The Legend of Zapam-Zucum

by Shailendra Ahangama

I have been lost in the desert once. It happened many years ago, when I was a child of nine. As the years progressed, I consigned that dreadful experience to the back of my mind, for it was both an unremarkable and unpleasant memory. Even so, there was one element in that experience contrary to those emotions that I fiercely kept to myself and dared not reveal to another soul. A very recent experience I’ve had shed new light on that event, and it was the final factor that motivated me to commit to paper what happened to me in the La Rioja desert those many, many years ago.

***

I must start at the beginning. I was seated in the back of my father’s dark red SUV watching the streets marked with pedestrian crossings, flanked by traffic lights and lined with colorful convenience stores slowly giving way to a rugged, half-paved road crusading through the thick shrubs and cacti that grew on the red soil.

I was a city boy, spoiled by comfort and convenience, enamored by the flashy electronic devices and toys concurrent with the industry of fast-paced, glamorous city life. My parents, both very intelligent and perspicacious people, had decided that I needed to be more rooted and leveled without being distracted by the tawdry offers of urban life.

So, this was why on every other weekend they drove me over to my grandparents’ house in rural La Rioja. I had to do without my toys and games in their humble home.

At first, it seemed like a stultifying prospect to me, but by my sixth visit, I loved visiting my grandparents in their desert home. They were my mother’s parents, and the more I spent time with them, the more I saw the attributes they imparted to her. My mother got her oval-shaped face from my grandmother, whose own face was now wrinkled and framed by long, wispy white hair. My mother’s vivacious and sociable nature, on the other hand, came from my grandfather, a short, bald, bespectacled, white-haired man who remained articulate in speech and staunch in stature despite his mild arthritis. They were both very hospitable and warm people who doted on me despite whatever mischief and tantrums I inconvenienced them with.

Ten minutes away from their home, my father glanced at me from the driver’s mirror with his coffee-brown eyes and sternly laid out the usual guidelines of behavior outside of home: be considerate, remember your ‘pleases’ and ‘thank yous’, and don’t give them too much trouble. He stopped the vehicle at the pathway flanked by a white picket fence, blessed me, and dropped me off. He drove off in his SUV, stirring up a trail of dust along the rural road.

My grandparents’ home was a low, single-story house built with timber that had been painted a bright, fantastic red.

They welcomed me on the porch. My grandmother, wearing an earth brown blouse and some denim trousers, hugged me and told me that she had made me my favorite food. My grandfather followed her out through the threshold, wearing his favorite green cotton shirt and beige trousers, clapping his hands and singing a song he claimed he had sung to me when I was still in the baby cot.

 I hugged them both and ran to the back of the house, passing the humble dining room, the neat kitchen, and the living room adorned with family portraits along the way.

 There was a verandah at the back of the house that gave a sweeping, idyllic panorama of the La Rioja desert. A mighty ochre mountain range rose along the horizon, looking like the gentle, sloping back of a giant sleeping beast in the light of the midday sun. Short, wiry tufts of bunchgrass were abundant along the desert ground, but there was also the jume with its pretty, yellow flowers, and the exotic, purple flowers of the silverleaf nightshade. I loved the eccentric arches of the columnar cactus and the scarlet flower, balanced on its head like a circus performer. But it was always the carob tree that stole my heart.

The carob trees stood further out in the distance, appearing like clusters of green brushes from where I stood. The girth of the carob tree’s bough was generous. Its branches were aplenty, and its shade offered a wonderful respite from the harsh, scorching rays of the sun. My grandfather took me on a little expedition to observe the carob tree up close one day on a previous visit. He praised it as if it were a dutiful and benign guardian, and he plucked one of its fruits and handed it to me. I took a bite of the brown, elongated fruit and immediately fell in love with its caramel-honey flavor.

“Wonderful, isn’t it?” my grandfather said, slowly approaching me from behind.

I nodded, and a great, wide smile curved up along the old man’s face.

“Lunch is ready, Benicio. Your grandmother has fried empanadas…”

I sat down and had lunch with them. After the delectable meal, I played a card game that my grandfather had taught me and told my grandparents all about my friends and what had happened over the past school year.

