Says

by María Sabina, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

The woman who tells this story is not María Sabina. She is a Wise One of a ranchería below the mountain, and the story is hers.

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The foreign woman came up the road in the month of the big rains, when the trucks do not come and the mud comes over the ankle. She came on foot. She had a bag on her back and a bag on her front and her hair was yellow, the colour of maize that has been left too long on the stalk.

My granddaughter Florinda saw her first. Florinda was carrying water from the spring, and she put the can down in the path and ran to the house, and she said, Grandmother, the Chikon is coming down off Nindo Tokoxho, but he has no horse.

I said, The Owner of the Mountain does not walk in the mud like a turkey. Go and look again.

She went and looked again, and she came back and said, It is a woman, and she is asking for you by name.

I knew then who it was. I had not seen her for seventeen years, but I knew. She had come with the others, the men with the machines, in the year the road was still a path. She was young then. She carried the cables. She was the one who held the lamp while the tall one took the pictures, and she was the one who wept in the corner when the saint children came, and in the morning she gave me a comb for my hair, a red comb, and I have it still.

Her name was Ruth. It is a name from the Bible. The priest has told us about Ruth. She went with her mother-in-law to a strange country and she picked up the barley the harvesters left behind. That is what this Ruth did too. She came to a strange country and picked up what others had left on the ground.

---

She stood at my door with the water running off her and she said a word in Spanish, and Florinda said, She says good afternoon, she says do you remember her.

I said, Tell her to come in out of the rain. Tell her she is wet as a frog. Tell her I remember.

She came in. She sat on the little bench by the fire and her clothes steamed. She was not young any more. There were lines by her mouth and her hands were the hands of a woman who has worked, though not with maize. She took the bag off her front and opened it and took out a box.

It was a black box, small, smaller than a brick. It had a handle. She put it on her knees.

She talked, and Florinda listened, and Florinda's face went strange, and she said, Grandmother, she says that is your voice in the box.

I said, My voice is in my mouth.

Florinda told her that. The woman laughed, the way they laugh, as if something has hurt them a little. She talked again.

Florinda said, She says it is the voice from that night. The night of Teódulo. She says she has carried it all these years, and the men who made it are dead now, the tall one is dead, and she wanted to bring it back to where it came from. She says listen.

She pressed something on the box, and there was a hiss like rain in the leaves, and then I heard a woman singing.

---

I am going to tell you how it was to hear it.

It was a woman with teeth. You could hear the teeth. The words were round in her mouth, they came out whole, every one. I have three teeth now. I had all of them then, or nearly all. The woman in the box clapped her hands and the clap came out of the box like a stick breaking.

I am a woman who looks into the inside of things, says,
I am a woman who looks into the water, says,
I am a woman who knows the path the fever walks, says,
I am a woman who stands in the path, says.

Florinda had her hand over her mouth. My son's wife came in from the back where she had been shelling beans, and she stood in the doorway with the bowl against her belly and did not move. The dog got up and went out into the rain. Dogs know.

I listened. I listened to the whole side of it, until the box clicked and the woman turned it over and put it back and pressed, and I listened to the other side too. Outside it got dark. Inside the fire went down and nobody put wood on it.

You want me to say I was frightened. I was not frightened. You want me to say I was glad. I was not glad either.

I will tell you what it was. It was like going to the house of a dead person and finding their huaraches by the door. The shape of the foot is there. The leather has gone hard in the shape of the foot. But nobody is going to put them on.

The woman in the box said says at the end of every line, says, says, the way it is done. That says is not me. It is the saint children speaking. When I sing, I am the one who carries the words across, like the woman who carries the water from the spring; the water is not hers. And in the box there was the carrying, there was the can and the path and the woman walking. But I listened and listened for the water, and the water was not there.

The voice was mine. Only mine.

---

When it was finished, Ruth looked at me with her wet eyes, and talked for a long time.

Florinda said, She says she has studied it. She says she has listened to it a thousand times. She says she has written it out in her language, all the words, with help from a man in the city who speaks Spanish and Mazatec, and he put it into Spanish and she put it into English, and there are some words that nobody can tell her. She says she has a list. She wants you to tell her what they mean.

I said, Show me the list.

Ruth took a notebook out of the bag on her back. It was wrapped in a plastic bag against the rain. She opened it and showed me. It was full of the little marks they make. Lines and lines. Some of them had a circle drawn round them in red.

I cannot read. I have never read. I looked at the marks and they did not say anything to me, and I gave the notebook back.

Florinda said, She says, there is a word you sang twelve times. She says it like this. And Ruth tried to say it.

