The Book of Lamentations

Rosario Castellanos

THE BOOK OF
LAMENTATIONS

—————

ROSARIO
CASTELLANOS

TRANSLATED AND WITH
AN AFTERWORD BY ESTHER ALLEN
INTRODUCTION BY ALMA GUILLERMOPRIETO

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The Book of Lamentations translated by Esther Allen first published in the
United States of America by Marsilio Publishers 1996
This edition with an afterword by Esther Allen published in
Penguin Books 1998

11 13 15 17 19 20 18 16 14 12

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

Castellanos, Rosario.

[Oficio de tinieblas. English]

The book of lamentations/Rosario Castellanos; translated and

with an afterword by Esther Allen; introduction by Alma Guillermoprieto.

p. cm.—(Penguin twentieth-century classics) ISBN 0 14 11.8003 X

I. Allen, Esther, 1962- II. Title. III. Series.

PQ7297.C25960313 1998

863—dc21 98-11868

Printed in the United States of America
Set in Stempel Garamond
Designed by Virginia Norey

CONTENTS

Introduction by Alma Guillermoprieto

The Book of Lamentations

Chapters

I – II – III – IV – V – VI – VII – VIII – IX – X – XI – XII – XIII

XIV – XV – XVI – XVII – XVIII – XIX – XX – XXI – XXII – XXIII – XXIV

XXV– XXVI –XXVII – XXVIII – XXIX – XXX – XXXI – XXXII – XXXIII

XXXIV – XXXV – XXXVI – XXXVII – XXXVIII – XXXIX – XL

Afterword by Esther Allen

A Brief Glossary of Tzotzil and Spanish Terms

Introduction by Alma Guillermoprieto

INTRODUCTION

IN THE 1930’s, in Mexico’s southernmost state of Chiapas, a little girl travelled to her family’s ranch for the holidays. She made the journey as generations of the state’s white landowners had done, and as at least one generation to come would still do, sitting on a chair strapped to the back of an Indian. Her mother travelled on the back of another man, her little brother on the back of a third, perched for days on their mounts, up rainforest-covered elevations and down steep ravines, in the suffocating heat of the dry season or through drenching rains. In Chiapas, long after the Mexican Revolution had brought the idea of equality, at least, to the rest of the country’s citizens, the owners of the state’s most productive land continued to use the destitute indigenous majority as beasts of burden, and considered this the rightful order of things. In the particular case of this little girl, however, several exceptional things occurred: as she grew up she came to understand the twisted nature of the relationship between her family and the people who served them; she remembered what she had seen; and she became a writer. In due course she wrote the novel we now have before us in a fluid and powerful translation whose English title is stunningly apt: The Book of Lamentations.

Rosario Castellanos found her calling as so many writers do, out of loneliness. But in her case, the decision to write only served to compound her sense of isolation. There was no precedent for her choice: no woman before her in Chiapas had decided to write, and the idea was as shocking, as against natural law as if, say, an indio or a horse had decided to put pen to paper. The act of writing—indeed the very act of observing that precedes writing —was subversive, and banished her from the place that birth and upbringing had reserved for her in the tiny social universe of Chiapas. It is hard to imagine today what it meant not to know one’s place in so rigid a society; for Castellanos it meant, of course, that her chances for achieving the expected goals—a comfortable marriage, children, the safe rituals of family and religion —were reduced to zero. But in such suffocating circumstances, not to know one’s place could also mean something more terrifying: not knowing who one is, not understanding the face in the mirror, because that face does not resemble any other face one knows.

Her parents defined her condition as an outsider early on. Her founding memory, as it were, was of the day one of her aunts burst into the room, saying she had just had a vision, and that one of Mrs. Castellanos’ children would not live to adulthood. “Not the boy!” Rosario’s mother exclaimed, rising from her chair in terror. (The boy did indeed die soon after.) Rosario was thus reduced to insignificance, and in the years that followed she was ignored and yet simultaneously overprotected: another childhood memory also involves her mother, this time instructing a servant to swab with alcohol the area on which Rosario was about to perform a school dance routine. The combination of her character, her intelligence and her upbringing left the girl completely unprepared for ordinary social intercourse, and the writer Castellanos remembers the child Rosario, painfully, as neither outgoing nor charming. To be present in the world was in itself a difficulty, and so in her happiest fantasies she reduced herself to nothing more than an eye. “It must be so lovely to be always like a balcony, all empty and carefree, only looking!” she wrote in the opening pages of her first, autobiographical, novel Balún Canán [1956, Fondo de Cultura Económica].

