“How strikingly the stony blackness stands out against the extravagant colors of the shawl. Look at its motionless face, its sealed mouth, its eyes fixed on a day that does not exist. It has been reborn here, in our midst, and nevertheless the distance between its hearing and our lament is like that between the stars!

“From Huistán and Yalcuc, from Jolnautic and Yaltem, from Zacampot and Milpoleta, from all directions we have arrived. The thread of tears that salts one person’s cheek joins another thread of tears and another and another to flow here, to inundate the plain, to cover the hillside.

“And the god, is he at all moved? Does he ever say: enough! He has been born again, it is true; it is true that he reclines before us. But he has forgotten our tongue and no longer succeeds in speaking to us. And you be silent, too, pilgrim. You cry out uselessly; and therefore your harvest of corn will not be sufficient to your children’s hunger; the patrón will grow fat on your debts and the malign powers will feed, as always, on your flocks. And you, woman, what are you whispering in a corner? It would be better for you to close your lips. The Ladina attacker at the outskirts of Jobel wrestled away the cloth you wove? Patience: wait for the sheep to be covered with wool again; shear it again, and weave. But do not go down to the city, be careful not to go near Jobel because the idol’s arm does not reach to defend you there.

“Look at it there, sleeping, mute. Ay, how much better it would have been to stay in our village, in our house, and not to walk all this way so our eyes could look upon this sad, sad spectacle.

“In vain, in vain you tear your hair, oh multitude! Uselessly you beat your chest, you break down in howls and pleas! God, the god you came to worship, sleeps. He sleeps like a newborn. Or like a corpse.”

Catalina never left the idols. Her hut could crumble away, abandoned; her family no longer received any form of care or attention from her. She was here, day and night, waiting. Waiting for what, she did not know.

When Catalina came back to herself after her discovery, she was surrounded by people of the tribe. She could not speak. Only her eyes remained fixed on the stone figures. The others looked at them as well, and understood. And when they left that place they spread out in all directions to announce the news.

With the offerings brought by the pilgrims the cave was decorated and by their labors it was kept clean despite the flow of visitors and the daily tumult. Drunk with the collective devotion, Catalina breathed an air of enthusiasm those first days, in the expectation of a supernatural immanence.