When yacare caiman are babies, they have herons and foxes as predators. When they’re adults, they have almost none.
—Nat Geo Wild documentary
When Amalia was twelve, she was always going over to her neighbor Celia’s house. Their families lived next door to each other in a community of country homes. When the sun went down, around five in the afternoon, Amalia walked down the dirt road that led to Celia’s front gate. She didn’t look back or to either side. She had promised her mother she never would.
That day, she had put on her white linen dress and pulled her hair tightly back, leaving her features clearly defined and letting the air caress her ears. Her friend’s house had a fence of steel bars and a white exterior of water-resistant paint. Amalia never went in through the front gate alone because Celia’s father, Silvio, had adopted a baby yacare the year before and he let it roam free in the yard. So Amalia stood outside and clapped until Celia came to the window and ran down to let her in. Celia’s mother had assured her the reptile was docile and would never hurt anyone. But the assurances of strangers never bore fruit in Amalia’s ears, so she preferred to clap.
The yacare would spend hours in a six-meter pool in the middle of the yard. At first, the reptile was very small, and whenever it opened its mouth, any visitors would give little cries of fright mixed with affection. Then it grew, as all creatures do with the passing of time. As an adult, it weighed almost fifty kilos. It pawed its way across that lawn of lush grass freshly planted by the hired gardener.
Amalia had seen the yacare up close only twice: the day Celia’s father brought it home in a box like a souvenir, and now, at the barbecue her friend’s family was hosting that afternoon. Silvio was turning sixty and wanted a big party. Celia’s mother had invited more than eighty people from the neighborhood and gotten a professional magician, one of those of the never-seen tricks. She strung the yard with gold and white garlands and hired a DJ with a thin physique and a formidable bald patch. As soon as Amalia entered the house, she told her friend that she hadn’t seen a party like that in their gated community for a long time. Celia said proudly that it was true and showed her an online tutorial for how she wanted to do her hair later that night, when the Cuarón boys got there.
Amalia and Celia ate finger sandwiches with olives and drank all the sparkling water their stomachs could hold before all their burping left them out of breath. The sun still hadn’t set, but they danced and made fun of the sagging skin of some older women who had just arrived at the party.
The yacare was hidden behind golden bars. Nobody wanted a typical isolation cage. Silvio had it specially designed: it was big and pristine. A temple. Silvio had a particular fascination with animals that walked close to the ground: he thought crawling a transcendent act. After a while, it was time for cake. Everyone came inside and gathered around Silvio, singing the familiar verses. Silvio blew out the candles gracefully and raised both hands in the air. He didn’t offer words of gratitude but downed his glass of white wine in a single swallow. He glanced at Amalia and winked. Amalia smiled. It felt good to get a look from her friend’s father at such a big moment. Some guests ate cake, and everyone else went back out into the yard. It was such a nice night. The two friends danced to a song they knew and let their hair down; then they lay in the grass and rolled around. Their faces were flushed. The youngest of the Cuarón boys hadn’t left the table. Celia was nervous. The boys’ presence had that effect. She excused herself to go to the bathroom. Amalia was left alone, surrounded by smoking adults. She noticed the grass had stained her white dress different shades of green. Her parents were probably sitting in the living room watching TV right now. She had tried to get them to come, but they hadn’t wanted to. Amalia felt strange, out of place. From a distance, she watched a woman three times her age struggle to tear a piece of meat off a toothpick. Who was she? Everybody knew everybody in their gated community, but Amalia had never seen her before. Then she realized that there were a lot of people there she didn’t know, and felt even stranger. The bald DJ changed the direction of the party and added a light show to the dance floor, awash in smells of nature. Elderly couples filled the space, moving gingerly, to the extent their spines allowed. Amalia twirled her dress and saw Silvio watching her. She decided to get away.
She took the opportunity to walk over to the yacare’s cage. For the past year, she had been fascinated by her friend’s pet. Amalia’s mom made fun of Celia’s parents, especially Silvio: “A yacare? Seriously? My God. So pretentious.”
