La Patasola
Colombia (the montane forest of Tolima) · Folk tradition, recorded nineteenth and twentieth centuries
The men of the coffee zone went up into the forest at first light. The cuts were in the high stands, above the line at which the houses stopped. They carried their meals in cloth and their water in gourds. They did not carry their wives.
The story was set down in the region many times across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by collectors of the universities at Bogotá and at Manizales, working from informants of the coffee farms and the timber-cutting camps. They did not always agree on the spelling of the figure’s name. They agreed on the figure’s shape.
The figure was a woman.
The figure was beautiful from the waist upward. The dress was loose. The hair was long. The face, at first sight, was the face the listener most wished to see, often the face of a wife or a mother. The voice was the voice of the same. The figure called from the laurel above the trail, and the call was a call of distress, and the call was specific.
The figure was called La Patasola. The single-foot.
She had one leg only. The leg ended not in a foot but in a single black bull’s hoof, sunk to the fetlock in the soft ground of the slope. She moved on the one leg in a manner the accounts describe as both a hopping and a gliding. When she stood at rest, the print she left was a single hoof-print, deep, already filling with the water of the slope.
On the approach
The approach was always the same.
The listener was alone on the trail. The hour was the late afternoon, after the sun had passed the ridge. The voice from the laurel above gave a name from the listener’s own household. The voice was the voice of someone the listener loved.
The listener crossed the stream toward the voice.
The accounts agree on the moment of recognition. The figure was first seen at a remove, in the lower branches of a laurel or a guadua stand, and was, at that moment, what she appeared. The listener took the further steps. At the third or fourth step the figure was at his shoulder. The accounts do not describe the crossing of the distance. They say only that the distance was, suddenly, not there.
The upper teeth slid down past the lower lip in two long curves, two on each side of the lower jaw, the length of a small finger, the colour of old bone. The one breast that the dress had concealed was bared. The leg, beneath the long hem, was the one leg and the hoof, and the hoof was set into the ground at the listener’s foot.
She drank the throat. She took the liver. She left the body where it had fallen.
On what the trail kept
The trail kept, in the morning, a particular arrangement.
The body was found at the place of the recognition, set on the back, arms by the sides, eyes open to the canopy. The wound at the throat was clean. The lower abdomen had been opened and closed, the liver taken, the body dry. The blood the throat had given had not gathered on the ground.
Beside the body, in every account, there were three things.
One: a single boot of the listener, the other foot bare. Two: the long axe, set into the trunk of a tree at the height of a man’s shoulder, the head buried to the helve. Three: at the line of the laurel above the body, a single hoof-print, deep, already filling with rain.
The other men, returning by the trail at the close of the day, recognised the arrangement at once. They sent a man down to the village for the priest, and they kept their distance from the laurel above. The body was carried out in a sling of cloth before the next dawn. The boot was left on the trail. The axe was not retrieved.
On the household and the warning
The households of the coffee zone took small precautions in the wake of the recorded cases. The cutters were taught not to answer to the voice of a wife or a sister heard on the upper trail. The wives were taught not to call from the laurel under any circumstance. The priests would walk the lower cuts and read a short office at the points indicated.
The figure was, in some accounts, slowed by a small bundle of tobacco carried at the breast, by the keeping of fire on the trail at dusk, and by the avoidance, by men, of intimacy with women they had not married. The texts say only that men who had broken faith with a household were the men whom the figure was most often heard to call.
The archive holds no position on whether the figure walks the high stands of Tolima at the close of any given afternoon. The archive observes only that a woman’s voice in the laurel above a trail is the voice the cutter has most reason to mistrust, and that the trail, in the morning, has been recorded to keep a single boot, an axe set into a trunk, and a hoof-print filling with rain.
- Ocampo López, Javier. *Mitos, leyendas y relatos colombianos*. Bogotá: Plaza y Janés Editores, 1976 (revised edition 2006). The standard national survey of Colombian oral tradition, with the Tolima and Quindío variants of the Patasola treated at chapter length.
- Pineda Giraldo, Roberto, and Hernán Tovar. "La Patasola y otros mitos del bosque andino." *Boletín Cultural y Bibliográfico*, Banco de la República, Bogotá. Field transcripts collected from coffee-zone informants in the central cordillera.