If Imps Ruled the World

Once there was a writer named Rafael Dieste, who was born in Rianxo in 1899. It's all right if you don't know or care where Rianxo is, but believe me, it's a nice little fishing village on the eastern Atlantic shore. Several really important writers were born there, so there must be something in the water.

Dieste, whose mother was from Uruguay but with family from Brazil and Portugal, ran into some serious difficulties when the civil war began in 1936, but he managed to survive. What is relevant here, however, is one of his books, Dos arquivos do trasno, which might be translated as The Imp's Files. Not that trasno is easly translated, and some people might prefer a term like goblin, little devil, fairy... you get my point.

The Imp's Files was first published in 1926, long before the coup of 36, and had eight stories, if I'm not mistaken. In subsequent years, more stories and a play were added. There may be twenty now, but we don't have to be concerned about the exact number. We can work with the original number of stories the Imp selected. As we do that, we are going to assign a trasno to each story, to tell it, but more so we can get the mysterious little beings together. They can be sneaky, but more than that they are pranksters, have a great sense of humor, and make everybody smile. If, that is, one chooses to believe in them. 

Those who don't believe in trasnos (also called trasgos and probably eleven hundred other names like their cousins the biosbardos are) are the real losers in this game. They choose reality and a straight face over laughter and chortling. The trasnos aren't very fond of the disbelievers, either.

Back to Dieste's marvelous little book. We have the set of tales that kind of seem like they emerged full-grown from the countryside, and we have eight little beings gathered inside the front and back cover. You know the song, "Girls Just Want to Have Fun," by Cindi Lauper? There's a similar one, "Trasnos Just Have to Have Fun," and you can sing it to the same tune. The mischievous crew hatches a plan, as we shall see.

"Let's have a contest," says T (for Trasno) 1.

"What kind of a contest?" asks T2.

"One where we get to rate the tourists who come here," replies T1.

"Why should we do that?" questions T3.

"Because so many people come here, eat, drink, and are merry, and never really see us for what we are." T1 had very clear ideas on the subject.

"But we're trasnos and nobody can ever see us." T4 piped up now, confused.

"The verb to see was used metaphorically," clarifies T1. "I meant they don't understand us because they know nothing about us."

"I think I see what you mean," said T2, nodding in agreement. "You don't like the superficial visitors who come, read a page from a guidebook, snap a lot of selfies, and never talk to any of us."

"Exactly," responded T1. "And by us, I mean all the people who live and work here, not just us. The outsiders come, gawk, learn nothing, and leave. Then they go home to rave about where they've been." T1 looked sad, and it is hard to find a trasno with that expression, so the rest of the group realized the proposal to hold a contest had a purpose.

The contest entailed exposing visitors to the trasno experience by having odd things happen. This would mostly be in their hotels or other lodgings, and could mean moving things from one place to another, hiding some, just generally upsetting the order of the place where the visitors were staying. The things that could be done had no limit other than not doing permanent damage to the walls, floors, or appliances, and not causing any heart attacks. Trasnos are the most mischievous creatures in the world, but they are not doers of harm. Even when an unsuspecting subject might feel afraid, an effort is made to assuage that fear.

When the eight imps put their heads together, the ideas became abundant, popping out like mushrooms after a good rain. Clothing could be turned inside out, a sock hung from a ceiling fan, a stone put inside a slipper, coins painted pink and green, really anything absurd and unexpected. This is all fine and good, you might say, but where is the contest?

"I think I have figured it out," proffered T5. "The visitors who are aggravated by our tricks, maybe even blaming it on the locals here, the humans, lose. Immediate elimination."

"You're on the right track, T5." T1 was smiling now.

"In comparison, the visitors who start to laugh at our antics and maybe even engage in conversation with us are the winners." That was the observation made by T6 and it was partially correct. Out of the thousands of tourists that came annually, it would be impossible to award half of the prizes to them. Way too many. There had to be a way to narrow down the good visitors to a few finalists. That was where T1 was stumped, and had to look to the others for help.

"We can lure them on a wild goose chase," suggested T7, who hadn't contributed much to this point, for fear of not having understood the whole contest thing.

"Isn't that more fitting for the biosbardos?" asked T8, also reticent to speak up until now.

"There's nothing that says we can't team up with them. After all, they're distant cousins of ours, according to some."

"Yes!" T1 was thinking hard now. "People don't go searching for us. We just do things around them to upset their daily lives. But people actually go looking for the biosbardos, often at night with a net in the middle of a stream. They really want to catch one. I think some people are really curious by nature, and that's a good thing. Those are the people who deserve to win our contest."

Everybody gave that some thought and ended up agreeing. They needed a new 'look' or a new image, something to make people long to interact with them, get to know them, instead of just reacting to what the imps had done and maybe not being happy about it.

