La Cegua: The Beauty Who Turns a Horse's Skull to Her Riders
The night roads of Costa Rica and Nicaragua — the old horse-and-cantina country of Guanacaste and the Nicoya rides, the lonely stretches between village fiestas — belong, in the region's firm conviction, to a woman who asks for a lift. La Cegua (Costa Rica prefers Segua ; both descend, the philologists note, from the Nahuatl cihuatl , simply "woman" — the same ancient root that names her terrible cousin the Siguanaba up the isthmus) appears at the roadside toward midnight: a woman of extraordinary beauty — the tellings dress her carefully: long black hair to the waist, fine features, a good dress dusty from walking — standing where no woman should be at that hour, asking, in a low sweet voice, whether the caballero might carry her to the next town, to her mother's house, just up the road. And her target — the tradition is unanimous, and builds its whole morality on the selection — is a particular man: the drunk one; the one riding home loud from the cantina with liq...