the one-legged trickster he has caught in a bottle, to get her back. They reach the cave on the one night in seven years when the witch is asleep. The air inside is hot and smells of smoke. They tie her down with forest vines, and when she wakes, raging, they let cold water fall on her forehead one drop at a time, patiently, until she can stand it no longer and gives up the secret that breaks her spell.

Lobato’s witch still had something of the old woman about her. The full reptile came afterward, drawn by illustrators and then built for television, where the adaptations of the Sítio, above all the Globo series that began in 1977, put a large, loud, yellow-haired alligator in front of a whole generation of children. That creature is now the Cuca. Most Brazilians asked to draw her will draw an alligator in a wig. The painter Tarsila do Amaral went her own way in 1924, three years after Lobato’s book, with a canvas called A Cuca that shows a bright, strange, rather amiable animal in the bush beside a toad and an armadillo. It has hung in the museum at Grenoble in France since 1928.

Her powers are the powers of the dark hour. She knows which child is awake, she comes without being let in, and she carries off what she comes for. In Lobato’s telling she adds a witch’s craft to that: potions, spells, and the ability to turn a living child to stone. Her limits are just as plain. She has no business with a child who is already asleep, which is the entire point of her. She keeps to the night. And in the version Brazil knows best she can be caught napping, tied up with vines, and beaten by two children and a dripping gourd.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Cuca in Brazilian folklore?

The Cuca is the best-known bogey of Brazilian folklore, a night creature said to carry off children who will not go to sleep. She appears in Brazil’s most famous lullaby and, in her modern form, is pictured as a witch with an alligator’s face.

Where does the Cuca come from?

The Cuca came to Brazil with Portuguese settlers and descends from the Portuguese Coca and the Iberian Coco, bogeys used to frighten children. The folklorist Luís da Câmara Cascudo traced this Portuguese origin in his Geografia dos Mitos Brasileiros in 1947.

Why is the Cuca shown as an alligator?

The Cuca is shown as an alligator because of the writer Monteiro Lobato, who described her with an alligator’s face and hawk-like claws in his 1921 children’s book O Saci. Illustrators and television versions of his Sítio do Picapau Amarelo stories, especially the Globo series that began in 1977, turned her into a full alligator. Before Lobato she was a formless night shape or a thin, hunchbacked old woman.

What does the Cuca do to children?

In the older tradition the Cuca comes at night and takes away children who are still awake and making noise. In Monteiro Lobato’s O Saci she also uses magic, and she turns the girl Narizinho to stone.

How is the Cuca defeated?

In Monteiro Lobato’s O Saci the Cuca sleeps only one night in every seven years. Pedrinho and the saci find her asleep in her cave, tie her up with vines and drip water on her forehead until she reveals how to undo her spell.