Catalina Díaz Puiljá, barely twenty years old yet already dry and withered, was given to Pedro from childhood by her parents. The early times were happy. The lack of offspring was seen as natural then. But later, when the companions with whom Catalina spun, gathered wood and carried water began to settle their feet more heavily onto the earth (because they walked for themselves and for the child to come), when their eyes filled with peace and their bellies swelled like granaries after the harvest, then Catalina probed her fruitless hips, cursed the lightness of her step and, turning suddenly to look back, saw that her feet left no mark behind her. This, she thought with anguish, was how her name would pass over her people’s memory. From that time on she was inconsolable.

She consulted with the elders, yielded her pulse to the diviners’ ears. They questioned the cycles of her blood, investigated the facts, intoned invocations. Where did your path swerve, Catalina? Where did your spirit take fright? Catalina sweated, immersing herself in the smoke of miraculous herbs. She did not know how to answer. And her moon did not return white like that of women who have conceived, but stained with red like the moon of spinsters and widows. Like the whore’s moon.

Then the pilgrimage began. She approached the wandering peddlers who brought news from far away. She stored the names of the places to be visited in the folds of her mind. There was an old woman in Cancuc who could work harmful magic but was also a healer, depending on what was needed. In Biqu’it Bautisti, a brujo went deep into the night to interpret its designs. An enchanter practiced in Tenejapa. Catalina brought them humble gifts: the first ears of corn, jars of liquor, a young lamb.

In this way the light was gradually hidden from her and she was caught up in a dark world ruled by arbitrary wills. She learned to placate those wills when they were threatening, to excite them when they were auspicious, to transmute their signs. She chanted mind-numbing litanies. She ran through flames, unharmed and delirious. Now she was one of those who dare to gaze on the face of mystery, an ilol, a seer, whose lap is a nest of spells. Those she frowned on trembled and those who saw her smile were reassured. But Catalina’s belly was still closed. Sealed like a nut.