Florinda laughed, and then put her hand over her mouth again because it is not polite to laugh at a guest. But it was a funny sound. It was the way a parrot says your name.

I said, Tell her I do not know what it means.

Florinda told her. Ruth's face fell down, the way bread falls when you open the oven too soon.

I said, Tell her this. Tell her the words were not mine. Tell her they were given to me for Teódulo, because Teódulo was burning, because his eyes had turned up into his head and he could not see his mother. The words were for that. They were the medicine for that. When Teódulo was well, the words were finished. Tell her you do not keep the medicine after the sick one is well. You do not put it in a box.

Florinda told her. It took a long time, because Florinda is twelve years old and she learned her Spanish at the school from a teacher from Tehuacán, and some of what I said is not in that Spanish. I could see her looking for the words, and not finding them, and taking other ones.

That is how it always is. I say it in our language. Someone puts it in Spanish. Someone else puts it in their language. Each time something falls through the floor, like beans falling through the cracks between the boards. By the time it gets to the end there is only the sack.

---

Ruth slept that night in the house. Where else would she sleep, in the rain? My son's wife put the petate down for her by the fire, and gave her a blanket, and gave her coffee and beans and tortillas, and she ate all of it like someone who had been walking since morning. Which she had.

Before she slept, she talked again.

Florinda said, She says she wants a velada. She says she will pay. She says she has brought money, she has saved it, she will give you whatever you ask.

I said, Is she sick?

Florinda asked her. Ruth shook her head and talked.

Florinda said, She says no. She says she is not sick. She says she was here before, and that night was the most important night of her life, and after it she was never the same, and she has always wanted to know what happened to her. She says she wants to understand. She says she wants to see God again.

I was quiet for a while.

Then I said, Tell her I am sorry. Tell her a Wise One does not sell the saint children. If I take money for them, they will go away from me altogether, and they have gone far enough already. And tell her this. The saint children are not for seeing God. They are for the sick. You eat them when there is a person who is sick and nobody knows why. You eat them so that they will tell you why, and what to do. Tell her: if there is no sick one, there is no velada.

Florinda told her.

Ruth sat with her hands around the cup and looked into the fire. Then she said something very short.

Florinda said, She says, then who was sick, that night? Teódulo was sick. But she was not. Why did she see what she saw?

I said, Tell her, she was sitting in the house of the sick one. The rain falls on the whole roof, not only where the hole is.

I do not know how Florinda put that into Spanish. Ruth nodded as if she understood, and lay down on the petate and turned her face to the wall.

I lay down too. I did not sleep for a long time. I was thinking of the box. I was thinking of my own voice with all its teeth, going round and round in the box in the house of Ruth in her country, on nights when nobody was sick. Like a dog chained up in a yard that barks and barks when there is no one on the road.

---

In the night I woke, because someone was being sick.

It was Ruth. She had got up and gone out the door into the rain, and I heard her by the wall where the chickens sleep. I heard her vomit, and vomit again, and then I heard the other thing, because the belly had turned over completely, and then I heard her crying.

I got up and lit the candle and went out. She was on her knees in the mud with her yellow hair hanging. When I held up the candle she put her arm over her face.

I said, in our language, Ay, poor thing. Ay, little foreigner. You drank the water from the stream on the road. They all drink the water from the stream.

She did not understand me but she understood me.

I brought her in. My son's wife woke and put more wood on the fire. Florinda woke and sat up and looked with big eyes. Ruth lay on the petate and held her belly and shook. Her face was the colour of a tortilla before it goes on the comal. She was hot to the hand. Then she got up and went out again, and came back in, and lay down again.

By the time the roosters began she had been out eight times. She could not keep water in her. When she tried to drink, it came back up. Her eyes had gone into her head a little, the way they go.

You may say: that is only the belly. It is only bad water. And it is true, it is the belly. But I have seen children die of the belly in two days. I have seen grown men die of it. The belly is not only.

I said to Florinda, Ask her if she has medicine from her country, pills.

Florinda asked. Ruth shook her head and said something.

Florinda said, She says she had some, but they got wet on the road, and they turned to paste, and she threw them away.

I looked at Ruth. She was lying on her side with her knees up, the way a child lies in the womb. She was not the woman with the notebook any more, with the red circles round the words. She was a woman with a bad belly, far from her mother, crying in a strange house in the rain.

I said to my son's wife, Go to the house of Teódulo's mother. Ask her if she still has any of the ones from the mountain. Tell her there is a sick one here.

