Time Commences in Xibalbá

by Luis de Lión

  But, out of pure inertia, he walked from the corridor toward the front gate. From the front gate to the street corner. And he decided to turn around and go back. But again, out of pure inertia, his feet kept taking him on through the streets of the town. But he was different now: pacified on the inside, purified, without anguish.

  Unbelievable town. It didn’t seem anymore like the picturesque nativity scene that it once had. It seemed destroyed. As though bombs had fallen on it, as though there had been a war.

  And out of the doors of the battered little thatched huts—out of the little adobe houses—came only children, women, dogs, cats, hens, baby chicks, turkeys, ducks, to watch him, to stare at him like they would stare at someone who was no longer of this world, like they would stare at a specterghost-apparition. They pointed at him and made comments about him with their silence, with their tears. Some seemed to laugh.

  Only children, dogs, cats, women, baby chicks, turkeys, ducks, hens. And not one, single man. He was the only one: just him, the man who had been stained with shit but had been newly purified by solitude. He felt strange. Strange in the face of the tearful, mournful, congenial joy of the only beings in the town: kids, women, baby chicks, hens, ducks, turkeys, dogs, cats, puppies, kitties. And not one, single man. Just him beneath the peaceful, quiet, blue, ethereal sky, a mirror of himself. Just him beneath the sun that was rotating like a wafer of the unleavened host of a spotless God.

  He started to fold up into himself—into his own body—and to come out of himself, to come out and fold himself back in; to see himself in those who were looking at him and not to see himself when he looked at himself; to be consumed inside in torrents, collapsing. He went slowly down the street and rapidly through his soul. He was and he was not. He was there and he was not there. He had lost the earth and now he felt less at peace, his mirror broken by the rock of his solitude, his terrible solitude in the middle of this multitude—children, women, dogs, cats, ducks, turkeys, hens, baby chicks—who were watching him, who were pointing at him, who were laughing at him with tears, with silence.

  When he looked back at them, they were all following him at a safe distance. He stopped. They all did the same. He started to walk again. Now nobody followed him; they went back into their houses, one by one. Yet he still felt all of their eyes, like hooks sunk into his body, ripping his clothes, tearing off his flesh, even penetrating his bones, right to the very marrow of his bones.

  So he thought about the reason they hadn’t talked to him. He thought it, but he didn’t say it in words. He couldn’t. He tried to but he couldn’t. He could only think.

  And he thought: Son of a . . .

  And he was thinking it again: Son of a . . . , when he felt something like rotten blood wetting his pants; something sticky, nasty. He quickened his step toward his house. As soon as he got there, he pulled down his pants and underwear and looked at himself. Yes, it was rotting, it was falling off in chunks.

  And he was alone.

  So, to console himself, he looked for his other. The unreality of himself, the falsity of his flesh. He went to the mirror, which was another of the only things Concha had left him. He wanted at least the other to keep him company. He stood in front of the pillar, but full of fear, without looking at himself yet, just tipping his face into the range of the mirror little by little. When he thought that the whole him from the other side was there, he let his eyes cross the dividing line between them, to greet him, so that the other would greet him, so that he would tell him not to worry about it, that He would keep Him company. But on the other side of the mirror there were only bones, only his recently deceased skull, with a few chunks of flesh still on it, but not many, just a few rotten remnants.

  He could no longer think.

  Prologue

  BECAUSE, EVER SINCE THE village church slowly emerged from its foundations,—little by little, like an immobile and nameless bird that came into the world without needing to be hatched from an egg, and whose bones were born first, then its flesh, and finally its feathers until it stood there like a living fossil—when it was finally painted white like a Castilian pigeon and the little thatched huts sprang up all around it like little hatchlings, nothing had ever happened in this town.

  And every once in a while, suddenly, the pealing of the bells would rip through the cloth of dead air hanging over the village and rip through the hailmarymostpureconceivedwithoutsin coming from behind some coffin—as though pushing the mumbled prayer so that it swirled off in the dust.

  Then, one year, in the furrows—where the stalks of corn and beans were always shriveling, as though instead of rising toward the sky they sank further into the earth, back into the seed—the stalks got fatter and shot toward the sky uncontrollably, green almost all the way up to the blue of the sky, almost to the very darkness of the firmament above it; and the bean stalks spilled out into the spaces between the furrows such that the people couldn’t even walk through them because the shoots and leaves filled all the fields as though it were a green invasion. And when the harvest came they all had to take turns helping one another to gather all that corn and all those beans, and they had to take this many sacks and that many nets and this many beasts and that many loads with their leather straps across their foreheads and so many hand carts, and even the very oldest men and those who were barely more than boys had to help in order to carry it all to the houses, where the small storage rooms, designed only for paltry harvests, were filled to the brim, and they had to pile up some of the harvest right there in the patios, to throw out the rotting ears of corn so that they wouldn’t completely obstruct the walkways, to throw away the emaciated beans, which they had always eaten before even when they were infested with weevils, to sell much of the harvest in the city, to give it away to the neighbors who didn’t even want it, and to stuff themselves full of only corn and beans until they got sick of the same food; and even then the piles of grain did not diminish.

