Malinche by Laura Esquivel

Author:Laura Esquivel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books
Published: 2007-11-27T05:00:00+00:00

It had been a joyful spring day. Malinalli was dressed all in white with necklaces of feathers and jade bracelets and anklets. She was excited, for her grandmother had told her that the butterflies had returned and she was taking her to see them. The child did not understand why they left each year or why they returned and, curious, she asked her grandmother why the butterflies didn’t stay in their homes so that she could see them all year long. The grandmother explained that the butterflies, like so many winged creatures, were great travelers and that this was good, for moving with the wind is what makes one change, renew, become stronger. Each journey of the butterfly was a struggle for life. They migrated in search of food and a climate that would allow them to survive the cold winters; otherwise they would perish. This way they fulfilled a promise of life.

Her grandmother explained to her that within the human body we all had a traveling butterfly buried in our pelvic bone. That was the bone that symbolized them.

“When the flower opens, the butterfly comes,” her grandmother said. “When the butterfly comes, the flower opens.”

This meant that the energy generated by the butterfly, at a certain moment, liberated itself from its source and flew upward through the innards of the bone through the spinal column until it reached the bones of the skull, which symbolized the celestial dome. This journey was a repetition of the one that Quetzalcóatl had taken on the moment of his initiation and his transformation into the Morning Star. Whoever went through it, like him, became a god. And for the grandmother the return of the butterflies to their sanctuary anticipated the eventual return of Quetzalcóatl.

The child was very excited about the trip, overcome at the prospect of seeing so many butterflies. Malinalli’s mother had been opposed to the idea of the journey, saying that it would be impossible for the blind old woman to endure such a trip, and on top of that, to care for Malinalli, who according to her was such a restless and disobedient child. The trip would have been canceled had the grandmother not argued energetically and forcefully that to travel to sacred places it was not necessary to see, and that her years did not matter, for fatigue did not exist there, and that no one was going to stop her or convince her not to go, because aside from everything else, it was important for Malinalli to come to know the origin and eternal return of life’s creation.

“And I will not die in peace, nor leave this world, until I have made this journey with my granddaughter.”

So she asserted, and thus, hand in hand, Malinalli and her grandmother left on the road to the sanctuary on the first day of spring. They walked for three days, resting in small towns along the way, where they joined a group of men and women who were traveling to the sanctuary,

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