Time Commences in Xibalbá

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

29 —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 expected 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 time commences in xibalbá 30 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 . . . * * * —The Other Half of the Night They Didn’t Sleep . . . 31 You were never your father’s son, and you were even less your mother ’s son, even if she did give...