Time Commences in Xibalbá

by Luis de Lión

  He felt white.

  And he also remembered, more than anything, all the time with Concha that he hadn’t put to good use.

  But, delicious and all ¿had she opened the door to his dream or really the door to his house?

  He didn’t have any idea what time he opened his eyes. By the time he really looked, the sun was already high in the sky. ¿When might she have left? ¿or hadn’t she left? ¿or had she never been there at all? And meanwhile he took notice of the morning because the sun burned his eyes and he realized he had slept longer than he should have, he also saw that he didn’t have his underwear on and he smelled a fishy smell coming from his blankets. He rifled through them in search of the ocean that had moved into his bed and his underwear. He found the underwear thrown under the bed and immediately he put them on to cover up his cock that seemed like it had grown bigger on him; but he didn’t find the ocean. Then, he noticed a new smell, the smell of something, of ¿the woman?, a special smell that emanated out of the blankets into the house; out of the house, into the corridor; out of the corridor into the street.

  —No, it wasn’t a dream. It was real, a woman came and slept with me.

  ¿Who? ¿The flesh-and-bone Virgen de la Concepción? ¿The wooden Virgen de la Concepción who had turned into flesh and bone just for him? Well, that didn’t matter to him now. It only mattered that the smell was turning him into a dog in heat. Into a bristling dog in heat. Let all the women from town come to his bed! And Concha the Virgen. And Concha the whore. But right this minute. Well, better in a bit. Right now he would go to find the woman who had raped him so deliciously; he wanted to savor her again, to thank her.

  He dressed quickly. And he sprang into the street like a dog after the scent of a bone, chasing the smell, following it, ducking down every so often to smell the ground when he lost the trail, smelling the rocks, the trash, the turds, the shit, see, she had walked through the cow patties. The smell steered him toward the plaza and the closer he got to it, the stronger the smell, like wet earth and old wood, like a bellflower and like love: tasted but forgotten. He went up the stairs and stepped into the plaza. The smell hit him hard in the nose and he thought he would drown. But he still managed to see that, at that exact moment, many men, in fact all the men of the town, except for him and Pascual—crowded together, piled on top of each other, and angry, in heat and armed with machetes and pistols—were coming out of the church in a strange procession; on their shoulders was the image carrier with . . . no, it couldn’t be . . . but . . . there it came . . .

  —¡My nana! ¡My nana!

  Your mother . . .

  —Juan, you’re getting old. Your face is all wrinkled now, like a mask. ¿Haven’t you looked at yourself?

  —Yes, Nana. I have seen myself.

  —Juan, now look at me. Here, the way you see me next to the fire; don’t you know what I go through to make your food for you. I almost can’t do it anymore.

  —Yes, Nana, I realize that.

  —And I’ve counted my days and determined that I’ve already gone beyond my time here on the earth. Sometimes I think I’ve already died and only because I see you alone, do I come back.

  —No, Nana. You’re still alive. Living is hard for you, yeah; but you’re still alive.

  —Ah, but I assure you that I won’t make it through this summer.

  —No, Nana, don’t say that. ¿What am I going to do without you? Besides die.

  —Don’t be such a fool. You don’t understand what I’m saying. What I’m trying to tell you is that you need to get a woman.

  —No, Nana, don’t say that.

  —¿Why not?

  —It’s just I wasn’t born to have a woman, Nana. You know that perfectly well, Nana.

  —Don’t be an idiot. Besides, ¿who is going to make your food for you, who’s going to wash your clothes, who’s going to close your eyes when you die? You need you a woman to give you at least one son. You know, vos, that although my life is sad, at least I’ve still got you. If not, ¿who would bury me? I know that, while I will rot, at least I’ll rot buried in the ground because you’re here, vos.

  —But I’ll make it on my own. I’ll be able to do everything for myself. Don’t worry about me.

  —That’s what you think, vos. But look, go out to the patio and look at the sky. I hear a noise. Please go out and look.

  He went out to the patio and looked at the sky.

  —It’s the asacuanes,* Nana. They’re migrating back—and he went back into the kitchen.

  Then his mother said to him:

  —Juan, promise one thing.

  —Yes, Nana, I will.

  —Okay, the thing is that when I die, you have to have a woman here in your house.

  —Mama, but you’re still going to live for a while longer.

  —Juan, the asacuanes have come through on their migration back. So run along and find someone to pray a rosary over me. I don’t wanna die unceremoniously.

  —No, Nana. Don’t tell me you know how to divine the day of your death.

