cuentos Almoradi

She breathed, she smiled; sat there under a canopy of bougainvillea with the heady musk of Lady of the Night filling her. She looked out at her two boys playing happily in the park among the other Spanish kids, Well, they were Spanish kids too. She had Spanish children! Three! What a life...

Beside her her Spanish daughter plodded happily around her buggy. It really seemed a genuine miracle that had happened to her. The Evil Eye taken from her .... listen to the thoughts she was having! Evil Eye, jesus! She had never been superstitious. She grew up in a mundane pebbledashed Semi where reality was having to eat sodden brussel sprouts.  Church was putting on uncomfortable clothes once a week. Children were seen and not heard.

Here though.. her Spanish children chattered and played and could be themselves, be loud, be shy, be silly, be coarse. They were taken and loved for who they were. Guapos. Never skelped for talking out of turn...
The first time she heard the expression Mal de Ojo was when her oldest boy was a baby and a friend commented that she didn't have protection from it on her pram. Her Spanish wasn't what it was now, and she thought that the friend was talking about bad eyes, that it would prevent squints or something.
Then just a few months ago she was talking to her sister-in-law about her daughter. She was listless. She endlessly has a mucusy cough and her nose ran. Infections seemed to come one after the other. Her sister-in-law nodded and held out her hand to the baby's face. Mal de Ojo, she said and this time she knew what it meant: the Evil Eye was on her. Some jealous person envied her daughter and was making her sick. So she submitted to the superstition. Why not, what could be the harm?

First she needed the Mal de Ojo exorcised then she need protection from its happening again. A red ribbon with la cruz de caravaca attached was to be pinned to her buggy. For the exorcism her sister-in-law knew someone who had come through breast cancer gifted with the ability to heal others with her hands. Hmmmm... she took her daughter anyway.
The healer wasn't as old as she'd expected. She expected a black dressed old lady, bent and hairsprayed, that she saw tending the Hermitas. The healer must have been in her late forties. She told her to sit down and put her daughter on her lap. She had to waken her and sit her sleepily there. The healer put a palm on her daughter's face on gave her such a tender look that she felt a sob trying to escape her.
The healer prayed first then came over to her daughter and held both her open hands about half an inch from her. She had her eyes closed and was muttering something, moving her hands over the arms and legs of her child. She felt goosebumps on her arms. Her daughter smiled and looked at the healer. Her hand movements about the body were circular and getting quicker until, at some climactic moment, she raised both of them up the trunk of the child , past her face and up out the top of her head. The child's hair shot straight into the air as if there was an electrical storm. The woman stood up and went to her desk and came back with the ribbon and cross.
It is lifted , she said, keep this pinned close to her at all times.
The healer kissed her on both cheeks and that was that. Her daughter had slept for three hours then roused and smiled and she could see in her eyes, in her steady breath, that something had changed. She was lively. She wanted up and out the buggy to explore. She was hungry and thirsty and babbling. It was a miracle.
When she told her husband he told her not to believe in such rubbish. She didn't care though, she didn't need to believe. She had been there. She saw what happened, she knows her daughter.
At the park, her two sons ran up to her and one went to play with the daughter. The other is thirsty. Water, he says, I want water. What a simple miracle a bottle of clean water is to give to a growing child. She goes into her bag to get it and behind her from the bushes the crickets strike up their serenade to the night. She finds the water.