Time Commences in Xibalbá

And, in Fact, They Were Alive . . .

48 —And, in Fact, They Were Alive . . . but it wasn’t the same as all the other days; it was different, a totally new kind of day that arrived suddenly, without any birds chirping to announce its arrival; and its copper sun was born on the opposite side of the sky from where it normally rose; and its rays weren’t weak like normal when it first came up; it was already so intense and spilled so much light on them and so much heat that some went blind and others were about to burst into flames. Nonetheless, all the people knelt down at exactly the same moment, as if they were trees split by an invisible lightning bolt, and they bowed their heads, and with their breath offered incense to the new day. Then, they started to look for each other, to look at each other, to try to recognize each other. But they kept scaring each other stiff—they’d look at each other and just take off running; they’d hide under the beds and try to remember what day they had died, how the casket had smelled, the silence and time, how much that first worm biting into their flesh had hurt, and then whether they had actually left the earth and flown, whether they had passed right by the moon, right by the sun and exactly how far beyond that last star they had gone, whether they had swum or walked across the Jordan of the sky, whether they had lived for a time without feeling hunger without thirst without heat without cold and what the flowers in paradise were like, or the angels the saints the birds, the trees the —And, in Fact, They Were Alive . . . 49 fruits the fountains, or the face of God of Baby Jesus of Christ of our Lady of Immaculate Conception of Our Lady of Sorrows, or the face of Saint Peter and the gates of heaven and its keys, which of their deceased relatives they had seen there; they looked at their own eyes to see whether they were blue from so much sky and whether their clothes were pieces of clouds with threads and buttons and zippers made of little stars; or whether, after they had been buried, a hole had opened up for them under the coffin where, by way of a chute, they had slid down and suddenly fallen among the coals of the other side of the world; and what the latest face of Satan looked like; of the satanettes; of the little baby satans; they looked to see whether their bodies were charred, if they had marks of torture on their bodies, snakebites, places where barbed wire had bitten into their flesh; and then they tried to remember, whether it had been heaven or hell they had come back from, what road they had come back on, how they had been made a part of the world again, at what moment they had been resurrected, what the transformation from dust to physical shape and from physical shape back to life had felt like, and they scratched themselves to see if they bled, they looked at their footprints in the earth to see if they had the shape of a real-flesh foot, they tried to count their ribs, tried to see if they were missing any pieces of flesh, any calluses, any strands of hair, they went to the cemetery to see if there were any open graves, they leaned over the water storage barrels to see if they could see their reflections so that the water would let them know if they were alive, or they banged their heads together to see whether that would wake them up, that it had all been but a dream, and when they finally realized that it had all indeed been a dream, still, just to be sure, they looked for the most recent photographs they had taken and looked in the mirror to make sure they weren’t other people now, they remembered their names so that, when they could speak again, if they could speak again someday , they could tell themselves that they were themselves, they tried on all their clothes and their sandals made of discarded tires and all their hats and all their shoes to see if they fit right, they made a point of recognizing their children, old and newborn, so as not to make the mistake of thinking they were...