THE ECLIPSE
When Brother Bartolomé Arrazola felt lost, he then accepted that nothing could save him. The mighty Guatemalan forest had ensnared him, relentless and final. Faced with his topographical ignorance, he sat calmly down to await death. He wished to die there, hopeless, isolated, with his thoughts fixed on distant Spain, and in particular on the convent of Los Abrojos, where once Charles the Fifth had deigned to speak to his eminence to tell him how much he trusted in the religious zeal of his practice of redemption.
Upon awakening, he found himself surrounded by a group of impassive-faced natives who were preparing to sacrifice him before an altar, an altar that appeared to Bartolomé as the bed in which, finally, he would be freed from his fears, his fate, and himself.
In three years in the country, he had acquired only a mediocre command of the native languages. He tried something. He spoke a few words that were understood.
Then an idea blossomed within him, one he recognized as worthy of his talent and his universal culture and his rigorous Aristotelian science. He remembered that a total solar eclipse was expected in those days. And he decided, deep inside, to make use of that knowledge to deceive his executioners and save his life.
"If you kill me," he said, "I can make the sun up there go dark."
The natives stared fixedly at him and Bartolomé was astonished by the disbelief in their eyes. He saw a small council form and waited hopefully, not without a certain disdain.
Two hours later, Brother Bartolomé Arrazola's heart was dripping copiously with blood onto the sacrificial stone (shining under the dull light of an eclipsed sun), while one of the natives recited without haste, without any inflection of the voice, one after another, the infinite dates on which solar and lunar eclipses would occur, which the Maya community's astronomers had predicted and recorded in their codices, without the precious help of Aristotle.
