The Mayan Codex

48

By the time you had passed through Santa Elena the hunger was giving you hallucinations. First you saw a small animal that looked like a dog, but which wasn’t a dog. It had a squared-off tail, and was grey all over. This animal watched you from the side of the road as you began walking. Then it followed you, darting in and out of the scrub at the edge of the highway. At one point you took out your machete and brandished it at the beast, but the creature lay hidden, perhaps anticipating your aggressive actions.

Then, later, you saw a snake at the side of the road. It was emerald green. As you watched, it coiled itself back and tried to thrust itself towards you. But the snake didn’t move. This was such a curious thing that you edged closer to see what had happened to the snake. It was then that you saw that a vehicle had at some point driven over the snake’s tail. This had become glued to the road by the blood, leaving the snake both free and not free. It could curl itself and lash out, true, and act in every other way as a snake should. But the blood had long since dried, and the snake was effectively anchored to the asphalt until another vehicle happened by and completed the job that the first vehicle had started.

This time you used your machete skilfully, as you used to do when you were cutting the pampas grass outside the cacique ’s house. The snake assuredly felt no pain. But, nevertheless, you regretted its passing.

You had already walked on some metres from the snake’s body when you realized that the creature contained meat. And that, freshly dead, it was of no use to anyone but the man who had killed it.

You took the snake with you into the underbrush, and you made a small fire, and cooked the snake over the embers, spitted onto a stick. When you ate the snake, the meat was tender and soft, like a chicken’s flesh. You could feel the meat rushing through your body, overwhelming you with its protein. You stood by the side of the track down which you had taken the snake, and you vomited, your stomach spasming with the unexpected food.

You stood for a long while, holding yourself. Then you reached down and picked up the parts of the snake that you had vomited out. Carefully, with great tenderness, you cleaned these parts and ate them a second time. On this occasion you managed to keep them in, for you knew that without food inside you, very soon you would die. And then the oaths sworn by your father, and your grandfather, and your great-grandfather, would come to nothing. Later, when it was time to be judged by the Virgencita, you would be found wanting, and she would get her son to condemn you to the purgatorio, where you would linger in the offal of your shame.

After this thought you sat by the side of the road and you watched the cars flow past you for some little time. But eating the snake had not helped you. Neither had the vomiting. In fact you no longer had the strength even to raise your hand and ask for help. Dusk fell, and still you sat by the side of the road. You were seventeen kilometres from Kabah, and you might as well have been seven hundred.

Once, a Maya man walked past you, carrying a rifle. You raised your head. He stared at you strangely. These Maya were a curious-looking people, you said to yourself. Small, and round of face, with backward sloping ears, curved noses, and protruding bellies. Not thin and lanky like the mestizos from Veracruz. This man even wore his hair short, like a scrubbing brush. As you watched him the man sneezed, then cleared his nose onto the ground.

‘Jesus,’ you said, meaning it as a blessing.

The man smiled, and pointed to his rife. ‘I am going to shoot a pheasant,’ he said. ‘Or failing that, an iguana.’

‘An iguana?’

‘Yes. They are very good to eat. Except in August and September when we cannot kill them.’

‘Why? Why cannot you kill them then?’

The Maya laughed. ‘Because they turn into snakes.’

‘Madre de Dios.’

‘And not only that,’ said the Maya. ‘If we kill one during this period and then we marry, our wives will be vipers.’

‘It is October now. You may kill one then?’

‘Yes. Yes. I will try to do that.’ The Maya started away. Then he stopped. ‘I have a triciclo. When I have killed my iguana, I shall come back this way. If you are tired, you may sit in the front and I will cycle you.’

‘Why will you do that?’

‘Why not? You are a tired man. You have come a long way. I can see that in your face. When I come back with firewood and an iguana you will tell me where you are going, and then you will share my meal. I live the time it takes to smoke two cigarettes further up this road. You are a foreigner here. You will be my guest.’

You dropped your head between your knees as the man walked away into the woods. So the Virgencita had indeed heard your cry. And she had answered it.

You were blessed.