The Xtabay: The Seductress Under the Ceiba and the Tale of the Two Women
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...