The story plays a lot with the relationship between the past and the present, particularly in regard to Mexico’s history. Slowly, the Chac Mool turns Filiberto into his slave…. Filiberto discovers that in all this moisture, the stone idol seems to be turning into flesh - a rain god coming to life.
After the Chac Mool arrives, the water pipes mysteriously burst and the roof springs leaks in the rain.
In Fuentes’ story, the protagonist, Filbert (Filiberto in the original), buys a chacmool (or as the story puts it, a replica of the Chac Mool, used as a proper noun) from some little junk shop, and brings it home. Both these rain gods are associated with human sacrifice (the bowl the chacmool holds is often a cuauhxicalli: a bowl to receive human hearts). Chacmools are often associated with the Aztec rain god Tlaloc or with the similar Mayan rain god Chac (or Chaac). Chacmools have been found throughout central Mexico and the Yucatan, down into Central America. His hands are on his abdomen, holding a dish or a bowl for accepting ritual offerings. “Chac Mool” was first published in Los Dias Enmascarados in 1954, then again in the 1973 collection Chac Mool y otros cuentos ( Chac Mool and other stories - also never translated).Ī chacmool is a particular form of Mesoamerican sculpture: a figure of a man reclining on his back, upper body supported by his elbows and knees bent. Sure enough, a little digging uncovered an English rendering of the short story “ Chac Mool“, translated by Jonah Katz, currently a professor of phonetics and linguistics at West Virginia University. But hope springs eternal, and so I had to look around…. Given the general preference of the reading public for novels over short stories, I’m not surprised, and such early writing would probably be considered only a minor work of his - not the optimal candidate for the effort of translation. In fact, his first book was a collection of fantastic fiction called Los Dias Enmascarados ( The Masked Days), which, to my knowledge, was never translated into English. One of the things I’ve learned in my reading is that Carlos Fuentes wrote quite a few short stories. I’ve been awash in translations of Spanish-language literature lately (more on that in a future article) it’s been fascinating reading.
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