Latin American Folktales (35 page)

113. The Priest’s Son Becomes an Eagle

They were living in Hawiku. The village priest had one son and four daughters. All the girls in the village wished to marry this son of the priest. Every night a girl came with a basket of flour on her head and climbed up the ladder. The boy and his father were eating their supper. The father said, “You ought to be a married man, the girls are all anxious to marry you. Choose one to be your wife.” The girl came down the ladder. She was dressed in white moccasins, and she had a fine red-and-black-bordered white blanket over her shoulders. His mother said, “You’re coming, aren’t you?” The girl said, “Yes.” The boy’s mother asked her to eat with them. She ate, and after eating she said, “Thank you.” They said to her, “What is it that you have come to ask?” She said, “I was thinking of your son.” The father and mother said to her, “Go with him into the inner room.”

In this room the boy stayed every day weaving a white blanket. It was in the loom. He said to the girl, “We must not sleep together tonight. In the morning come to this room and weave this blanket, and if you are able to do this, you shall be my wife. If you are not, we shall not marry.” That night they slept apart.

Next morning she got up to grind before the father and mother of the boy had waked. When the mother had made ready the morning meal and they had eaten, the girl went back into the inner room and tried to weave the blanket, but she could not. When she found that she could not, she went back to her home weeping. She was ashamed.

The next-eldest sister came to ask for the boy, but she, too, had to return to her home when he saw that she could not weave; the third sister came and was turned away. Everybody was watching the house of the priest’s son. Every morning they saw a girl go home weeping.

That night the youngest sister went to the well to get water. She was wishing that someone would teach her to weave. She heard someone speak to her. She looked all about but she could not find where the voice came from. At last the voice said, “Here I am in the top of this flower stalk.” She looked, and saw that it was Spider Woman. Spider Woman said to her, “On the morning of the day you are to go to the house of the youth, come back to the spring, and I shall climb into your ear. I will go with you to his house and teach you how to weave.”

The next morning she went back to the spring, and Spider Woman climbed into her ear. She put on her white moccasins and white puttees and her white blanket, and they went to the house of the youth. His mother said, “You’re coming, aren’t you?” She put out a seat for her and brought food. The girl ate, and when she finished, she said, “Thank you.” The mother took away the food, and they said, “What is it that you have come to ask?” She answered, “I was thinking of your son.” They said, “Go with him into the inner room.”

When they had gone into the other room, he said to her, “We shall not sleep together tonight. In the morning if you are able to weave this blanket, you shall be my wife.” They slept apart.

In the morning they ate their morning meal. When they had finished, she went into the inner room, and went directly to the loom and sat down. Spider Woman said to her, “First pull out that short stick. Pull the lower bar out toward you. Now put the ball of cotton thread in between the warp.” Everything that she had to do Spider Woman told her. The youth sat close beside her and he saw that she understood how to weave the blanket on his loom. He said, “My dear, now we shall be married and we shall have a long life.”

That morning everyone was watching for the girl to come weeping out of the youth’s house. But no one came, and they knew that she had married the youth. Her sisters were very angry. After that she always stayed in the house and did the weaving, and her husband helped his father hoeing the fields.

Whenever he came home, his wife asked him, “My dear, do you love me?” Every time he came in she asked him again, “My dear, do you love me?” The youth did not like this. He thought, “I must find out whether you really love me.”

The next day when he and his father were hoeing in the fields he said to him, “My father, is there any way I can find out if my wife loves me?” His father answered, “My son, you can call the Apaches.”

There were crows flying about the cornfield, and he told the crow, “Go to the Apaches and tell them the priest’s son has called them to come against the people of Hawiku.” The crow flew off to the Apaches. He sought out the Apache priest and said, “The priest’s son at Hawiku has sent for you to come and fight him and his wife.” The Apache said, “Very well. Tomorrow we will come.” They made ready to go to Hawiku on the following day.

In the morning the priest’s son told his wife to dress in her white moccasins and puttees, and to put on her blanket dress and a red-and-black-bordered white blanket and over that an embroidered white blanket. He said, “I and my father are going out to our field to hoe. Bring us a lunch of parched-corn meal.” She went out to the field and took the parched-corn meal. They built a shelter for her to sit in while they were working. At noon they soaked the meal and had lunch. The youth told his father to go home, and the old man went back to the village. He could see the dust in the distance where the Apaches were coming.

