“Buenas tardes, Nancee,” begins my Maya sister Catarina when she calls from Guatemala the week after the lunar eclipse. “Oye,” she says, listen. “I have a story I think you will enjoy!” She begins to tell me the story of her family and the lunar eclipse. She lowers her voice to almost a whisper as she tells the story. I feel her reverence and realize that yes, I do want to hear this story. She also wants to tell it.
Later in the evening, my WhatsApp audio rings again. It’s Lesvia, my Maya niece. “Buenas noches, Nancee,” she begins. She speaks rapidly in Spanish, forgetting that I might need her to speak more slowly. I sense excitement in her voice. “I’ve been talking with my tia Catarina. We want you to write the story of Nan and the eclipse,” she blurts out. When I ask why she doesn’t write the story, she replies, “you know my talent is in drawing. If you write it, I will illustrate it!” It is clear she has thought about this.
“Pues, how will you understand the English? I don't think I can write it in Spanish,” I hesitate. My interest is piqued, but how can I portray this important family event?? “I’m not sure I can do this, Lesvia,” I say. “I’m not Maya, and I wasn’t there for the eclipse.”
“Está bien, Nancee. I have a plan,” says this twenty-one year old university architecture student, who usually has a plan. “Amanda says she will translate it for us!” she declares, referring to her cousin who is bilingual. “And she will read the drafts with me and we will make sure you get it right.”
And so our collaboration begins.
Doña Maria Gomez Ixmatá is the eighty-five year old mother, grandmother and matriarch of her family, my adopted Maya family in Nahualá, Guatemala. To those close to her she is Nan, a name of affection for older Maya women. In the thirty years I have known her, she has changed little. She wears her hair, still black with only a few strands of grey, woven into a braid which is wrapped around her head. Usually a few strands of hair are escaping as a testament to her unbounded energy. All four feet eight inches of her is in constant motion. She is the first one up in the mornings, starting the kitchen cook fire and warming tortillas and atole for her family´s breakfast. Frequently she is the last one to go to bed. “I like to feel the quiet of the house after everyone is asleep. It helps me settle down at night,” she once told me when I asked her about her long hours.
Nan dresses daily in the traditional handwoven red huipil of Nahualá, a double-headed eagle is featured on the front and back. She is often caring for someone with a smile on her soft and wrinkled face. Sometimes she is patting an arm with her well-worn tiny hands. Or, with those same hands, she may be pat-patting tortillas to feed a hungry mouth. Sometimes she places her hands on each side of a cheek as she turns it to gift one of her soft kisses.
Nan is a devout Catholic. She is also a devout Maya whose culture and history are seared into her bones and her heart. This sincretismo or mixture of Catholicism and Maya spirituality is common among older Maya in Guatemala. Her altar tells the story: a large faux gilt-framed painting of the Virgin of Guadalupe stands next to a painting of the Cruz Maya, the Maya Cross. The equilateral Cruz Maya represents the four sacred directions, each painted in its color of red, yellow, black or white. The center is painted in equal parts blue and green to depict el corazon del cielo y el corazon de la tierra, the heart of the sky and the heart of the earth. Candles stand in front of each. She lights these when she kneels to pray morning and evening, bending her head with palms together, fingertips resting on her chin.
Nan asks for guidance in her prayers, her grandchildren tell me. Sometimes she asks them to kneel and pray with her, and sometimes they hear her prayers as they walk by. She is worried. Fewer and fewer of the old ways are surviving in today’s Maya society. The young people, and even their parents, walk around with a cell phone or a tablet in their hands and interact with it instead of connecting with people and the natural world. They do not notice the hibiscus flowers with their bright red blooms or that the coffee beans have ripened. When the sun sets and the moon rises, members of her own family don’t even know what phase the rising moon is in. As she prays she wonders if she could have done more to teach her family some of the rituals and beliefs that were so important to her parents and grandparents when she was growing up in the mountains. Has she shared the stories? One evening as she is kneeling in prayer, she promises the ancestors to do more.
And so it is that the entire Gomez Ixmatá family is up on the third floor cement-block roof as the earth begins to slide itself between the sun and the full moon. The two brothers and their wives, who happen to be sisters, and their collective five children, all students at local universities, are chattering excitedly. “How dark will it be? How long will it take for the eclipse to reach totality?”