It was T3's turn to make a good suggestion:

"What if we develop a covering that makes us visible? We have to make sure we don't get mistaken for rats or badgers, which we definitely are not."

"Easy enough." T5 was talking now. "We can dress in shimmering colors that make us resemble a prism. Or we can extract the color from petals of borage and goldenrod, or lilacs and violets, and bathe in it." T2 smiled at that idea.

The group was once again hard at worki, in a true imp think tank. They had to display themselves in a seductive manner, but also in a manner that would only be detected by a few outsiders. Therein lay the problem. 

"I think it depends on the colors we choose for our disguise." T8 observed that, but winced at the disguise part, because it felt deceptive. T8 was mischievous, but never deceitful.

"Let's see..." T1 was very much in agreement with T8. "We can have a range of colors. I suggest we include seafoam at dusk, the color of Barrantes wine, and sun reflected off orange lichens in Muros."

"I'd like to add white ceramic pitchers for serving the Barrantes, fiúncho green from the woods by Monte Lobeira - you know, the feathery anise plants? - , and marigolds from Anllada." This from T3.

The last colors were suggested by T7: 

"Lettuce from Pontevedra, blackberry purple from dusty paths in Manselle, and the color of the Sarela in April."

Since all eight trasnos were very familiar with the colors in this list and more besides, they gaily set about gathering their collective palette, which would then be presented to the visitors who had passed the first round of the contest and were in the semifinals. Things went quite well. The imps were able to weed out a large number of contestants because they were unable to see the gamut of colors that was presented to them. A few caught a brief glimpse of, say, three colors, but only five of the whole mass of tourists were able to perceive all the chromatic display and also admire it.

It was decided by unanimous imp vote that all five could be named winners of the contest, but there was also a desire among those in the group to lead these perceptive individuals to a deeper comprehension of the nature of the trasno. This then happened:

"I suggest we try to determine if the visitors with the good vision also have good mouths. By that I mean, do they know the words to describe the colors we've created? After all, we need to play our tricks as well, and can't always be concerned about what outsiders think of us." 

T1 seemed quite adamant about that.

In the end, two people, not in the least related, were able to speak the language of the colors they'd been shown. You don't need to know if those two persons were male or female, young or old, or what country they were from. They simply had understood the imps' challenge and had met it. 

They had known all the places that were the sources for the colors. They had known all the times of the day when those colors could be harvested, they hadn't felt the need to take a single selfie during the whole context. They didn't care about uploading photos to the cloud in order to brag about their travels.

They weren't thinking about going home, either, because all those little bodies of color that hid an imp inside them had lured them into thinking there had to be more where those had come from - more colors, more places to see, more words to learn. They started off to do just that, oblivious to all the visitors with no eyes or mouths but with huge stomachs they had left behind.

Meanwhile, the trasnos were back in their little group of eight, each preparing to return to its assigned story in the book from 1926 by Rafael Dieste who was born in Rianxo, in a lovely little fishing village with an affinity for literature. All of them were thrilled at how well the contest had turned out, even if its original goal had been to toy with the annoying tourists or to flex the imps’ playful muscles. They did not want to lose that thrill, so discussion began, although it would not be completed right then, as to what else they could do to be productive.

"We could write things on the windows of abandoned buildings."

"That's not goion to work. Most of those windows are broken, boarded up, or already covered with writing."

"We could go by night to serenada some young maidens."

"What age do you live in? Plus, isn't that considered sexist nowadays?"

"We could go clean all the plants off the outer walls of the Catedral and see if anybody notices."

"That would be considered a good deed and not a prank."

"We could gather lots and lots of stones into piles like the pilgrims did. Milladoiros, I think they call them."

"People still do that. You can see those piles along the Camiño de Santiago."

"But I mean we can put the stones in places where the pilgrims don't. Then the archaeologists and historias will come to study the mysterious heaps of stones and develop a lot of theories about who put them in those places and why."

"I'm still not convinced that classifies as a prank," reiterated T6, which left them all shaking their heads. Finally, T1 dared to say what nobody else did:

"Maybe it's time we all went back to our stories to think for a while. We can take our stories back into Dieste's book and reconsider our purpose. After all, we were first produced in 1926 and maybe, since that is almost a hundred years ago, we need to learn to think in a more modern way."

"What do you mean?"

"What are you suggesting?"

"I am just thinking," stated T1, that we may have a different role to play. This world is tough on everyone. Maybe we can make that change."

And so everone tucked ears and knees and head into a smallish, round ball and retreated into their stories. Someone with a gentle hand came along, gathered up all eight and the dozen or so more stories that would eventually join them, and slid them back between two covers.

Like one slides a child who is very drowsy between the sheets, with a kiss on the top of its head.

Like that.