Belagile

Belagile is a witch figure in the local beliefs recalled by Amaia Salazar: a danger that can be answered with a protective formula, and whose ill intent may be conveyed through an ordinary object. The belief comes into view through remembered instruction and reported warning signs, linking inherited folklore to Amaia’s present investigation.

The Protective Formula

Amaia recalls that her grandmother Juanita taught her a defense against witches nearly thirty years earlier. If she recognized a witch, she was to cross her fingers by passing her thumb between her index and middle fingers; if the woman spoke to her, she should answer, “Sola vayas.” Juanita described the words as a witch’s curse: witches go alone and never rest, even after death. The memory returns vividly after Amaia encounters a frightening woman, and she is struck by how completely the lesson had lain buried in her mind.

Signs and the Walnut

A woman recounts what she understood as reminders of a witch’s presence: drops of blood beside her home, a small box containing herbs tied together with animal hair, and, one day, walnuts given to her little daughter by a woman on the way home from school. In this account, the walnut is not merely a food or a token. It represents the power of the Belagile, whose harmful desire is imagined as concentrated inside its small kernel; if a child eats it, the child will become gravely ill. Amaia’s question about the walnut is prompted by remembering a solitary fruit Flora had placed on Anne Arbizu’s grave, connecting the folklore to another conspicuous walnut in the story.

Inherited Belief and Present Danger

The concept is presented through remembered instruction and a woman’s interpretation of events, rather than as an independently verified supernatural fact. Its force lies in the pattern of signs: blood, bundled herbs and animal hair, and a walnut passed to a child. Together with Juanita’s hand gesture and spoken counter-curse, these details make the Belagile belief a practical language for recognizing and resisting a feared threat. Amaia’s recovered childhood memory shows how an old piece of folklore can become newly legible in the face of a present encounter.