Content note: references to sexual violence and child abuse

Gabriella Munoz reading ‘El Coco’

Sleep my baby,
Sleep, baby, do!
The boogeyman's coming
And he will snatch you. 

Sleep my baby,
Sleep, baby, do!
The boogeyman's coming
And he will eat you.

Duérmete niña
Duérmete ya
Que viene el coco
Y te llevará. 

Duérmete niña
Duérmete ya
Que viene el coco
Y te comerá.

(What’s the scariest lullaby you remember? Sing it twice, thrice if you dare.)

I’m four or five years old. We have moved houses and my bedroom feels big and dark. The noises coming from the rusty pipes, wooden floors and buses passing by scare me; I cover my head with my pillow and hear my own heart, beating fast.     

The emptiness of this new house scares me. It smells of chlorine and lime. I tiptoe my way to my parents’ room. The shadows scare me but I make it there and tell them I can’t sleep.

My father grunts. It’s cold. My mother shepherds me back to my bedroom. Her knobby hands around my shoulders are somehow scarier than the shadows.

‘Why can’t I stay with you?’ I ask. ‘This place is scary.’

She yawns and tells me in that tone of voice that suggests she's up for no nonsense: ‘El Coco va a venir por ti si no te quedas aquí. Va a salir de debajo de tu cama y te va a jalar de las patas. Te va a llevar.’

She turns off the light and leaves; I hug my pillow. Shadows with long fingers emerge from behind windows, trying to reach for my feet. I hear banging noises again and curl my legs up. Is the Coco hiding under my bed? My heart beats faster. I try to hold my breath so that the half-beast, half-man who carries a sack where he puts all naughty children, particularly little girls who misbehave or can’t sleep, can’t reach me. Eventually I fall asleep.

My mother threatened me with El Coco until I was about 9, when I was finally able to go to sleep by myself. My father equipped my bedroom with a small television set that would keep me company until I fell asleep. Its noise protected my ears from the awful sound of El Coco’s lullaby—or, should I say his footsteps. To this day the babble of the TV shows protects my ears at night from the noises that lurk from outside into my home.

***

Duérmete niña,
Duérmete ya
Que viene el coco
Y te comerá.

(On your way back from school or work hum El Coco, then sing it out loud, once, twice if you dare. Then run back home as fast as you can).

I’m 12 and my breasts are new buds. Random men on the street stare at them. They undress me with their gaze, make me blush with shame. It happens on my way to school, when I’m waiting for the bus, when I’m with my friends at the shopping mall sharing strawberry milkshakes and molletes. It happens in gym class too, when the teacher makes all the girls run in shorts and squat while the boys play soccer. If we plea to keep our pants on because we are menstruating and are terrified of staining our white shorts, he threatens to fail us. We abide and run with our jackets tied to our waists.

El Coco se lame los labios when he sees how we try to cover our bodies with oversized backpacks and long t-shirts.

I’m 15 or 16 and my aunt walks fast when a man glares at her body with that same lascivious face I’ve seen before and says ‘¿A qué hora sales por el pan?’ She grabs my hand, trying to protect me. She blushes with anger.

We are not safe.

El Coco is not half-beast like my mother said. El Coco wears musky cologne, sometimes so much he makes everyone nauseous; his eyes have a lustful sparkle and his pupils dilate when he gets closer to young people, particularly girls. His hands are quick to touch bodies. My friend’s body, my cousin’s body, my teacher’s body, my mother’s body, my aunt’s body. My body.

El Coco is sometimes a teacher or the father of a friend or an uncle or my father’s colleague—the one who kisses the palm of my hand every time he sees me and says ‘la quiero para nuera’.

He’s the poet who made me sit on his lap to talk about poetry. He’s the men who said ‘qué linda señorita’ or ‘feliz día de las mamacitas’ just to make me blush.

‘Smile and walk fast. Don’t stop to argue. Don’t give them reasons to follow you,’ my mother told me once. Her way of protecting me.    

Whenever El Coco can, he cinches me at the waist. Every time I walk past to read in front of the class, or when I take the train to go back home, or when there is an exam. He is there, waiting.

El Coco nunca se detiene.

I’m 23 or 24 and he’s with me at home trying to put my hand on his crotch. My best friend opens the door just in time.

When I migrated to Australia in my 30s, I thought El Coco wouldn’t follow me, but I was mensa, naïve, tonta. El Coco is everywhere and he changes his strategy as we age.

El Coco wears black pants. He casually asks me during a Monday meeting if I miss tortillas and long siestas. I don’t know what to reply. Politely, I nod and start rolling my Rs even more.

El Coco has aged. He asks me if my husband serenades me. He wants to learn about the mariachi suit he wears to go to work. Politely, I tell him my husband doesn’t have a musical ear.

El Coco asks if I write everything in Spanish first and then use Google translate. Politely, I say no. I smile and leave the room to get us a coffee.

Sometimes I can’t sleep. I cover my ears with a pillow. But I can hear El Coco laughing harder and harder.

El Coco’s sack is full of stolen lives, promises, dreams, bodies, lands, stories. Si me cantas la canción de cuna otra vez mamá, ¿crees que El Coco desaparezca para siempre?

