Some of the villagers laughed at him, he said, calling him a zampope, or leaf-cutter ant, known for its ability to cut bits of leaves and carry them through the jungle to their underground lairs, rarely if ever stopping to rest.
“They say I have a pact with the devil. But they are wrong. I am lifting people up, not dragging them down. Never has a person walked in here and had to be carried out, but many were carried in and walked out after I healed them.” He was arguing with unseen enemies.
There was another reason why he couldn’t teach me, he said. His medicine came from the Maya Spirits. “Prayer is very important to my work, and our Spirits speak Mayan and you don’t. Besides, my daughter, you have no sastun.”
“What’s a sastun?” I asked.
“It is the plaything of the Maya Spirits, and the blessed tool of the Maya healer,” he declared, apparently expecting that would clear up any confusion and end my quest.
I didn’t know what a sastun had to do with my learning about Belize’s healing plants, but I decided to let the subject go…for now. I didn’t want to pester him.
It was well past four and I had to head back to the trail before dark. Just as I began gathering up my things, several young Maya women entered, each carrying a baby. Glued to the hut door, I watched as Panti held each baby’s chubby wrist and whispered in Mayan. He repeated this over the ankle, the other wrist, and the other ankle.
“Excuse me, Don Elijio, please,” I said, observing proper protocol by requesting permission to return, “may I visit you again next week?”
“Of course, mamasita. I will be right here, neither more nor less than you see me right now.”
As I walked out to the road, I could hear him and the young mothers speak the rich, mysterious sounds of the Mayan tongue. Then I heard the women squeal in delight, until the sound of my boots swishing in the grass drowned them out.
CHAPTER THREE
Wormseed Epasote Chenopodium ambrosioides
A highly aromatic common weed found throughout the Americas, used principally as a flavoring for beans, as a reliable means of ridding intestinal parasites from children and adults, and as a tea for flatulence. The entire plant boiled in water and drunk throughout the day is a good cure for hangovers. For the bean pot, add five leaves per quart of water when beans are nearly cooked. For intestinal parasites in children, give one teaspoon of the leaf juice each morning before breakfast for three consecutive days. On the fourth morning give a teaspoon of castor oil.
I returned to Panti’s clinic a month later. This time Greg rowed me across the river and kissed me good-bye under a wild coconut palm.
It had started raining days ago and the path was slick and muddy, defying all my feeble attempts to climb uphill. I slipped and fell twice, caking thick, red mud onto my clothes and backpack. But I was determined. Soon the going got easier, and I studied the leaves on the fully bloomed tropical trees and those in the thickets. Each plant seemed like a stranger beckoning to me. I had always considered plants my friends and was anxious to get acquainted with new friends in the Belizean rainforest. Whether Panti helped me or not, I was determined to unravel the riddles locked in the veins of a heart-shaped leaf or the fibers of a clinging vine. I eyed a pale pink flower. Are you medicine? I wondered. I wished it could answer.
I was thrilled to see a familiar species—a thorny, flowering Wild Poppy in brilliant yellow, growing on the edge of a sandy cliff near the riverside. It was the first I’d seen in Belize. In Mexico it was called Chicalote, and my neighbors had used it to treat insomnia and nervousness. My research had revealed that its active ingredient was papervine, a proven, effective sedative.
I stopped near a mammey apple tree and took a gulp of refreshing peppermint water from my flask. I looked down to see a legion of leaf-cutter ants, which made me smile, thinking of Panti as the zampope. I watched them tirelessly mobilize the chips of green leaves—heavy loads for their tiny frames. I found that I couldn’t wait to see the old man again.
I loped up the last hill to San Antonio. The distinctly pungent stench of pigs and rotting cornhusks greeted me as I walked the last quarter mile to Panti’s compound.
He was at home, sitting on the kitchen floor, vigorously chopping medicine. He was chatting with the mother of the sick child, whom I had met the month before.
“Buenos días,” I said, as I came through the door. The woman introduced herself to me. Her name was Juanita, her daughter, María. “Yo soy Rosita,” I said. They were camped out on the floor, and Maria was asleep on an old door, without a mattress or pillow.
