who are all this people?

my spanish teacher spent about a half hour today telling me ghost stories from her life. what could be better? i would like to start off this post by excoriating every friend or family member who hasn`t yet shared their ghost stories with me. please, folks, we`re not kicking around this planet for nothing. put down your inhaler and write me.

anyway, about mildred...she was telling me about the four most famous legends of guatemala, their own versions of the pied piper, the headless horseman, the republican with a heart. they were allegedly terrifying, though not really at all since they´re just about as believable as the hobbit.

for example, you have the woman who visits cheating men, but only when they`re drunk, and she leads them to a remote location where she, naturally, kills them. but they die only when they look directly at her, because this woman has the head of a horse. it`s a fairly credible legend - i've seen women like that, and it's true that they only really take home guys who are very plastered.

then mildred told me about the sombrerón, the little fella (yea-high-abouts) dressed all in black who wears an enormous sombrero and plays a guitar, or some instrument. he sits in a window and attracts women, women with very bad taste, and then - get this - he braids their hair. for nothing! the problem is that he braids it so tightly that it can't be undone. and that's the end of the popular retelling of the sombrerón.

BUT - then mildred tells me about how her grandmother, her abuelita, saw the sombrerón when she was nine years old. the entire story sounds lifted out of a garcia marquez novel, much like this country: her abuelita lived in an enormous house with several different wings, and one day she entered a room and saw a gold figurine on a windowsill. she picked it up and turned to leave the room when she saw the sombrerón, who told her, "it's yours, but don`t tell anyone about it."

naturally, abuelita understood his words to mean the exact opposite, and she immediately told her mother, who wrapped the figurine in a cloth and shoved it in a drawer. when her father showed up later that evening, they opened the drawer and found that the figurine had turned into a piece of charcoal. abuelita's mom asked her to tell the story about the sombrerón, and they found that the little girl could no longer talk.

and so the abuelita spent the rest of her life mute, communicating through sign language. she apparently continued to see the sombrerón up until her death at 92, only when whoever was taking care of her left the room or fell asleep.

personally, my reaction as mildred told me this story was to rifle through my little catalog of mental disorders and diagnose granny before she even lost her voice. which, of course, is not the reaction mildred was waiting for, so instead i gave myself over to the mystery of the story and said "wow" a lot.

mildred went on to tell me several stories of visitations and disturbances she has experienced in her own room over the years - the creepiest possibly being the night that both her television and one of her many mechanized dolls turned on in the middle of the night at the same time. but the loveliest of all the stories was probably the day whe she and her family were having some sort of dinner/holiday. mildred's mother struggled to open the dish cabinet, which had belonged to mildred´s grandfather and had never stuck closed before. at the same time a little girl, not part of the family, pulled aside a relative of mildred's and showed him an old family photo on the wall. "i just saw him here," she said, pointing at mildred`s deceased grandfather. and presto, the cabinet opened.

the ending of that story is kind of lacking...so then they all sat down to eat, and everyone was served rice tamales, for which mildred`s mother was famous. and guess what? they tasted like shit!