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Names & Creature Profile

The promised tobacco arrives at the center of Egídio Ferreira da Silva’s telling, recorded in Taperaçu Campo in July 2013. Maria hears the night whistle and offers a portion for the following morning. An older neighbour comes, receives it and leaves. Maria tells others what the visit has revealed. A few days later, the news reaches the neighbour. When Maria asks her to bless a daughter with fever and a headache, she refuses: someone called a Matinta Perera does not give blessings. The tale’s consequence is the withdrawal of a neighbour’s help. It does not say the visitor caused the child’s illness. [2]

The encounter has a quiet but sharp reversal. Maria gains the identity she wanted and loses a relationship she still needs. The morning visitor is neither defeated nor banished. She hears what has been said about her and answers with the label used against her. The story gives the listener an unresolved social cost: knowing a secret does not mean knowing what one may safely do with it. There is no added reconciliation to soften that ending. The request for help remains unanswered.

Matinta Perera, Matinta Pereira and the joined Matintaperera occur in the selected written sources. Smith prints Matinta-pere in his 1879 travel book. Their different forms of the name accompany narratives that also differ in bodies, conduct and tone. A reader can recognize the recurring presence without assuming that every teller means the same appearance. [1][4]

Homeland & Tradition

These accounts come into view through particular parts of Pará. Silva Júnior’s research in 2012–2013 followed narratives circulating in Taperaçu Campo near Bragança. Ferreira and Nascimento gathered another set at Curuçambaba, Bujaru, in 2015; their coauthor’s family connections helped bring the conversations together. Their studies locate storytelling among people who work, visit and remember one another. [2][3]

That setting matters to the suspense. A figure who comes for a promised portion enters a household’s ordinary social world. The uncanny presence of the night can become a person recognizable by daylight. Distance between forest and home is therefore less important than the change between hearing without seeing and meeting someone at the door. The revelation does not close the story. It changes what the listener understands about the next conversation.

Historical Record

Herbert Huntington Smith’s Brazil, the Amazons and the Coast, published in 1879, presents a brief Matinta-pere section beside other collected Amazonian narratives. He explicitly admits that he has learned little about the being. His interlocutors are described by locality, including Santarém, without the individual names he gives to some other storytellers. He calls the figure harmless and offers a moth explanation for sounds around sugar mills. The explanations and the words he chooses belong to this visitor’s written account. [1]

The difference between a story and its collector’s interpretation is visible on the same page. A voice asking after molasses is one remembered event; Smith’s suggestion about insects is another kind of statement. Neither needs to erase the other. Reading them together reveals both the attraction of the encounter and the observer’s effort to explain it. His confidence about harmlessness also belongs to this small selection. It cannot settle the conduct of Matintas in later records.

Appearance & Signs

Smith describes an often invisible presence announced by wings or a repeated call. It may take the appearance of an old man, a priest or another person or thing. Shouting can make it disappear with the sound of wings. One story gives it an older woman’s form; his comparison with the Tau-tau of Ereré adds bat, snake and bird appearances, although he proposes rather than proves the identification. [1]

Ramos and Simões place contrasting Santarém descriptions beside one another: one narrator describes human and animal forms, while another says the figure cannot be seen or defined. Their study makes the disagreement part of the subject. [4]

Sound can therefore do work that a fixed portrait cannot. A listener knows something is near while lacking a dependable outline. A human shape the next morning rearranges that expectation again. The frightening quality lies in the interval between those perceptions. Giving every account the same feathers, face and costume would remove the very uncertainty that keeps the selected appearances distinct.

Nature & Powers

The requests in Smith’s account are modest. A Santarém interlocutor tells him of an old man passing a sugar mill who hears a voice asking about his molasses from behind a stump. He looks and finds no one. Smith also places nocturnal sounds near the small mills, where sweetness and darkness give his phantom a particular attraction. The being’s mobility has no single defined limit in his description: walking, flying, vanishing and assuming forms all occur. [1]

The stump encounter depends on a small failed action. The man turns to identify a speaker and cannot find one. There is no pursuit or injury in the reported ending. A question has made an everyday substance strange, and looking has failed to restore ordinary certainty. The tale gains its flavor from molasses beside a mill. Replacing that request with a demand for souls would produce a different being and a different encounter.