The Apaches crept up in ambush. They hid from cedar to cedar. At last they were near. The youth took out his arrows. He had twenty arrows and he shot them all and killed many of the enemy. When the arrows were gone the Apaches killed him and he fell. His wife ran away.

The boy’s father went to the bow priests and told them to make proclamation that in eight days they would dance the yaya dance. When the eighth day came everyone was ready for the dance. All the women had dyed red wool to embroider their blanket dresses fresh, and they wore their white deer-skin moccasins and puttees. The priest’s son’s wife dressed also and went with her sisters to the dance. She did not give a thought to her dead husband. In the middle of the morning the dance began. The yaya leader went up to the wife and her sisters and said, “Shall I tie your blanket?” He took out his deer-bone needle and sewed together their blankets and put them into the dance circle.

The priest’s son came in from the west and climbed up to the tops of the houses around the plaza. He saw his wife and her sisters going into the dance, and he saw that his wife never gave a thought to him. Soon the yaya leaders came up to the priest’s son and put him also into the dance. They pushed him into the circle next to his wife. She looked up at him and recognized him. Tears ran down her cheeks. Immediately he turned into an eagle and flew up to the houses where he had been standing. Then he flew away giving his eagle cries. That is why we value eagle feathers so much, because the eagle is the priest’s son.

Zuni
(New
Mexico)

114. The Revolt of the Utensils

In the old days clay pots and other objects were like people. They could talk, visit, dance, and make chicha.

One day a man left his house, and the pots decided they would go to the garden and the stream to get the maize and the water to make maize chicha. Off they went to the garden, the stream. They got the maize and the water. Then they made the chicha.

They felt happy. “Now we will make music and have dancing,” they said, and when they had prepared the chicha, they made the music and had the dancing. They were in good spirits, they were enjoying each other’s company. When they had played for a long while, they realized that the man of the house would soon return. They began to put everything back. They cleaned up, and the place was just as it had been.

The man came back. He looked around. “Everything is in order,” he said—and all the pots doubled up with laughter.

Tacana
(Bolivia)

115. The Origin of Permanent Death

After the first death, the hummingbird was sent to get clay in order to make a more durable human. Then the cricket was sent to get lightweight balsa wood. Finally, the beetle was sent to get stones to mix in with the new creature to give it firmness.

And so they started to make a human who could withstand death. The cricket returned right away with the lightweight wood. And the hummingbird came with the clay. But the beetle never showed up. Its job was to bring the stone, but it never came back.

After a long wait, and it still had not returned, they decided to make the human being out of clay. Having no stones, they just used clay, and those balsa sticks. Then they blew the breath of life into it, and the human being was finished.

And then Etsa [the sun] said, “Did I not ordain that humans be made also of stone? Was it not my wish that humans be immortal? Had I not determined that even old people would become children again? I had indeed determined that humans would be immortal. But now I say they must die.” He pronounced this solemn judgment: “Now let full-grown men and newborn children die. Let young men die who have not yet had children, and young women who have not yet married.”

Whatever is made of earth and fragile clay must it not break? The earthen bowl, though it is made well, does it not break? We ourselves are made the same.

Shuar (Ecuador) / Píkiur (no surname)

NOTES

All translations are from the Spanish and by the editor unless otherwise noted. Tale type numbers, if preceded by “AT,” are from Aarne and Thompson. Types from Boggs 1930, from Hansen, and from Robe 1973 are so indicated. Motif numbers are from Stith Thompson’s
Motif-Index.
Folktale distributions have been derived mostly from these same indexes, keeping in mind that Spanish-American tales are generally supposed to have been channeled through Spain from remoter origins in Europe, the Middle East, and India. Thus distributions outside the presumed Asian-European-Hispano-American pathway are not taken into account here.