---

My comadre came herself, in the grey of the morning, with her shawl over her head and a little bundle wrapped in a banana leaf. She is old too, older than me, and she walks with a stick, and she had come down the path in the mud with the stick, for a foreigner she did not know.

She looked at Ruth on the petate. She said, This is the one who held the lamp. The one who cried.

I said, Yes.

She said, Did she bring back my son's night?

I said, She brought back the box with the singing in it.

My comadre made a sound with her tongue. She put the bundle in my hand. There were not many. It was not their season; the ones in the banana leaf had been dried and kept since the last rains, for an emergency. The saint children do not like to be dried and kept. But they will come, if there is need.

I said, Florinda, tell the foreigner what we are going to do.

Florinda told her. Ruth turned her face and looked at the banana leaf in my hand. She looked a long time. I could not tell what was in her face. Then she reached out to the bag on her front, and took out the black box, and held it out to me.

Florinda said, She says do you want her to make it record.

I looked at the box. I looked at my comadre. My comadre shrugged with her shoulder, like when the price of coffee goes down: what can you do.

I said, Let it do what it wants. It is not my business what the box does. I am not singing to the box.

---

We did it in the day, with the door shut and the blanket over the window, because the sick one could not wait for the night. I put the candles on the table where the Virgin is, and Saint Peter, and the picture of the Sacred Heart my son brought from Teotitlán. I burned copal. The smoke filled the house, and Ruth coughed, and then lay quiet.

I counted the saint children out in pairs on the leaf. They are always eaten in pairs, a man and a woman, so that they are not lonely. I gave Ruth two pairs only, because she was sick and because she was a foreigner and because they were the old dried ones and I did not know how strong they would be. My comadre took three pairs. I took the rest. I chewed them slowly. They taste of earth, of the floor of the forest, of something bitter at the back like the skin of a walnut.

Then I blew out the candles, all but one, and we waited.

I want to tell you that it was as it used to be. That they came up through me like water through the ground after the rains, and lifted me, and carried me, and showed me everything. That is how it was before. When I was young, when I was the woman in the box, they would take me up so high I could see the whole of the Sierra, every ranchería, every sick one in every house, laid out like a cloth on a table. They would open the Book in front of me and the words would come off the page into my mouth so fast I could not catch my breath.

It was not like that. I will not lie to you. It has not been like that for many years, not since the foreigners came in their crowds to find God, the ones who came after Ruth and the tall one, with their long hair and their bare feet, eating the saint children by the roadside like sweets, in the middle of the day, laughing, without any sick one, without any candle, without any prayer. Since then the saint children come to me slower. They come like old people climb a hill. They stop and they rest.

But they came.

They came slowly, and my hands went cold, and the one candle grew a ring around it. I heard my comadre start to breathe in the dark the way you breathe when they are arriving. I heard Ruth moan. And then the words began to come up into my mouth, not fast, not like before, one at a time, like the first drops on the roof.

---

I am a woman who goes out to the wall in the night, says,
I am a woman who kneels in the mud with the chickens, says,
I am a woman whose belly has turned over like a basket, says,
I am a woman who has emptied herself out, says.

I am a woman of the clean spring, says,
I am a woman who knows where the water is good, says,
I am a woman who knows where the water is bad, says,
the water by the road where the mule stands, says,
the water where the mule has pissed, says.

My comadre laughed in the dark. She laughed out loud, and clapped. The saint children are clowns; they make you laugh in the middle of your crying. Ruth was crying, and then I heard her laugh too, a little, though she did not know the words. Perhaps she knew the clap.

I am a woman who is a clown, says,
I am a woman who laughs at the foreigner, says,
I am a woman who laughs at herself, says,
I am an old woman with three teeth, says,
I am an old woman who used to sing with teeth, says,
but I know how to stand in the path of the water, says,
I know how to tell the water to go back to the stream, says.

They showed me her belly. I will not explain how they showed it to me. It was like looking into a pot of beans that is boiling too hard, and the bad water was in it going round, and I saw it, and I told it to go. I told it with the words they gave me. I told it to go back down the road to the place where the mule stands. I told it, This one is not yours. This one belongs to her mother. Go.

And then they showed me something else. They do this; they do not ask you. I saw a white house with a lot of windows and a woman lying in a bed, old, older than me, very thin, with tubes going into her arm, and her hair was white but it had been yellow once. And Ruth was sitting beside the bed with a little black box on her knees, and in the box a woman was singing in our language, and the old woman in the bed was not listening. She was looking at the window.

I did not sing about that. That was not for the velada. That was for afterwards. The saint children tell you more than you can sing.

