0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6
Clothing the Body in Otherness
tions that spun off into one tale and then another. These were bursts
of stories, like rain showers, that I could feel but barely comprehend.
Stories of houses and saints, of cargoes, cloth, foreseeing, and dreams.
A story of caves, a black man, an abducted woman, the coates (feath-
ered serpents), and sacred lances. The sentences were double-woven
coupleted phrases within the flow of a Mayan tongue, laying out the
twinned drives of tradition and change. While their simplicity carried
emotional force across three languages, these stories were simultane-
ously as layered as the brocades that Vera wove.
Asked how it was that she was the first person to leave her town to
come to the United States, Vera launched into a tale that cited what
I have come to call a lineage of spiritual power going back to her
grandparents. Just as one might present one’s line of descent to estab-
lish rights to land and material property, so one may cite the occult
powers of one’s ancestors, thus claiming the ability to dream truly, to
have prescience, to move in otherworldly ways that affect the reality
of the day to day. According to Vera, to be born with such abilities
in her society, manifesting from a young age, bestows more author-
ity than any knowledge that one might gain by being apprenticed to
a teacher. But training is necessary to be able to control one’s natural
powers. The following synopsis of Vera’s tale, “Shapeshifting Wives”
demonstrates this.
Part I: The Transforming Wife
It was in the time of my grandfather. Yes, my grandfather. He was mar-
ried first to a bad wife. This wife had no children; she was barren. She
was a woman who went out into the night and ran wild like a lion.
The husband grew to be afraid and suspicious even though she gave
him something to make him sleep as if he were dead. One night he
awoke anyway; his wife was not beside him. She had left a grinding
stone in her place. He went out of the house, taking his machete. He
waits and he waits, and then it is big, crying Aieee, aieee in the night
and it is coming close, it is coming closer, it is as big as a horse and
he slashes with his machete; he slashes his machete and she falls, she
dies. He knew and yet did not know that it was his wife. The head of
