Читать книгу I, Rigoberta Menchu - Rigoberta Menchu - Страница 10

‘That night he spent howling like a coyote while he slept as a person.

To become animal, without ceasing to be a person.

Animal and person coexist in them through the will of their progenitors at birth.’

—Miguel Angel Asturias, Men of Maize.

Every child is born with a nahual. The nahual is like a shadow, his protective spirit who will go through life with him. The nahual is the representative of the earth, the animal world, the sun and water, and in this way the child communicates with nature. The nahual is our double, something very important to us. We conjure up an image of what our nahual is like. It is usually an animal. The child is taught that if he kills an animal, that animal’s human double will be very angry with him because he is killing his nahual. Every animal has its human counterpart and if you hurt him, you hurt the animal too.

Our days are divided into dogs, cats, bulls, birds, etc. There is a nahual for every day. If a child is born on a Wednesday, his nahual is a sheep. The day of his birth decides his nahual. So for a Wednesday child, every Wednesday is special. Parents know what a child’s behaviour will be from the day of the week he is born. Tuesday is a bad day to be born because the child will grow up bad-tempered. That is because Tuesday’s nahual is a bull and bulls are always angry. The child whose nahual is a cat will like fighting with his brothers and sisters.

We have ten sacred days, as our ancestors have always had. These ten days have their nahual. They can be dogs, cats, horses, bulls, but they can also be wild animals, like lions. Trees can be nahual too: trees chosen by our ancestors many centuries ago. A nahual is not always only one animal. With dogs, for example, nine dogs represent a nahual. Or in the case of horses, three. It can vary a lot. You don’t know how many in fact, or rather, only the parents know the number of animals which go to make the nahuals of these ten special days. For us the meekest days are Wednesday, Monday, Saturday and Sunday. Their nahuals are sheep, or birds or animals which don’t harm other animals.

All this is explained to young people before they get married so that when they have children they know which animal represents each day. One very important thing they have to remember is not to tell the child what his nahual is until he is grown up. We are only told what our nahual is when our personalities are formed and our parents see what our behaviour is normally. Otherwise a child might take advantage of his nahual. For example, if his nahual is a bull, he might like fighting and could say: ‘I behave like this because I’m such and such an animal and you must put up with me.’ If a child doesn’t know his nahual he cannot use it as an excuse. He may be compared to the animal, but that is not identifying him with his nahual. Younger children don’t know the nahual of their elder brothers and sisters. They are only told all this when they are mature enough and this could be at any age between ten and twelve. When this happens the animal which is his nahual is given to him as a present. If it is a lion, however, it is replaced by something else. Only our parents, or perhaps other members of the community who were there when we were born, know the day of our birth. People from other villages don’t know and they are only told if they become close friends.

A day only has a special meaning if a child is born on it. If no baby is born on any one Tuesday, it is of no interest to anyone. That is, there is no celebration. We often come to love the animal which is our nahual even before we know what it is. Although we love all the natural world, we are often drawn to one particular animal more than to others. We grow to love it. Then one day we are told that it is our nahual. All the kingdoms which exist on this earth are related to man. Man is part of the natural world. There is not one world for man and one for animals, they are part of the same one and lead parallel lives. We can see this in our surnames. Many of us have surnames which are the names of animals. Quej, meaning horse, for example.

We Indians have always hidden our identity and kept our secrets to ourselves. This is why we are discriminated against. We often find it hard to talk about ourselves because we know we must hide so much in order to preserve our Indian culture and prevent it being taken away from us. So I can only tell you very general things about the nahual. I can’t tell you what my nahual is because that is one of our secrets.