That such a childhood would produce such a novel was probably inevitable, although Castellanos did not begin her writing career as a novelist. Strictly speaking, she began writing as a teenager in a dismal “young ladies’ school” in Comitán, the coffee-trading Chiapas town where she grew up. Here, she drafted highly successful mash notes for her classmates, and thus bought herself a degree of popularity, although one can imagine that she might have preferred to have the boyfriends. The door to real writing was opened in the late 1930s, as a result of a confrontation with the modern world that the wealthy landowners of Chiapas had long resisted—often by force—and which was finally imposed on them by President Lazaro Cárdenas: he decreed a program of land reform and peasant emancipation that greatly diminished the Castellanos family holdings; embittered, the family left Chiapas for Mexico City when Rosario was sixteen.

In interviews, Castellanos described her encounter with this rude, noisy city as traumatic. Much more so were the deaths, in quick succession, of both her parents, a year later. But in high school she met a gentle and luminously intelligent girl by the name of Dolores Castro, and, with her, fell in with a group of young poets. At last she saw a face in the mirror that suited the person she could be. The Nicaraguan poet/priest Ernesto Cardenal was part of this group, and so were Dolores Castro, the Guatemalan short-story writer Augusto Monterroso, and a fellow Chiapaneco, the great Mexican poet Jaime Sabines.

Castellanos read constantly. She wrote and published her first poems. She spent hours talking in coffee shops with her poet friends. She studied Filosofía y Letras at the National University. Her intelligence and sharp wit were no longer a source of shame, and although she would later title a book of essays Mujer que sabe latín . . . from the Spanish saying, “A woman who knows Latin will not find a husband or a good end,” the fact was that she could now write this truth, rather than simply suffer it.

Castellanos joined the National Indigenous Institute—founded under the aegis of Lázaro Cárdenas, the same president whose active social reforms had so affected her family—and worked there writing and producing scripts for didactic puppet shows that were staged on market day in the most inaccessible villages in Chiapas. Back in Mexico City, she taught at the National University. For several years^ she wrote a lengthy weekly column in the newspaper Excelsior. She published eleven volumes of poetry. Her numerous essays include the first feminist texts ever published in Mexico. For Mexican women, “[Castellanos] opened wide the door of feminine literature, and began it. In a certain way it is thanks to her that those of us who now attempt to do so are able to write,” Elena Ponitowska states. “Before her no other woman except Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz . . . truly committed herself to her vocation.”

But Castellanos would never be happy. Indeed, the many friends who loved her felt that she was rarely anything but deeply depressed. Late in life, and unhappily, she married. She had a child. Eventually she was named ambassador to Israel.

Unsparingly, she summarized her life, and the inevitability of her writing career, in an Excelsior column:

To recapitulate: first, I was an only daughter, who never attended any school or childhood institution on a regular basis that would allow me to develop friendships. Abandoned to the resources of my imagination during adolescence, it seemed logical to me that I would suddenly be left utterly orphaned. I remained single until the age of thirty-three, during which time I reached an extreme degree of isolation, confined in a tuberculosis asylum, and [then] working in an institute for Indians.

I then entered a marriage that was strictly monogamous on my part and totally polygamous on my husband’s. I had three children, of whom two died [through miscarriage], I received my divorce papers when I was in Tel Aviv.

Add to this that I am shy, and that, as long as I had no obligation to do so, I never went to parties, out of fear that I would lose myself in others, abolish that distance that kept me so safe from any emotional contact.

For company, I virtually never had need of another’s physical presence. When I was little I talked to myself because I am a Gemini. Not yet out of childhood I had already begun to write poems. What was the result of my first falling in love? The production of an intimate diary which was first intended as an instrument to bring the object of my love closer but which ended by utterly substituting for and supplanting it.

Given the despairing way in which Castellanos almost always wrote about herself, there is a widespread belief that her death in 1974 in Tel Aviv was an act of suicide. Instead it was the result of one of her many idiosyncrasies—her utter mechanical ineptitude. On August 7,1974, while trying to plug a lamp into a socket at the embassy residence, she died of electrocution. She was forty-nine years old.

Had The Book of Lamentations been published in English at any other time until very recently, it would have been necessary to start this introduction by explaining that Chiapas, a state bordering on Guatemala, is one of Mexico’s poorest, that the majority of its three and a half million people are descendants of the Maya, who built fantastic limestone cides in the middle of the jungle more than a thousand years ago, and who today are largely illiterate, impoverished and enraged. But newspaper readers around the world know all this now, thanks to the uprising that started in the former capital of Chiapas—referred to by its old name, Ciudad Real, in this novel—on January 1, 1994. On that day, thousands of Maya campesinos, including descendants of the very same field workers who lived on the Castellanos estate, declared war on the Mexican government. They called themselves the Zapatista National Liberation Army, after General Emiliano Zapata, who led campesino troops into battle eighty years ago and gave the Mexican Revolution its distinctly agrarian cast. The new Zapatistas’ rebellion was a throwback both to a long-gone Mexican agricultural past and to a more recent form of struggle—guerrillas for socialism—that had seemed exhausted in this hemisphere. That the uprising should have happened at all, much less endure so stubbornly against all odds, struck millions of people as astonishing. But the rebellion should not have come as a surprise to anyone in Mexico who had read The Book of Lamentations.