All the while, dusk descended over the desert. As I walked past the window, I could see the shy hares going back to their burrows for the evening and the condors soaring to their mountain nests. The ochre rocks and soil took on a stronger scarlet hue in the rays of the evening sun, and until the sun set completely over the horizon, the desert looked grandiose and immortal, and it was a picturesque sight.

Night came swiftly, but by then, I was in my bed in the guest room. My empty mug of cocoa was beside me on the bedroom wardrobe. The day passed by too quickly, and I had only spent time indoors, talking to my grandparents. I loved them, but my mind was young and restless, and I yearned to explore more.

My grandparents were asleep, so I tiptoed to my window and undid the latch. I vaulted over the window and felt my feet land on the soil.

The desert was chilly and pleasant at night. A gentle breeze lulled over the bunchgrass and created a soporific rustle. Toads croaked, and crickets chirped in one chorus. I looked up to the sky, and what I saw filled me with awe; silver stars were abundant across the firmament, free from the taint of city lights. The Milky Way claimed the sky with its glittering cosmic expanse.

All the sci-fi comics and shows I had seen portrayed space in such an insipid and dull manner compared to what I saw that night. I was so captivated by the immense, purple bruise stretching across the cosmos that I ventured further out into the desert.

My young mind vividly conjured images of distant planets, and I imagined myself to be an intergalactic explorer on one of them. My eyes were fixed on the scattered cosmic dust, and my feet followed the wayward direction of my heart.

I can’t remember how long I was occupied with my imagination, but then I remember realizing that I had lost my bearings. My grandparents never kept any lights on in the house after they went to bed, and their house was invisible among the trees and shrubs that created a dark blue horizon at night.

I felt scared. I felt foolish. Why had I abandoned the comfort of my warm bed? Why had I stepped out into this deceptively boundless and baleful land all by myself at night?

Direction seemed like a futile concept to me. Beyond me, I could see nothing but the sharp outlines of cacti and shrubs stretching out interminably into the horizon. I only knew that the great mountains, an otherworldly blue in the starlight, were behind me.

I took a few steps forward with a lot more fear and uncertainty than I had before, moving in the direction I thought I had come from. I felt some thorns graze my ankle, and I yelped in pain. As I bent over to tend to my wound, I heard something slither stealthily along the soil. Then came a sharp, rattling sound, and I felt the stare of a cruel pair of eyes upon me. I froze in place, and my mind grew wild with every morbid possibility.

I shut my eyes tight and hot. Warm tears rushed up to the corners. I was prepared to feel a pair of fangs pierce my flesh and kill me with a fatal dose of venom.

‘Zapam-zucum!’ ‘Zapam-zucum!’
I opened my eyes at the loud sound. It was so loud that it made me deaf to the rustle of soil and shrubs in the wind. It was so loud that it scared the snake and made it flee through the thick clusters of grass. There was a percussive rhythm to the sound as it grew louder and louder.

‘Zapam-zucum!’ ‘Zapam-zucum!’

It sounded soft and heavy in its impact. It did not scare me. Instead, it assuaged my fears and put me at ease. I turned around to investigate the source of the unique sound. What I saw shocked me.

Standing before me was a woman. She must have been well over six feet tall, but to a younger me, she appeared like a giant, for she was the tallest woman I had ever seen. Starlight gleamed on the mocha complexion of her slender frame.

I only stood as tall as her navel then. I slowly moved my eyes up and saw that she had a gargantuan pair of round, full breasts. Each breast was much larger than my torso, and they hung down past her ribs and onto her abdomen, leaving her navel just exposed.

I saw the serene symmetry of her heart-shaped face looking down on me. It was a face framed by long, straight, black hair that cascaded down her back. Her brown eyes were kind and doe-like, and her full lips gave me a motherly smile.  

In a tender voice, she asked me, “Are you lost, dear child?”

I slowly nodded my head. Words just didn’t manifest in my spellbound soul. I simply stared at the beautiful face of the woman who looked down on me past her overly generous bosom.

“You don’t have to worry, my dear child,” she assured me in her voice, which was like a balm to my apprehensive, young soul.

“I am the guardian of the carob trees and the mother to all lost children in this land. You will be safe with me, and I will take care of you with my boundless, devoted love.”

She got down to one knee and picked me up effortlessly with her long, supple arms. I felt the latent strength she possessed beneath those seemingly lithe and feminine limbs.

