A long, long time ago, when the world was still very small, the spirit of evil wandered from place to place carrying a huge mirror with which it made everything it found evil and ugly.

If the glass of the mirror reflected the smile of a sweet soul, that smile instantly turned into a macabre grimace; if it was a fresh field of flowering grasses that entered the mirror of evil, the orchard immediately transformed into a wasteland full of thistles and burrs.

In this way, the spirit of evil had in his mirror the key to erasing all the beauty and goodness he found in his path.

The frightened men asked the angels for help, and immediately the Nine Heavenly Choirs descended to the world, which was still small, to pursue evil.

Squadrons of seraphim and cherubim and crews of powers and virtues, together with the guardian angels, fought the Evil One, who cowardly fled, dragging his evil mirror behind him.

In his flight, he crossed valleys and streams, hills and plains, leaving in his wake a trail of evil and an unbearable stench of Pedro Botero's cauldron.

He ran so fast and was so eager to protect his mirror that, in a moment of carelessness, he tripped and fell to the ground. And the mirror finally shattered into a thousand pieces.

Angels and men from that tiny world celebrated the victory with kisses and hugs.

But a few days later, the guardian angels were the first to notice that evil had not been defeated: they said that each of the pieces into which the mirror had broken retained the power of evil. Each of the tiny shards that had been scattered by the wind could be found anywhere, in the air, among the grass, in fountains... they were evil itself.

This finally explained why men sometimes became angry suddenly and without reason and began to see everything as dark and dry; or why they shut themselves away in sadness, ignoring the songs of children and the laughter of birds. Or why they so often became incapable of compassion.

Once again, the men of that tiny world needed help, the guardian angels reported to the Council of Heavenly Choirs.

After much deliberation, the Council decided that an archangel would seek out Paco Peralta, who was also still very small, and whisper the solution in his ear: he would instruct him on how to build tiny men and women, and also horses and mice, if he wished.

So Paco began the task... The archangel told him how and with whom and what and where, and little by little, with Matilde as his assistant, he built the figures that the archangel ordered him to make.

And it happened that when the first puppets were finished, the men realised that just looking at them made them feel sweeter, kinder and more handsome.

Wise men and doctors then began to prescribe puppets for ailments and sorrows. They looked at Peralta's puppets, who were sickened by the shards of the cursed mirror: for melancholy, three times a week; for resentment, nine visits a month; and to cure evil, one had to look daily and insistently into the eyes of the Countess.

Now you know what Paco Peralta's puppets are for.

Author: C. de Santos