Explore "The Nine Guardians" by Rosario Castellanos on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
My bedroom windows are shut because I can't stand the light. I'm trembling with cold under the covers, yet I'm burning with fever. Nana bends over me and lays a damp handkerchief on my forehead. It doesn't do any good. It will never be able to remove the memory of what I've seen. That memory will stay here inside me, as if it were carved in stone. There's no way to forget.
He came from a long way off, from Chactajal. Many miles across mountains hard to scale, moors where the wind howls, endless stony wastes. And there was the man spilling blood, lying on a stretcher carried by four of his companions. They arrived panting, altogether beaten by the exhausting journey. And the dying man had breath enough to last him over the threshold into our house. We hurried to look at him. A blow from a machete had almost chopped off his hand. The rags that bound it were stained with blood, and he was bleeding from other wounds too, and his matted hair clung to his head in cakes of sweat and blood.