Introduction:

Ramón Pané and Taino lore (Stevens-Arroyo, pp. 74, 78, 88, 103, 137, 168–9). Colombian female deity (Anglería, p. 645). Sahagún as “physician” (Sahagún 1982, pp. 45, 67). Toledo and Sarmiento (Urton, p. 29; Bendezú, p. 393). Montezuma and Inkarrí (Bierhorst 1990, pp. 204–5; 1988, pp. 235–7). Tzotzil view of European kings (Laughlin 1977, p. 78). Aesop in Nahuatl (Kutscher et al.). Cuban tale of eleven thousand virgins (Feijóo, vol. 2, p. 178). Female divinity in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta (Reichel-Dolmatoff 1951; 1978, pp. 23–5; Reichel-Dolmatoff and Reichel-Dolmatoff 1961, p. 347; Tayler 1997, pp. 35, 147). Pedro de Urdemalas “alive in the hearts of the Guatemalan people” (Lara Figueroa 1981, pp. vii, 20). Antonio Ramírez (Lara Figueroa 1981, pp. 112–13). Tía Panchita (Lyra, pp. 3–8). José Rivera Bravo (Anibarro de Halushka, pp. 448–9). Mazatec folk-Bible recitation (Laughlin 1971, p. 37). Martin Gusinde on women narrators (quoted in Wilbert, p. 3). Stanley Robe east of Guadalajara (Robe 1970, p. 36).

Prologue:
Early
Colonial
Legends

[Epigraph]:
Lumholtz, vol. 1, p. 516.

[Introductory Note]:
“Told in the book of Amadis” (Díaz del Castillo, ch.

87). Alexander Pope, “Windsor Forest,” ll. 411–12. Incas emerged through cave openings (Sarmiento, pp. 213–16; Cobo, ch. 3).

1/I.
The Talking Stone, tr. and adapted from Tezozomoc, ch. 102; and Durán, ch. 66 (the two sources derive from a presumed Nahuatl manuscript provisionally called Crónica X).

The legend recalls the great round-stone that had been carved during the reign of Tizoc (1481–86), a generation before Montezuma’s time. This was a cylindrical piece of basalt eight and a half feet in diameter and three feet high. The prisoner, drugged, was stretched over the upper flat surface and held down by attendants, while a priest cut open the breast and removed the still-beating heart. The stone of Tizoc, as it is now called, is displayed at the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City.

Huitzilopochtli: principal god of the Aztecs, a god of war.
1/II.
Montezuma’s Wound, tr. and adapted from Durán, ch. 67; and Tezozomoc, ch. 103.

Two other, similar tales were current in sixteenth-century and early-seventeenth-century Mexico. In one, a noblewoman dies and is buried. Four days later she breaks out of her grave and goes to tell Montezuma that Mexico will be conquered by strangers (Sahagún 1979, libro 8, cap. 1). In the other, the king’s own sister, Papantzin, dies and is laid to rest in a cave, where, returning to life, she hears an angel predict the coming of the Spaniards and the conversion of the Indians to Christianity. She reports this to Montezuma, who is so distraught that he refuses to see her ever again (Torquemada, bk. 2, ch. 91).

1/III.
Eight Omens, tr. from the Nahuatl in Sahagún 1979, libro 12, cap. 1.

The disconsolate mother of the sixth omen prefigures the famous “weeping woman,”
la llorona,
of modern Mexican folk belief. People say they hear her at night, especially in abandoned places and along streams, crying for her lost children.

12 House: the year 1517.

1/IV.
The Return of Quetzalcoatl, tr. and adapted from Tezozomoc, chs. 106–8, and Durán, ch. 69.

The account confuses the reception given Juan de Grijalva, who arrived on the coast in 1518, with the similar reception for Cortés in 1519. It was Cortés who arrived with Malintzin, the Nahua woman who had joined his party farther down the coast and was serving as his interpreter—and mistress—by the time he reached Aztec territory. Loyal to Cortés, Malintzin proved invaluable in the Conquest. Her name is dubiously enshrined in the modern term
malinchismo,
meaning attachment to foreign influences with disregard for Mexican values. The emblems of Quetzalcoatl, presented to Cortés as gifts from Montezuma, were among the treasures sent back immediately to Europe, where they were put on display. Albrecht Dürer saw them in Brussels in the summer of 1520 and wrote in his journal, “All the days of my life I have seen nothing that rejoiced my heart so much as these things, for I have seen among them wonderful works of art” (quoted in Keen, p. 69).

Mexico Tenochtitlan: the more important of the two boroughs, or twin cities, that formed the Aztec capital, Mexico; the other borough was Tlatelolco.

1/V. Is It You?, tr. from the Nahuatl in Sahagún 1979, libro 12, cap. 16.