Orivaldo Pereira da Silva tells of his grandfather Dico, who fishes for grouper. On a trip to the tidewater he hears a whistle and promises a portion for the next morning. Returning early, he sees a woman approaching across the field. She addresses him by name and asks for the fish he promised. He recognizes her as the night whistler, cuts a piece and gives it to her. The teller identifies her as a familiar woman from an island. In this encounter, recognition ends in the delivery of food. [2]

Tales & Encounters

Smith’s other complete episode takes the voice into the streets of Pará. His narrator places it after the rebellion of 1835. A patrol hears singing and follows it to an orange tree, where it finds an older woman who cannot answer its questions. The patrol takes her to the guardhouse and locks her securely inside. By morning she is gone. The account ends with that disappearance, without explaining the means of escape or adding an attack on the guards. [1]

Following the sound seems to solve the first mystery: unlike the man beside the stump, the patrol finds a visible person. Its next action assumes that a locked building can contain her. Morning defeats that assumption. The sequence offers two thresholds of understanding, discovery and confinement, then leaves both unsettled by the empty guardhouse. The orange tree is especially memorable because it gives the strange voice a precise perch inside a town.

A different outcome appears in Visita noturna, an Abaetetuba narrative discussed by Andressa Ramos and Socorro Simões. A household offers tobacco in response to a night call. The morning visitor brings flowers for a thirteen-year-old girl, who thanks her and says she loves flowers and animals. The scholars read this generous encounter beside other narratives of lively older women. Here recognition leads to a welcome gift. [4]

The difference is emotional as well as visual. An empty locked room leaves authorities with a failed explanation; flowers let a young recipient respond with pleasure. Both outcomes require the story to continue past the first sound. The name can support alarm, embarrassment, humor or friendliness according to what the visitor and the people around her do.

Landscape & Associations

The sugar mill, stump, orange tree and guardhouse give Smith’s selected encounters a landscape of work and settlement. His Matinta-pere travels near paths and villages, and his Tau-tau comparison concerns a miriti grove close to Ereré. These are different locations, rather than a single remote lair. The extraordinary presence enters places already used and recognized by people. [1]

In Curuçambaba, Ferreira and Nascimento describe cassava plots, regrowing vegetation, forest and streams near the Guamá. Their account follows stories within that inhabited landscape. [3]

A map of encounters would follow routes rather than a monster’s territory: paths to work, a place where sweetness is made, a street heard by a patrol, a door reached after a promise. The boundary that changes most decisively is the household’s threshold. What could only be heard outside becomes a visitor who expects someone inside to remember what was said.

Variants & Kindred Beings

Smith’s proposed Tau-tau connection is useful precisely because he marks it as a comparison. He also introduces an adjacent lost-soul story whose narrator cannot identify the being. That unidentified episode is not made part of Matinta-pere’s powers here. Similar placement on a printed page does not establish that two figures are the same. [1]

The selected newer narratives give another reason to resist a single anatomy. The night sound and daylight visitor can connect the accounts, while a particular body or moral character changes. A friendly gift is not evidence that the frightening versions never existed; an ominous call does not turn every older woman in these stories into a villain. Variation changes what the encounter asks of its listeners.

Silva records a finer distinction in the Taperaçu Campo call. The listeners identify the name Matinta Perera within its repeated whistle, the feature they call dobração. A similar night whistle without that identifying turn can be attributed to Curupira or Mãe d’Água. The sound therefore invites close attention: hearing a call is not yet the same as recognizing who has made it. This distinction belongs to the community account he records. [2]

Meaning & Belief

Silva Júnior interprets the promised portions through relationships of giving, receiving and returning. His analysis treats supernatural disturbance alongside everyday connections between neighbours. Ferreira and Nascimento, using their own Curuçambaba material, interpret requests in relation to poverty, age and help for people whose means of supporting themselves are limited. These are the scholars’ readings of particular narrative collections. [2][3]

Maria’s story makes that problem personal without resolving it into a simple moral. She delivers what she promised, yet repeats a secret and encounters a refusal later. The older neighbour can withdraw cooperation as well as request it. The tale gives her agency through speech and memory. Its discomfort survives because both the exchange and its breach occur between people who expect to meet again.

