Another Cuento told to myself and my cousins once it gets dark and we wall sit around the fire. In this one they just didn't believe how bad the pest problem was. . .
My grandmother’s family was somewhat wealthy in the town of Morelos. They owned one of the nicer houses where they kept animals and stored corn. If you’ve been to Casa de Estudillo in old town here in San Diego it was similar to that just a bit smaller. And I say was because nowadays most of that house has gone into severe disrepair and only a small portion of it is livable. That includes the main hall, a couple of rooms, the corral where my great-grandma liked to keep chickens, and the corn room.
This story my uncle told me himself when he came to visit us and it’s about that corn room. It was the room where corn was stored. Of all the somewhat repairable rooms, the corn room was the most salvageable since the only thing wrong with it was that it was stacked, wall to wall, ceiling to ceiling with sacks of corn. It had one door and no windows. One of my uncles thought it’d be a good idea to clear out some of the corn use the space to store some of his things.
That, at least, was the plan.
There was so much corn in this room it took a few days to empty it out. In between breaks, my uncle would find that small things were not where he left them. The key to the room being one of them. He chalked it up to maybe he misremembered where he left it, or his shoes, that he had to switch because the room was so dirty, were misplaced.
He continued his clean-up.
Once when he took a break and sat down to eat, he found that his sandwich had been nibbled on by mice, so he set about placing traps to catch them. As he cleared out the room, he started seeing them out of the corner of his eyes; small dark shadows that darted away before he could get a good look at them. None of them fell for any of the traps and he couldn’t find the hole where they were coming in from. So instead of clearing out some of the corn, he committed to clearing out the entire room because the mice would return to eat the corn if even a little was left behind. He couldn’t have them getting into his stuff.
He worked hard and by himself, clearing out all that corn. He was nearly done with the sacks of corn when suddenly one of the mouse traps went off. Excited that he finally caught one, my uncle went to see it he saw a tiny, bloody arm with a hand and fingers and all still attached to the trap. He heard strange mutterings behind him and when he looked, he saw a tiny one-armed person with a gorrito (a hat) waving a rude gesture at him with its remaining arm before it vanished behind the last remaining corn sacks.
A duende! My uncle couldn’t believe what he saw, so he ran to tell his brothers who of course didn’t believe him. They told him he had gone crazy lifting all that corn nonstop. He remembered the arm, forgotten in his haste to get to his brother, and told them he had proof. But when he returned the trap and the blood was still there but the arm was gone.
His brothers all laughed at him but he set about proving them wrong.
He cleaned out the room of the remaining corn. Swept the floor and cleared out the cobwebs until the room was spotless. Then he methodically lay down a fine layer of flour over the floor and left some corn in the center then called it a night. He locked the door and made sure he had the only key to that windowless room.
The next morning he gathered his brothers and took them to the corn room. When he opened the door the corn was gone. There were not one, or two, or three sets of footprints in that flour. There were over a dozen flour-covered prints that went up the walls and on the ceiling.
Whatever corn was outside was hastily put back in and that room, or any of the older ones, were ever opened again.
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