***

Sleep my sweet, baby,
Sleep, baby do!
El Coco is coming
And he’s taking her

(Remember that lullaby you promised you would never sing to your daughter? Are you ready to break your promise?)

My son sleeps in his bedroom. From a small monitor perched near my bed I hear his breathing. He’s almost two and full of life.

His newborn sister sleeps in a cot attached to my bed. She wakes up every three hours demanding milk. I rub my eyes before picking her up slowly. I hold her small head in my hands. When will she be strong enough to hold her head by herself? She’s so fragile. I watch her in awe.

I hear a noise coming from the monitor and I put my daughter back in her cot and go to my son’s bedroom. He sleeps and grunts—¿con qué sueñas mi niño? When we are at the park and he tries to climb the stairs by himself or when he runs to the swings and he trips, my hands are not always fast enough to grab him and he falls. His bruised knees remind me I couldn’t catch him.

Soon my daughter will have bruised knees too. I shiver because I know not all bruises heal with a kiss and a plaster.

My children have grown. He’s 5; she’s 3. They’ve become accomplices and while she distracts me with her rendition of ‘Let it go’, he has turned on the TV. She runs to the couch and sits next to him. They laugh and hide the remote. I laugh with them and watch them be kids.

A pause, I sit down and check my Twitter feed, #fatima is trending. Who is this person? Scroll, click, read. Una niñita was found inside a rubbish bag in Mexico City, the place where I grew up, the country where 10 women are killed every day. I could have been one of them; mi madre, mi suegra, mi cuñada, mis amigas o sus hijas, podrían ser Fátima Cecilia. The seven-year-old girl was tortured, raped, and killed by a man who had told his wife that he would harm her children if she didn’t get him a novia chiquita. On the day Fátima was abducted from outside her school, her mother had to work late and her teacher had to leave. No one stayed there to protect her. The desperate woman threatened by her husband saw Fátima and she told her she was in charge of picking her up. Y ella le creyó.

Niñas, they were 3 y 4 y 5 y 7 y 9 y 12 y 15, and they all had mothers and aunts and abuelitas that worried about them and didn’t know how to get rid of El Coco.

Madres who try to do their best to protect their daughters and teach them independence. Then, one day they are late, or take them to the wrong pyjama party, or entrust them to the wrong person. How could these mothers have known they were inviting El Coco into their homes or taking their daughters to him, like an ofrenda—fresh flowers for their own graves?

We are not safe.

I wonder, when I hold my daughter in my arms, how will I protect her? How will I teach her about the world y todos sus males?

She often wakes up in the middle of the night. ‘Mamma I’m afraid of the shadows,’ she tells me.’ I tell her ‘Nothing will ever happen to you. I’ll always protect you,’ and I sleep in her bedroom. But in my head, I hear that lullaby my mother taught me and although I don’t sing it to her, it’s there, stuck in my head, like a bad pop song. I fear for her. But, perhaps, she will be wiser and stronger than me.

Duérmete niña
Duérmete ya
Que viene el coco
Y te llevará.
Duérmete niña
Duérmete ya
Que viene el coco
Y te llevará

Glossary

El Coco (el koko): The coco, cucu or cucuy is a legend that has been used throughout centuries in Spain and in Latin American countries to scare children who can’t sleep and/or misbehave. Coco has been portrayed as a demon, dragon and a faceless person. The Spanish painter Francisco Goya (1746 -1828) depicted it in the etching ‘Que viene el coco’ (Here comes the boogey-man). In my family, it has been described as a half-best, half-man who carries a sack and can hide anywhere. There are similar legends around the world, such as the sack man.

Molletes: A Mexican dish made with bolillo (a type of bread), refried black beans, melted cheese and salsa.

Lame los labios: Licks his lips

¿A qué hora salen por el pan?: It literally means, at what time do you leave to go buy bread? It’s a common catcall in Mexico City.

La quiero para nuera: I want her as a daughter-in-law.

¡Qué linda señorita! : What a beautiful lady! Another catcall.

¡Feliz día de las mamacitas!: Happy Mamacitas Day! The word ‘mamacita’ means ‘little mamma’ but in this context it means ‘hot mamma’. The phrase is said to women who don’t have children on 10 May, when Mother’s Day is celebrated in Mexico.

¿Si me cantas la canción de cuna otra vez mamá, crees que El Coco desaparezca para siempre?: If you sing me the lullaby again, mum, do you think El Coco will disappear forever?

¿Con qué sueñas mi niño?: What do you dream about my son?

Niñita: Little girl

Mi madre, mi suegra, mi cuñada, mis amigas o sus hijas podrían ser Fátima Cecilia : My mother, my mother-in-law, my sister-in-law, my friends or their daughters could be Fátima Cecilia.

Novia chiquita: A child bride

Y le creyó: And she believed her

Todos sus males: All evils

Gabriella Munoz is an award-winning Mexican-Australian writer and editor. Her work has been published internationally including in The Victorian Writer, Mascara Literary Review, Australian Multilingual Writing Project, Picnic and many other places.

She is a 2019 Wheeler Centre Hot Desk Fellow and has been featured at Feria Internacional del Libro Infantil y Juvenil, Emerging Writers’ Festival, Swinburne’s Writers Festival and elsewhere.

Gabriella is working on her first collection of short stories and can be found on her website.