If I had to rank my causes of fear as I walk alone on a jungle road in Misiones at 2 am, it’s a complex scale that includes the human, the natural, and the supernatural. Any of the three can be deadly. This is what I think about as I make my way back to Iguazú town from the hotel where I work a night kitchen shift. I can’t wait to get to the asphalt and the lights.

We all know this road is favored by smugglers, but even so, this is one of the least worries in the mind of a worker at the Triple Frontier: smugglers come in many sizes and nationalities. Mostly they carry cigarettes or frozen chicken up to the river and the silent barges that cut the waters dividing Argentina from Brazil like pale knives. They might be a bit more dangerous if it’s drugs; it’s always a good idea not to look them in the eye. Their faces, even if flashing by as half-moons, are all familiar faces.

So if I had to rank them, smugglers’d be at the lowest part of the fear scale. As for me, you could say I’m at the bottom of the hotel’s one: I’m a dishwasher and have to stay until all the cleaning is done. I smoke my last cigarette, leaning on the hotel’s stone walls as the supervisor does his last round and there’s a cumbia playing on a small radio, feeble against the huge night.

Then we all start our way home, although most workers have their motorbikes or even a battered car to avoid the walk. All of them have been working here for longer than I; free seats were all arranged before I started. I try to ignore their jokes on a diversity of horrors; I keep silent and act as if I were arranging my backpack—carefully checked by guards every night at the gate—and wait until they’ve all left. I may stay, like tonight, to chatter about the latest football match or the weather with the guards. They also have stories to tell, like the one about the puppy they loved which one night, after barking and darting into the forest right in front of the hotel gate, whimpered a couple of times, and was never heard of again.

“It’s jaguars, and no one believes us,” they insist.

They tell me of the images in the cameras from a neighboring hotel, but then I’ve heard the roaring myself a couple of times. I listen to the night’s silences in the forest, as they speak predator. But sometimes it’s much more frightening to hear sounds you cannot account for, like this unsettling wind, refreshing but making all the trees talk behind my back as I walk.

Sounds and sights are so misleading. How to discern frogs from crickets or bats evades me. The sudden rustle of leaves a meter away from you, inside the black wall the jungle turns into, could be anything. The way the moon hits the treetops and creates that mottled light—hushed and silvery—and fills spaces with shadows. The lichens on trunks seem to be ghosts, and form strange maps.

Allow me to go up in the scale: legendary creatures. In our province’s tradition, most of us believe in several of them. Everyone says they derive from Mbya Guaraní folklore, but I once asked a Mbya kitchen hand, and he despised them as settlers’ tales. They have their own beings to fear, he said with a smirk on his face, and upon trying to find out more, he became quiet.

“We know how to read the night,” he just said. “And only some nights are for walking.”

There’s no family in Misiones that hasn’t got a relative’s account of an encounter with one of the creatures. The setting is always a lonely road upon a late return, or a backyard overlooking the jungle. We have the unpredictable Pombero, and this hairy dwarf can either help you or get you lost; when he whistles at you from a distance, he’s right beside you. The sound of chickens is also typical of him (you could argue that people have poultry in Misiones, but there’s no poultry in the jungle). Yet I think I’m more afraid of Malavisión, a tall ghost of a woman that plucks the tongues out of hunters’ mouths and turns them mad. Not that I’m a hunter, but her size and her legendary screams are nightmarish, plus the tonguecutting. And I don’t even want to talk of werewolves.

So when I hear the sound of a motorbike, I’m almost relieved: it’s smugglers, and I just have to hide until the mosquito-like sound passes by, disrupting the forest smells and silence for a few minutes. Once they’ve gone, I can continue, and one of my worries is done with. The jungle shines on in its intense courtship with darkness one is never part of, and my steps patter with a soft regularity once more, as if I stepped on cloth.

It’s the last stretch of forest now, closer to the route. To the right, the Customs in its white light; to the left, the curve that takes you to Iguazú town, still far but announcing itself with a glimmer.

Every night, when I get to this point in my walk, I notice how something starts relaxing around my jaw; I forget what the jungle was murmuring and concentrate on the town’s shimmer.

Only something is suddenly off now, and my jaw clenches once more, and my hair stands on end. I turn around, and it all looks as usual but feels different; my mind races through the alternatives I’ve been considering, weighing the length of my dart across the route, and how many seconds it will take me to get across if I run hard to where the lights are.

There’s a movement in the trees behind me, like before a storm. I start running, feel the asphalt’s smoothness, and I don’t see the car that runs me down, racing towards who knows where at this time of night, never expecting to see a dark figure plunging out of the jungle into its headlights.

Behind, the jungle closes on itself like dark water after a stone has fallen in.

Andrea Ferrari Kristeller

Andrea Ferrari Kristeller is an Argentinean teacher, bilingual writer and naturalist. Her poems and short stories have been published by several different American, Canadian and British magazines. Her nouvelle “The Land Without You” was published by the University of Misiones Press and self- published in English on Amazon in 2023.