La Gringa Perdida
From A Demonology of Desires: The Rejected Dissertation of the Notoriously Disgraced Folklorist Joseph Geistberg, by Joe Grim Feinberg
LA GRINGA PERDIDA (Brunvand 1981; Ortiz 1983; Klein 1988; Valsecchi 1995; Hernández Valencia 2018; Geistberg pers. exp. 2012). From the Spanish, meaning “the lost gringa,” referring to a legend of uncertain origins and rarely noted in folkloric research. In fact, despite considerable research, I have been unable to locate more information regarding La Gringa Perdida than I obtained by chance in 2012, when my friend Patricio began to tell me about her along the road between Ambato and Baños de Agua Santa, in the Equatorial Andes.
I had gone there for a college semester abroad, but at the time I knew nothing of the scholarly study of popular fears. In fact, my experience the year before in Iron Bottom Sound (see THE GHOST SHIP OF IRON BOTTOM SOUND) had nearly robbed me of my taste for ghost stories. But early one evening, as I was riding on the back of a pickup truck, Patricio turned to me and said, “You ever hear about La Gringa Perdida?”
I sensed from the nervousness in his voice that it was no ordinary woman he had in mind.
Patricio and I had hitched a ride to visit the hot springs of Baños, “to thaw the cold of the mountains out of us,” as Patricio put it, “before the life in us freezes.” As we jumped up into the cargo bed, he added, “The nightlife’s better in Baños, too. Up in the mountains your balls freeze, and how are you supposed to dance?”
“What happens to girls?” I asked, intrigued by his theory.
“They also melt down here,” he said. But when the truck started moving he fell silent, apparently distracted from his vulgarities. He seemed hypnotized by the rocks and dirt and the dry, frail bushes that sped past in a blur on the side of the road. Just when the sun fell behind the ridges above us, he commented, as if to no one, though I was the only other person there, “You sometimes see her here.”
“Who?” I asked.
In the twilight, the stones and bushes looked like pilgrims hiking up toward the highlands. The river rapids, at the bottom of a ravine to our left, seemed like dancers frolicking their way to the jungle below. The trunks of stunted trees leaned out from the slopes toward the road like the sunken backs of women from the upper villages who carry bundles of woolen hats or shawls down to the markets below. But there were no houses, no footpaths, no sidewalks, no reason for any living person to pass by. This was when Patricio asked me if I’d heard of the La Gringa Perdida.
“What are you talking about?” I asked. There were white girls in Ambato and even more white girls in Baños, but out here along the open road? “Why would there be a gringa here?”
“She’s lost,” said Patricio. “Perdida. It’s right in her name.”
“But why does she get lost right here?” I was still trying to make sense of what he was telling me. “And she stands by the road, waiting for drivers to stop?”
“You calling her a puta?” Patricio clipped his breath, plainly offended. “Chucha madre, you think I go looking for putas along the road? I can get a fucking woman in Baños, Baños is full of women, I don’t need your goddamn putas. Is that how you do things up north? You just buy everything you can’t have for free?”
“I didn’t mean that.”
But he waved off my apology. “Anyway,” he said, now more somber than offended, “La Gringa is different.”
“She does sound different,” I said, “choosing this spot in the middle of nowhere to ask for rides. But why does she do it?”
Patricio shrugged. “How should I know? You think I asked her?” He turned away and fell silent again.
The truck banged over a line of potholes, and the dank smell of rotting soil swept up toward us from the lowlands ahead. The river hurried down toward the waterfalls that passed under Baños’s springs. In the last light that reached into the ravine, I was watching the water churning over the rocks when Patricio broke his silence. “But then,” he said, “on nights like this, sometimes people do see her here.” Without looking at me, he went on. “She’s a knock-out, they say. Long white dress. Blonde as a ghost. Tits like a pornstar.”
The trees’ bark was dark brown. The stones were dark brown. The dirt was dark brown. The broken road was black. The air around was black.
“How can you see her tits, driving in the dark like this?” But by then it was clear there was no use pointing out logical gaps in his account. He was obviously not just describing some expat with a predilection for nighttime strolls in the country.
“If we see her,” Patricio said, “we’ll tell the driver to slow down.”
This was all Patricio told me, and I would not likely have thought more on the topic if not for a vision I had later that same evening. Yet when I returned to the topic years later, my investigations hit a dead end. This demon, if it is or was a demon, appears to have made no further mark on the folkloric record. Perhaps she has hidden herself from the scholars, her white form failing to catch the attention of those who search for darker things. La Gringa Perdida appeared in the stories I heard as nothing but a pale apparition who lured travelers off the road. Where did she come from? How had she lost her way? What motivated her haunting? Where did travelers imagine she would take them if they got out of their trucks to follow her? What delights or horrors might she offer? In the absence of further data, I am reduced to speculation.
Could La Gringa Perdida be related to other, better-documented characters who lurk in the dark corners of the Americas? Maybe she was kin to the vanishing hitchhikers of modern legends, who ride in silence after you pick them up, and then, when you look back at where they were sitting, they’re gone, because they died years before when their cars went off that road, and no matter how many rides they hitch, they’ll never reach the place they were going (a party? a wedding? their own funerals?). But still, what was a gringa like her doing all the way over here? Maybe she was never really a gringa, and it was only Patricio who imagined her so. Did she take on the form he wanted to see?