In the Maya tradition, it’s customary for healers to house their patients, since many are far from home and too poor to pay for room and board. By the time they had found Don Elijio, María’s family had spent their savings on medicines, hospital stays, and taxicabs.
Panti didn’t even glance up at me. He said a polite hello, then continued chopping. He didn’t seem to notice or care that Juanita was at the moment straining to pull one of the wooden poles of the wall of his hut off its bracing to add to the fire. Already, more than half the wall was gone, leaving a large, gaping space. At this rate, the rest of the walls would burn up in a few weeks.
Juanita sensed my astonishment. “Too much rain this week,” she explained meekly, as she stood surrounded by buckets and pots that had been called into service to catch the rain pouring in through the holes in the roof. “The wood is all wet and we must have a fire to warm Maria and cook our food.”
“I built this house fifty years ago,” Panti chimed in. “My wife and I lived here like two kittens on a pillow. Now the roof is rotten but those corner poles! They would outlive you and I both. They are of Escoba, a palm that doesn’t even know how to rot. But this house is beyond saving. And when it is all gone, God will help me build another one.”
When his wife had been alive, he explained, she had tended to patients, feeding them fresh beans, pumpkins, and homemade tortillas. She had always made sure the hut was snug and warm. Although he did his best, it could never be the same.
“It is too damp and muddy for me to venture out for wood—not with my rheumatism and these bad eyes—and the mother will not leave her child,” he told me and shrugged.
I asked if there were any old logs and rotting fence posts around the village. Panti said there was lots of “widow’s wood,” so called because it is women without men who are forced to pick up scrap wood off the ground.
Maria awoke and sat up on her board bed. I was impressed by her improved appearance. Juanita began to feed her, and I watched as she took small gulps of warm corn cereal. The eyes that had been dull and vacant were now clear and shining. She held her body erect; there was no sign of listlessness. Even her hair, dull and brittle before, looked healthier.
“Ah, you look so much better, so pretty and much happier,” I said. Her hand was frail and trusting in mine.
“There is no one like God and Don Elijio,” said Juanita, smiling over at him while she rearranged her child’s bedclothes.
I volunteered to go out and find firewood. “I’m already muddy, so it won’t matter much if I hit the ground a few more times,” I joked.
“That’s because you are young and have so much blood,” said Don Elijio. “When one is young nothing seems too hard. I am strong and stiff as a young man, and I would like to marry again—to a fifteen-year-old who will keep me warm at night and whisper secrets in my ear, and kiss, kiss, kiss,” he said cheerfully while kissing the air around his elbow as if holding his invisible mate.
Juanita and I both giggled, which spurred him on.
“But these days I can’t tell if I’m kissing a tree or a woman.”
Juanita’s eyes teared up as she laughed out loud.
“I need a blanket to keep me warm at night, a blanket of guts that turns when I turn and curls up around me.” He wrapped his arms around himself in a symbolic hug. “A cloth blanket just falls off to the floor,” he said, mimicking the unhappy sleeper.
J
uanita finally threw up her hands and declared, “Don Elijio, you are shameless!”
“Yes, mamasita. Shameless and womanless. What is a man without a woman? Only half of nothing. It is much that a woman does for a man,” he said, seriously enough to dampen our amusement.
“I need a woman to administer my house and to help with my patients,” he said. “And my heart calls out for a woman, my body aches for a woman.”
I left them chatting and went out to scrounge for wood scraps and came back loaded down with enough firewood to last the rest of the day. Then I made two more trips to a stash I’d piled under a tree near the edge of the village.
When I got back, Panti was tending to the child, who dangled her legs over the bed. He carefully washed out her open sores with a hot, green liquid, before taking out his tattered handkerchief and drying them. Then he reached under the bed for a musty glass jar with a rusted lid, and, tipping it on its side, he shook out a tiny bit of greenish black powder onto each sore. I noticed that some sores had healed while others were beginning to heal. The child winced as the powder fell, crying out to her mother, “Me quema.” It burns me.
