“As soon as he was wrapped in the shawl, the stone son could no longer move or live. In despair the ilol broke her head open against the slowly disintegrating matter.

“Their corpses strewed pestilence and harm to all the winds. Animals died, fields dried up, men fell as if struck by lightning.

“Out of ten families, one was saved; out of ten villages, none was completely preserved.

“The lords of Ciudad Real observed nine days of mourning and ordered the tribe’s survivors to cleanse themselves of their guilt by acts of penitence. Those same lords furnished the guilty with the instruments for inflicting the punishment.

“The name of that ilol, which was once spoken by all with hope and reverence, has been outlawed. The man who feels himself stung by the temptation to speak it spits and the saliva helps to erase her image, to erase her memory.”

The nana was silent. Gently she set the sleeping girl’s head on the pillow.

Silently she went back to her place.

It was still a long time before dawn.

Afterword by Esther Allen

AFTERWORD

“Writing has been, more than anything, explaining to

myself the things I don’t understand.”

—Rosario Castellanos

“Love is not consolation. Love is light. “

—Simone Weil

The term that has come into the English language as “magic realism” (in Spanish, lo real maravilloso), was coined by the great Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier, who argued in a 1949 essay that European ideas of the fantastic had faded to an exhausted reworking of a few familiar themes and twists, while the reality of America held out wonders still far beyond anything dreamed of by Europe. The essay’s final question—“What is the history of America but a chronicle of this marvelous reality?” rang out as a challenge to all Latin American writers.

By the time Carpentier’s essay appeared, the technique of magic realism had already been pioneered by, among others, the Guatemalan novelist Miguel Angel Asturias, winner of the 1967 Nobel Prize. In 1925, at the beginning of his literary career, Asturias translated the sacred Maya text known as the Popol Vuh, or Book of the Council, into Spanish. Maya myth became one of the wellsprings of Asturias’s vision, yielding a fantastical dimension of existence where the laws of the material world no longer hold sway, yet which is portrayed in realist detail, interwoven with depictions of ordinary life and human beings.