Time Commences in Xibalbá

by Luis de Lión

  Then he thought:

  —What a fool I am. And I thought I would be able to distract myself just looking at women. Poor things, all of them as simple as my mama. And he felt a certain tenderness for them.

  He decided to get out of there, leave town again, but this time for good. And he looked inside, to take his leave of them all, to say goodbye, even if it was just with his eyes, to all those people who had been bowing their heads for centuries, who never lifted their heads. And it was at that moment that he saw her. It was her; he felt it. It was her he had been waiting for with lovehate. No, he’d better not leave after all. He’d go back out to his house, but he wouldn’t leave the town. It was her and she was waiting for him.

  Back at his house he began to call up his vision of her. While the bells madly celebrated the Elevation,* he began to trace her figure in his head: she was small, she had long, golden brown hair; she had eyes that wouldn’t look directly at a man; she had a straight, thin nose, a mouth that perhaps had never kissed a man, a sweet, soft shape like he had never seen on any other woman, though her chest lacked tits because it was flat; but her stomach had the grace of a feather pillow, really soft, just barely curving out from her abdomen. He remembered her white dress, her blue wrap, the flowers that the others who were in love with her would constantly bring to her.

  That same afternoon, when she was alone, he went to see her again at the church and he realized that his memories had in fact been rather blurry. He looked at her, and looked at her again; he recorded the impression deeper in his head so that he wouldn’t forget it, wouldn’t screw it up; he kissed her from a distance and he swore to himself that he would make her his own.)

  * * *

  * The distinction between mama and mother here marks the indigenous nana versus the Spanish madre, which is used distinctively in different places to mark differing ties, both conscious and unconscious on the part of the speaker, to the indigenous culture or the Ladino as well as to the particular woman addressed. But it does not just mean “mom”; for example, in K’iche’ one would use the term nan to refer respectfully to any woman in the village. There is some residue of that here and its later application to Señora Chus, the midwife, which I have left as nanita (diminutive of nana) because its use is different in that case than this one.

  * In rural Guatemala, these wooden images stay either in the village church or in a special room of the house of a community leader who has been chosen for the year because he can afford it and because the community needs to honor him. These images are then taken out once or twice at select times of the year and solemnly marched around the village, stopping at important homes and businesses for offerings and prayers. The image then either goes to the church or to its new home for the year. Later in the novel this cofradía (sociopolitical group, see note page 40) custom will be important. The degree to which these images retain non-Catholic, pre-Columbian meanings from the pantheon of Maya spiritual beings depends on the village and on the person making the argument, though the practices associated with these images certainly differ from more strictly Roman Catholic practices. (Of course these differ to a certain extent everywhere Catholicism has been exported.) I have retained la Virgen here, spelled as it is in San Juan del Obispo, because it actually functions as a proper name. She is just known as la Virgen.

  * The most familiar or informal of the three second-person-singular voices that developed especially in some countries of Latin America. The countries where it is still used most prominently are Guatemala, Argentina, and Uruguay. This is remarkable because of the marked difference between Guatemala and these two countries in terms of indigenous sectors of the population. In Argentina and Uruguay the indigenous people were virtually wiped out, while in Guatemala the majority is still indigenous, both culturally and linguistically. I have retained the “vos” here because the novel clearly uses the different second-person voices (usted, tú, vos) to mark significant shifts in voice, both from the narrator/s to the reader and among the different characters. Vos might translate something like “man” as a tag on the end of a line except for a couple of significant differences: it is not gender specific—note that here it is used between a man and his new wife—and it has its own set of verb conjugations that mark the close ties between the speakers. “Man” does not mark the closeness of the relationship like this. I have retained the vos tag throughout especially because I can’t retain the corresponding verb conjugations in English and because it reflects a somewhat paradoxical relationship between supposedly “conservative” indigenous cultures and the pervasive use of the voseo. However, the logic that dictates when it is used in indigenous communities in Guatemala undercuts Spanish grammatical logic, especially as compared to its use in Argentina and Uruguay, or even as compared to the vos as used in Guatemala City.

  * This is the equivalent of nana in that it comes from tat for father or honorable man in several indigenous languages in Guatemala, such as K’iche’, Kaqchikel, and Tzutujil. Its use in Luis de Lión’s village represents the persistence of the residue of indigenous language in a village that uses primarily Spanish. It also exhibits a poetics of the uncertain (see “Translator’s Introduction,” this volume) because it blurs the importance of blood relatives and community leaders.

