by Luis de Lión
Must have been about nine in the morning.
They were sitting facing each other at the kitchen table.
She had come in with the news.
But, after each of them had said those first few words, just silence. The memories the news brought up for each of them hurt. But Concha couldn’t stand her memories anymore and she got up from the table, went out of the room, grabbed her wrap, and opened the front gate. Juan just watched her go out.
Birds don’t sing at night.
But one time they did sing. As if they had all agreed—the birds that lived in every kind of tree: grevilleas, izotales, blackberry bushes, cypresses, plum trees, coffee plants, hog plums—exactly at nine o’clock at night, from the nests of every kind of bird—blue jays, blackbirds, clarineros, doves, motmots, mockingbirds, warblers—they all took off and circled the town in search of one particular house; they perched on the roof of the house, all bunched together and anxious, and they sang. The people said: ¡How weird! But later they understood that those birds had all sung out of sheer joy—joy that someone was going to lose his virginity that night. But they only sang for a bit. When they heard that the man who was below that roof, instead of sleeping with his woman, was snoring in the other bed, as though it didn’t even matter to him that she could turn to ash; they let the air out of their beaks and went back to their nests.
Birds don’t sing at night, but there are some who do; they sing warnings.
When the pixcoy* bird sings to you, your body trembles. You think something is going to happen to you. But if you’re an Indian, maybe you don’t believe in omens anymore, maybe your head now has other ideas in it, maybe you live in the city, maybe now you know something about the science in books. But if you’re an Indian and you go back to your town and you go out at night and hear the pixcoy sing to you, you forget all about your city, your books, science, your new ideas, and you say: —I believe in Dios, and not in vos—but really you still believe in it; you cross yourself, and for several days you’re just waiting to see what’s going to happen to you. Maybe nothing happens to you, maybe what happens to you is the same as any other day: a spat in the house with your woman; an injury to your foot or your hand, but purely by accident and it’s not really a big deal; a dust-up in the cantina; or even the fear itself, the fear that something is going to happen to you. But you blame it on the pixcoy.
However, ¡damn pixcoy! this time it didn’t say anything to anybody. It didn’t warn a single person in the whole town that somebody was going to make off with the Virgen. Afterward everyone was wondering how this bird had come out looking foolish; after all it’s always getting involved in those things called omens. And there’s no doubt that he knew it was going to happen. He had to know about it.
Now, me, I say that, since it’s an Indian’s bird, it didn’t have any reason to warn the Indians that something was going to happen to a Ladina. Faithful bird, bird of premonition, heart that flies, that goes from tree to tree, always seeing what’s coming—but nobody sees you coming. It didn’t matter much to him that it was going to be the Virgen who would be kidnapped, raped, and thrown to the floor that night. It’s not like it was going to happen to your woman, or your daughter, or your sister. He must’ve just been playing the fool.
There’s no point in even talking about the rest of the birds. If those ignorant birds sang that one night it was by pure dumb luck that they had a premonition of the impending happiness; this time they didn’t make a peep. Maybe if they had been Spanish birds. But, of course, it was really no skin off their dicks whether or not someone made off with the Virgen. At the end of the day, it was enough for them to worry about the trees, fruit, seeds, their nests, their hatchlings, their little eggs, and the air for flying; and the rest of it, well, so what.
But there was one that sounded a warning.
It was a bronze bird, an imported bird, a Catholic bird, and what’s more, an effeminate bird: the biggest bell in the church; that same night of the kidnapping, shortly after the sacristan had recited the prayer, that biggest bell had—completely of its own accord—sounded a warning, striking its clapper against its metal side three times, mournfully. But no one understood why. Everyone thought that the clapper’s three clangs in the skirt of the bell must have been the work of the wind.
But the next day, when that same bell summoned everyone in town, clanging madly—only this time it was aided by the hand of the sacristan—and when everyone got to the town square to find out what had happened, then they realized that she had rung herself the night before, without anyone’s help.
—¡Someone’s made off with the Virgen!—said the president of the Society of the Daughters of Mary as she stood in the door of the church.
She had gotten there early that morning with some other members of the Daughters, all of them carrying Madonna lilies, irises, midnight showers, estaticias, and calla lilies to replace the rotting ones at the altar of the Virgen. They had been walking along talking as they approached the glass case in the niche, when they suddenly realized that the case was empty. They fell completely silent. But soon they reacted and, seeing that the glass case had not been opened with a key, but that there was a piece of wood lying in it—with which someone must have smashed the case, since the glass indeed was broken—they immediately thought it must have been a case of robbery; and amid their tears and curses, they ran off to let the sacristan know; he went up into the bell tower, nearly tearing it to pieces in his haste, and yanked the rope on the bell’s clapper, which—this time with human help—rang out in alarm, as well it should have.
