Day three: Of ghosts and monsters: Other voices from the CERESO de Mérida

“What is a ghost? A tragedy condemned to repeat itself again and again? An instant of pain, perhaps. Something dead which still alive, a feeling, suspended in time, like a faded photograph, like an insect trapped in amber.” –from Guillermo del Toro’s El espinazo del diablo (The Devil’s Backbone, 2001)

On Monday, we talked about myths and monsters.

I had decided to skip the topic of monsters because someone suggested that it might be too heavy a theme to take on with the women of the CERESO. However, last week, one of the students, Yelena, very young and thin, with a beautiful innocent face and who always causes me to wonder, “what could she have done, at such a young age, to end up here?” asked me why we had skipped the class on monsters and if we would return to the topic.

We began the class with metta meditation practice. Because the topic of monsters is so potentially dark and disturbing, I wanted to focus on how to call up positive emotions, even in the face of difficulty.*

Then we delved into the reading. The material that most interested the women was story we read last, one that I had added at the last minute because I thought they might like to read a Mayan legend: the story of the Xtabay.*

After reading, María says that the Xtabay was known to walk under the Ceiba tree on a hill near her house and that the men who went to see her were never heard from again. I ask the students if they would like to write stories such as this that they have heard.

Yelena, the one who asked me about the class on monsters, responded. “One thing is stories, another thing is truth.”

I ask her what she means.

“I’ve seen a ghost,” she says, her eyes wide.

She goes on to describe a photo that was taken of her in the CERESO in which another woman appeared at her side, ghostly and dressed in rags. A couple of other women chimed in, embellishing the description of the woman. Her skin was scaly, her eyes were large empty sockets. Yelena said that the photos, which she had posted on Facebook, had disappeared shortly after.

Amidst the sound of the rain pounding on the tin roof above our heads and sounds of thunder, other stories followed.

María pointed to a corner of our classroom known as the “library,” where books are kept in locked bookshelves. “There’s a ghost who lives in that corner. Sometimes you can hear her crying, saying ‘why am I here?’ People who have seen her say she looks just like Lucía, a prisoner here who died.”

Yelena, who has been silent, starts suddenly as if she had just remembered something. “The CERESO is full of ghosts. Before it was the CERESO, it used to be a big hacienda, and they buried their dead here,” she says, gesturing to the grounds visible from the open windows of the classroom.

The other women nod. They begin to speak about other famously haunted haciendas in Merida. One mentions a haunted abortion clinic down the road. Another mentions a ghost town, which doesn’t appear on maps, but which nonetheless exists, in the jungles surrounding the city. One of the women asks me if I will go to the ghost town for them, and tell them if I find it.

I remember the words of one of my former professors at UCLA, Dr. Adriana Bergero, who studies literature from the time of the dictatorships in Argentina: ghosts are the voices of the oppressed, voices that reclaim an injustice that hasn’t yet been rectified, voices that demand to be heard. How many injustices, how many stories of un-righted wrongs, are buried here within the walls of the CERESO?

The stories keep coming, and class ends 20 minutes late. Grateful yet also shaken by the stories I’ve heard, I close by asking the women to write their own folk tale, myth or legend. I ask them to flesh in the stories they’ve repeated to me with details and to employ a fresh perspective (as Borges does with the story of the minotaur in “Casa de Asturión,” one of the readings for the class).

After the women have left, Edgar stands looking out the window at the wet garden, the vivid reds and purples of its flowers, the leaves of the trees dripping with rain and the birds chirping and circling. “Everything changes when it rains here. Usually, in the sun, when it’s hot, everything feels more settled, more final. But when it rains, things come alive.”

*Although I am not a licensed meditation teacher, I have studied secular Vipassana meditation for many years under George Haas, who specializes in meditation for situations of strong emotional distress, specifically related to addiction and other harmful behaviors. When I learned that I would be teaching creative writing in the CERESO, I knew I wanted to bring some of George’s teachings to this space. I also recalled an undergraduate creative writing seminar I took with Maxine Hong Kingston at Stanford University, and that she always brought a small gong to class with her and began class with a short meditation. Finally, a couple years ago, I took a class that combined writing with secular Buddhist meditation at Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Marin County, California. During the half-day retreat, we alternated meditation with focused writing exercises. I found that meditating helped me produce writing that was both clear-headed and that came from a different, less self-conscious place than other things I have written. Before writing it is important to clear the typical preoccupations of the mind.

*In the Yucatan, there are many versions of the legend of the Xtabay, one of the most well known in Mayan mythology. According to this one, the Xtabay was a beautiful and kind woman who tended to many people in her village. However, she was so good that she inspired kindness and love wherever she went. Her only defect was that she had many lovers, which caused some gossip in the village to gossip.

In the same village lived another beautiful but mean-spirited young woman named Utz-Colel. She was very upright and honest and never had problems with anyone—she did not even have a boyfriend—but she never took care of the sick and felt disdain for the poor.

One day, the Xtabay disappeared. Soon after, the pueblo filled with the sweet aroma of flowers. Following the delightful smell, the villagers soon found the body of the Xtabay, dead. It was from her beautiful cadaver that the wonderful smell of flowers emanated. The villagers buried her and from her grave sprang a lovely and sweet-smelling flower, Xtabentun.

When Utz-Colel heard that the wonderful smell that filled the village came from the tomb of the Xtabay, she was filled with jealousy. She claimed that it was impossible that such a bad woman should emit this aroma of flowers upon her death. She claimed that, when she died, her grave would smell a thousand times sweeter than that unfaithful woman’s.

However, soon after, Utz-Colel did die, and the village filled with the smell of pestilence, an unsupportable smell that the village attributed to the evil arts of the devil. They tried to cover it up by filling her tomb with flowers, but by the next morning the flowers had disappeared. Then from her tomb sprang spiny plants called Tzacam, a cactus that features a beautiful flower but that is filled with spines and that emits a foul-smelling odor.

Filled with jealousy, Utz-Colel vowed revenge on her nemesis. From the grave she called upon evil spirits who granted her the privilege of returning to walk the earth in the form of the Xtabay, thinking thus to make many men fall in love with her and that in this way she would become the equal of the other woman. However, she forgot that it was because of the love and kindness of the Xtabay that she became the Xtabentun.

However, because Utz-Colel was a woman who never knew how to love, she is only able to bewitch travellers in the Mayab, luring them with her songs and beauty only to claw them to death with the spines of the Tzacam.

Every afternoon she awaits them seated beneath a Ceiba, a sacred Mayan tree, next to which grow the Tzacam, in the same place where the victims of Utz-Colel are found with their chests rent with spines.