With gentle assurance and ample confidence in his herbs, Panti spoke softly to the child. “Yes, yes, my heart. It burns, but it cures.”
Piling the firewood under the hearth, I pulled out my machete from its leather scabbard and sharpened it with Panti’s file. “May I help you chop medicine, Don Elijio?”
He peered over at me with his soft, weary eyes, asking, “Are you sick? Tell me first, because soon there will be many people arriving on the transport from town. It is better to tell me of your sickness now.”
It was painfully obvious once again that he didn’t remember me by voice or face. I gently reminded him that we had met twice. “Yo soy Rosita.” His eyes crinkled at the edges and a smile creased his leathery face. He humbly apologized for his eyes. American doctors had visited the village the week before and informed him he had cataracts, leaving behind eye drops and sunglasses.
He pointed with his worn machete to the far corner toward another chopping block. “Those sacks hanging from the rafters—spread them out,” he instructed. I did and then sat down on the dirt floor across from him and his hand-hewn wooden block. He pushed a pile of gnarled, brown vines in my direction and motioned for me to watch how he chopped. “Not too big. Not too small. Just so.”
We worked in silence with only the sounds of the machetes on wood and the rustling of the vine tendrils. “What vine is this?” I asked, cutting through the quiet as gently as I could.
“This is Man Vine. This plant is for ciro, and its root is for men who can’t.”
I smiled at his delicate description then watched as he chopped. He wielded his machete without pause or worry, as if he were a master chef mincing vegetables with artful aplomb. Despite his failing eyesight, he was amazingly dexterous. At times, though, my heart leapt as his machete appeared to come dangerously close to hacking his already scarred fingers.
Juanita picked up Maria and arranged her on her lap as she sat in the room’s only chair. The girl held a battered, naked, pink doll missing all its arms and legs. With one of her delicate fingers, she skillfully traced the lines around the doll’s eyes and mouth, turning wounded plastic into a joyful toy. She bumped her thin, bare legs against the side of the chair, and some of the black powder Don Elijio had rubbed into her sores fell like coal dust onto her mother’s already heavily stained dress.
“Ciro is something that jumps in your belly like a rabbit, but it is not a rabbit,” Don Elijio continued without breaking the rhythm of his chop, chop, chop. “It is a very bad disease of the stomach.”
Juanita interrupted, announcing that the Epasote herb, Wormseed, had run out. She had given Maria the last of it that morning. Despite the rain and mud, someone would need to gather more before dark.
I knew Epasote from my days in Mexico and volunteered to go hunt for it. Don Elijio was skeptical but handed me a quart-sized muslin sack and told me to try.
I found the plant about a quarter mile down the road, growing along a footpath near a creek besmirched by rusty cans and plastic bottles. I filled the bag with the fresh, aromatic leaves and returned to the hut.
Don Elijio was clearly surprised to see me return so soon. He seemed even more surprised when he inspected the contents and found I had brought back the correct plant. Without a word he dropped the Epasote into a pot of boiling water waiting on the hearth.
The afternoon transport arrived, and soon four patients wandered into Panti’s cramped kitchen. “Is this the house of Elijio Panti, the doctor?” asked a somber-looking man in Salvadorean Spanish.
“Elijio Panti?” shouted the medicine man, without missing a chopping beat. “That rogue! He’s gone. You missed him. They chased him out of town long ago…said he was no more than a mad clown.”
The family looked at each other in panic. They were just about to turn away when Panti stopped them and introduced himself. “I only jest like a mischievous boy. That is my way. I am the one you seek. Tell me, what is your problem?”
They were from the Valley of Peace, a settlement of Salvadorean refugees near Belmopan. The man’s family had been sick for a long time, and nobody else had been able to help them. “We heard of you from a neighbor who sings your praises and prays that you will live many more years,” said the Salvadorean, searching Panti’s aging eyes with hope.
First, he pointed to his eighteen-year-old married daughter, standing next to him, and explained that she could not have children. The young girl blushed and dug her plastic shoe into the dirt floor.
