Note 8 — Mabait and the Duende.

The husband pushes his bad wife into an abyss. When he attempts to draw her out again, another woman appears. She is the Plague.8 Out of gratitude for her liberation from that other wicked woman, she proposes to him that they travel together through the world: she, the pest, will make people ill; he, as physician, will cure them. So done. As a result the man becomes rich. But at last he grows weary of his excessive work: so he procures a snappish dog, and puts it in a sack. The next time he is called to the side of a person made sick by the pest, he says to her, “Enter human beings no more: if you do, I will liberate from this sack the woman that tormented you in the abyss,” at the same time irritating the dog so that it growls. The Plague, full of terror, begs him for God’s sake not to set the woman free, and promises to reform.