 kept” (ibid., p. 96). Law, up to this point, had been the patrón, but Felipe has been to Tampico. He has heard Lázaro Cárdenas speak. He knows that he has a new weapon in his arsenal (ibid., p. 99).
Felipe’s narrative is a reminder that the peasant’s memory is long. What the state provided was not so much consciousness-raising as it was an opportunity. Felipe’s wife, with whom he has a barren marriage, worries about what he is doing, but not so much out of loyalty to the Argüellos as out of fear about the consequences they might face for confronting the old order. This fear seems about to be realised when the Indians, led by Felipe, go on strike during the sugar harvest, insisting that they will not go back to work until César hires a competent Tzeltal-speaking teacher in Chactajal.9 César forces them back to work at gunpoint, but his victory is short-lived. As the Indians eat lunch a massive fire engulfs first the sugar mill, and then the entire finca. Everything is ruined. The Indians see evil spirits here but know that one of them is responsible, and they are racked with distress and recrimination (ibid., pp. 178–9).
Peasant justice is brutal but it is necessary, and it is most definitely not land reform from above. This is not the state enacting the reform. It is long-suffering peasants using the tools at their disposal literally to drive abusive finqueros off the land, taking advantage of the fissures between national and local elites to press their advantage. Indeed, we do not see a competent or even a visionary state here. Where the federal government is more than a spectre, it is incompetent, capricious, as likely to make things worse as make things better. Only two federal agents populate the text, and both inspire little confidence. The Federal School Inspector shuts down the only school available to the children of Comitán because they have learned the catechism. Gonzalo Utrilla, the Agrarian Reform Inspector, is driven not by a sense of justice but a desire to take revenge on a godfather who had spurned him. He announces that the land is the property of the peasants, feigning to inform the peasants of something they already know, but lacks both the paperwork and the muscle to do anything about the situation (ibid., pp. 128–32).
This is far from the “perfect dictatorship” imagined by Vargas Llosa. We are instead reminded of a state that talked big, insisting on schools and land reform, but whose agents were largely powerless to enact real reform. It is indeed the Indians of Chactajal, who have long understood their own suffering, that are the agents of reform. César’s misfortune is individual, particular, highlighted by a series of contingent events that make the recovery of his land impossible. He fails in his efforts to summon help from Ocosingo to put down the revolt. The son of César’s friend and fellow finquero Jaime Revelo, now a powerful lawyer, refuses to help either of them, as he has concluded that the fincas are stolen land. The Governor, on the verge of coming to his aid, is called away to Mexico City (where we assume he is read the riot act).
Felipe, by contrast, shapes events to his liking as he and the peasants enact their reforms through three specific acts. First, they demand that César follow the 1917 Constitution and provide them with a teacher. Secondly, when their efforts result in threats of violence from César, they burn the finca to the ground (driving the Argüellos to ruin). Thirdly, when César dispatches his nephew Ernesto (the incompetent and abusive teacher in their school) to Ocosingo to get help from the Municipal President, they follow him and assassinate him on the way. Ernesto’s body is lashed to his horse and the horse dispatched to Chactajal. The message is delivered, and the Argüellos abandon their estate for Comitán. Though it seems pretty clear that Felipe is the author of all these acts, the actual perpetrators are never identified (indeed, Felipe could not have started the fire himself as he was not in the fields that day). It is the work of the entire community.
If the doom already hanging over the family is not enough, after they return home to Comitán, Nana (the narrator’s nanny) tells Zoraida that the Indians at Chactajal have placed a curse on Mario and that he will die. From the perspective of the Indians (though not clearly Nana, who is also Tzeltal), the curse represents the final step in assuring that what they have taken from the Argüellos can never be taken back. Mario is the sole male heir, and with his death, the family’s claim to this property also dies. In this sense, the curse represents the ultimate evocation of the rough justice of the Revolution, but one with a particularly original twist.
Mario is entirely healthy, and the idea that he will fall victim to some sort of a curse seems on the face of it absurd. Yet Zoraida, as well as our narrator, knows better. She angrily assaults Nana and then casts her out of the house, but the two of them wait in deep despair for the inevitable. Consumed with the fate of her only son, she loses any sight of the narrator. She laments, “not the boy” (an utterance said to be taken from Castellanos’ mother’s response to the death of her brother Benjamin), in the presence of her daughter, reminding her that she is of no value.
As Zoraida understood it, Mario was literally being consumed by the Indians at Chactajal, and there is nothing she can do about it. As readers we are shocked as a seemingly healthy Mario slowly succumbs to a mysterious illness, which the local doctor first denies and then concludes is so grave as to preclude moving the boy to a hospital in Mexico City, where he might get better treatment. Mario, everyone understands, has been cursed and will die. And the Argüellos, lacking a male heir, will have lost their lands forever. Ever the fool César loses his chance to say goodbye to his dying son because he remains in the State capital in a futile effort to get an audience with the Governor, in spite of Zoraida’s repeated requests that he return home (see Cypess 1985 and Woodrich 2010).
It also is in the curse placed on Mario that Ladino and Indian cosmologies come together. Yes, the Indians of Chactajal placed the curse, but Zoraida knows its power to be real. It is a shared world of spirits and spells, of mystical powers, of things we fail to believe at our peril.10 That César and the doctor do not understand this power is their failing. Zoraida, Nana, and the narrator know that Mario is doomed. They are in this sense not unlike César’s cousin, Francisca, the only Argüello who manages to hold on to her finca in these troubling times. Francisca’s success is rooted in the fact that she has become a witch-doctor in league with the forest spirit dzulúm, and has gained powers over the Indians on her estate. They remain relatively docile because they fear her powers. In the process, however, she has driven away both her sisters, one to madness and death, and the other forced to return to an unfortunate marriage.
These incidents resonate with José Arguedas’ Rios Profundos/Deep Rivers, which offers a similar effort to incorporate indigenous cosmovisions in a text written largely from a Ladino point of view. Arguedas was raised by Quechua-speaking servants and identified with their worlds, in the same way that Castellanos’ first real character in the text, the young daughter who goes without a name, identifies most closely with Nana, her Indian nanny. For Castellanos, as with Arguedas, this serves as the basis of a concerted effort to give voice not only to a Ladino culture in which magic and spells exist, but also to an indigenous culture in which political acts are shrouded in mystical origins. We cannot be sure if the gods actually exist or if they merely provide a language that first explains powerlessness (Felipe’s wife’s fear of action) and then spurs action (the curse on Mario). In Castellanos’ telling it does not really matter, as these spirits are real enough to all involved. Such a position would be deeply unfashionable today, a reason to accuse Castellanos of appropriating indigenous cultures for her text. At the time, however, it represented a concerted effort to give voice to the other in a way that was not patently patronising.
In part she succeeds here because her Ladino characters, even the seven-year-old narrator, remain impossibly cut off from the worlds of their Tzeltal-speaking servants. There are things the Ladinos simply cannot and do not understand, and that failure is as much about their own racism as anything else. This point is driven home in the final scene of the novel, where the narrator, who to this point was passive, if pained, reveals her inability to see the Indian subjects of the novel as fully human. As she walks down a street in Comitán, consumed with grief over the death of her brother and fearful that she had something to do with it, she sees Nana