The Witching Hour
By Lorena Hernández
Leonard
Theano Giannezi, Hide, pencil drawing and golden leaves on paper, 7.8 x 5.9 inches, 2016. Courtesy of the artist.
The Witching Hour
Lorena Hernández Leonard | APR 2022 | ISSUE 15
A couple of summers ago, my family and I vacationed on a horse farm just north of Boston. The sun was scorching when we arrived, and the air was thick with the smell of horse manure, but I didn't mind. Instead, the pungent odor greeted me, serving as a welcome reminder of my trips to family fincas along the Andean cordilleras when I was a child. I ran towards the horses and fed them from my open palm. Their hot, heavy breath felt good on my skin. I didn’t care that my clothes were sticking with sweat from the intense humidity. The horses’ breath—a mixture of earth, sweat, and the sweetness of grass—was so delicious I had to get closer. I wrapped my arm around the mighty neck of a gorgeous chestnut-colored mare, ran my other hand through her fiery red mane, and pushed my forehead against her muzzle. I inhaled deeply and drifted happily.
Most people are repulsed by the stench of horse manure, but for me the smell brings me back to something magical. It transports me to the otherworldliness of the Andes, roots me like a tall tree to the dense mountain floor, and clouds my mind from the present moment like the ethereal fog that hangs low to the ground in the mornings. That smell, no matter how many years have passed, allows me to see the hummingbirds sipping nectar in a hurry; to hear the sounds of the campesinos tending to their chores—drying coffee beans in the sun, milking cows, and chopping down platano clusters with machetes; to reimagine myths and legends about indigenous burials full of gold or the bloodcurdling cries of La Llorona.
I was about ten years old the last time I remember visiting tío John’s finca. That particular year the mountains were saturated by heavy rainfalls, making the trek up the cordillera an odyssey. When the old Toyota FJ Cruiser my uncle had hired to drive our entire family to his finca could no longer pass through the thick mud, we hiked the rest of the way on foot. Our shoes were caked with ochre-colored clay and my sister Katerina was entirely covered, as she pretended to fall in the mud numerous times. Her white outfit, which Mami had handsewn, was unrecognizable. I was certain that ruining her new clothes meant Katerina would be getting my mother’s hand, with all five fingers, imprinted across her bottom. But Mami didn’t seem to worry, she only scolded her.
This was unusual. At that age I understood our place in the economic ladder. Scraping by each day, I knew I couldn’t ask for much. I recognized that the outfits Mami had sewn for us had been a significant sacrifice of financial resources we didn’t have; not to mention the late night hours Mami spent making them. My sister carelessly destroying an entirely new outfit seemed like the kind of crime that would require severe punishment and when she didn’t receive it, I felt relieved even though I was not the one who committed the offense.
Maybe the mountains might have changed Mami’s mood, as it changed mine, as it seemed to change everyone else’s. Such was their magic. This was our brief escape, our heaven for a couple of weeks out of the year. The loud roars of motorcycles in a drive-by shooting, the commanding military police holding machine guns, and the anxiety of everyday life were all left behind the further we traveled up the mountains. Our only concern was the tiring trek on foot as we lugged our things up the steep and muddy trail—clothes, blankets, pots and pans—along with my baby sister Alexandra, who, at the time, was a wobbling toddler. In the city, bullets flew fast and we ran for cover. In the Andes, hummingbirds flapped their wings in a frenzy and came to feed from all sides of the forest like buzzing bullets. We watched in wonder. Our anxiety drifted.
The rawness of this untamed natural setting heightened our experience. The scent of burning firewood, sweet like aguapanela, kept our bodies warm and our bellies full. We visited distant relatives at their finca, played with baby pigs in a stinky pen, ran around after the chickens (one of which would inevitably end up on our dinner plate). We watched in awe as the cows were milked—a squirt of their warm, creamy elixir, straight from the teat, was shot right into our mouths. We climbed tangerine trees, the citrus oil infused our clothes, hair and skin. We fell off of horses and cried over our bruised bottoms. And we made the trek down to the river to replenish the water we needed for food, for drinking, for washing the mountain off our bodies.
