Photo by: Mas-Mexico
At that time, in the village, fields were distributed. However, Don Porfirio did not get any of them, so he held a lot of resentment and envy towards the people of the village.
However, no one expected that Don Porfirio would be able to do so many evil things to avenge himself. He kept a great secret that would affect the whole town. It was always said that he was a bad sorcerer, and that he hid his true image.
At night, Porfirio transformed into a huge and violent animal, it was said that if you saw him, you would not survive to tell the tale. All this happened at sunset, the witch doctor prepared his wife a drink to put her in a slumber until dawn
while his wife remained in a deep sleep, Don Porfirio began to perform a ritual in which he said a couple of unintelligible words and spun backwards. After this he had the power to remove his head without dying.
In his transformation to creepy, frightening, and infernal animal, he would go to the village to destroy the fields and the houses that had no harvest, he would smash doors and windows, causing scarcity and poverty in the village. This nightmare ended at dawn, returning home peacefully as if nothing had happened.
The people, already tired of all this happening, came with a healer from a nearby town to tell them what was happening, to which he replied that it was an envious person. So the peasants began to suspect Don Porfirio, because he had been the only one who had not obtained a piece of land.
The peasants, not having evidence of Don Porfirio, went against his wife, so she decided to get to the bottom of the problem. That night, she played a trick on her husband and did not drink the tea he prepared for her every night. While Doña Balbina pretended to be asleep, she could observe the ritual that her husband was carrying out and she realized the terrible animal that he was became.
The next day, Balbina decided to go to church and tell the priest everything she had seen , who recommended that she should stop him with a series of steps that she had to follow to the letter.
On that same day, when she saw her husband, now transformed, leaving her house, she decided to boil hot water with lime, take her husband’s head and spread salt around it, so that he could no longer return to his normal body; while all this was going on, her head began to shout: “Don’t do it, I’m your husband!”, but Balbina knew that her husband’s soul had already been lost. That night Balbina took her things and left the place.
When the animal decided to return home, it began to wriggle in pain, this being because as it was close to the head and the pain intensified; since it could no longer return to its normal body, it ran out of the place cursing its wife. It is even said that to this day his cries of pain are heard.
The Yucatan Times
Historic Yucatan