She cradled me close to her enormous breasts as she stood up. She made me feel safe and warm.

 “Rest in my arms, for the journey is long.”

With long, elegant strides she began to walk into the desert, and I began to hear that sound again.

‘Zapam-zucum!’ ‘Zapam-zucum!’

It was much closer to me now, and I soon realized its source. The sound came from the woman’s enormous breasts. Their soft, heavy mass quivered with every step she took and collided against one another, creating the loud impact that went,

‘Zapam-zucum!’ ‘Zapam-zucum!’

But the sound did not disrupt my calm. To me, it sounded as tranquil and life-affirming as a heartbeat.

I stared at the woman’s face and scrutinized her radiant features. I felt her arms about me, so she couldn’t have been an incorporeal being, but she exuded a demeanor so infinitely gentle and trod upon the sharp cactus and thorny shrub without showing the slightest trace of pain that it was unlikely she was a mortal.

“You must be hungry.”

As she suggested this, I felt a low rumble in my stomach. I must have been spellbound by the stars for hours.

Her glimmering brown eyes fastened on me as she spoke. “Anyone who doesn’t cut down the carob or isn’t a cruel enemy to the animals of this land is always my child,” she said with a smile, “and I will always protect and feed my children with the deepest devotion.”

She raised the arm closest to my head and angled it closer to her breast. The dark outline of her nipple was a hair’s breadth away from my face.

I was hesitant at first, but then I felt her calming, motherly gaze on me which convinced me to accept her offer. I suckled away to my heart’s content.

Writing about this memory is enough to bring me to tears. Tears wrought from sadness, melancholy, and guilt. As I drank from the woman’s abundant bosom, I felt so happy and warm and safe. This wasn’t the variety of happiness that was rapid and ecstatic. This happiness settled in you and warmed you from within like a hot meal. It thawed out all the worry and distress in me at that moment. As I reminisce about it, I realize that the other types of happiness I have felt were paltry and shallow compared to what that graceful, goddess of a woman had given me.

I lost track of time. My eyelids grew heavy. The sound of the woman’s colliding breasts was like a sleep-inducing trance, and I surrendered to its rhythms. As I drifted into sleep, I heard her say, “Remember to protect the trees and the animals as I have protected you, dear child…”

When I woke up, I saw the faces of my grandmother and grandfather against the background of a bright, blue sky. There was worry in their eyes.

“Son, son… are you alright?” my grandfather asked me in a tone of consternation, “Your grandmother and I were very worried. We saw your bedroom window open and… we thought abduction, runaway…”

He stuttered a few more fearful possibilities and shrugged. I looked around me and saw the potted ferns and the rusty wheelbarrow in one corner. The woman had left me on my grandparents’ back verandah.

 They asked me what had happened, where I had been, and whether I was hurt. They inspected my body for any wounds. I eventually lied to them and told them that I had a freak episode of sleepwalking. Their sheer relief had made them temporarily blind to reason, and they accepted my explanation as they hugged me.

 I withheld anything about the mysterious lady from them because I was scared of derision and disbelief. Yet, in my mind, I thanked the guardian with the gigantic bosom profusely.

***

The years passed by in the blink of an eye. I was subjected to the rituals of adolescence and graduated into the rigors of adulthood. I went through all the banal processes: high school, university, and a job. Throughout these periods of my life, I endured failure and celebrated triumph, fell in love and suffered from heartbreak’s wounds, and acquired new virtues to practice and new vices to battle against. My grandparents passed away when I was in high school. I didn’t visit and enjoy the charms of rural La Rioja for a long time. My memory of being lost in the desert and the mysterious, tall woman I had met became a half-forgotten, faded photograph left in the back of my mind.

 I came back to my apartment one evening, exhausted after a long, arduous day of work at the bank. Who could have imagined a more wonderful way to celebrate one’s fortieth birthday?

While I was unbuttoning my shirt and removing my shoes to go for a bath, I heard the telephone in the kitchen ring. I answered it and heard the familiar, comforting cadences of my mother’s voice, “Happy birthday, my darling Benicio! May God bless you in the years ahead!”

She went on to tell me about the lost Marquez novel she had procured recently and her newfound interest in growing ornamental potted cacti. Then, she gave me the news that sparked my excitement.

