After they’d walked two hundred meters along the catwalk, meeting few tourists, Juan picked up Gaspar, who by then was trotting beside him. There were signs that forbade you to let children ride on your shoulders, but there was no rule against holding them in your arms. Still, Gaspar was dangerously high as Juan carried him, and he was restless. He looked down worriedly at the water flowing under the catwalk. As the noise of Devil’s Throat grew louder and a flock of birds flew across the cloudless sky toward the Brazilian side of the river, he kicked a little, anxious and frightened, and said: put me down.
“Are you scared?”
“Put me down!”
There was a shade of hysteria in the boy’s voice, and Juan complied. The catwalk was shaking a little, but it was clear Gaspar wasn’t dizzy. Out of nowhere a coati ran past Juan, who had to step aside to let it pass.
“Tell me what’s wrong.”
Gaspar opened his mouth and extended his hands, then brought them to his cheeks. His eyes were damp and terrified.
“Is there a monster that sucks down the water? Is there a devil? I don’t want to see a devil.”
He knows how to read, thought Juan, and he’d seen the sign.
“There’s no monster, it’s just the name of the big waterfall.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Let’s sit down.”
Along some stretches the catwalks had iron and wood benches painted a dark green, a detail added by the landscape artist Charles Blanchard, who had also designed the gardens at Puerto Reyes, Rosario’s family mansion and the one Gaspar would inherit. The few other tourists around them tromped heavily over the catwalk, carrying thermoses and cameras. Juan waited: he cleaned his sunglasses on the hem of his shirt and took a long drink from the bottle of Crush he had bought at the entrance. It was warm and sickly sweet. He licked his lips.
Gaspar stood up on the bench and approached Juan in a way that could only be described as threatening. He brought his face so close that Juan saw four blue eyes filled with fear, but also determination.
“Did you bring me here to throw me to the monster?”
So that’s what he thought. Of course, it could just be a fear fed by those confused days, by the unhealthy mourning he was going through—the recent months had been a nightmare for his son. But it was true: he was leading Gaspar straight into the arms of monsters. Juan hugged his son, not just because he was trembling, but because he had to keep him from running away, from escaping. Gaspar struggled in his arms. Juan made him sit down, and, holding his face in one hand, he forced the boy to look at him.
“Gaspar, son, it’s water. It’s the river, and farther down it has a huge drop, and the water falls and makes a loud noise. It’s beautiful. That’s why I brought you here, because it’s beautiful. There’s a rainbow. There is no monster, and I would never throw you to a monster and let it hurt you. Never. Look at the people who are on their way there—do they seem scared? No, because there is no monster.”
The boy slightly relaxed his hands, which he had squeezed into fists, and wiped his nose on the back of one.
“I wanted to bring you here so you could see something beautiful,” said Juan. “But if you want, we can leave.”
“There’s a rainbow?”
“Sometimes there are two, and one time I saw three.”
He hugged Gaspar again, and this time the boy didn’t resist. Juan said nothing, not wanting to confuse him. He waited until the boy’s sobs and shivering had subsided. He caressed the back of his neck.
“We can come another day. If you’re scared, we can go back. No problem.”
Juan watched as his son wiped his wet face on his shirt, a gesture he’d copied from his father.
“Let’s go, I want to see if there’s a rainbow,” said Gaspar.
Juan led him by the hand to Devil’s Throat. When they caught sight of it—because the waterfall was visible from some two hundred meters away, before they reached the lookout—Juan sensed Gaspar catch his breath and look at him fearfully again, but this time there was no distrust: he was frightened by the enormity and strength of the river as it plummeted, the water so powerful it was white and hung in the air, and by the noise that forced people to shout if they wanted to talk. Juan wouldn’t let him lean against the railing the way the tourists did. “Dad, we don’t have a camera, we can’t take pictures!” Gaspar yelled, his face spattered with water, and Juan resolved to buy him some postcards later on. There were two rainbows, one in the depths where the water disappeared and transformed into mist and foam, and another in the distance, a truncated rainbow that touched the highest point of the vegetation and disappeared among the branches.
On the trip back to Puerto Reyes, Gaspar babbled about the turquoise butterflies and the rainbow, and he wanted to know their legends. Juan found himself talking about leprechauns, about Ishtar’s necklace of precious stones, about the route between Asgard and Earth. Gaspar talked about the loud noise, he laughed again about how wet they’d gotten, and he wanted to know why his grandparents hadn’t built their house right there. “They couldn’t, replied Juan, it’s a national park: it doesn’t belong to anyone. It belongs to the State.”
“What’s the State?”
“The land belongs to everyone, a single family can’t buy it, that’s what it means. But your grandparents did build a house nearby—don’t you remember it?”
“Yeah,” said Gaspar, “but only a little.” Juan thought it was remarkable how similar children and old people were: both extremes with their forgetful dementia, unable to retain people or places or situations. Gaspar had spent many months of his life in that house, ever since he was a baby. And he remembered it “a little.” Would he forget Juan so easily too, or was it different with fathers? “It’s a very pretty house,” Juan went on. “And it’s yours. It’s going to be yours when your grandparents die. Your mother didn’t have any siblings.”
“Then it’s yours, too. If it’s Mom’s, it’s yours.”
“No, said Juan. “It’s not mine. I don’t have anything. Only you.”
The mansion was built in the twenties, when the Bradford family decided to expand their agricultural business—back then, mostly focused on wheat and located in the province of Buenos Aires—to include yerba mate. In that decade, the province of Misiones was in the process of being settled by colonists from Eastern Europe, Russia, Scandinavia; the Bradfords, descendants of British landowners who had possessed the most fertile lands of Argentina, distinguished themselves by knowing how to handle the local politics, and also by entering the business with significant capital of their own. It was Santiago Bradford who decided where his dream house would be built in that jungle he so loved, and into which he would disappear for days on hunting trips. It would be on the Paraná River, thirty kilometers from Iguazú Falls. Santiago Bradford bought two thousand hectares of jungle, and he hired the architect Von Plessen and the landscape artist Charles Blanchard to design the mansion, the gardens, and the walkway to the river that had to float above the trees, a kind of kilometer-long terrace with a view of the rushing water, the sun as it turned the sky into a red ember, the virgin jungle on the opposite shore.