At first they all thought that maybe one of the little thatched huts had caught fire or that maybe his Excellency the Archbishop had come to town. That was usually the case when the biggest bell in the belfry rang.
—¡People, someone has made off with the Virgen!—said the Daughters of Mary.
—¿And who could it be?—they all asked; the women who had gathered were half happy and half frightened; while every man was cursing the one who had stolen her from him.
But no one knew.
By this time the mayor, and his assistants, and their flunkies, and the leader of the Cofradía of the Virgen, and his enemy, the other leader, and all the rest of the members of the cofradía, and the head of the militia, and little kids and adults, and women and men, and young people and old people—in short, the whole town—had arrived on the scene: asking questions, checking everything out, cussing, rejoicing, dreading the cursed futures this turn of events might bring down upon the town, trying to guess who it might have been, wondering why, deciding what to do.
—Search all of the houses from top to bottom—said the mayor.
—Search all of the houses from top to bottom—responded the two leaders and all the members of the Cofradía of the Virgen and the members of the Society of the Daughters of Mary.
—Yeah, search all of the houses from top to bottom—responded everyone assembled there.
All the men gathered in the atrium of the church were divided into groups of five; they were to go get their machetes and their shotguns and work their way down each street, house by house, cranny by cranny. The ones who lived on one street were to search the other streets and vice versa because everyone was under suspicion—everyone, even those who were now giving the orders. T
hey were to act forcefully, especially in the houses where the residents didn’t want to let them in; and, finally, if anyone knew exactly who the thief was, would he please step forward so as to avoid any further trouble.
But no one knew.
Minutes later the search began. They closed off all the streets that led out of town, they put guards in the canyons between those roads, on the paths, on the bridges. Only a few men didn’t take part; the rest, like an army of devils—burning with envy—swept through the town. The women and the children fell into two categories: those who went back to their daily business—which was mischief-making in the case of the kids; and those who stayed at the church to see what would happen.
But no one could enter or leave the town.
One lady who tried to leave the village to go to a nearby farm to fetch the woman who had taken over for Señora Chus—the midwife who had died some years ago—was forced to come back without her; and her daughter-in-law’s son was born dead. Another lady, who headed out to the cornfields to take her husband his lunch, was also turned back; and when her husband got home, he hit her for having left him hungry in the field. Another boy who . . . A girl who . . . A beggar from another town who . . . There would be absolutely no funny business.
The men would go into the houses and come back out again without anything in their arms. They turned the houses completely inside out as they zealously combed through them. They searched in the trunks, in the armoires, under the beds, under the big tamale pots—stored upside down in the patio; in the trees, in the holes in the yards; in the very thoughts of the men, in the jealousies of the women, in the hate of the children. Nothing.
When they got to Pascual’s house they all stopped for a moment. It was the last house and now they were beginning to get the feeling that they would find her there. But instead of bursting in, they knocked.
Inside, he could hear them calling. He was on the main altar, sprawled out on a rug, with the Virgen naked by his side. They were intertwined like dogs that have no desire to untangle themselves, screwed together for good. He was lying back, feeling himself being sucked softly in and out of her body, absorbed, devoured down there below; she was dissolving in sighs, in sways, in the soft undulations of a tranquil sea. From his niche on the wall over the altar, Saint Joseph was watching them stiffly, with the horns of the cuckold, wanting to put out his eyes, which he couldn’t close, which he had to keep open. On the other side, the Holy Ghost, in a picture painted on the altarpiece, was trying to escape from the paint that had him tied to the picture. He was a spirit—just not holy—but like any other spirit, red with envy.
They kept on calling out at the door of the church. They knocked and knocked and they wanted to push the door in and enter, but they didn’t dare. She moved closer to him. He tried to wriggle free so he could go to the door to see what they wanted, but she wrapped her legs around his back like pliers and pulled him closer to her body as if to make him disappear into her.
They kept on knocking on the door.
—Let me go just for a minute. I’m only going to go see what they want and I’ll come right back.
But she didn’t hear him. She was approaching the ultimate moment.
Then, they didn’t knock anymore; instead, they opened the door . . .