  And the sugar apple trees—usually trees with nothing but twigs, tree skeletons that only bore two or three pieces of fruit—were populated with as many fruits as there were heads of children in all of the houses and the avocado trees couldn’t hold their branches up anymore because there was so much fleshy fruit hanging from them and it looked as if a thick layer of red hail had fallen and completely covered the cherry trees and the Japanese plum trees, the hog plum trees, the apple trees looked like they weren’t even real; they looked fake—like they were make-believe trees—because the fruit didn’t appear to be hanging from the branches at all but from the sky itself, suspended in the air. And the people couldn’t figure out what to do. They picked the fruit, but the trees didn’t get any less full. And the kids could pick and eat as many as they wanted without their fathers scolding them. And the birds, too, could indulge themselves; they spent day and night stuffing themselves, hatching little birds by the piles so that they too could eat up the abundance of the trees; and perhaps the birds even sent word to other faraway lands because, soon, species of birds appeared that had never been seen in these lands, birds that had never been named, not even in the oldest collective memory. And children came from other towns to help the birds and the local children. But it was still impossible. Neither the birds, nor the kids, nor the adults could empty the trees. So the trees let their fruit fall to the ground, not little by little as the fruit matured, but all at once, like rain
, and from one day to the next the trees were left completely naked. And—also from one day to the next—only seeds remained in the furrows, kernels that simply rotted, that turned back into dirt, that announced they would never grow into trees. And the strange birds took off with all of their children, leaving behind only a few loose feathers. And the kids from the neighboring towns also left town. And the trees looked desolate on the land, as though they were painted black on the sky, like cadavers.

  And then the corn in the storage huts began to swell with maggots that in no time turned the ears to pure dust; and the barrels of beans filled with weevils that soon left only shells.

  And one day around noon in Juan Caca’s house, the white house, the rooster—the only animal in the patio, a rooster that was only for show: beautiful, brilliant, proud, white—began to cluck like a hen while Concha fed him his corn; and then he found a nest and settled down on it as though it had suddenly occurred to him to lay eggs.

  Then, that night, first there was the wind . . .

  The skirts of the volcano Pacaya, May 1970.

  The skirts of the volcano Junajpú, June 1972.

  Afterword

  Racialized Subalternity

  as Emancipatory

  Decolonial Project

  Time Commences in Xibalbá

  by Luis de Lión

  ARTURO ARIAS

  IT IS NEARLY IMPOSSIBLE to understand Luis de Lión’s masterpiece, Time Commences in Xibalbá (1985), without knowing the context of what happened in Guatemala, his country of origin more or less since the 1970s, or without understanding the emergence of a new, contemporary Maya literature in this country, one of the places where Mayas constitute the majority of the population.1 These two elements inform how his book came about, without taking away de Lión’s singular genius and personal struggles, and how he would eventually be kidnapped by a death squad on May 15, 1984, and subsequently assassinated.

  Luis de Lión was born as José Luis de León Díaz in the small town of San Juan del Obispo, a few miles away from Antigua Guatemala, the former colonial capital of Central America, on August 19, 1939. San Juan del Obispo was the spot chosen by Guatemala’s first Catholic bishop and founder of Antigua, Francisco Marroquín (1499–April 18, 1563), for his personal residence.2 De Lión knew this. The old bishop’s palace is still the main tourist attraction in this town, named “del Obispo” (the literal translation would be “St. John of the Bishop”) literally because of Marroquín’s residence. Those who built his palace, or worked as his servants, established themselves around the palatial structure, giving rise to a new indigenous town without a pre-Hispanic existence, a focus of de Lión’s acerbic irony in some of his earlier short stories and poems. De Lión was a Kaqchikel Maya, as are most indigenous people from this region of the country, transplanted there by the Spaniards to serve them. The Kaqchikels are the second largest Maya group after the K’iche’s and have vied for hegemony with them since the 1400s.3

  De Lión’s father was a policeman. This enabled him to provide Luis an elementary and high school education, something extremely unusual among Mayas in the 1940s and 1950s, given the marked discrimination against them, which, combined with their economic and cultural subalternization, placed them in a precarious condition of misery and exploitation. De Lión thus was able to go to Guatemala City where he managed to complete his escuela normal in the city’s poor public school system (exclusively Spanish-based in language and Eurocentric in culture), which granted him not only a high school diploma but also a teacher’s certificate. He became an elementary school teacher, working at first in the indigenous countryside, and later in the city itself. He was also a precocious writer, producing many poems and short stories on a daily basis, most of which have been lost. His literary language was Spanish. In the 1960s there still was no Kaqchikel dictionary in existence, or indigenous scholars working in Kaqchikel that he knew of.4 However, whether by instinct or in a personal trajectory aimed at developing a personal style, he succeeded in incorporating many Kaqchikel apocopes and other linguistic traits into his literary Spanish, thus producing a unique double-voicing that enriches his best work.