  * Also known as the Cristo Yacente de San Felipe de Jesús. This image of a reclining Christ (after being taken down from the cross) resides in a church just outside of Antigua Guatemala; María Tula de Leon (Luis de Lión’s widow) says it is known for being specifically preferred by the indigenous people over the other Christ images in the Antigua area.

  * An open concrete water reservoir in the center of town where women gather to wash clothes. They are of varying sizes with little sections cut into them for anywhere from six to fifty women to each have a scrubbing section that juts out into the main water reservoir. Most people now have private little pilas on their patios (and quite a few even have washing machines), but in this era the communal pilas in the center of town would have been the only source of running water. The pila was the women’s exclusive domain in town; it was the most important place where only women would gather and share news and opinions; thus, it was the central artery through which the village received and disseminated information and the most important political arena for village women. The pila represented the alternative to the official (male) censored news or the news from the outside.

  * In Guatemala Ladino has a very specific use. It designates people who no longer use indigenous languages or other cultural markers (like indigenous dress). While it is not technically a racial category (because Ladinos can have mixed blood of various percentages, or even “pure” indigenous blood), it functions as a racial category because it separates Ladinos from the racist disparaging of the category of indio.

  * Or el alza: when the host is raised at the end of the mass, all of the church bells ring at the same time. Here, obviously the host is not the only thing that elevates.

  —The Other Half of the Night They Didn’t Sleep . . .

  ALL THE PEOPLE WERE straining their eyes, scanning the horizon—like they were calling up a vision of a woman they had seen before—trying to catch sight of the first steps of the day as it would move over the hump of Cucurucho Hill; their ears stretched toward the expe
cted dawn like they were trying to blow the silence away; their eyes, hidden behind the bushes of their eyebrows but completely rounded like the mouths of shotguns, open as wide as possible so that not one little piece of that night would stay with them when morning light came. But the minutes were elastic, and the night just hung there eternally in all the gravity and heaviness of a Good Friday, dragging on and on, a blackened stone griddle lying on the hearthstones that were the hills.

  And the sleepless people would sit down, stand up, sit down again, and stand up once more, desperate because the sun wouldn’t rise; and they would try to light matches to at least give themselves the illusion of light. But the matches wouldn’t catch fire; they were like red hailstones of frozen fire; so, they rubbed stones together, but the stones disintegrated until they turned back into little piles of dust that would not light—dead dust, ash of dust, ash of ash. Still, the worst thing was that the kids that were on the way, in different stages of gestation, were born early from the fright: little preemies, mere twigs of people, babbling; and enormous rivers of wrinkles sprang out on the grown-ups’ bodies and their heads felt like extinguished fire; and the pain—from not being able to do anything about all of it—made them furious with each other like wounded sharks. Still, worse than the worst was when the hunger hit them and they wanted to eat up the chickens and the birds that had been killed by the wind, but when they went to gather them up, they found only the feathers on the corpses because the dogs had completely devoured the meat and bones; so, they got furious with the dogs and they grabbed them, tied them up, and squeezed their bellies so they would spit up the food, but the dogs bit them and they had to let them go. There was nothing else for the men to do but open wounds in their own arms to give their women blood to drink, and the women wrung their tits dry to give the last of their exhausted milk to their husbands and children; and then, in order to make something positive out of the darkness and the extended time, the men tried to put their cocks in their women’s nests, but their cocks had already been dead for some time, shriveled up and dry like rats wasting away in traps, like wrinkled little snakes, rolled up forever. Then, the little pieces of their tongues that they still had left, that hadn’t quite been shredded by their chattering teeth, were gobbled up by the ants of fear.

  And, unable to think of anything else to do, they decided that it was best just to get used to the darkness and keep gazing out to where the sun had always dawned. But now it was the seconds that were elastic, and the people started making the sign of the cross when they brushed against each other because they thought maybe they had already been dead for some time, but that they were only now realizing it; and they felt they must have been deceased for a very long time, and now they were only haunting . . . and haunting themselves; they felt like the souls of men, and because they were souls they could only live in the darkness; and they thought that if they were watching for the light of the sun it was so that they could stop suffering, since the darkness wasn’t good for anything except making more little dead ones.

  And so, in order not to go on suffering, they decided to invent the day, just in their heads . . .

  You were never your father’s son, and you were even less your mother’s son, even if she did give birth to you.

