The rejection of magic realist forms of “wonder” does not mean that myth itself is absent in The Book of Lamentations. The narrative develops out of a Tzotzil myth of the origin of the church of San Juan Chamula, a collective, inherited myth engraved in the portals of the church, and ends in a mythical retelling of the events of the novel itself (with echoes of the Popol Vuh), invented by the Chamula nursemaid Teresa Entzín López to soothe Idolina, her insomniac charge, and put her to sleep. This brief, final myth places the novel’s events in an enigmatic light: in Teresa’s tale, Indians and Ladinos are not pitted against each other, but join forces against a nameless ilol and her stone son (though in the end, it is the Indians who are punished—who punish themselves—for the ilol’s excesses). The first and most immediate function of this final myth is to mold catastrophic events into a recognizable, intelligible form: a story with a clearly demarcated beginning and end, connected by a simple sequence of actions, bearing a resemblance to a very familiar and much older story. Recast in this way, the events become bearable, even soothing, and thus forgettable. The final sentence of Teresa’s myth speaks of the Indians’ desire to eradicate the ilol from their collective memory.

As an antidote to this sedative, corrosive power it fears in myth, the novel offers its own rigorous, pitiless lucidity. Its plot is loosely based on a singularly resonant historic episode—the crucifixion of one of their own by a group of Tzotzil rebels in Chiapas in 1867, who are thought to have believed that by creating their own Christ they would achieve the same power as their Christian oppressors. Though the historic accuracy of the story has in recent years been disputed by U.S. anthropologist Jan Rus, it is widely believed in Mexico and has taken on a life of its own. In addition to Castellanos’s book, the story has inspired at least two other novels: Flavio Paniagua’s Florinda (San Cristóbal, 1889) and Carter Wilson’s A Green Tree and a Dry Tree (New York, 1972). And who knows if some echo of it didn’t find its way into Jorge Luis Borges’ searing paradox, “El Evangelio según Marcos” (The Gospel According to Mark) (Buenos Aires, 1970). In any case, the clarity Castellanos sought is something entirely different from factual accuracy. The events of 1867 are transposed in time to the 1930s and altered in many other ways as well. Castellanos began by researching the history, but then, she told an interviewer in 1965, “As I progressed, I realized that historical logic is absolutely different from literary logic. However much I wanted to, I could not be faithful to history. Little by little, I abandoned the real event.”