Stealing Benefacio’s Roses

Stealing Benefacio’s Roses: A Mayan Epic

“Gaspar Culán the younger did not believe the Sun was a God neither was the Earth a sky for another world beneath, nor was it alive at all”

Thus begins the beautifully narrated, romantic epic of Martín Prechtel’s search for the “deer-like look in a woman’s eye,” and his dramatic getaway with his family against impossible odds during his last years in war torn Guatemala.

A story within a story within a story, the apex in Prechtel’s autobiographical trilogy, Stealing Benefacio’s Roses is an epic adventure that begins in the 19th century Guatemalan highlands and ends in the semi-arid foothills of the Sangre de Cristo mountains of New Mexico of today. In between lay tribal memory, the smell of mule caravans, the fury of the Gods, man-eating birds, bare-footed land moguls, forbidden roses, religious trials and unhappy love affairs, bullets and crenulated palaces, polyester and high heels, guerillas and suburbs, international arms sales, the hope and losses of the diasporas, the amnesia of modernity and Holy Remembrance forced to survive homeless under bridges.

As a political exile within the borders of Guatemala then as a spiritual and cultural exile within the confines of the United States, Prechtel tells a tale of irony and beauty where chaos, terror, love, magic and the unexpected live side by side as fingers on the same hand that curl around a cup holding the wine of one man’s life. Rooted in an ancient mythology passed ritually on to him by a magical generation of Tzutujil Maya now gone, Prechtel reminds us that these kinds of stories, if forgotten, will be lived out in our daily lives but can help us live when they are consciously remembered.

Stealing Benefacio’s Roses is a literary masterpiece in honor of oral indigenous story and the indigenous heart of every person. Though easily read as a logical third in sequence with his other two legendary books, Secrets of the Talking Jaguar and Long Life, Honey in the Heart, it also stands on its own as a classic work of beauty and adventure.

Previously published under the title The Toe Bone and the Tooth

“Nobody knew why or when it was or how it happened that Gaspar Culan the younger, grandson of a long line of ancient royal Mayans, shamans, famous weavers and merchant magicians, woke up one morning at an early age and saw the world as a ragged patch of lifeless stone and human hatred.” — excerpt from Stealing Benefacio’s Roses