The Andes not only provided a sensory experience, they evoked a sense of the supernatural, the mythical. They were the stuff of legends that inspired curiosity and a different type of fear. I was afraid of La Madre Monte, as I imagined her with long vines and moss hanging from her giant stature, who might appear in the dark and grab me by the legs while I slept. I worried I might run into La Llorona, crying hysterically by the river, while we filled up our buckets with water. Under the full moon, I watched with dread and delight for the place where I was told there was a tunjo—an indigeous burial that hadn’t yet been dug up.
The idea of finding a tunjo especially thrilled me. I fantasized about catching a glimpse of the small golden figurine of a cacique, an indigeous chief, as he came out of the dirt to dance above the grass. I pictured its solid gold, flat body shining under the moonlight. According to the campesinos, whoever caught the cacique would become rich. He was the key. The ground would open up and reveal a clay pot full of gemstones and pre-Colombian artifacts made of gold. But catching the cacique was not easy. He only came out under the light of the full moon and only after midnight when malevolent spirits also came out to haunt the living.
Excitement and danger lurked from every corner of the thick forest we inhabited for those two weeks out of the year. The fear of encountering a mythical thing was overpowered by the excitement of encountering a mythical thing. This fear wasn’t the same as encountering sicarios (narco hitmen) in their motorcycles or the teenager on the second floor of my apartment building who wanted to violate my body. Those fears were all-consuming. They left me petrified and numb. I wanted to run away from the fears in the city. I wanted to run towards the fears in the mountains. This possibility accelerated my heart and left me wanting more.
The spellbinding stories the elders told became an integral part of my psyche. This landscape of dense vegetation—that under the blackness of night hid creatures both of this earth and of another world—was an excellent backdrop for such fantastical tales. My grandfather saw sunset as a good opportunity to infuse our hungry brains with tales of incredible feats, like outrunning the devil while he was a boy growing up in the same monte where we now stood.
“Do you know the story Cien Años Debajo de un Palo de Aguacate?” Papito Martín would begin his stories with this joke. Of course, he was parodying Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude with his own version, One Hundred Years Under an Avocado Tree. My sisters and I giggled and settled in for what would surely be an epic story.
“When I was around fourteen, I saw a shadow moving in this forest. It was very dark that night, but I could see it was a tall, thin figure. Suddenly, it charged towards me!”
Katerina and I shivered.
“I got spooked, so I ran and ran until I reached the fence of a nearby finca. I thought maybe someone there could help me, so I climbed the fence.”
I could see my grandfather as a young teen running in the dark, scared, tripping over rocks and roots.
“When I reached the top, I looked back and saw his eyes. They glowed red!”
Katerina gasped and I yelled, “¡El diablo!”
“He was still coming after me. I ran towards the house, looking back to make sure he wasn't closing in. That’s when he changed his shape. He turned into a bull.”
Papito Martín’s words got quieter. Our eyes opened wider and our scrawny arms wrapped around our chicken legs, hugging ourselves into tight balls.
“¡Vean mijas, vean!” He said as he pointed to the large, arcane pacemaker that was visible over the surface of his heart. “This is why I have a bad heart. The devil himself chased me!”
We believed him. Every word. Our anxiety about encountering the devil in the darkness of this wilderness was too real; but despite my fear, I welcomed it. I wanted to run into the devil. I had seen a kind of devil first hand in different shapes and forms––the menacing men at the end of my street, the sicarios, the abusers. This devil in the mountains, however, was different. Perhaps I was seduced by the mysteriousness of it all. In my grandfather’s stories, the devil never actually caught him, never harmed him. The devil I had seen in the city always did.
Papito Martín was raised in the mountains so it makes sense that his upbringing forged his thinking despite how rational of a city man he became. I know he believed in the supernatural. We all did. After all, this is the land of magical realism, where the extraordinary lives in harmony with the real world.
While I’ve carried my grandfather’s stories close to me over the years, the story that has had the biggest impact in my life was told by an old woman who lived alone in a big farmhouse about a mile away from tío John’s place.
One evening, my uncle took us to visit his elderly neighbor. With flashlights in hand, the adults illuminated the doughy clay path in front of us. Not much could be seen. The darkness of the skies dotted with stars, the coolness in the air, and the sounds of the many animals that lurked in the thickness of the trees and shrubs set the stage for a fable-like adventure.
The farmhouse was typical—a century’s old rustic colonial with tiled floors, horsehair plaster walls, and a long wrap-around porch, Spanish moss and succulents hanging from planters. The house was not lit within, only a few candles illuminated the front porch where a very old and frail looking woman sat in a rocking chair and greeted us warmly. The candles cast a glow on her long white hair, giving her a halo effect.