“I am giving you my parents’ land that you used to visit, son… No, I have no use for it… My life is in the city now, and I know how much you loved visiting it… You can redesign it and alter it to your liking…”

I thanked my mother countless times. Inheriting that gorgeous bucolic home was a miracle for me. I found myself eager to go back and revisit the place that had brought me the simplest and purest of joys in my childhood.

It was a miraculous coincidence that I had custody of my son, Matias, for that weekend. I took him with me in the passenger seat of my Mitsubishi Jeep. I took occasional glances at him as I drove and felt immense happiness as I saw his little brown eyes gaze out at the shrubs and plants of the desert. He was eight years old, and besides the soft head of black hair and sharp nose I had passed on to him, he had the intellect of his mother, which put him in a state far ahead of me when I was his age.

We arrived at my grandparents’ home in the afternoon. The unattended yard had given rise to various multicolored weeds, untamed and unshapely shrubs, and trees that nature had once dispersed as humble seeds. Carobs, red quebrachos, and evergreens congested the yard, appearing incongruent and unpleasing without any order or space in how they grew.

 The lack of maintenance afflicted the house as well. Flakes of dried, red paint had fallen from the warped planks of timber, and thick films of red dust had settled on the surface of the windows. Rust had claimed the networks of the once bright, metal pipes that ran along the roof of the house.

Yet, when I unlocked and opened the door that creaked on rusted hinges, I was surprised that the house’s interior had been well maintained. I supposed the farmers who had rented it had taken good care of this, at least.

Matias ran about the house excitedly. He asked me where I had slept, what his great-grandparents had looked like, and whether he could see any wild animals through the windows.

I led him to the window at the back and pointed out to the desert. His young face held an expression of palpable awe, and seeing this made me feel very nostalgic.

As I left him there to admire the desert, I made a call to a lumberjack I knew nearby. I had envisioned a minimalist, austere holiday home out in the desert, and the first step was to lay out a patio in the front yard. For that, I needed the trees to be cut down.

The lumberjack, who was named Adan, came in an hour later. He arrived in a large, green Ford pickup truck. He was a short, plump man with a thick, black, bushy mustache and an olive complexion. He stood on the porch and acknowledged my instructions with laconic responses and nods of his thick, broad head.

He called two boys in their late teens out of the back of his truck to help him, and they started work promptly. The teeth of the cacophonous chainsaws made the evergreen trees collapse with a cracking sound. A few vigorous swings of the axe brought down the tall red quebrachos.

An hour into their work, they called me. All three workers had pensive expressions on their sweating faces. I saw that they had loaded several trees on the flatbed of the Ford, but the carob trees had not been cut down.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“Sir, we cannot in good faith cut down the carob trees,” Adan said, shaking his head slowly. “Miguel and Benjamin also believe it brings ill fate to those who desire to do so…”

“How so?”

“We have seen many bad things happen to those who cut down the carob tree. We do not wish for you or your son to fall victim to such things.”

He said this to me in a sincere tone of voice. It was the wise voice of a man who had much greater knowledge about the abstruse mystic laws that governed the desert than I. He had the honor, character, and solicitude to warn me of my decision. Yet I foolishly responded with an indignant growl, “I’ll pay you extra for cutting the carobs, happy?”

They hesitated and looked at each other at first. I heard them discuss something, but they must have felt my livid glare on them, for they soon resumed their work. In little over an hour, they loaded the flatbeds of their trucks with the carob logs and drove off.

As I turned around and entered the house, I saw Matias leaning against the doorway. He looked at me coyly with his close-set, chestnut brown eyes.

“Papa, why did you get angry at those men?”

I inhaled deeply and tried to compose myself. I knew how children were quick to antagonize angry people. I absolved myself by explaining, “You see, son, I promised to pay them good money if they cut down all the trees, but they refused to cut down some trees.”

“But they looked scared when you told them to cut the trees down,” he said.

“They are most likely scared of some mythical mumbo-jumbo. Point is, if someone promises you money or a reward to do a task, you commit yourself to it until it is completed.”

He nodded with the pouting face he usually made when he was trying to understand something.

“And this simply isn’t a matter of money, my dear son. It’s about integrity and ethics. If someone helps you, always be prepared to return the favor, or at the very least, do not break the trust you have built with that person. Now, come on in; it’s getting late. I’ll make you those empanadas my grandmother used to make me.”

