Time Commences in Xibalbá by de Lión Luis

Author:de Lión, Luis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Published: 2012-11-01T00:00:00+00:00

Birds don’t sing at night.

But one time they did sing. As if they had all agreed—the birds that lived in every kind of tree: grevilleas, izotales, blackberry bushes, cypresses, plum trees, coffee plants, hog plums—exactly at nine o’clock at night, from the nests of every kind of bird—blue jays, blackbirds, clarineros, doves, motmots, mockingbirds, warblers—they all took off and circled the town in search of one particular house; they perched on the roof of the house, all bunched together and anxious, and they sang. The people said: ¡How weird! But later they understood that those birds had all sung out of sheer joy—joy that someone was going to lose his virginity that night. But they only sang for a bit. When they heard that the man who was below that roof, instead of sleeping with his woman, was snoring in the other bed, as though it didn’t even matter to him that she could turn to ash; they let the air out of their beaks and went back to their nests.

Birds don’t sing at night, but there are some who do; they sing warnings.

When the pixcoy* bird sings to you, your body trembles. You think something is going to happen to you. But if you’re an Indian, maybe you don’t believe in omens anymore, maybe your head now has other ideas in it, maybe you live in the city, maybe now you know something about the science in books. But if you’re an Indian and you go back to your town and you go out at night and hear the pixcoy sing to you, you forget all about your city, your books, science, your new ideas, and you say: —I believe in Dios, and not in vos—but really you still believe in it; you cross yourself, and for several days you’re just waiting to see what’s going to happen to you. Maybe nothing happens to you, maybe what happens to you is the same as any other day: a spat in the house with your woman; an injury to your foot or your hand, but purely by accident and it’s not really a big deal; a dust-up in the cantina; or even the fear itself, the fear that something is going to happen to you. But you blame it on the pixcoy.

However, ¡damn pixcoy! this time it didn’t say anything to anybody. It didn’t warn a single person in the whole town that somebody was going to make off with the Virgen. Afterward everyone was wondering how this bird had come out looking foolish; after all it’s always getting involved in those things called omens. And there’s no doubt that he knew it was going to happen. He had to know about it.

Now, me, I say that, since it’s an Indian’s bird, it didn’t have any reason to warn the Indians that something was going to happen to a Ladina. Faithful bird, bird of premonition, heart that flies, that goes from tree to tree, always seeing what’s coming—but nobody sees you coming.

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