The adults chatted, laughed, and downed aguardiente shots. My sisters and I, bored, just poked at the praying mantises that rested on the porch’s banister.
“Let me tell you a story about this house,” the old woman said to me and my sisters.
“This house is haunted.”
Fear and excitement bubbled inside my stomach, making it quiver like creamy flan.
“When I was newly married, my husband would leave me here alone in the house while he went out to work in the coffee fields.” I held my breath. Being all alone in this big house already seemed scary enough to me.
“After working all day in the kitchen and tending to the animals, I would go into my bedroom to rest. But a bruja haunted me and wouldn’t leave me alone.”
A witch?
“What did the bruja look like?” I asked, feeling a sting in my chest.
“I never saw her. I could never see her, but I felt her presence and the heaviness of her body. She was always there, in the corner of my room. Always watching. And when I would lie down on my bed she would sit on top of me.”
This story was far more horrifying than the stories my grandfather would tell us. In his stories, the devil never actually got close. He never made physical contact. But I had no reason to doubt this old woman, who was clearly distraught.
“While I lay there in my bed, the bruja would press all her weight on my chest and belly. She was dreadfully heavy and I couldn’t move or barely take a breath,” she said.
“I would try to yell for help but I had no voice. The bruja would take my voice from me and watch me gasp for air.”
The more the old woman spoke, the heavier the burden on my torso. I embodied her experience; felt the crushing weight of this invisible witch. This physical pressure came whenever I was scared, whenever I anticipated something bad was about to happen, or when something bad was happening. The thunderous roars of motorcycles, the teenager on the second floor with his fixed gaze on me, the abrupt silence that sometimes would fall over our street.
I believed her. I believed the witch that tormented this woman by sitting on her chest, rendering her immobile, speechless, and even breathless, was real, and I agonized over this story throughout my childhood. There had been times when fear would pin me down in place and steal my voice. When, immobile and mute, all I could do was watch, wide eyed, and wait for the terror to stop. Was la bruja to blame for this? I wasn’t sure.
Although my fears about the witch changed as I grew older, the old woman’s recollection of these events would follow me into adulthood to one of my darkest moments when I, myself, came face-to-face with the devils that haunted me. In that particular instance, I felt like I had been fighting for my life against this invisible witch. What I understand now, but couldn’t have known as a child was that the witch this old woman had described was a representation for what she had no other way to explain. A superstitious culture, a life of hardships and high demands, innocence, lack of education, and ignorance about mental illness were ingredients mixed together in a large black cauldron, giving life to something devilish, birthing the proverbial evil witch of lore.
This was no longer the same fear and excitement of encountering a mythical thing in the Andes. By the age of thirty, I had reached a point where I could no longer avoid the sickness growing inside of me. The past was choking the life out of me. It was time to reclaim my own story.
Lorena Hernández Leonard is a Colombian native living in the Boston area. She's a storyteller, writer, and filmmaker whose award-winning animated short film, Demi's Panic, was Oscar long-listed in 2021. As a storyteller, Lorena has appeared on World Channel’s television program Stories from the Stage and has performed on Suitcase Stories, a traveling storytelling event created by the International Institute of New England which features immigrant stories. Lorena is a Pauline Scheer Fellow at GrubStreet, where she is currently working on a memoir about her experiences growing up during the Colombian drug war and migrating to the United States.
Theano Giannezi (Θεανώ Γιαννέζη) is a visual artist, born in 1991 in Thessaloniki, Greece. After completing her studies at the AUTH University of Fine Arts in 2016, she exhibited her first professional pieces at the Gallery Zina Athanassiadou and the Macedonian Museum of Art. In 2019, she won the Indonesian Scholarship Darmasiswa and majored in traditional puppetry while completing her studies in ISI Yogyakarta. She attended a residency program in Papermoon Puppet Theatre in Kasongan and, in 2021, created a solo project in Krack Printmaking Studio in Yogyakarta. Her work has been in solo and group exhibitions in galleries and cultural institutes in Europe and Asia, and she has participated in art seminars and residency programs. Her art practice focuses on exploring and incorporating various elements of nature and human psychology. These elements helped her observe the close relationship of culture with fine art and the transmitted human mindset, by creating artworks consisting of naturally occurring repetitive forms and conceptual figures.