Unlike the modern Zapatistas and their supporters, Rosario Castellanos did not have a romantic, or even optimistic, view of the world. She did not believe that indigenous peoples are perforce purer human beings than mestizos, and she was devastatingly clear-eyed about the distortions of the spirit that ignorance and misery can bring about. The Book of Lamentations is a heroic attempt to re-imagine and understand an atrocious event: the rebellion spearheaded by the inhabitants of San Juan Chamula in 1868 which, according to contemporary accounts, culminated in the crucifixion of a child. This book revolves—lovingly, it can be said—around that central horror.

The lack of violence in the current Chiapas rebellion is one of the essential differences with the events related in the pages that follow, but that does not diminish The Book of Lamentations’ relevance to the present. The desperate urgency with which the Maya communities dream that they will one day be free of the caxlanes—the powerful whites who rule them—continues to this day. The dependence on white revolutionaries who join and give direction to the Maya uprisings in pursuit of their own ideological utopias continues as well. Maya history has been, since the Conquest, a tragedy marked by the Indian communities’ enduring faith in the possibility of an avenging, cleansing war. It was an unlikely observer—an awkward girl who wanted to transform herself into an eye because she did not see any room for herself in the world—who understood this better than any other Mexican novelist to date. She turned herself into a mirror in which the Maya people who brought her up could be reflected, and what she saw still has the authority of truth today.

Alma Guillermoprieto,

MEXICO CITY, 1996

The Book of Lamentations

THE BOOK OF
LAMENTATIONS

Whereas your glory is no longer great;

Whereas your might exists no more

—and though without much right to veneration—

your blood will still prevail a while . . .

All the children of dawn, the dawn ‘s offspring,

will not belong to your people;

only the chatterboxes will yield themselves to you.

People of Harm, of War, of Misery,

you who did the wrong, weep for it.

THE BOOK OF THE COUNCIL

I

CHAPTER I

SAN JUAN, the Guarantor, he who was there when the worlds first appeared, who spoke the yes that started the century on its way and is one of the pillars that keep stable what is stable, stooped down one day to contemplate the land of men.

His eyes travelled from the sea where the fish glides to the mountaintop where the snow sleeps. They passed over the flatlands where the fluttering wind scuffles, over the beaches’ buzzing sands, over the forests, refuge of wary animals. Over the valleys.