Maquetaurie Guayaba

Also Known As: Machetaurie Guayaba in older printings of Pané; the second element is the Taíno word behind Spanish guayaba, the guava
Region/Culture: Mesoamerica and the Caribbean
Mythos: Caribbean Mythology, Native Caribbean Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: He was the first to arrive in Coaybay and its lord thereafter, holding authority over the whole country of the Taíno dead.
Role in Mythos: He rules the place the departed go, where they are shut in by daylight and free to roam at dark.
Relation to Humans: The living met his subjects rather than him, at night, at dances, and in bed, where an opía could wear the face of a relative and be found out only by the missing navel. Nothing in the record has him judging, punishing or admitting anyone, so the Taíno seem to have feared the returning dead a great deal more than the man who ruled them.

Somewhere on Hispaniola, five centuries ago, a man slid his hand over a woman’s belly in the dark and felt for her navel. It was not affection. It was the only test anyone had, and if his fingers found smooth skin where the navel should have been, he was lying beside one of the dead.

They had a country of their own, and a lord who had got there first. Coaybay lay at one end of an island called Soraya, and the man who ruled it was Maquetaurie Guayaba. That is very nearly all that survives of him. Ramón Pané, the Jeronymite friar Columbus set to writing down what the islanders believed, gave him one sentence: the first who was in Coaybay, they say, was one called Maquetaurie Guayaba, who was lord of Coaybay, house and dwelling place of the dead. Then the friar moved on to the dead themselves and never came back to their king.

What he wrote next is what gives the lord his shape, since the record will not give him a face. By day the dead were shut away. At night they came out for their pleasure and ate a certain fruit, sweet, about the size of a peach. In the surviving text the sentence describing its taste has a hole in it, a word lost by a copyist somewhere between a Taíno village and an Italian printing house, so that the flavour of the food of the dead is the one detail nobody will ever recover. Most readers since have taken the fruit for the guava, partly because the friar’s spellings point that way and partly because the lord’s own name ends in it. The dead turned themselves into that fruit. They came out among the living, joined the dancing, and went back before light.

A living soul was a goeiz. A dead one was an opía, and an opía could arrive wearing the face of your father, your mother, your brother, anyone at all. Hence the hand on the belly, and hence operito, the word for what you had just found out. Hence, too, the failure Pané recorded with something close to relish: the man who did not think to check, who lay down with a woman of Coaybay, and who closed his arms on nothing whatever, because she had gone out of them in an instant.

Every popular account of Maquetaurie Guayaba now describes him as a bat. That identification is real scholarship and it is also modern. José Juan Arrom, working on Taíno art in the 1970s and 1980s, matched a skull-like carved head to the lord of the dead; Antonio Stevens-Arroyo in 1988 and Manuel García Arévalo in 1997 built the case out, arguing that the bats and owls fused with skulls all over Antillean carving are images of the opías and of the country they belong to. García Arévalo noticed something better than an argument: some Taíno bat figures carry a hole punched through the middle of the torso, exactly where the navel would sit on a body that had one. Not everyone agrees. Henry Petitjean Roget reads the same bats as men and dryness, set against frogs as women and water, and Maria Poviones-Bishop, going back to the photographs, points out that the geometric patterns joining the owl motifs to the supposed portrait of the lord sit on a headband that is barely visible in the plates. The bat may well be his. Nobody heard it from a Taíno.

The name is disputed in the same way, and the two readings pull in opposite directions. Arrom took the opening syllables as a negative prefix on an Arawak root for life, giving something like the lord without life, and set him beside Mictlantecuhtli of the Mexica. Racso Fernández Ortega and Juan Cuza Huart, writing in 2010, thought that left too much of the name unexplained and proposed instead a compound meaning roughly the fasting dog, abstinent from guavas. On their reading the lord of Coaybay is defined by the one thing he does not do. His whole population goes out nightly to gorge on the sweet fruit, and he keeps his mouth shut on it.

There is a second figure that popular retellings hand him, and the record does not. Opiyelguobirán, the wooden cemí with four feet like a dog who kept slipping his ropes and running back to the forest, has been called the Taíno Cerberus for a century, and Stevens-Arroyo made him one of a pair of twins serving Maquetaurie Guayaba. Pané never once mentions the two in the same breath. In his account the dog belongs to a living chief with many subjects under him, and Coaybay does not come into it.

Whatever power the lord of Coaybay had was jurisdiction rather than force. There is no gate in the accounts, no river, no ferryman, no toll, no reckoning of a life at the door. The only boundary his country has is the sun, and it holds his subjects for exactly as long as it is up. They leave every single night, walk into the villages of the living, eat, dance and lie with them, and he does not appear to stop or accompany them. A king whose people all go out after dark and come back at dawn is not much of a jailer.

That may be why the two chapters on the dead give Pané more trouble than anything else in his manuscript. Mercedes López-Baralt, counting his interruptions, found the friar breaking into his own text more often here than anywhere else in the work, correcting, doubting, changing voice. He had been sent to find idolatry and had instead found an afterlife with fruit in it, and dancing, and company, and a lord who asked nothing of the people who arrived.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Maquetaurie Guayaba?

Maquetaurie Guayaba is the Taíno lord of Coaybay, the land of the dead. He is named in a single sentence of Ramón Pané’s account of Taíno belief, written on Hispaniola around 1498, which says he was the first to be there and its lord afterwards. Nothing else about him survives from the Taíno themselves.

What is Coaybay in Taíno belief?

Coaybay is the house and dwelling place of the Taíno dead, located at one end of an island called Soraya. The dead were confined there during daylight and free at night, when they came out to eat fruit, dance and mix with the living. It was not a place of punishment, and no source describes anyone being judged or refused entry.

Why is Maquetaurie Guayaba shown as a bat?

The bat is a modern identification rather than a Taíno statement. José Juan Arrom, Antonio Stevens-Arroyo and Manuel García Arévalo argued from Taíno carvings that bat and owl images fused with skulls stand for the spirits of the dead and their lord, and García Arévalo noted that some bat figures have a hole where a navel would be. Other scholars, including Henry Petitjean Roget, read the same bats entirely differently.

How did the Taíno tell a dead person from a living one?

They felt for the navel. Pané reports that the dead had none, so touching a person’s belly and finding it smooth meant the visitor was an opía rather than a living neighbour. Anyone who forgot to check might embrace a woman of Coaybay and find she had vanished out of his arms.

What does the name Maquetaurie Guayaba mean?

There is no agreement. José Juan Arrom read the first element as a negative prefix on an Arawak word for life, giving a sense close to the lord without life, and compared him to the Mexica death god Mictlantecuhtli. Racso Fernández Ortega and Juan Cuza Huart proposed in 2010 that the name instead means something like the fasting dog, abstinent from guavas, making the lord of the dead the one being in his country who refuses the fruit.