A Mula sem Cabeça — a Brazilian legend in easy Portuguese

The Mula sem Cabeça, the Headless Mule, is a woman under a curse. On Thursday nights she turns into a big dark mule with no head and fire where the head should be, and gallops through the fields, breaking bushes and neighing, until dawn, when she is a woman again and remembers nothing. In the tradition the curse is broken by whoever is brave enough to take off her iron bridle, or to draw a drop of her blood with a pin. Thursday is her night by long custom, which is why in the story nobody on the farm goes out on a quinta-feira.

The legend is Portuguese and Catholic in origin: in the old telling the woman's sin is to have been a priest's lover. Brazil made it its own in the countryside of Minas Gerais, Goiás and São Paulo. Monteiro Lobato calls her the most sinister spirit of all in O Saci (1921), galloping without stopping and breathing fire, and the reader letters he collected in 1917, published in O Sacy-Pererê: resultado de um inquérito (1918), describe a woman who gallops at night over the ridges with fire from her eyes and smoke from her nostrils.

This telling leaves out the sin and the blame, and keeps what a child needs: Thursday nights, the headless mule, the fire from the neck, the gallop and the neigh, the bridle, and the woman freed at dawn. Its ending is Nina's, and it is about mercy: the curse is broken by kindness, not by a weapon. In the Portuguese, notice virar (to turn into), há muito tempo (a long time ago), and the storyteller's "Dizem que…" (they say that…), which is how every legend in Brazil begins.