Los Duendes This is a retelling of a well-known folktale told to children in many Latin American countries. I have adapted it from interviews with villagers of El Guanacaste in the skirts of Mombacho Volcano in Nicaragua. I went there (Nicaragua) hoping to be kidnapped, adopted, and romanced. I had no intention of going back home until I had been transformed – whatever it would take. I wish I could say that I was taken by surprise, but even though I was still that same little fish, I only pretended to be stunned by the “plastic castle.” I came with a plan. It was all contrived. My parents could not understand why I was so dead set on changing. They warned me I’d come back too foreign, too far gone to ever find a husband, and begged me not to stay too long. Every time I got into a relationship, did they feel like I had been captured by dwarves and worry that I’d be whisked away? Were my boyfriends that strange to them? I know that when I fell in love in Nicaragua, they thought they’d almost lost me. But why was the journey I chose so threatening? I had been truly kidnapped before. Didn’t they remember the middle-class drop-out with the dideridoo who took my virginity by force? The one I tried to make into a good guy, so I could marry him and still be chaste. The one who took the keys when we were on our road trip, and wouldn’t let me call home? Remember that guy? Remember 48 hours, thinking, “Oh, my God, I have been kidnapped. Oh, my God, I have been kidnapped.” After staying with him and trying to make him into a good guy, it was not too hard to seduce him then, to let him think I was in for the ride. Pretending was my only sense of control over the situation . . . and so I waited. Until we drove into a public park with picnickers galour and made a run for a pay phone. When the police searched my car and found his drugs and I went to jail. . . . When my parents thought the drugs were mine and left me in Wisconsin to sort myself out, . . . didn’t they know that that was when I really became unrecognizable? They were not my drugs, but they may as well have been. I felt so dirty, so responsible for the oppression I had suffered under his foreign reign, that I wanted justice for the whole world from that point on . . . and all the tests I gave myself from that point on were testimony to my awakening – to the harsh reality and to the possibility that hides in every shadow and every gasp. Adventure now coursed through my veins and drove my learning. . . my growth elixir. When Sarahi came back to the village, everyone knew duendes existed. Everything about her was different. Through still strikingly beautiful, her sad, dark eyes searched desperately for something that was not there. She was disconnected. She no longer braided her raven hair, but let it hang widely like the bramble that grows at the edge of the cliffs. She was still a “cachetona” with big, round cheeks that made her look like she had swallowed two small planets, but they blushed, almost scarlet now, with new found life. She was a wild thing now, not ugly, not savage, but not of this world either. For the first few months, she didn’t speak. She just searched with wandering eyes, surveying people’s faces, the landscape, and animals, for something that was now missing – her evasive past, the adventure, the wonder, gone. No one saw her eat, but she didn’t lose weight either. Shee seemed to be getting rounder, actually, swelling, transforming into her own world, the sole inhabitant. Sarahi had just walked calmly back into El Guanacaste one day, dragging her feet, smiling at the sound of pebbles scrambling out of her way, after having disappeared for almost a year. She stank of sweat, earth, and animal musk. She was embossed with red-green mud that emanated a dark glow. Months before, the town had given up on looking for her, so, of course, her mother and father were overjoyed to see her, but later, her mother said, “I’m not sure if this is my child. My child was different.” She looked wistfully out of the window at the strange girl drudging around the patio, whispering to the plants. “What happened to her?” The younger children looked at her imploringly, and the aged woman settled down in a rocker to tell the story. “This way you’ll learn not to go out into the forest alone,” she said, giving the children a stern look. “Mi hija was beautiful. She still is . . . but then, she was different, she was different. She was a normal girl before the day she went out into the forest alone that day . . . The school closed because of a storm warning. Sarahi finished her chores early, so she went out on the patio to play. Old Jaime next door saw her talking to herself, but he thought she was probably just playing with imaginary friends. Jaime is a joker. He loves Sarahi. He teased her, “What’s your friend’s name, Sarahi?” Sarahi looked at him and laughed, “It’s a duende. He brought me a present.” She held up a little crown made of flowers. Now, the flowers on that crown were flowers one can only find around the crater, the kind that bloom deep blue at night, and there she was with a crown of moonflowers on her little head. Jaime knows about the duendes. He knows they are dangerous for little girls. The people say that duendes seduce little girls with gorgeous presents and entice them into the forest. Then, they don’t let them come back to their homes . . .” The little girls gasped at the thought, but they couldn’t help blushing at the idea of little men bringing them presents. The little boys laughed. “Don’t you laugh,” she chided the boys. “And don’t you go wishing a little principito would bring you gifts,” she shot at the girls. “The duendes are very bad men,” she added sadly, “Ni si quiera Dios, heaven forbid a duende to take you away from your mama and papa like they took my Sarahi from me!” “Anyway Jaime knew about the duendes, and he knew that Sarahi didn’t pick the flowers by herself, so he locked her up inside of our house until I got home to keep her safe. When he opened the door for me, we found the house in complete ‘alboroto.’ Pots and pans were all over the floor. The food was gone. The pillows were torn and the foam was strewn on the bed. The sheets were on backwards, the floor was covered in honey and rice. And there was Sarahi, sitting on her little bed, blushing and laughing. She was wearing a new crown and a dress made of leaves. “Sarahi, who was here?” I asked her. ‘My friends,’ she answered defiantly, scrambling to her feet. She made a run for the door, but Jaime caught her before she escaped, and she started to scream. We had to tie her up to keep her from leaving the house, and she screamed all night long, sometimes like a human, sometimes like an animal. I told her all the stories I had heard about the duendes, stories I wasn’t even sure were true until now because this had never happened to anyone in our village. She wasn’t hearing any of it. She just screamed and spat at the wall, trying to break fre from the bed. I slept by her side that night, watching her breathe wildly. The next day, I left her, but Jaime was going to keep an eye on her. When I got home, Sarahi was gone. Jaime couldn’t conceive of how she had escaped. He swore up and down that he had just checked on her five minutes before . . . We sent out a search party, and at about three AM, after 8 hours of searching they found her near the crater, wearing the same out fit as before, a new crown of fluorescent flowers, and a dress made of leaves. The men brought her back to the truck, but she wasn’t the same. ‘This girl is gonna fly away,’ they said, watching her wave her arms at the sky, in the back of the vehicle. We took her back to where her home once was, but she did not want part of our world anymore. She wanted to escape. She wouldn’t eat. She wouldn’t talk. We had to keep her tied up with someone watching her. But strange things started happening. Houses were broken into and turned upside down. If a mom turned her back on her baby for even a moment, a duende would come and paint his or her face with coal. And one day, they took Sarahi away. She disappeared for almost a year, and here she is. You see her? She’s not normal. She’s absent. Se quedo dunda! Do you want your momma to suffer like I suffer? Do you want to end up like Sarahi?!” The boys looked at the girls, stupefied. The girls wagged their heads back and forth dumbly, but then a strange thing happened. The same little heads began to bob, up and down, as if they belonged to someone else, possessed, and the frightened woman and her grandsons heard a strange laughter in the distance. There is nothing innocent about kidnapping another person, no noble cause to justify it. But what if the experience of being kidnapped makes you grow so much that you want to be kidnapped again and again and again just to keep growing? What if in the moment of threat, you learn to make the release of control, the sensation of being whisked away, the strange sights, sounds, and tastes into pedagogical tools? The real and the unreal self (Boyatsis), and the pulleys you use to leverage yourself between them are an alchemic mix of exposure and will to meaning (Frankl). By kidnapping me, Justin Tinkle (that’s his real name – sounds like a dwarf name, no?) released me from fear and challenged me to better myself through exposure. CREDITS: Los Duendes is based on tellings by Alberta Jimenez, Norma Corrales, and Roberto Alvarad NOTE: My parents are amazing. I gave them plenty of reason to assume that I was wild and out of control at that time. I had always been very well-behaved, but at this point in my life, while I was not experimenting with any drugs, as it had seemed, I was traveling and doing other, more innocent things that made them worry with no regard for their concern. This misunderstanding has long since been forgiven. We respect and adore each other. They know I will live and work in dangerous settings, but they also know that I do so with the best of intentions, and with their support and protection from above, all will go well. My parents and I are the best of friends, and the best of friends have the greatest capacity to hurt each other. That is just a fact of life. I would not be able to tell this story if it weren’t for our precious and quirky relationship. They give me the story and the confidence to tell it. About the author:
Erin Myers was diagnosed with Autism at age 48. Erin supports neurodiverse learners and their allies through her organization, Pipe Dreams Youth and Families (www.itsnotapipedream.org). This will be her first publication from a massive body of work she has been utterly too shy to share.
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