The Nine Guardians by Rosario Castellanos — Read

The day of Our Lady of Health dawned cloudy. The chapel bell had been ringing since sunrise and its doors were open wide. Indians entered with offerings: bunches of wild flowers, measures of incense, harvest tithes. All these were brought and laid at the Virgin's feet, which were almost hidden by the ample broad folds of her dress embroidered with seed-pearls that shone in the candle-light. The trek to and fro of bare feet withered the cypress spread on the floor. Its ever-weakening scent rose and mingled with the sweat of the crowd, with the bitter smell of milk from the newborn babies and the whiffs of brandy clinging to objects, to people, and to the air itself. Effigies of more saints wrapped up like mummies in yards and yards of coarse cotton leaned against the wall or lay on the ground. Out stuck their disproportionately small heads, the only part of their bodies that were not swaddled in cloth.

The women, coiled on the ground, were rocking their snivelling babies smothered under rebozos. Their high-pitched, piercing voices began a monologue which, since it was directed at the images whose swathing bound them and reduced them to impotence, acquired a harsh inflexion as if they had been blaming or reproving a dull-witted servant, as if their role were that of conquerors before the vanquished. Then the women turned distracted glances towards the niche which held the lovely Lady of Health in thrall. Supplicating, they laid bare their wretchedness and suffering before the enamelled and unmoving eyes. Their single, communal voice became the voice of a whipped dog, of a cow that had been cruelly separated from its calf. They shouted aloud for help. In their own dialect, liberally interspersed with Spanish words, they complained of hunger, sickness, and of the ambushes the sorcerers laid for them. Little by little the voices were overcome with exhaustion and faded off into a hoarse murmur, as of water trickling among stones. One might have thought the sudden spasms that shook these women's breasts were sobs, only that the pupils of their eyes, fixed stubbornly on the altar, were shrouded in a dry and mineral opacity.