AND
the time, what is it? The question was put to me point-blank by Don Abelardo, a na savi praying man, while we rested on an improvised bench, after he had concluded part of his ceremony addressed to a mixture of his own and Catholic saints, where names of people also appeared who, later he explained to me, they were prayer men who had gone to another dimension and helped him so that the gods would listen to his prayers. It was the last day of the year in the Gregorian calendar and the principales, together with the civil, religious and agrarian authorities of the San Miguel Cuevas community –nuyuku, they name it in their language– had gone to Cerro del Venado, where they entered the underworld. , while other of his companions did it for the Cerro de la Olla. Outside, on the mountain, a wind band played while the people cooked the part of the sacrificed animals that had not been offered to the gods, to taste it among themselves and accompany them to enjoy their food.
His question disconcerted me and Don Abelardo realized it, that’s how I understood it when I saw the sly look he gave me, accompanied by an explanation of what he really wanted to know. He told me that this year’s offering had the purpose of asking the gods that the waters arrive on time so that there would be good harvests, because corn and beans have gone up in price, that the carnival is coming very soon and he did not understand who He was the one who set the days on which this festival should be celebrated, which is also an occasion to balance the world; that they were very concerned and wanted to put an end to so much insecurity in the region. From his questions I understood that what they were looking for with their ceremony was to transcend the time of insecurities of all kinds in which the towns live, to arrive at everything calmer. They sensed it, but they were not clear about the causes of this situation. Hence the importance of his question.
I didn’t answer anything because I had nothing to say to him and he himself turned the talk towards more mundane things. The conversation was interrupted when they brought him the supplies he needed to continue the ceremony. I began to observe him in silence. With the parts of the ram that had been sacrificed outside, on a wide container, he formed little piles of meat. From where I was, I counted them, there were 13, as 13 were also the names of saints, Catholics and their own, as well as the rezanderos whom they invoked. Immediately came to my mind what another rezandero, in other times, had explained to me: that 13 is a number of balance and joining the four thirteens that correspond to the four elements that make up the world (water, earth, fire and air ), the balance of the world is achieved, the 52 years that the ancients conceived as the cycle of life. I had no doubt, the na savi rezanderos sought to transcend their time, as in other latitudes others did in their appropriate places.
When Don Abelardo took another break, I asked him why he had made 13 little piles of meat and his answer confirmed what I thought. He told me that he learned that this is how the forces that define the times were balanced, although he did not know why. With his answer I confirmed another assumption: that deep indigenous knowledge does not go through Western rationality; its logic, if it has it, is another. Don Abelardo and his fellow rezanderos in charge of the ceremony knew what they were doing and why, although they did not understand the reasons for it. I was in those thoughts, when they began to call all the principals and members of the authorities to go to a clean, to start the year purified. After them they began to do the same with those present, including those of us who were not from the community.
The ceremony had begun on the morning of the last day of the year and ended with the entry of the new one, as a way of linking the end of one cycle and the beginning of another. The people from outside the community who had the privilege of participating in the ceremony without being part of it left before it was over, to reach our destination in daylight. We say goodbye giving thanks for the opportunity to be part of them for a moment and participate in their rituals for the transcendence of time. Don Abelardo commissioned me to get him some information that he needed to better understand his activities. Listening to our talk, a town principal approached me to advise me not to stop observing the sky and nature in the next 12 days. That each one of them will be painting the months of the year that begins and there we will be able to know what the times to come will be like.
Another way to build the future, I thought.
