Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

Belize — the small green country where the Maya world runs down to the Caribbean — keeps as its national goblin a figure whom every Belizean child can draw before they can spell, and whose portrait contains the strangest single detail in the whole hemisphere's little-people lore. Tata Duende — "Grandfather Goblin," the Spanish duende adopted and promoted to elder — is the dwarf of the deep bush: three or four feet of him, aged and bearded, in a wide-brimmed hat (red in most tellings) of the same family millinery his cousin the Cipitío wears in El Salvador ; his feet, in the widespread tellings, are set on backwards , printing his trail away from himself in the trademark of all the untrackable ones from the Curupira's Brazil northward; he whistles in the dark heart of the forest — loud when far, faint when near, by the same treacherous acoustics this chronicle has now charted through half the world's night countries — and he is, in his core office, a guardian : ...

The Yucatán that this chronicle has walked — past the aluxes in their little contract-houses , under the Xtabay's ceiba — keeps, for its night roads, a terror of an entirely different legal category: not a spirit, not a demon, not an enchanted dead woman, but a neighbor with a second body . The Huay Chivo — in the Mayan orthography waay chivo : waay , the sorcerer's spirit-shape, joined to the Spanish word for goat — is a man: a living, daylight, tortilla-eating man of some village or rancho, who has made the old pact and acquired the old craft, and who by night puts on the goat : becomes a beast the eyewitness accounts of three states describe with remarkable agreement — goat-formed but wrong-sized, big as a calf or bigger; black or ash-dark; moving sometimes on four legs and sometimes, with a horridness every teller emphasizes, upright on two ; eyes that catch headlights and lantern-light in a red that no ordinary animal returns; and around it, arriving before it and linger...

The warning side of the legend is standard equipment for its family, and the Yucatán delivers it crisply. On the night roads of the peninsula — and above all beneath the great ceibas , the sacred trees of the Maya world whose branches hold up the sky — there waits, for men walking late and worse for drink, a woman: beautiful past argument, in the white huipil of the country, combing black hair that falls to her waist. She calls softly; she retreats; the man follows — off the road, into the brush, into an embrace — and the embrace is the last clear thing he knows: the searchers find him days later, fevered or mad or dead, deep in the thorn-scrub, his body scored everywhere as though he had lain all night in the arms of a cactus — which, the tradition says with a straight face, is exactly what he did. She is the Xtabay, and as a cautionary apparatus she works the same night shift as her sisters across the isthmus — the Siguanaba who punishes the faithless of Central America — and nee...

On the highway from Cancún's airport toward the hotel zone, drivers pass — most without a glance — a small stone structure tucked beneath a bridge: a miniature house, windowless, solidly built, obviously maintained. It is not a utility box. It is the house of an alux — and the story the whole Yucatán tells about it, engineers included, is the modern flagship of one of the oldest living traditions in the Americas: the bridge, they say, kept failing during construction — collapses, accidents, delays past all engineering explanation — until someone did what any Maya farmer would have advised from the start: built the small house, made the offerings, and formally requested permission of the aluxo'ob , the little people whose land the pilings stood on. The bridge has stood since. Hotels along the Riviera Maya keep alux shrines on their grounds with the same quiet practicality; and out in the villages and cornfields where the tradition has its roots, the knee-high landlords of the p...