The Book of Lamentations, first published in Spanish as Oficio de tinieblas, in 1962, followed Castellanos’ autobiographical Balún Canán, and was to be the last novel she published. The plot recreates an Indian rebellion that took place in the vicinity of San Cristóbal de las Casas (the official name of the book’s “Ciudad Real”) in the mid-nineteenth century. The novel is faithful to the known facts in many respects, including the character who sparks the rebellion when she hears miraculous voices issuing from three “talking rocks”—a woman called Catalina Díaz Puiljá in the book, Agustina Gómez Checheb in real life—and the ritual crucifixion of her foster child, called Domingo in both fact and fiction.

The plot differs from history in one respect: Castellanos decided to set it in the 1930s—the very time when her family was suffering the impact of the Cardenista reforms. She transformed the real-life nineteenth-century mestizo anarchists from central Mexico, who provided the Maya rebels with much of their military training, into a romantically complicated trio: the historical Ignacio Fernández Galindo is the basis for the novel’s Fernando Ulloa, the Cardenista school teacher and land reform agitator; Ulloa’s assistant in the book, César Santiago, corresponds to Fernandez Galindo’s real-life aide; while Fernandez Galindo’s wife, who appears to have been an epically courageous woman, is replaced in the novel by the equivocal, sexually traitorous Julia Acevedo. There is ambiguity in the author’s attitude towards the mestizo protagonists of The Book of Lamentations. Perhaps it springs from her childhood memories of dispossession. Perhaps, in the case of Julia Acevedo, it is related to the mistrust she appears to have felt for women who were sexually lively and openly seductive.

But the novel’s heart is not really with the mestizos (or Ladinos, as they are called in Chiapas). It is with the Maya outcasts of a desolate highland village, who put the white-skinned inhabitants of Ciudad Real to siege because three speaking rocks have told them that justice will someday be theirs. What is astonishing is Castellanos’ fluent understanding of the world view of the hopeless rebels; of their sense of how whites behave, of their singular relationship with the Catholic God the Father and his attendant saints, of the ways in which a woman in the Maya community can acquire power and of the ways in which individuals with a tiny measure of power in such deprived communities can come to be distrusted and feared. Castellanos was able to know and imagine all this because in her outcast childhood the people closest to her were the equally hapless Indians who cooked for her, carried her on their backs, sang her to sleep and loved her, as the nanny does the willful, sickly Idolina in The Book of Lamentations.

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.

The gaze of San Juan Guarantor paused at the valley called Chamula. He was pleased by the gentle slope of the hills that come there from far away to meet, their ravines gently heaving. He was pleased by the sky, hovering near in the early morning mists. There rose up in the soul of San Juan a desire to be worshiped in this place. That was why he turned all the white sheep in the flocks grazing in that valley to stone: so there would be no lack of materials to build his church and so his church would be white.

And there the rocky outcrop remained, silent and unmoving, sign of a divine desire. But the tribes that dwelled in the valley of Chamula, those called Tzotzils, the People of the Bat, did not know how to interpret this marvel. Neither the eldest among the elders nor the men of the Council were able to express a worthy opinion; they produced only confused stammerings, lowered eyelids, arms falling in gestures of fear.

That was why the other men had to come, later. And it was as if they came from another world. They carried the sun in their faces and spoke an arrogant language, a language that wrenches the hearts of those who hear it. A language not like Tzotzil (which is also spoken in dreams), but like an iron instrument of mastery, a weapon of conquest, the striking lash of the law’s whip. For how could orders be given or condemnations passed down, if not in Castilla? How could punishments or rewards be meted out, if not in Castilla?

The newcomers did not fully understand the enigma of the petrified sheep either. They understood only the command that work be done. So they with their heads and the Indians with their hands began to construct a church. By day they dug the foundations, but at night the foundations filled in and became level again. By day they built the walls, and at night the walls fell down. San Juan Guarantor had to come in person, pushing the stones himself, rolling them down the slopes one by one until they were all gathered in the place they would remain. Only then did the men’s efforts come to fruition.

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The Book of Lamentations

Introduction by Alma Guillermoprieto

The Book of Lamentations

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