  —Juan, I don’t wanna go on suffering. I wanna go straight to heaven and I don’t wanna come back and see that you are also suffering, vos. Juan, there are so many women in this town. Young women, single women, widows, even old women. Any one of them would die to come and live by your side. I know; they’ve told me. Besides, vos, you yourself are gonna realize how much you’re gonna miss having you your own little woman.

  —No, Nana, no.

  —Remember, you promised me.

  —¿How’re you going to do that, Nana?

  —But, Juan, ¿what’s going on with you? ¿Why do you answer when I’m not even talking to you?

  —¿What, you say you’re not talking to me? Then, ¿who is?—and he looked for the owner of the voice in the kitchen, in the bedroom, in the patio, but he didn’t find her. So, he practiced saying what he had heard her saying to him because he could still grasp the tone of voice; but when he spoke, he realized that it had been him the whole time.

  —Son of a . . .—he said.

  And from that day on, he started listening to himself in order to monitor whether he was imagining people in front of him so as not to talk to them. Still, doing that made him feel even more alone, even further from everything in the world. And he stared out at his house, and his patio, and he stared at himself.

  Finally, one night he thought that he was going to burst. That’s why the next morning he dressed in his best clothes and went down to the city, through all its streets. To look at the women. To greet them. To try to strike up conversations with them. To endure their laughter, their mocking. To go to the cantinas. But not to drink. To talk to the little whores; they did listen to him; but they also laughed at him, and made fun of him. For days. Months. A year. Finally, defeated, he thought it would be better to search in the town. And he bought a notebook to write down in its pages the name of every single one who could be his potential woman. He set about uncovering their histories, going out every afternoon to talk to the men, for the first time in his life, looking into all of the houses, sniffing, smelling, calculating, comparing, meditating, and coming to the conclusion ev
ery time he headed back to his house that they were all just like he had always seen them: either strong and manly, or like twigs: dry and simple, or ambitious, needy, hungry, ugly.

  But then he discovered that at night, groups of anxious, burning men would set off without fail to the end of one particular street. There was a door there. Beyond that door was a patio. Beyond that patio there was a little thatched hut. And the men just let themselves in through the gate, crossed the patio, went into the thatched hut; and not long later, they came back out: drained and happy. He decided to find out who she was, and one morning, when he was able to get a look at her, he realized that she looked like the one he loved in secret. Except that she was dark and Indian. Then he set about observing her for a long time and finding out her complete history.

  —She’s just like a hen: she’ll sleep with anyone; except she can’t have little baby chicks—he said to himself—. She’s perfect for me.

  * * *

  * The equizúchil tree (Bourreria formosa) is especially significant here because legend has it that it was brought to Guatemala and planted in Antigua Guatemala by the first person upon whom sainthood was officially bestowed in Central America, San Pedro de San José de Bethancourt. He is known locally simply as Hermano Pedro and is the most venerated post-Contact saint in Antigua Guatemala. He supposedly brought this tree from the Canary Islands in Spain and planted it in 1657 in the courtyard of the Jardín del Calvario outside the chapel San Francisco that now houses Hermano Pedro’s remains. Antigueños claim the tree that now stands in this courtyard is the same one Hermano Pedro brought from Spain and planted here. As such it would represent the oldest living connection to the actual, physical “planting” of the Catholic faith and its relationship to the colonial past. However, the word itself is of indigenous origin (Nahuatl) so it further confuses the mestizaje. Furthermore, botanists are quite certain that the plant is native to Central America. Bishop Francisco Marroquín planted one in San Juan del Obispo, Luis de Lión’s village, in that same century. (See Arias’s afterword to the translation for more on complications of the bishop’s founding of the village.) Here the tree is ripped up because it stands in opposition to the World Tree of Maya renown. (For more on the equizúchil, see Prensa Libre, Sunday, May 3, 2009, and Revista D: Semanario de Prensa Libre, 68, 23 [October 2005].)