Only after the earth takes its first bite out of the moon does someone ask, “Where is she? Where is Nan?” It is strange that Nan is missing because she was the one who insisted everyone climb up to the roof to watch the lunar eclipse together. From there, they would have a wide-open view of the full moon, and of the distant mountains surrounding them.
Just as one of her granddaughters is carefully descending the stairs that lead to the roof in search of her, Nan appears at the bottom. Her hands hold up the hem of her delantal . It is impossible to see what she carries in the little cloth basket she has formed of her apron. Her granddaughter offers to help. Nan brushes her away with a shake of her head, her gaze forward and her brow furrowed. She climbs the steep steps slowly, placing her tiny feet in their black plastic Mary Janes one at a time on the blocks. Her lips move in silent prayer.
When she reaches the rooftop, Nan keeps her head down, staring at the uneven cement surface. She seems not to hear the questions about where she has been and the comments about how everyone was worried about her. Nan walks to the center of the roof and carefully empties the contents of her apron. She takes the folded pañuelo from atop her head, the one she wove years ago on her backstrap loom. She lays the multi-colored cloth out on the roof’s floor, smoothing it and straightening the edges. Carefully, she places a blue candle, an incense burner full of copal, and a red hibiscus bloom in the center of the pañuelo. Mumbling prayers, as if to herself, she kneels and lights first the candle and then the incense.
With palms together prayerfully in front of her chest, Nan looks up at the moon, which is now totally obscured by the shadow of the earth. She begins praying. “Abuela Luna, don’t leave us. Please, Abuela, your children cannot live without you.” She pauses to wipe the tears from her cheeks with the back of her hand. “Por favor, Abuela, return to us. We need you. Please, Abuela, please. Come back Abuela.” She continues with her prayers to Grandmother Moon until they are successful, until the moon returns and the shadow cast by the earth disappears. Then through tears, “Gracias, Abuela, gracias for remembering your children. Gracias, gracias Abuela.” She leans forward and places a kiss on the panuelo that is her altar.
Now that the moon has returned in its entirety, Nan rises and approaches each of her children and grandchildren, who have formed a circle around her. She takes each face in her soft, tiny, wrinkled hands and one by one kisses it, saying, “Buenos dîas, my child. This is now a new day, a new world.”
The family gathers around the wood cook fire in the kitchen to share a post-eclipse atole, a traditional warm corn drink that is thick and chunky and slightly sweet. It is what Nan’s grandmother drank with her after ceremonies. Rather than talking excitedly about the eclipse they just viewed and asking Nan about her ceremony, they are silent. They sip quietly on their atole, staring at the hands holding their cups. Each one senses correctly that there is more Nan wants to say.
“When I was a little girl we lived high up in the mountains, those mountains we were looking at from the roof,” she looks up to her left and points in the direction of the mountains. “We lived with our feet on the earth and our arms open to the sky.” In K’iche, her native Maya language, she says, “All of nature was part of our family and we were part of nature.” She gazes into the fire, remembering. As Nan speaks, everyone shifts their gaze to her face. Her five grandchildren are barely breathing as they lean forward on their wooden stools, listening intently. She tells her family that one of the earliest memories from the mountains of her childhood is of her abuela praying as she has just prayed. “Your great-grandmother,” she looks at her sons, “and your great great grandmother,” looking at each of her grandchildren, “prayed to Grandmother Moon begging her to return to her children. And she had been taught this by her grandmother, and her grandmother by hers.” Nan’s brow is furrowed and tears flow down her face. Her usually steady hands tremble. “We must never forget who we are and where we come from. We must make sure that the modern ways do not come between us and the ways of our ancestors, that nothing eclipses our culture.”
Hiding her face in her hands, she asks her family’s forgiveness for not sharing this memory before. As she moves her hands to clasp them again in front of her chest, she continues, “Gracias a Dios, Grandmother Moon came back. But will our traditional ways return? Will we be able to pray them back to us?” Looking each of her children and grandchildren in the eye in turn, she tells them through her tears, “Mis hijos, you must use your love, your light, and your wisdom to pray our culture back to us, to coax it out of the shadows and bring it back so that it is full and whole again, just like Grandmother Moon. It is your work. It is why you have come at this time.”
During the last 35 years, Nancee Neel has been privileged to be welcomed into two Guatemalan Mayan families. This story comes from one of those families.
