Mbói Tu’ĩ

The sandstone hills above Tobatí hold the day’s heat long after the light has gone off them, and the low forest at their feet gives off the green, standing-water smell of a country that is mostly marsh. Somewhere in there, near Cerro Kavaju, the old accounts put a snake as long as a fallen tree. On the end of it was the head of a parrot. The beak was the wrong size for the head and the head was the wrong size for the body, and none of that troubled anyone who told the story.

Mbói Tu’ĩ is exactly what the name says. Mbói is snake. Tu’ĩ is parrot. He is the second of seven brothers, and the seven of them exist because of a single act and the punishment that landed on the next generation instead of the guilty party. Tau, a spirit of the bad kind, wanted a Guaraní woman called Keraná badly enough to take her. The goddess Arasy answered with a curse aimed past him: every child of that union would come two months early and come deformed. Seven pregnancies, seven months apiece, seven monsters. Teju Jagua arrived first with his seven heads. Mbói Tu’ĩ arrived second.

The descriptions agree about the trunk and quarrel over everything else. All of them give him the body of an enormous serpent, heavy and scaled, and a parrot’s head with a beak big enough to count as a weapon on its own. Most add feathers running from the crown down the length of the spine, and a forked tongue the colour of fresh meat. The museum text that fixed his modern image gives him nothing further: a snake, a bird’s face, and no limbs at all. Other printed versions insert a pair of short legs at the front of the body, which does the picture no favours. He crawls, and the tellings are firm that he can also fly, low and heavily, the way something too large for its wings gets off the ground.

He lived among rocks and broken ground, but the marshes were his in a way the hills never were. Flooded grassland sits warm and shallow for months at a stretch and the whole of it ticks and clicks with frogs after dark. That was where he worked. Sliding through the reeds at first light with the dew still beaded along his scales, taking nothing, moving nothing, walking his boundary the way a keeper does.

What he guarded was oddly specific. The aquatic animals first, which is the part everyone remembers, but also the dew itself, the damp, and the flowers. His diet matched the work. He ate fruit and drank dew, and the Paraguayan versions name the fruit: apepú, the sour orange, the one nobody eats straight. A serpent the length of a canoe, cursed into the world by a goddess, living on bitter citrus.

The sound was what carried. Anyone who has heard a parrot at close range knows the register, and the stories scale it up to fit the animal, until it is a screech that leaves the water and reaches the far bank before he does. A man crossing the shallows at dusk hears it come off the reeds and does not stop to work out how far away it started. The wail is there in the Guaraní verse a Paraguayan poet set beneath the sculpture of him, where anyone going over Cerro Kavaju is advised to get past the place without hearing it.

The shape all of this has now is younger than it sounds. Almost everything the seven brothers do in modern Paraguay reaches us through Ñande Ypy Kuéra, a long Guaraní-language poem published in 1929 by Narciso R. Colmán, who signed himself Rosicrán and translated his own work into Spanish eight years later. Colmán said plainly that parts of it were his own invention, assembled from oral scraps and from his reading of petroglyphs. Then in the early 1960s a sculptor from Capiatá, Ramón Elías, went round the interior collecting the legends and modelled all seven in the round, and the Mbói Tu’ĩ that Paraguayans picture is largely his. Curators in Asunción are direct about what this material is: folklore built after the Conquest by Paraguayans, on Guaraní roots and Spanish Christian ones at once, warning stories rather than religion. The seven monsters were never part of the Guaraní creation accounts. That is precisely why the missionaries left them where they were. There was nothing sacred in them to pull out.

It leaves him with a problem the other brothers do not have. Moñái, the third son, gets a story: he steals, he is cornered, and the woman Porãsý walks into his cave and burns with him to finish him. Kurupi gets his appetites. Jasy Jateré gets the children. Mbói Tu’ĩ gets a territory, a description, and no episode at all. Nothing in the record kills him. Nothing defeats him, tricks him, or hands him a last scene. He is a guardian who was never given anything to guard against, and the silence around him says more than most of what was written about his brothers.

His powers follow from the body he was cursed into. He is vast and he can constrict, which the retellings mention without ever quite showing him do it. He moves fast over ground that stops nearly everything else, reeds and mud and standing water together. He can get himself into the air for short distances. Above all he has the voice, and the voice does the work of a far more violent animal, because a warning that carries a mile means the fight usually never starts.

The limits are just as plain. He does not leave the wetlands, and out of them he is a very large animal in the wrong country. The diet that makes him nearly harmless in the museum’s account also ties him to a landscape that has to keep producing fruit and dew, and the marshes he answers for are exactly the marshes people drain. His shape is not a choice and cannot be shed. Arasy’s sentence was passed before he was born, and not one of the seven is ever recorded getting free of it. He is stuck being what he is. The parrot’s head does not come off.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Mbói Tu’ĩ?

Mbói Tu’ĩ is a monster of Guaraní and Paraguayan folklore: an enormous serpent with the head and beak of a parrot. The name is a straight compound of the Guaraní words for snake and parrot. He is counted as the second of the seven monstrous sons of the spirit Tau and the woman Keraná.

What does Mbói Tu’ĩ protect?

Mbói Tu’ĩ is the guardian of the great marshes and everything in them. The accounts name the aquatic animals first, then the dew, the damp and the flowers. His authority does not extend beyond that flooded country, which is where he stays.

What does Mbói Tu’ĩ eat?

Fruit and dew, and nothing else in the older museum account. Paraguayan versions specify apepú, the sour orange. For a monster the size of a fallen tree, it is an unusually mild diet, and it is one of the reasons the seven brothers were treated as warning tales rather than as devils.

Why are there seven Guaraní monsters?

The spirit Tau abducted a Guaraní woman named Keraná, and the goddess Arasy cursed the union so that every child of it would be born at seven months and born monstrous. The result was Teju Jagua, Mbói Tu’ĩ, Moñái, Jasy Jateré, Kurupi, Ao Ao and Luison. Mbói Tu’ĩ is the second of them.

Where does the story of Mbói Tu’ĩ come from?

The version circulating today was given its literary form by the Paraguayan poet Narciso R. Colmán, writing as Rosicrán, in his 1929 Guaraní-language poem Ñande Ypy Kuéra, and its visual form by the sculptor Ramón Elías in the early 1960s. Colmán acknowledged that parts of the work were his own invention. The seven monsters are post-Conquest Paraguayan folklore with Guaraní roots, not part of the older Guaraní creation accounts.

Related Entries

Teju Jagua, Moñái, Jasy Jatere, Kurupi, Ao Ao, Luison, Pombero, Tupã, Jasy, Boi-tatá, Yacumama, Sachamama, Amaru, Curupira, Anhangá