The bad hour, a mochó story from Motozintla, Chiapas

Abstract

This is a story about something that happened to a man who had a girlfriend in Amatenango. One night when he went there to court her, he met a woman on the road who said that she was the one he loved. She urged him to go away with her before her father could find them. But when he looked closely, he saw that her toes were backwards. He put a blindfold on her and hit her, and she ran off. Later, the man decided to try to find her again in order to get her back for deceiving him. So he went out again at night on the road where he had met her, and there she was again. "I've come looking for you", he said. "Well, then, let's go", said the woman. So they went off and when they sat down, he embraced her. So she didn't notice that he put a blessed needle beneath her. The needle had some power that kept the woman from getting up. "You just stay there", the man said. And when dawn came, she was still there. Some other men came by and saw her sitting there with her hair all streaming down, and they knew it was the Mala Mujer that the man had met. Meanwhile, the man went to get a priest. He told the priest that he didn't think the woman was a real woman, and the priest went to see her sitting there on the needle. He told the man to hit her with a branch while the priest prayed. When the man began to hit her and the priest began to pray, the woman just disappeared.