“Humph!” said Don Elijio, waving his machete in the air. “Here I cure those that want and those that don’t want. Nearly always it is the uterus that is in poor condition. This is a woman’s center, her very being. Nothing can be right for her if her uterus is not in good condition. I massage, give teas, baths, and prayers. Then look out! She will have a baby for sure,” he said, moving his hands over his belly to mimick the curve of pregnancy. He smiled over to the young woman, rocking an imaginary baby in his arms.
But the man still looked worried. He too had a problem, and it was more difficult to explain. “My luck has left me,” he blurted out nervously.
It had started when he had been fired from his job as a watchman after a jealous co-worker told lies about him. Then, he and his wife, who had been happily married for twenty years, had begun to quarrel constantly. “I believe this is not natural,” the man said. “Someone is doing this to us. It must be an enemy.”
Panti nodded, then proclaimed with great forcefulness, “This is the work of the sastun! Come into the other house and we will pull out your luck to see if this is natural or not.”
The family trailed off behind Panti. I ached to follow but got no invitation.
A minute later, I heard sonorous chanting. Panti was reciting in Mayan, and all I could understand was an occasional word in Spanish. Then I heard what sounded like the clanging of a clay object on wood. In the doorway I saw Panti bent over examining something in the light.
Panti held the man’s right hand, then instructed him to open his palm. There was a small, translucent ball the size of a marble. Panti moved the man’s hand back and forth, causing the marble to dance about on the flattened palm. Panti moved his face closer to the object, pushing up the glasses the doctors had given him and looking directly into it before pointing and exclaiming, “Yes. There it is. Do you see that black dot? That is your bad luck. That is your illness. Envy. Pure envy.”
Panti smiled like a doting father at the man and continued his diagnosis. “Maybe you eat well, have a good job, have handsome cattle or beautiful, obedient children. Your neighbor begins to feel jealousy toward you. That makes you get sick in the head. You lose all your courage and drive. Don’t worry, my friend, we can cure that easy. I understand all of this.”
I had no idea what Panti was doing, but I had the feeling I was getting a glimpse of the heart of his work.
It was clear that he was more than a man of plants. In some way, the cement house was as much a Maya temple as the ancient pyramids where shamans had healed mind, body, and soul with physical and spiritual means.
I thought, perhaps, that he was what I had heard called a H’men (Heh-mén). H’men translates as “one who knows.” It was an honored title given to doctor-priests or priestesses of the ancient Maya civilization long before Cortéz and Bishop de Landa carved out the soul of the culture they found in the New World.
Juanita awoke me from my thoughts, saying, “The old man is very funny, isn’t he? He laughs and jokes all the time—nothing is serious to him. I can see his loneliness and grief as a widower. Were I not a married woman, I would be tempted to stay with him. He is not poor and a very loving man. He would care for a woman well.”
A short time later, the family filed out of the house and took seats on a roadside bench. Each person carried a bag of medicine. They looked cheerful and relieved, handing each other cookies and sodas. As they waited for a lift back to town, they seemed more like carefree tourists than the fretful patients they had been an hour before.
Panti came back to the hut and took his customary seat at the chopping block on the floor. His cheeks glowed.
I wanted to ask so many questions, but I didn’t know how to start. I didn’t want to pry or seem rude. Finally I said, “A lot of laughter in there, huh?”
He grinned and shrugged. “Oh, yes. Most people think too much, but get them to laugh and half of their trouble and sickness will go away.”
We began to chop again, and soon the rhythm picked up where we had left off. Chop, thwack, chop, thwack against the worn blocks.
Within the hour, he climbed to his feet and announced he was off to tend to a new mother and her baby. I stayed in the hut chopping medicine until late afternoon, then swept out his yard and piled up the garbage left behind by his patients.
As I hiked home in the rain, I thought about what a funny old man he was. I was moved by his genuine compassion and empathy for people’s fright and pain. Despite the gossip, I saw no “witch doctor.” I saw a healer of the highest caliber and a talented clown. I saw a H’men.
Sastun Page 4