Word: josefina
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Father Feeney has deserted the little red house on 12 Bow Street to go on to bigger and better things. Fortunately for the citizens of Cambridge, the 200-year-old house has not been left unoccupied. It is now the proud possession of Josefina Yanguas who owns and runs the Cafe Pamplona...
Like 250,000 other Venezuelans, Señorita Mercedes Urbina and her cousin, Sefiorita Elena Josefina Gonzalez Urbina, enjoy taking a modest flyer on the Five-and-Six, he country's fabulous Sunday horse-race lottery, based on a five-or six-horse combination. But since they are sheltered girls who find form charts hard to puzzle out they relied mainly on Mercedes' brother Nelson for expert handicapping in last week's races at Caracas' Hipódromo track. With proper humility they accepted his picks for the first four races; then girlish independence took over...
Nelson, as it turned out, did very well; his winners got him $3,600 for a $3 ticket. But the girls' ticket, the day's only entry that listed all six winners correctly, paid off $300,000. Mercedes and Elena Josefina took the windfall calmly, perhaps because they could not understand just how much money $300,000 is. Mercedes is eight years old and is in the fifth grade; Elena Josefina is four, goes into kindergarten next year...
...most people have probably forgotten the story of a frail heroine from the Philippines named Josefina ("Joey") Guerrero. After the Japanese invaded the Philippines. Joey became a guerrilla; when the Americans landed on Leyte in World War II. Joey continued to be a U.S. spy. flitting back & forth across the Japanese lines, carrying messages, maps. food, clothes. She had a sure immunity from capture: her face and body were blotched with the sores of leprosy, of which the Japanese soldiers were morbidly fearful...
Then one day Maria Miranda-for it was Maria herself, as it turned out, who had cursed Josefina-sneaked into Chavez' house, shrieked at Josefina: "You will never see again!" and fled. Next morning Joe's wife was blind again. Fruitlessly, Joe took her to witches in Tucson, in Nogales, in Pitiquito, in Sonora and Cavorca, Mexico. Finally Joe went humbly to Maria herself; in her flyblown parlor, with its green altar and its saints' pictures (some laid face down with coins placed against their lips to protect Maria's clients from gossip), Joe begged...