The flower visit allows a different recognition. The young recipient meets someone who has thought about what she might enjoy. Generosity supplies a human detail that a stock portrait of an evil crone would miss. Putting these endings beside one another preserves the older visitor’s range of conduct rather than making age itself the explanation for menace.

Later Retellings & Reception

Rádio Web UFPA’s Conto Ribeirinho presents Matinta narratives from recordings made in Abaetetuba and Ananindeua in 1994. Its programme note describes alternating bird and human appearances and explains why tape noise was retained in the 2020 podcast presentation. The old recording medium becomes part of a new way to hear stories. The note itself emphasizes local differences among the Matintas. [5]

Ferreira and Nascimento also describe Matinta in a Belém public monument and in the environmental-education performance of actress Maria Borges. These are later uses with particular settings and purposes. [3]

A performance makes an arrival audible to a new audience; a monument gives the figure a lasting outline; an edited recording carries a teller’s sound across time. Each changes the conditions of encounter. None has to exhaust the versions that preceded it. The return from whistle to visitor remains especially suited to storytelling because its force depends on hearing one thing and discovering another.

Evidence & Open Questions

Smith’s unnamed interlocutors, the later recorded field conversations and the literary study have different trails of attribution. The older print record preserves his explanation alongside its stories. The newer studies name places, occasions and methods, while their quoted narratives still require readers to distinguish a teller’s account from a researcher’s inference. The disagreement about appearances is evidence of that varied trail, rather than an error to be silently corrected. [1][2][3][4]

What a listener does with recognition remains the entry’s most consequential question. An older visitor may leave someone holding flowers, leave a patrol with an empty cell, or refuse help after a confidence has been broken. Maria’s tobacco was delivered, but the story continues because the relationship was not finished with the transaction. By the time she asks for a blessing, the night whistle has become a dispute between neighbours. The answer she receives is memorable because it uses her own discovery against her.

Sources & Manuscript Notes

Read Smith’s complete Matinta-pere section on pp.566–568 beside Silva Júnior’s Taperaçu Campo conversations on pp.491–493 and their analysis. Ferreira and Nascimento’s Curuçambaba study offers an independently gathered local set. Ramos and Simões discuss selected Abaetetuba narratives and the representation of older women. Rádio Web UFPA’s programme note identifies a separate route from 1994 recordings to the Conto Ribeirinho podcast. [1][2][3][4][5]

Brazil, the Amazons and the Coast: Matinta-pere ↗
Herbert Huntington Smith · Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1879; Internet Archive
Chapter XVIII pp.566–568, complete Matinta-pere section and transition
Fresh complete public-domain OCR read; surrounding lost-soul account read only to check explicit uncertain identification. No ritual procedure imported. Original storytellers unnamed.
Checked 2026-10-11
O mito da Matinta Perera de Taperaçu Campo e o conceito de dádiva ↗
Fernando Alves da Silva Júnior · Amazônica 6(2):484–502, 2014
Printed488–499/PDF5–16; especially491–493 and496–498
Fresh complete selected methods, locality, transcribed narratives and gift-analysis sections read. Maria episode follows actual transcript daughter/tabaco, not later analysis’s inconsistent son. Original interview audio not played.

The artist’s reading of the legend

Illuminated folios

These artworks interpret the stories and landscapes explored here. They are imaginative illustrations, rather than historical records or evidence of an encounter.

An elderly woman stands partly in a wooden doorway beside a moonlit Pará riverbank, with a small indistinct bird silhouette outside, within a dark carved wood, silver-reed and violet celestial frame. — Original interpretive illustration inspired by the old-woman appearance recorded in Smith’s Matinta-pere section; clothing and the ambiguous distant bird are artistic choices.

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