The two waters

Six paper leaves in alphabetic K’iche’, copied in the Guatemalan highlands while the conquest was still in living memory, in a mission-schooled hand using the numeral-shaped letters devised for the sounds Castilian could not hold. The book they witness otherwise survives in a single copy, made around 1701 by the parish priest at Chichicastenango; these leaves predate it by nearly a century and a half. They carry the account of the people before this people. Where they overlap the priest’s copy, the wording agrees to the letter. The interruption below appears in no other witness.

“…these were the effigies of carved wood, the people of wood. The flesh of the man was of the tzité tree; the flesh of the woman was of the pith of the reed. They looked as people look, they spoke as people speak; they got daughters, they got sons; they filled the face of the earth. But there was no blood in them, no water of the heart; their faces were dry, their hands and their feet were dry. They spoke, and there was nothing behind the words: no memory of the ones who had made them. Not once did they call on the Framer, on the Shaper; not once did they say the name of the Heart of Sky. For this the water was made against them, and came down on their heads; out of the sky poured a heavy resin, and a rain that was black, and it did not stop, neither by day nor by night. And the small things and the great things of their houses rose against them, the dogs and the birds of the yard, the stones and the clay of the kitchen. The dogs said: we were given nothing, we were looked at and driven off; now we are the ones who eat. The grinding stones said: every day, every day, at dark and at dawn, holi, holi, huqui, huqui, on our faces for your sake; now it is your flesh under the stone. The griddles and the pots said: you blackened our mouths, you set our faces on the fire; now you are the ones to be burned. And the stones of the hearth came out of the fire at their heads. They ran to the roofs, and the houses fell under them. They climbed the trees, and the trees shook them down. They went to the mouths of the caves, and the caves closed against them. So the wooden people were finished. And their sign is in the forest to this day: the monkey, which looks like a person because it is what remains of a people that were only the image of one.”

“Here I ceased for that day, because the father, reading over the wet ink, said: this is the deluge of Noah, which these people have kept wrongly. And the old man who gives me the words said, with courtesy: father, it is not kept wrongly. The water of your book was sent for the violence men did each to each. This water was sent because the made ones would not say the names of those who made them. Yours punished what was done. Ours punished what was never said. Then he asked the father: and in your country, father, is the saying of the names still kept up, or has it gone quiet there also? The father did not answer, and wrote that day in his own book, quickly, and did not show us. The next day we did not write the water. We wrote the generations.”

The exchange is the ledger’s clearest statement of the charge. In the Babylonian account the charge is noise: the decreeing god cannot sleep for the racket of mankind. In the Hebrew account it is violence. Here it is silence: a people able to speak who never once said their makers’ names. The floods agree on the sentence and divide on the crime. The replacements are likewise on file. In the Greek account the two survivors throw stones over their heads, and the stones become men and women. Later in this book the grandmother grinds yellow maize and white maize, nine grindings, and the water she rinses her hands in is worked into the fat of the people now living. In both cases the people that comes after the water is not born. It is made.

The leaves are unsigned. So is the book they witness. Its preface, as the priest’s copy preserves it, states that the original book exists, written long ago, but that it can no longer be seen: it is closed now to the one who would search it and the one who would ponder it. The statement is the tradition’s own, made in the first generation of the copying, and it has survived every copying since without variance. See findings 01 and 05. Transcription confidence: 92%.