The Snake Inside Eve by Ana Vaz
Travelling by car from the backcountry semi-arid lands towards the Atlantic coast, it is known that travellers are led to stop and contemplate the impressive scenery of Serra da Mantiqueira. The lush mountain range is called Mantiqueira after Amantikir, from the Tupi Guarani meaning “crying mountains”. The range is replete with cascades and waterfalls; a vast network of natural springs supplying fresh water to large cities in the country. Mesmerized by the timeless beauty of the ranges, travellers tend to stop their serpentine journeys to contemplate the land. The story goes that one family taken by awe, stopped their car and walked into the forest to drink from the mountain’s tears. They were surprised to find a blue waterhole standing majestically below a thin and crystalline waterfall. The family approached the fall and each of them used their hands as cups to drink from the flowing water. The younger of the family, a curious and entranced young girl, mesmerized by the intensity of the scene, decided to open her mouth wide and drink directly from the fall. Oh, I think I swallowed a leaf! Not a minute had passed until the young girl began desperately screaming. Raging pains attacked her stomach while her parents watched her in shock. The young girl was now possessed by a new being hosted inside her: a small snakelet coiling and expanding inside her stomach. The young woman’s tale reverberates timelessly across the ranges, now transformed into a cautionary proverb: beauty is treacherous.
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We were traveling by car, crossing over 300km of soy monoculture plantations that have exponentially taken over the Brazilian cerrado.1 I was taken back by the brutality of the scene: endless green fields of soy pushing back the wild, rough, uneven and savage vegetation of the semi-arid. This is a road I thought I knew, yet the extensive green layer of soy transformed the landscape into a perfectly green dystopia, or rather a murder scene. This is when my mother begins to tell me in great detail about the snake-swallowing tale. Maybe because of the amount of dead snakes by the road, maybe as a warning. All I know is that the image of the young girl drinking from a fall and swallowing a snake rested with me. She appeared to me in recurrent dreams, serene and whole. The tale resonated with me as a founding myth: a snake, a family, a deviant
1
p. 36 “Some notes on making Serpent River”, photocopy of text by Sandra Lahire, 1989.
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Tropical savannah that extends over Brazil’s centre-west states: Goiás, Tocantins, Mato Grosso, Mato Grosso do Sul and parts of Minas Gerais and is home to the country’s most notable river beds.
the films and words of Sandra Lahire
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