  In 1970 de Lión met Marco Antonio Flores, a controversial figure in Guatemalan letters, who, along with the critic José Mejía, was the co-editor of the national university’s journal Alero. Flores was indeed breaking new literary ground and de Lión chose to become part of his group, which included another young writer, Mario Roberto Morales. Perhaps more than by just grounding de Lión in literature, Flores contributed to his life by helping him publish in a literary magazine, La semana, and by encouraging him to take courses at Guatemala’s San Carlos University, where he studied literature and philosophy. There he joined another young writer of indigenous origin living in Guatemala City, Francisco Morales Santos, in forming a Saturday study group where they read major literary figures such as Jorge Luis Borges or Octavio Paz and discussed them.

  De Lión published his first book of short stories, Los zopilotes (The Buzzards), in 1966. His second one, Su segunda muerte (His Second Death), appeared in 1970. Throughout this period he wrote numerous poems, but most were not published until the 1990s. He began to work on Time Commences in Xibalbá around this time. Finished in 1972, the novel technically won Guatemala’s most prestigious literary award, the Juegos Florales de Quezaltenango.5 The jury, however, declared that no manuscript had won the first prize, but Time Commences in Xibalbá was awarded the second prize. We can only speculate on the racist decisions behind this controversial decision on the part of the jury. It never happened before or after, though the prestige of this award dwindled dramatically after the 1970s.

  Despite its controversial award, the novel was not published until 1985, a year after de Lión’s disappearance. There are various reasons for this aberration. On the one hand, the award did not offer financial benefits or promise publication of the winning manuscripts. At the time, all Guatemalan authors had to pay for their own publications in Guatemala, a tradition that persisted well into the late 1980s. As an elementary schoolteacher with a meager salary, de Lión was in no position to finance the publication of his own book. Also, the quality of his text was questioned by both Flores and Mejía.6 Given the brutally racist nature of Guatemala City, perhaps the equivalent of Birmingham or Atlanta circa the early 1960s, de Lión’s insecurities as an indigenous subject kicked in, combined with the fact that he trusted Flores’s aesthetic judgment. He then began to rework the manuscript. As the years went by, he prioritized his militant political work over the text, in a critical political landscape in which civil war seemed inevitable to all concerned. De Lión was a leader of the Teachers Union that launched major strikes in the early 1970s and was a clandestine member of the Guatemala’s Workers Party (PGT). After his disappearance, his widow Tula gave the manuscript to Francisco Morales Santos. His daughter Mayarí and Morales Santos prepared the manuscript for its first printing, and only then did they discover that various versions of the text existed. As Emilio del Valle Escalante has explained, after de Lión’s disappearance, nothing was known about his fate until 1999, when the Peace Accords Commission made public a Guatemalan army document listing 183 people captured in the early 1980s by military units (204). The name of Luis de Lión was number 135 (see p. 117). A code indicating that he was executed appeared next to his name. Apparently, his assassination happened three weeks after he was captured.
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br />   In this afterword, I will first explain the importance of the Maya classical book, the Popol Wuj, from which Time Commences in Xibalbá derives its title, its topic, and its symbolism. I will then review the emergence of a new Maya literature in the 1980s, to better contextualize the historical and cultural context within which we need to place and understand de Lión’s text. I will then shift to a textual analysis of the novel, so as to make this highly symbolic and nonlinear text more accessible to non-Guatemalan readers. Finally, I will attempt to place it within what Aníbal Quijano has called the “coloniality of power,” deployed to move thinking beyond Western and Eurocentric conceptualizations. This will provide a new way of framing the issues of indigenous cultural production and agency, transcending subalternized identities originally associated with specific Latin American nation-states in a creative reframing of the implications of ethnic/ racialized classifications of the populations conquered by the Spaniards in the 1500s.

  The Popol Wuj: Its Importance and Its Aftermath

  Spanish conquistadors created the myth that indigenous cultures were illiterate societies. This was not true. Maya cultures prior to the conquest were literate. From what is present-day Mexico, some codices—texts painted on folding books of bark paper—are still in existence. These were presumed to have existed in Guatemala at the time of the Spanish conquest but none survived (Carmack, 12–13). Crucial to this literate order is the Popol Wuj. It constitutes the heart of the Mesoamerican cultural matrix that lingers even at the center of Ladino (i.e., a mixed European and indigenous identity with a Western worldview; Guatemala’s rulers have all been Ladino since independence from Spain in 1821) literariness as an epistemic metaphor of the trace of indigeneity among mestizos, a visible sign of their inferiority complex in relation to “whiteness.” This emblem is important for problematizing Ladino literature’s representation of Maya subjects, and for explaining present-day Maya literature, the new phenomenon launched by Luis de Lión’s Time Commences in Xibalbá. Since then, contemporary Maya literature has become a way of thinking beyond hegemonic Western conceptualization, fitting within Walter Mignolo’s “macro-narratives from the perspective of coloniality.”7 If Mayas’ own identity became hybridized and/or trans-cultural over time (meaning by this simply that after the consummation of the Conquest in 1530, when the Kaqchikels were subdued, it no longer remained impregnable nor unaffected by Occidentalist power deployment), it is also true that Ladino identity, also a result of miscegenation between Spaniards and Mayas, cannot be described as strictly European either (as it is also impacted by Maya culture on a daily basis).