Here the story definitely passes from legend into stylized history-telling, no more or less reliable than the mutually conflicting accounts preserved in the letters of Cortés and in Bernal Díaz’s
Historia verdadera
(True history).

Itzcoatl, Montezuma the elder, Axayacatl, Tizoc, Ahuitzotl: Montezuma (more fully Montezuma the younger) is naming his predecessors in chronological order, stating that all of them had been simply waiting for Quetzalcoatl to return and claim the throne.

2/I.
Mayta Capac, tr. from Sarmiento, chs. 16–17.

The events on which the legend is based occurred more than two hundred years before the Conquest of 1533. But in this mid-sixteenth-century version we hear that already in Mayta Capac’s time the Incas “lived by thievery,” thus sowing the seeds of culpability that will justify their future destruction. At so early a date the empire, if it may be called that, did not extend beyond the Valley of Cuzco. The town of Oma, which produced Mayta Capac’s mother, was only two leagues from Cuzco itself; and the Alcahuiza, alternately called Culunchima, were original Cuzco natives whose ancestors had been subdued three generations earlier by the first Incas. The story, therefore, tells of a rebellion, said to have been the first major test of Inca rule (Cobo, ch. 7).

2/II.
The Storm, tr. from the Quechua-German text in Trimborn and Kelm, ch. 23. The translations of this tale and the next have been compared with the Spanish versions in Urioste and the English in Salomon and Urioste.

Topa Inca Yupanqui added more territory to the empire than any other Inca, acquiring the gods of the various tribes he had subdued. Yet, according to the story, he was bedeviled by a rebellion and survived only because the god Macahuisa sent a storm against his enemies. This tale of the Inca’s weakness, significantly, comes not from the official records of Cuzco but from the conquered province of Huarochirí, where Macahuisa and his “father,” Pariacaca, were among the homegrown deities.

Coral (
mullu
): translation follows Trimborn and Kelm. Lara 1971, p. 177, has “red-colored marine shell that used to be offered to the gods in Inca times.”

2/III.
The Vanishing Bride, tr. from the Quechua-German text in Trimborn and Kelm, ch. 14.

With the reign of Topa Inca Yupanqui’s son, Huayna Capac, the legends become more pointed and more ominous. This one, among the most mysterious, incorporates a version of the American Indian Orpheus myth, so called by folklorists who note its resemblance to the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. The basic plot is of a hero who attempts to fetch a bride or wife from the underworld and fails. The story in this case is told twice. The first time around, the Indian people themselves lose the bride; the second time, they lose both the bride and the Inca. The Inca’s subjects are here divided into three fictional classes, condor (the proverbial sky dweller of Peruvian lore), hawk (a bird of earthly elevations), and swallow (nesting inside the earth)— implying that the three tiers of the universe (sky, earth surface, and underworld), or, better, the entirety of human society, became bereft. On account of its underworld associations the swallow is the principal actor. (But Salomon and Urioste, offering a different interpretation, suggest that the people are being described as shamans, whose bird familiars simply give them power to fly to the other world.) For another, modern version of the Orpheus myth see “The Dead Wife,” from the Mískito of Nicaragua, no. 106, below.

Cajamarca: the definitive incident of the Peruvian conquest, the execution of the Inca Atahualpa, occurred in this Andean town about halfway between Quito and Cuzco.

2/IV.
A Messenger in Black, tr. and adapted from Pachacuti (the text is to be found four-fifths of the way through this relatively brief chronicle).

As mentioned above in the introductory note, the epidemic that spread south from Panama is thought to have been typhus (or plague). But “faces covered with scabs” implies smallpox. The final detail is not fantastic; Inca mummies were brought out in litters on ceremonial occasions.

2/V. The Oracle at Huamachuco, tr. from Sarmiento, ch. 64.

The idol destroyed by Atahualpa was the statue of the god Catequilla. Its broken pieces were scattered, according to the
Relación de la religión y ritos del
Perú
(written about 1561), which adds further details: “After the arrival of the Christians in this land, there was an Indian woman who had thoughts of Catequilla. A small stone appeared before her; she picked it up and brought it to the grand sorcerer [native priest] and said, ‘I found this stone.’ Then the sorcerer asked the stone, ‘Who are you?’ and the stone, or rather the Devil speaking through the stone, replied, ‘I am Tantaguayani, son of Catequilla.’ ” Thereafter another “son” of Catequilla came to light, and the two were “multiplied” until there were some three hundred throughout the district, promptly established as objects of worship. In a deed recalling the fury of Atahualpa, the Augustinian fathers collected all of these objects and “burned them and smashed them and did away with the sorcerers” (
Relación,
pp. 25–7).