Was she, perhaps, a local variant of La Tunda, a shapeshifter who haunts the lore of the Afro-Ecuadorians along the Pacific coast, who lures loggers and all lonely people into the woods and — if they don’t notice her telltale wooden leg, if they don’t run away before it’s too late — she bewitches them with a diet of cursed shrimp, then sucks their blood and eats them alive? Did La Gringa Perdida also take her prey away to some hidden lair, guarded not by evil birds and caiman skulls, but decked instead in glorious flags and pin-up art and defrocked Barbie dolls? Nobody I knew had seen La Gringa’s legs to check for the wood prosthetic that, according to the stories, gives la Tunda away. La Gringa’s legs were covered in shadows. So they said. At any rate, their eyes were occupied with other things.
Or was La Gringa, rather, a distant relative of La Llorona (see LA LLORONA), who cries across two continents for having drowned her children to spite an unfaithful husband and who, gone mad from her deed, abducts other children and other men to replace those she lost? But no one ever told me of La Gringa crying. On the back of a pickup truck, all voices more than an arm’s length away are lost in the wind.
Some traditions relate La Llorona to La Malinche, the Nahua slave who gave Cortés a son and all of Mexico, only to have the conqueror abandon her for a highborn woman of Spain. Was she now returning in whiter skin? Is the ghost of the colonized being pushed aside, in modern myth, by the ghost of the colonizer? In the legend of La Llorona, people concentrate their sorrows and sweep them away by attributing them to someone else. Let La Llorona mourn the stolen land for us, while we get on with our lives. Yet her mourning arouses sympathy, and draws victims in, and they give themselves over to the pleasure of her sadness. But what do people see in La Gringa? She, a gringa, could not possess the frightening attraction of sorrow; might she possess instead the lure of power? Is her legend a representation of the whiteness that dominates and aids, that rations out pleasure and pain, that determines the measure of beauty and deprivation and need? Is she a concentrated image of all that one is told to love and fear and serve and buy? And here she is, here she offers herself to you, right here along the road, for free — at what cost? — helpless — helpless? — in need, stop the truck and help her and find out what she demands in return!
Other traditions go back before La Malinche and relate La Llorona to the goddess Cihuacóatl, who once abandoned her son at a crossroads and never got over her regret. Her son grew to be Mixcóatl, god of storms and war, but Cihuacóatl had lost him, and without War beside her she turned to dark prophecy. She presaged an invasion from the east and frightened all Tenochtitlán with her wailing. She cried over her lost son and over her doomed country. But what tragedy could have befallen La Gringa Perdida, here, half a continent to the south? La Gringa, whose nation’s army wins every war? La Gringa, who never heard the bootsteps of invasion? La Gringa, for whom the world is good and fair and bright — what catastrophe could she foretell? Whom might she have loved, whom might she have abandoned? What proud Indio rejected her? Whose civilization’s end does she mourn as she wanders here so far from home?
Patricio was still looking out at the passing slopes and the hunched and solitary trees. For a few moments, his eyes fixed on something. His head turned as the truck rolled past whatever it was. I saw his muscles tense like he’d forgotten to breathe. He started to stand up and point. But then, as if freed from a trance, he sat back down.
“What was it?” I asked.
“Eh,” he huffed dismissively. “You wouldn’t understand.”
But maybe I did.
As we reached the outskirts of Baños, I saw a figure moving in the shadows. A face appeared for an instant in our headlights, not blonde, but framed in long, black hair, skin smooth and dark, chin and cheeks chiseled as if from the mountain’s stones, or from the night itself. It was a face you see once in a lifetime, the kind of face you don’t just let pass by, the kind of face you need to follow right this instant, or it will be too late, because you feel that it in a moment it will back away. Forever after, it will only mock you from a distance, it will never again look at you like this face looked at me, like I was sure she had looked at me, right into my eyes, her deep black pupils saying now, now, but only now, let me wrap you in the shadows of my hair.
I knocked on the window behind the driver’s seat.
“What are you doing?” asked Patricio.
“Maybe she needs a ride!”
“Who?”
I pointed to her. But she must have turned off onto a side street, or ducked behind a bush. There was nobody there.
From the passenger seat the driver’s friend looked back at us and held up his hands to ask what was wrong. I waved him off. We drove on into town.
Patricio had a big smirk across his face when the truck slowed down and let us off. “So, you’re too civilized to believe in La Gringa Perdida, are you? And then? What did I tell you?”
“But it wasn’t her,” I said.
“Sure it wasn’t,” he said. “Come on, let’s find our hostel.”
As we passed the central square, he said, “You know I was just kidding about La Gringa, right? You know there’s no such thing?”
I shrugged, concealing my strange feeling of sudden despair. “Anyway, it wasn’t her.” Maybe La Gringa Perdida refuses to appear to gringos. Everyone sees demons of his own.
But at that moment, and for just that reason — because I recognized I could never quite make other people’s stories my own — I felt the need to look for as many demon tales as I could. I sensed that only by seeking others’ stories could I find the one that would truly be mine.
The Rejected Dissertation of the Notoriously Disgraced Folklorist Joseph Geistberg
Found in his apartment the morning of December 31, 2022, after he was taken to the hospital, Joseph Geistberg’s PhD dissertation appeared to be nothing of the sort. Were his personal accounts of pale mountain demons in Communist China, ghostly sky spirits in the South Pacific, suffocating hags in Slovakian villages, and nefarious experiments beneath the streets of Prague true? And why did so many of the women he claimed to encounter all have the same name?
A Demonology of Desires: The Rejected Dissertation of the Notoriously Disgraced Folklorist Joseph Geistberg is the thrilling fiction debut of writer Joe Grim Feinberg and will be proudly unleashed released upon the world 5 May, 2025.
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