  ** See the previous note on the equizúchil tree.

  The specific date here has no significance as it stands in the translation because I have substituted this for abril ocho in the novel. María Tula de Leon (de Lión’s widow, with whom I checked all of the difficult passages of the translation over one month of meetings in the summer of 2010) insists that the actual date here has no significance but was chosen for the play of sounds in the switches between abril and abrir as well as ocho and coche. Arturo Arias suggested in a personal communication that this date refers to de Lión’s awakening/symbolic birth after the events in April 1962 when students of the Universidad de San Carlos who were protesting against the abuses of the military government were killed by police. This event was important in setting off a new kind of student resistance to the military dictatorship that took over Guatemala and ruled for more than thirty years under different leaders after the CIA-sponsored coup (1954) that overthrew the Guatemalan “democratic spring” (1944–1954). This date very well could have been pivotal in awakening de Lión’s political awareness. However, the student massacre took place on April 12. While the months of March and April of that year were full of events to which this date could refer, I cannot find anything specific from the eighth of the month. Because doña María was a close collaborator with de Lión, I have followed her insistence that the sound play was more important to de Lión than the specific dates in this very difficult passage. Therefore I have prioritized the play of the sounds by pairing October/ open and nine/swine, which inevitably erases (defers?) any other potential connection to the date. In my defense, Arias himself has called this passage “untranslatable” in his Taking Their Word (242). I’ve also radically altered another set of words in this passage for the same reason: de Lión plays on the similarities among the words cerrar (to close), cesar (to cease), aserrar (to saw), and asesinar (to assassinate), which I have substituted here with shut, shun, shotgun, and shoot to maintain the soundplay.

  * Migratory birds whose passing signals the change between the rainy and the dry seasons and serves to signal the appropriate time for certain human actions.

  Epi . . . taph

  HE TOOK THE LATCHSTRING on the front gate and pulled it out of the hole so that it couldn’t be opened from the street anymore—the string that the people would pull, without knocking, to let themselves in when they came to ask him for corn, beans, flowers, alms; and he put one, two, three bars across the door so that no one could get in. Then, he went into his room and struck a match to light the candle on the altar of the saints, but the wick didn’t want to catch flame; the candle looked like a stream of ice that was quite happy to be ice. He couldn’t figure out what to do. He feared the light of day; and the darkness of his room gave him the feeling that she would come, that she would return, that she would push him down on the bed; and that, once again, she would defeat him.

  He threw himself down on the bed, but the bed still held her scent. He kneeled in front of the saints, but the altar still held her scent, too. The whole house was still flooded with her, with her scent.

  Then, he realized that his member didn’t seem to have lost any of its life at all. He could still feel it, its every vein and every nerve tense. It stood erect, unforgiving, even though he tried to bend it, he spit on it to defeat it, he hit it hard as though it were a son, a rebellious son who had come across evil for the first time. He mistreated it.

  But he forgot all about his member when he heard steps in the street. The vigor of the steps seemed to indicate that they were men. And the solemnity with which they were coming suggested a procession. A procession of silence. He heard the silence. And his body became a knot. He thought that because they were men, they would just push their way through, knock down the gate, and come in; and then it really would be like the end of the world. Then his cock really did go limp and he tried to kill his breathing, to stop the beating of his heart; and he plugged his ears, but in spite of all that, he could still hear the procession advancing toward him, coming closer to his house; he wanted to die and be buried right then, but not in some hole in the ground; he wanted to be buried in the air, like a balloon.

  But the procession didn’t stop. It passed right by as though the house weren’t even there, as though everything there were consummated.

  He didn’t know how much time had passed since he had locked himself in. He didn’t want to think; he wanted to forget, to empty his head of all that it held inside, to leave it truly blank; he didn’t want to eat—despite the rumbling in his intestines—nor to smell—despite the scent driving him mad, making his cock stand back up every once in a while—nor to see, nor to hear, nor to anything.

  But somewhere around that time, the thing with the women happened. ¿Was it before or after the procession, or at the same time? He didn’t know. Time was happening outside, but it wasn’t happening inside his room. But it must have been after. He heard that they were knocking on the door. That they knocked and knocked again. That mixed in with the knocks, there were high-pitched voices and cries. Women’s a
nd children’s. But ¿what could they want?

  Then they started to plead in desperate shouts saying:

  —¡Corn! ¡Beans! ¡Corn! ¡Beans!

  They were hungry. They wanted his corn and his beans. Let them starve.

  But now they weren’t knocking anymore. They were pushing through the door. They were knocking it down. They came running in like animals. They were heading to the thatched hut that housed the corn. They were making all kinds of racket. Joyful, happy. They were leaving. With all the corn and the beans in baskets, in their aprons, in their pockets. But now he remembered. Days ago that corn and those beans had started to rot. They’d starve after all. Let them die. He was him; and not those women and those children. Robbers of the white house.

  Time kept happening, but not inside his room.

  However, when he realized that time started to run for him again, he thought that he must have succeeded in purifying himself and he opened the door to the room so that the scent that his mother had left would air out. But the scent wouldn’t go away. It had stayed inside forever and it was like a new oxygen. He realized this when he went out to the corridor and felt bothered by the air, the smell of the flowers.