With the rest of the yard decorated, inside that big cage the animal looked like a wax sculpture. Amalia stared at it. The yacare’s eyes were watery and indifferent, like someone who’d been crying and didn’t want you to know. She sensed a kind of agitation in the animal; wanting to communicate understanding, she reached out her hand across the golden threshold. Behind her, Brazilian bossa nova played and a few couples feigned drunken dizziness.
A month before, at a family dinner Amalia was invited to in the role of “sleepover friend,” Silvio had told a story about his childhood in the south. Celia and her mother no longer found the story entertaining, but Amalia listened eagerly. Silvio told them about Moris, a thrifty neighbor who lived deep in the forest of Patagonia. It was Moris’s custom to invite the neighborhood children over for afternoon tea, Silvio and two brothers around his same age among them. He offered to watch them for free, and their parents were quick to accept. Silvio remembered Moris with such feeling that Amalia found it startling. A grown man getting emotional can be unsettling at that age. Silvio wiped away a tear and continued, telling them how he spent hours and hours at Moris’s house, and how sometimes Moris let the boys take naps in his bed. And how Moris, fond as he was of children, also had an odd habit: he liked to buy eggs at full gestation. He got them at a neighbor’s farm and often had boxes full of them, Silvio said. And it happened a few times that, as a kind of show, Moris enjoyed squashing those eggs one by one on a wooden table in the living room. And after squashing them and watching what could have been a chicken spill out, Moris would smile and say that he had the power to turn the future into remnants. That sometimes it was better not to let a thing grow. Celia asked why they didn’t just eat the eggs, but Silvio didn’t answer.
And then he told them how he and the other boys would stay at Moris’s until nightfall, and sometimes he made them soup. He would sit them on his lap and brush their short hair. Even when they didn’t need it, he would do it anyway, saying he was polishing them.
Silvio concluded the story with eyes fixed on a point on his porcelain plate. Celia’s mother asked if he wanted to go to his room and he said no. Celia kept eating as if it were a scene that’d played out a thousand times before. Silvio looked out the window, craning his neck to check that his yacare was still there. And indeed, there it was, eyes shining in the deep end of the pool. Amalia tried more than once to imagine Moris, but couldn’t. She never told Silvio’s story to her mother or father. Or to anyone.
Celia came running back with a pastrami sandwich in one hand and a glass of sparkling water in the other. When she saw what her friend was doing, she shouted no, but Amalia ignored her. The caress was already underway. The young yacare brought its snout to Amalia’s outstretched hand and sniffed it. Celia’s sparkling water spilled across the grass. Amalia smiled and Celia released a high-pitched scream, the kind that turns children’s throats hateful and venomous. “Papá!” she cried, “Papá, the crocodile!”
The yacare had never harmed anyone in the family, but obviously Amalia’s blood smelled different. A group of adults mimed catastrophe. Amalia lost hearing, as if a shrieking alarm were going off. She saw hairdos, belt buckles, cigarettes in the mouths of men. She remembered that egg-breaking adorer of children and the lost gaze of the birthday boy above the candles of an overpriced cake. Celia’s mother tried to calm the situation, soothing the guests and telling the bald DJ to turn the speakers and lights back on.
Amalia was safe and sound in the arms of Silvio, who looked down at her as if he had discovered something. “Don’t worry,” he said, “yacares are almost extinct.” Amalia shut her eyes from the pain and Silvio carried her to his room to treat her. The party continued. Celia doesn’t remember anything else about her father’s birthday. Amalia doesn’t either. The yacare still roams the yard. The species hasn’t disappeared. 
Camila Fabbri was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She is a writer, director, and actor. Her first work of fiction was the short story collection Los accidentes, and her second was the novel El dia que apagaron la luz.
Will Vanderhyden is a freelance translator, with an MA in literary translation from the University of Rochester. He has translated the work of Carlos Labbé, Rodrigo Fresán, Fernanda García Lao, and Juan Villoro, among others. His translations have appeared in journals such as Granta, Two Lines, The Literary Review, The Scofield, Slate, The Arkansas International, Future Tense, and Southwest Review. He has received fellowships from the NEA and the Lannan Foundation. His translation of The Invented Part by Rodrigo Fresán won the 2018 Best Translated Book Award.
