The Fish Man

Well, this month lends itself to a couple of Taboga legends thanks to the book by Mr. Álvaro S. González H., “Taboga, más que una isla” (“Taboga, More Than an Island”); I asked him a few months ago to let me share a piece of it. Legends of Taboga.

Holy Week is the religious feast that has held the most devotion and religious fervor over time among the people of Taboga.

Being one of the youngest grandchildren of my maternal grandmother, Flora Carrera, whom we affectionately called Nana, I got to hear so many stories about Holy Week in Taboga straight from her own lips. My grandmother Flora was born in Taboga on August 8, 1874, and died on September 20, 1974, at exactly 100 years old, and I was 18 years old at the time. I always knew my grandmother Nana as an elderly woman, dressed in the style of her time, in wide skirts that covered her legs completely and long-sleeved blouses. All of us grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the same age would gather to listen to the stories she told.

One story we heard again and again was about the man who turned half into a fish. Grandmother Nana would tell it to us by name, insisting that she herself had seen it: one Good Friday, a young man, defying all the beliefs of the time and his mother’s advice, went to bathe in the sea, and turned into a fish from the waist down while the other half stayed human. When his mother saw what had happened, she sought help, and he was moved to the town’s stream, where he lived; his mother brought him food there, until one day a flood swept him out to sea, and he was never heard from again. The curious thing about this legend is that she told it to us over and over by name, and the most unbelievable part was the certainty with which she swore she had seen it herself. In those days, who was going to doubt grandmother’s word?