3.
Bringing Out the Holy Word, translated from the Nahuatl, Bierhorst 1985a, pp. 269–73.

This catechistic version of holy scripture was prepared by Don Francisco Plácido, Indian
gobernador
of the town of Xiquipilco (the title “don” here indicates a member of the old Indian nobility). Chanted for the benefit of the town of Azcapotzalco, whose patron saint was the apostle Philip, the piece has a prelude and an envoy (neither of which is included here), greeting the people of Azcapotzalco and, at the end, summoning the ghost of St. Philip. Evidently the catechistic portion is intended to explain how the apostles, including Philip, fit into the history of the world. As an account of the doctrine on which the Latin American folk-Bible cycle is based, it is complete in itself. Compare the folk-Bible stories, nos. 55–73.

Lords and princes: the Aztec nobility.

Folktales:
A
Sixteenth-Century
Wake

[Epigraph]:
Los muertos al pozo y los vivos al negocio
(Pérez, p. 123).

[ Introductory Note]:
Information on wakes (Reichel-Dolmatoff and Reichel-Dolmatoff 1961, pp. 378–82; Vázquez de Acuña, pp. 45–8; Chapman, pp. 186–95; Lara Figueroa 1981, pp. 112–25; Campa, p. 196; Laughlin 1971; Portal, p. 38; Carvalho-Neto 1961, p. 319). “Ah serene, ah Sir Ron . . .” (Cadilla de Martínez, p. 240).

4.
In the City of Benjamin, tr. from Carvalho-Neto 1994, no. 39. Motif J1185.1 Sheherezade.

“Benjamin” translates
Benjuí,
an old Spanish name for the aromatic gum benjamin or benzoin, evidently intended here as a means of transporting the listener to the Orient. The story, clearly, is a variant of the framing tale of the
Thousand and One Nights,
where it is written that a king named Shahriar was betrayed by his wife while visiting with his brother, whose wife had betrayed
him.
Concluding that women could not be trusted, Shahriar from then on took a new wife every night, killing her in the morning. After three years people fled with their daughters. Needing a wife, Shahriar ordered his vizier to get him a virgin. The vizier’s elder daughter, Sheherezade, who had read a thousand stories, offered to be the bride, provided she could bring along her younger sister. On the wedding night the sister asked for a story, the king assented, and Sheherezade began her recitation. On the thousand-and-first night, after she had borne three sons, she begged the king to spare her for the children’s sake; he wept and relented.

The tale that follows also stems from a Near East lineage but moves more decisively into Latin American territory.

5.
Antuco’s Luck, tr. from Saunière, pp. 286–97. Motifs N531 Treasure discovered through dream; H1226.4 Pursuit of rolling ball of yarn leads to quest; N512 Treasure in underground chamber; N813 Helpful genie.

The blood-red talisman beneath the cross implies the Sacred Heart (mentioned finally by name in story no. 101); here it subdues the genie of Middle Eastern lore in a characteristically Hispanic touch. The realistic locales, including the Alameda in Santiago, as well as the name Antuco, borne by both a town and a volcano in Bío-Bío province, mark this novella-like tale as a Chilean creation. Though the novella may be regarded as a literary form, such tales “are also widely told by the unlettered, especially by the peoples of the Near East; the action occurs in a real world with a definite time and place, and though marvels do appear, they are such as apparently call for the hearer’s belief” (Thompson 1946, p. 8). The story is discussed in the introduction, p. 8. See also the comments to nos. 13 and 51, below.

6.
Don Dinero and Doña Fortuna, tr. from Andrade 1930, no. 269.

Assignable to AT type 945 Luck and Intelligence, but deserving of a special Hispanic subtype, Money and Luck, reported also from New Mexico (Rael, no. 93). In one of the New Mexican variants the characters are even styled Don Dinero and Doña Fortuna, as here (Brown et al., pp. 140–3).