Dr. Lemos cleared his throat. “There are... regulations. Your clinic is unlicensed for wildlife of this magnitude. And we have reports of an ‘unusual attachment’ to the animals. A local official claims you refuse to release a cured tapir back into the wild because it is ‘depressed.’”
And Xuxa, listening, smiled.
Saturnino lifted his head. His nostrils flared. He looked at the open hatch. Then he looked at Xuxa.
“I am sorry,” the officer murmured.
The word seize hung in the humid air. Xuxa looked at the IBAMA officer. “Do you know what happens in Manaus?” she asked him.
The officer shifted his weight. He knew. The facility was a concrete warehouse with steel cages. Animals went in, paced for a year, and came out as hollow ghosts or not at all.
Xuxa leaned on her shovel. “From whom? The loggers I reported last month? Or the rancher whose cattle are dying because he poisoned the creek?” XUXA A VOZ DOS ANIMAIS
“Calma, pequeno,” she whispered, pressing a poultice of crushed neem and barbatimão bark against the jagged gash on a howler monkey’s flank. The monkey, no bigger than a football, whimpered. Its family had been scattered by a trap set for a jaguar. The mother had died trying to free him. “Calma. A dor vai passar.”
On the tenth day, at 5:00 AM, Xuxa walked into the large enclosure behind the clinic. A crowd had gathered outside the gate: the bureaucrat, the officer, two armed security guards, and a vet from Manaus in a sterile white coat.
The rain began to fall again, softly this time. And in the quiet, you could hear it: not just the drumming of water, but the chuff of a tapir, the trill of a macaw, the whisper of a sloth. regulations
Dr. Lemos sighed. “The law does not recognize animal trauma, Senhora. Only viability. You have ten days to transfer your large mammals to a state-approved facility in Manaus, or we will be forced to seize them.”
Inside the enclosure were her children. Not just Saturnino the tapir, but Chico the three-toed sloth, Valentina the blind macaw, and a mated pair of tamarins whose tiny fingers could hold hers with a trust more profound than any human handshake.
Outside the fence, Dr. Lemos frowned. “What is she doing?” A local official claims you refuse to release
The monkey’s black eyes, wide with terror, locked onto hers. For a moment, there was no species, no cage of bone and flesh. Just a shared, silent understanding. Xuxa did not just heal bodies; she listened to the silence between the screams. That was her gift.
“Senhora Mendes?” the bureaucrat said, not meeting her eyes. “I am Dr. Lemos from the Ministry of Agriculture. We have received a complaint.”