We cooked and ate together. I entertained him with stories of my childhood and made him laugh. I taught him one of the card games my grandfather had taught me, and by the second round, he had already mastered its subtle tricks. I tucked him in bed in the guest room and showed him the night sky’s constellations through the window as he sipped on a mug of warm cocoa.

I said goodnight to him and went to sleep in the room my grandparents used to sleep in. Nostalgia welled up inside me as I saw the black-and-white framed photographs hung on the walls around me. I fell asleep quickly, but just before I was about to plunge into the depths of slumber, I heard a faint but distinct sound. I was too tired to register exactly what it was, but I thought I could hear a distant rhythm:

‘Zapam-zucum!’ ‘Zapam-zucum!’

I woke up earlier than expected the next morning. I gazed out of my window and saw the orange sun’s light suffuse with the retreating darkness to create marvelous contours of pink in the sky.

I left my room and rushed across the living room to wake Matias and show him this glorious sight. I gently opened the door so as not to abruptly wake him and peered into the room. I was greeted with the sight of an empty bed and an open window.

The bedsheet was crumpled and kept to one side of the bed. The blue curtains that flanked the windows fluttered gently with the frigid breeze.

“Matias? Matias?” I called out.

At first, I thought that he was pulling an elaborate prank, though he wasn’t the kind of child to do that. Only silence answered my calls, and I grew worried.

“Where are you, my darling son?”

I must have sounded like a madman as I walked about everywhere in the house, shouting for him in a panicked, beseeching voice. No area in the house was spared in my frantic investigation. I crept underneath the beds. I peered into the wardrobes. I even searched about in the surrounding shrubs.

I sat on the porch and gripped my hair ferociously. I was drowning in despair. Just when I thought fate had gifted me a wonderful opportunity to bond with my son, it capriciously turned cruel and stole him away from me.

From the position of the bedsheet, I deduced that he had pushed it aside when he saw or heard something through his window. It had to have happened during a time of darkness.

But there was no neighboring house for miles. It couldn’t have been a person he saw.

I taxed my mind relentlessly to figure out just what it could have been. I tried to recollect anything strange I had seen, smelled, or heard last night…

Cognizance leaped into my mind like lightning. I recollected hearing that sound– Zapam-zucum!’— just before I had fallen asleep.

The memories came tumbling back all at once. It was as if I had opened the doors of a cluttered wardrobe.

I remembered the radiant benevolence of that tall woman. I remembered how she had saved me from certain death on that cold desert night. I remembered how I had suckled from her soft and immense breasts, which had calmed the hunger that rioted in me. I remembered how she told me that I would always be her son, for she was the guardian of the carob trees and lost children.

At first, the memories came back with a quiet, contemplative joy, but then I began to feel contrition strong enough to make warm streams of tears fall down my cheeks.

I had failed. I was a miserable and pathetic human being devoid of the wholesome qualities of gratitude and loyalty. I had been nothing but a deplorable leech of her abundant generosity and compassion. I looked at the stumps of the carob trees. In many ways, the divine woman would be a better guardian to Matias than I had ever been.

Author’s Note

Zapam-Zucum is a legend from the austere desert landscapes of La Rioja, Argentina. She is often described as a young woman with long black hair and huge breasts. She is said to be a good and charitable spirit who is a guardian of lost children and carob trees.

She takes care of and breastfeeds children who have been abandoned by their mothers in the desert. Her name is derived from the onomatopoeic sound her breasts make when they collide against each other when she walks.

However, there is a darker side to her. She is said to have stolen the children of those who cut down the carobs and cruelly harmed the animals of the forests, never returning them to their parents ever again.

Shailendra Ahangama is an aspiring writer from Sri Lanka. He published his poetry anthology ‘The Beauty Of Becoming’ in 2019. He has contributed poems and short stories to various local online literary collectives in the past. He has also had his essay ‘The Irish Shop’ published as the cover story in the Piker Press, an online weekly publication, in 2025. Besides writing, Shailendra enjoys diving into music, reading up on foreign cultures and is an avid cinephile in his home in Colombo, Sri Lanka. You can find Shailendra on Instagram @shailo17_ah.