Mal de Ojo

An urban legend as related by one of my professors, well, more or less:

Here in Chile there exist those who possess the power of the evil eye, people who with a look of malice can bring harm to the unwary and defenseless. The ones most at risk are the weakest–the very old, the very young, and the mentally retarded. In order to protect the guaguas or babies some Chileans will tie a red ribbon with a saint’s medallion onto the baby’s clothes.                

Interesting, but you know no one really believes that any longer. I mean we live in the modern age. Urban legends are just legends, right?

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Staring drowsily out the window of the micro, as I usually did, after I finally leave the university in the afternoon, I noticed a family of four get on the micro. I wouldn’t really have noticed much about them except that the little girl (maybe 6 or 7 years old) sat next to me and the father with his baby sat across from me. Cute, fat little thing. I sat there halfway smiling as the father bounced him on his knee. The older child sitting next to me kept looking over her shoulder at me, which I just dismissed as a little kid’s curiosity when presented with an unknown person.           

I glanced back over to the baby, burbling in his father’s lap, and tensed, looking away quickly. I had just noticed a bit of red ribbon with a tiny gold medal carefully safety-pinned to his bib. Noticing that, I turned to look at the window, half afraid to turn and look that way again in case the dad actually thought I wanted to harm his child.

I know he probably didn’t even think about it, but I often have a very direct gaze, a tendency to look people in the eyes when I’m talking to them. It was a weird experience. This normally dressed family, who looked like they’d just come back from playing together on the beach, had pinned a saint’s medal with red ribbon (red ribbon is key for some reason) on its baby’s shirt.

¿Qué estás hashiendo?” or “What are you doing?”   

The father asked the tot as he bounced him around. The verb here is "haciendo" ha-si-endo. Not ha-shi-endo. It comes from hacer, which is to make or to do. Our teacher had also brought to our attention (literally the day before), saying that pronouncing the “c” as a “sh” is a linguistic marker of lower socio-economic status.

An interesting combination of social and cultural traits sitting next to me in the micro, reinforcing the fact that we’re all the same but so very different. Everyone wants his children to be safe no matter what the country. Some use sun block on their toddlers when they go to the beach or some give their teenagers mace when going off to college and some use saints’ medallions tied with red ribbon.

I wonder if the members of that family actually believed in the mal de ojo or if the parents had just used a saint’s medallion because that’s what you do with babies. Was it a tradition or an actual belief? I don’t know–I would never have the courage to ask. Maybe I should have though. Maybe they would have been happy to share the information, but my fear of offending them stopped me. So I still wonder whether or not such beliefs actually exist in the middle of modernity.

January 23, 2009

La Micro, Part 2

¡HELADO! ¡HELADO! ¡HELADO! ¡CIEN PESOS! ¡HELADO! 

Cheap ice cream is always nice on a hot afternoon. Vendors, mainly men, hop on the bus when it stops to sell ice cream (or pencils, pens, candy, bags...). You can see one, two, sometimes three or four vendors in a single trip, especially if you decide to take one of the Libertad micros to get back home. A Libertad micro means you have to go through the plaza in Viña with its plague of Argentines and other tourists who swarm the town during the pleasant summer months. 

Once you enter the plaza it may literally take another fifteen minutes to get around it because of the number of people, and the fact that the micros often linger here to pick up passengers. Imagine a largish roundabout with a small park in the middle with a fountain, trees, benches and a number of oversexed teenagers.      

“Tengo una gran enfermedad y no tengo dinero y tengo diez hijos. ¡Ayúdenme!”

 “I have a disease, and I don’t have money, and I have ten children. Help me!”

Here you see a whole new spectrum of people—the beggars. They might have a personal story of woe and misery—how their husband left them with a troop of children and how they need money to feed said children. You don’t want them to starve, do you? They might be sick and can’t afford some desperately needed surgery, such as the woman with the hole in her throat from her tracheotomy. If you don’t want to contribute to improved tracheotomy surgery or whatever it was she said, you don’t make eye contact. You’re left feeling slightly guilty, since you never know if she was telling you the truth or not. 

After you’ve made it through the plaza on the micro—if you haven’t just decided to walk home from there—about twelve blocks or twenty minutes—you’re pretty much home-free. All you have to do is hop off the bus, or squeeze off of if it is rush hour, and walk the one or four blocks home, depending on which bus you decided to take. This method of travel is considerably more interesting than driving to work or to school every day and considerably more exhausting. However, you find that you can have more social interaction, without ever opening your mouth, on a single bus ride than you can in a whole day at home—a far cry from the independent yet isolated American South.

January 22, 2009

La Micro, Part 1

I ran out of my house every morning this summer (January in Chile) around 8:45—I had class at 9:15—to make it to the parada or bus stop that is about a block from my house. The trip between the two cities should take about fifteen minutes, but you never know. There could be a lot of traffic, you could get one of the extremely rare drivers who actually drive the speed limit, or the buses (called micros here, short for microbús) could be running late. This last situation leaves you getting antsy on the street corner, waiting for your magic number to come rolling around the corner. They have a very complex numbering system for the buses here in Chile that corresponds to their routes. All I’ve really figured out so far is that I have to take a 212, 213, or 214 bus to get to school, and I can take any of those home, as well as any bus that says “Libertad” (a main avenue in Viña), though that means a little more walking. 

Let’s say that the micro is running late this morning. So you’ve made it to the corner on time, but you’ve been standing there for nearly ten minutes when a 212 comes flying around the corner. The drivers tend to drive like maniacs when they are running late, but it does get the adrenaline flowing early in the morning—almost as good as coffee, not that I’d recommend trying to drink it on the way to work.

So you wave, just to make sure the bus driver stops, and hop aboard. It costs 500 pesos, slightly less than a dollar, or 150 pesos, if you’re a student, to go to Valpo. The “conversation” between you and the driver generally goes like this: “Valpo, por fa.” The conductor takes the offered coin or bill, rips off a boleto, a small paper ticket, and hands it back to you with change if necessary, “gracias.” The conductor has got this down to an art and manages to do it without having a wreck or running anybody over. By this time you’ve already started speeding forward. He doesn’t even really look at you, just sticks his hand out behind him waving it somewhat impatiently—leaving you to receive your ticket and change.          

Now, to find a seat. That is if you can find an open seat during the morning commute—not likely. So generally you have to cling to any surface you can so as to not end up in the lap of the nearest Chilean, who is already giving you sidelong glances because you are a gringo/a. However, most of the commuters will get off the bus in the center of Viña, and you can usually find a seat for the rest of the ride.

Let’s say you decide to sit in the back row, where there are five seats. To make your way back there while the bus is speeding along you must navigate your way down the aisle. If you are lucky, some of the seats will have handles—very helpful this—with which you can support yourself on your way to the relative safety of a seat. Now the back—this is definitely the most fun place to sit, especially if you sit in the middle where you have very little to support yourself with and run the risk of getting launched into the aisle. Always good to live on the edge.

Now that you’ve survived the “find a seat challenge” and the bumpy ride/race, your next task is getting the bus to stop where you want it to stop. This means locating the bell—if there is one—and pushing it somewhere ahead of where you want to get off. Not the hardest thing ever, that is if you know where you want to get off...

Bus rides in the morning are relatively tranquil, but the afternoons, it’s another story altogether...