  It’s true ¿isn’t it? You don’t even know what it’s like to wear sandals with soles made from the rubber of old tires. It’s true ¿isn’t it? You’ve got no idea what it is to have calluses on your hands. You don’t even know what it’s like to get up and out of the house before dawn, with the day’s food rations on your back and your hoe over your shoulder; or in the evenings, to make your way home from the fields with that leather strap pulled tight across your forehead toting the load of firewood on your back. No. Your world was always another world; even the air you breathed was always a different air. Vos, you were never tied to the earth. Well, okay, sure you are, but only indirectly; sure, you do go out to the land—the land that you inherited from them—but not like the man who busts his ass over the furrows; more like the little village plantation boss that you are.

  Now, your parents were something entirely different; they did bust their asses, working the earth so that you could get out of here. And you did leave. But you didn’t come back; you stayed lost in some other place. Because what came back was only your shadow; and when your shadow finally did find its way back to your house, it found that your father wasn’t there anymore. Your beast of burden. It is true that you went out to the cemetery to see where they had buried him and you took him his little bunch of flowers and shed a tear or two. But you only did it out of duty. Because you thought that the one that was under the dirt there looking up at you was the skeleton of someone who, by accident, had made you, and, by accident, had bestowed your last name on you. You thought, at least to yourself, that you were international, and that you could have been born somewhere else to some other father, and not to this father from whom you inherited this land you live off of. ¿What did it matter to you that you had wandered half of the world and all of it had always seemed strange to you? There was still the other half. And this half was dead: just you, floating over the village like a balloon that can never touch the ground.

  But you didn’t mourn her either. That servant didn’t so much as deserve a tear. What did hurt you was being alone, not having anyone to serve you while you dreamed about that world so far away from your village.

  Now you are on your way back from the cemetery. You finally remembered that you had parents. That it was on you to bring flowers, to put a little cross on their graves. What you didn’t know was that the grave you decorated was the grave of your only father, your only mother: death itself, your death.

  Because you were never your father’s son, and even less your mother’s.

  Nobody was expecting him; actually they had forgotten about him altogether, thinking that he would never come back or that he had died. That’s why, when he crossed the bridge and came into the town, no one who saw him even recognized him.

  If only he had died at the exact moment he had first popped his head into the world. He had his umbilical cord wrapped around his neck and he could have died right there, hanged; but a weed never dies. He always has had his guardian angel, his guardian devil. His little body had been completely blue from asphyxiation, and he didn’t seem to have any chance at all to make it into this world alive; in fact, death would have taken him right then and there if Señora Chus, the town midwife, didn’t grab a machete lying nearby and act quickly, almost with the baby still in midair.

  Señora Chus was already old, very old, and going all the way back to her first midwife jobs, no one had ever died on her; she thought that, in spite of her age, no one was going to die on her now either and cause her to lose her reputation and her reward: cane liquor before and after every birth; and when the children she had brought into this world had grown up and would run into her around town they would say: Good morning, nanita*; good afternoon, nanita; good evening, nanita. That’s why she couldn’t help but get the chills when she saw how this child had come into this world. The quick-as-lightning machete to the umbilical cord cemented her reputation as a midwife and made her even more famous.

  —You’d have dried up on me, little boy—she told him while she was wrapping him in burlap rags to protect him from the cold.

  Piedad Baeza was also an old lady, though not as old as Señora Chus, and this was her o
nly son. She had been single her whole life and she didn’t like to be called Señora; she preferred Niña Piedá because she claimed she was a virgin. And, in fact, it was really true. She was the town virgin; a real virgin. But a virgin who really wanted to stop being one someday. And men knew it, but they didn’t say anything to her. She was ugly. However, there was an old man in town, as old as her, alone and in need of love. A man who didn’t need beauty, but just a little company. And that’s why he got together with her. But he was too old. And he couldn’t handle the rhythm of life that marriage brings. And he only had enough time left in this world to father the son and then he died.

  Now when Piedad Baeza recovered her wits and stretched out her arms to take her son from Señora Chus, she was thinking that now she wouldn’t have to die alone anymore, that there would be someone there to close the eyes on her dead body; someone who would mourn her, who would throw a fistful of dirt over her casket when it descended into the earth. However, when she took the baby into her arms and felt something like a hard beetle crying under the rags he was wrapped in, she raised herself up on the bed as best she could and, quickly, like a little girl who wants to inspect a new doll, stripped him nude, burst into tears, and, with both tenderness and compassion, said: