And the forty thieves
…..
Chapter VII: About the trenches and the multiplying tables
Santiago de Querétaro, Querétaro, México
“Look kiddo, don’t tell anyone I told you so (especially not your grandma), but the bedroom I sleep in… I can´t help thinking of it as Ali Baba’s Cave! You know that famous bandit and his forty thieves. Now, the way I see it, since only Manuela and I sleep there, who, would you say, turns out to be Ali Baba?” However, the fifteen children they had were the undeniable proof that his favorite spot, in the bedroom, was the bed and not the altar.
Grandparents’ huge carved wood bed was carefully protected against all kinds of insects. In León’s extreme heat and, in general, Nicaragua’s hot weather, there were a great variety of insects to be wary about. There were flies of different colors and fluctuating sizes, mosquitoes with long legs and short ones, all of which could be found abundantly. Now, also in a widespread diversity there were spiders of different sizes, colors, shapes and lifestyles. Proximity to the coast meant that there were always scorpions, some quite big, by the way.
Of course, Grandmother would fumigate the rooms and the house; but just in case, from the four massive bedposts, she hung gossamer mosquito-netting cotton fabrics, ultra-white, so soft and impeccably clean, and placed them there to protect the bed, from all these crawling-and-flying, buzzing, and ultimately annoying insects and bugs.
In the land of volcanoes’ Chapters Purchase the book