I sang until the candle went out. I sang for her mother in the white house, without saying it was her mother. I sang the names of the saints, and Jesus Christ, and the Morning Star, and the little ones who spring forth. I sang until my voice went thin and there was nothing more in my mouth, and the words stopped coming, and I knew they had finished and gone back where they go.

The box was clicking. It had been clicking a long time. Nobody had turned it over.

---

When the blanket came off the window it was afternoon. The rain had stopped. There was steam coming up off the whole mountain, the way it does, as if the earth itself were being cooked.

Ruth was asleep. She slept like a child, with her mouth open. She had not gone out to the wall since the singing began. My son's wife brought her a little water with salt and lime in it, and when she woke she drank it, and it stayed in her.

My comadre took her stick and went home.

In the evening Ruth was sitting up. She was weak, but her face had come back to its colour. She looked at me for a long time, the way she had looked at the banana leaf. Then she said something to Florinda.

Florinda said, She says thank you. She says she feels better. She says, what did they say? She says please, what did the saint children say?

I said, Tell her they said not to drink from the stream by the road. Tell her that is what they said.

Florinda told her. Ruth looked at me and her face did the thing again, the falling bread.

I said, And tell her this. Tell her, when she goes home, she should go to her mother.

Florinda told her. Ruth went still, very still, like a deer in the coffee when it hears you.

She said something very quiet.

Florinda said, She says how did you know about her mother. She says she never told you about her mother.

I said, Tell her I did not know. Tell her it was not me who said it.

---

Ruth stayed two more days, until she was strong enough for the road and the trucks were running again to Teotitlán. She did not ask for the meaning of any words. She did not take out the notebook with the red circles. She played the box once, the new side, the one from the day with the blanket over the window, and she listened to it alone, sitting on the bench by the door, with a little cable going into her ear.

I asked Florinda afterwards, What was on it?

Florinda said, She let me listen. It is you, Grandmother. It is you singing and the old comadre laughing and the rain. And the foreigner being sick, at the beginning. It is not very nice to listen to.

I said, No. It would not be.

When Ruth was leaving she tried to give me money, folded up small, and I would not take it, and she put it in Florinda's hand for the school, and that was all right. She gave my son's wife a little mirror. She gave me nothing, because there was nothing in her bags to give, and she was ashamed of that, and I told her, through Florinda, that she had given me a red comb seventeen years ago and I still had it, and I took it out of my hair and showed her. She cried again. They cry a lot, the foreigners.

Then she did something. She took the first box out of her bag, the black one, the one with the night of Teódulo in it, and she took out the little thing from inside it that the voice was on. It was like a little flat case with two wheels in it and a brown ribbon between them. She held it out to me.

Florinda said, She says it is yours. She says the big wheels the men made that night are in a building in her country, and she has other copies at home, but this one is the copy she has carried all these years, and it is yours, and it should stay here.

I took it. It was very light. You would not think that a whole night could weigh so little. I turned it over in my hand. I could see the brown ribbon in the little window. I did not know what to do with it. I could not play it. We have no box.

---

That same week Teódulo came by with his truck.

He is a man now, Teódulo, a big man with a moustache and a belly, and he drives the truck with the coffee down to Teotitlán and comes back with soft drinks and cement. He does not remember the night. He was a child with his eyes turned up into his head. He only knows what his mother has told him: that he was dying, and that I sang, and that in the morning he asked for a tortilla.

He stopped outside my house to bring me a sack of sugar, the way he does, and I came out and gave him the little case with the ribbon in it, and said, This is yours. This is your night. The foreigner brought it.

He turned it over in his big hand like I had. Then he laughed and said, I have a machine for this in the truck. My cousin put it in. And he climbed up into the cab and put it in the hole under the radio, and pushed.

And there it was. The hiss like rain in the leaves, and then the woman with teeth, singing.

I am a woman who looks into the inside of things, says,
I am a woman who knows the path the fever walks, says.

Teódulo sat in the cab with his hands on the wheel and listened. He listened for a long time without saying anything. His face did not know what to do with itself. Then he said, Is that you, Doña Evarista?

I said, That was me.

He shook his head. He said, It is very beautiful. He did not know what else to say. He started the engine, because he had to be in Teotitlán before dark, and he waved, and he did not take the tape out.

The truck went off down the road in the mud with the sacks in the back, slowly, rocking, and from the open window of the cab came my voice, young, with all its teeth, saying says, says, says, to the coffee bushes and the steam and the dogs, going away down the mountain, getting smaller, and nobody in that truck was sick.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, Kalendīs Novembribus (1 November 2026), ā Marīā Sabīnā per mystērium cōnscientiae renātā.

María Sabina, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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