And the mayor and his six assistants and their flunkies, and the head of the militia, and the two leaders and the rest of the members of the cofradía, and the Daughters of Mary came in. ¡Jesus, and the Daughters of Mary! So she got embarrassed and with one push she freed herself from him, ran over to where her clothes were lying, and put on the white dress, the blue wrap, the queen of the virgins’ crown, mystical rose, tower of David, ark of the covenant, health of the sick, refuge of sinners . . . And she begged them all to forgive her, she said that she was ever so sorry but that it had been years and years, and she had only ever known the dove, and from then on nothing at all; that it was nothing but a bunch of lies, that she would go on being a virgin, that thanks so very much for forgiving her, that thanks for not doing anything to her momentary husband there, that yes, leave him alone, that it was not his fault, that it had been she who had insinuated it to him, and that anyways, he was a man. ¿Did they really, truly forgive her? ¿But really, really? Very well then. Indeed she would do all the little miracles that they wanted her to. But that, yes, if she had gotten involved with him, it had been a result of pure accidenecessity. That they certainly should not think it would be the same with just anyone. That they should remember they were all little Indians, after all. That thanks again for putting her back in her glass case in the niche. ¡Thank you, little Indians, for your good little Indian hearts!
* * *
* Scientific name Piaya cayana ssp. thermophila linnaeus. Also known as the agorero guatemalteco (Guatemalan fortuneteller). According to Maya lore, this member of the cuckoo bird family has an extensive set of specific circumstances associated with it that indicate what exactly it is foretelling when it sings to a person (though what these specifics mean differs according to region). For example, if it is on one’s left side when it sings to the person, it foretells something negative.
—And the Day Came . . .
AND WHEN THEY REALIZED that they weren’t dead after all, they commenced rebuilding the village, wanting to reinvent it exactly like the image of it they’d had in their brains for centuries.
But they realized that they would have to do it all over again . . .
But then they didn’t do anything at all . . .
If even the blind saw her,
the deaf heard her,
those with stuffed up noses smelled her . . .
No. Nobody spread the news. Everyone realized it at the exact same moment: she hadn’t gone back to the cemetery after all; she was on the loose, wandering around the atrium of the church; and she was waiting for them.
And running, sweating, trampling one another, falling down, getting up, they headed toward the center of the town; and when they got there and saw her, the flies on their trousers flew open immediately, like a miracle; and their eyes were barely kept in control by the attached optical nerves; and their hands seemed to turn into magnets. And they no longer thought about the past or the future, or rebuilding the village, or reinventing it; instead, her lovers—hungry, thirsty, enlightened, resurrected—knelt around her, religiously, luxuriously, sinfully. They discovered a new ritual, there was a new queen who was watching over them, who would—yes, she would—give them eternal happiness in the heavens she carried around between her legs and in her eternal sons because they would be filled with death and not with life. And that was worth celebrating.
And so, like atheist ants, they finished uprooting the equizúchil tree* the wind had already half-leveled; and they stripped it of its branches, leaves, empty nests, dead birds, its Hermano Pedro flowers** and hoisted the stripped trunk onto their shoulders and, as if they were sinner christs, they headed to the door of the church—so rarely open—and, gathering strength as if they wanted to knock down the wall of time in order to live in a new one, they started to hammer the wooden door with the battering ram of the stripped trunk; and the wood creaked with every blow but refused to open, until finally the nails popped out of their holes, the iron latch gave way with a rusty echo, and the door split in two like the mo
uth of a skull. Then they threw down the trunk and went into the church, running like horses, and threw aside the pews, the curtains, the saints—old and useless for performing miracles—, the virgins—fresh on the outside, but rotted on the inside—; they set aside the gospels and the apocalypse, geneses and redemptions, baptisms, hosts, chalices, monstrances, earthly fears, heavenly promises, entombed christs, still-crucified christs, and the christs up against the wall waiting for the members of the firing squad—who still had their weapons over their shoulders, weapons they would eventually fire into the awaiting christs’ bodies,—extreme unctions, confessions, miracles, altarpieces, bells, flowers, beeswax candles, tallow candles, altars; and, taking her on their shoulders delicately, like a crystal virgin that could break at the slightest sound—we won’t say at the slightest touch—they took her to the glass case in the niche that held that other one, de la Concepción, who they removed, dispossessing her of her crown, of her shoulder wrap, and of her dress; then they spit on her, insulted her with shouts of whore here and whore there, they struck her with machetes, they threw her into a corner with all the other old things from the church; and then they proceeded to put her dress, her wrap, her crown onto the new virgin, they put her on the carrier, they adorned her—with lights made of bones, flowers made of bones, sawdust made of bones—and they took her out on parade.