Time Commences in Xibalbá

Epi . . . taph

78 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 Epi . . . taph 79 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 and 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...