Sastun

by Rosita Arvigo

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Amaranth Amaranto Calalu Amaranthus sp.

  A favorite food throughout the Americas since ancient times, when the toasted and sweetened seeds were molded with honey into cakes offered to the Gods. Also known as “garden spinach,” it can be prepared in any way that one would spinach. The mature seeds make an excellent, protein-rich grain. A tablespoon of the fresh leaf juice is given three times daily for anemia, as the plant is rich in iron, calcium, and vitamins. The leaves and branches are boiled and cooled to use as a wash for wounds, sores, and rashes.

  When I went to Don Elijio’s clinic the next week, I found him alone. It wasn’t clear if he remembered me or not, but he welcomed, as usual, my offer of help. He was pleased by my gift of a bag of European Chamomile, the last that we had brought from Chicago.

  I brewed us each a cup of tea and Don Elijio began to talk. He told me his story as we chopped a freshly harvested vine of pungent Contribo.

  He was born in San Andreas, a small Maya village on a steep slope on the Lake Petén Itzá in Petén, Guatemala. When he was only an infant, his father, Nicanor, killed a man in a drunken rage. At fifteen, his father was already a known hechisero, one who practices black magic. Authorities suspected he was responsible for a number of unexplained deaths, and it was known that for the right price, he would use his power to harm innocent people.

  Rather than face justice, Nicanor fled. He brought with him his wife, Gertrudes Co’oh. Nicanor had used his powers to enchant Gertrudes when she was just fourteen. He had sent her sesame candy contaminated by evil power that had rendered her a slave to his whims.

  Gertrudes carried eleven month-old Elijio in her reboso, the ubiquitous shawl of Central American women. Sleeping by day and traveling by night, they made their way through the jungle trails. After six days they reached the border of British Honduras, now Belize, and waded across the river under the cover of night. They joined thousands of refugees who came to Central America’s only British colony to escape war and starvation. They resettled with Gertrudes’s brother in Succotz, a Maya village alongside the Mopan River. There, Nicanor built a simple thatched house and planted corn to feed his family.

  But soon Nicanor stopped caring for the fields or his wife and son. He began returning home late at night, often with other women. He’d pull Gertrudes out of bed by the hair, kick her around the floor, and force her to sleep under the stove, while he made love to another enchanted woman in their marriage bed.

  Nicanor began charging large sums of money in Succotz to perform his evil spells. On occasion, he also cured a sick person using medicinal plants from the surrounding forests.

  Young Elijio asked to learn about the plants but his father refused. “You have too much blood,” Nicanor told him gruffly. “When you are older I may teach you, but not now.”

  At the age of nine, Elijio was put to work helping Uncle Isaac with his milpa, or field of corn, beans, and pumpkins. He was paid in corn, beans, and pumpkins, which kept his family fed. By the time he was thirteen, Elijio had secured his own piece of land from the village mayor, who felt sorry for him and Gertrudes.

  The boy grew healthy and abundant crops. He was a good farmer because he had a natural love of plants and tended to his corn as if it were a personal friend. As is the old Maya custom, he showed his gratitude to his corn by saying prayers before he chopped down their stalks at harvest. Through plants he found peace and escaped the sadness of his violent home.

  He wanted peace for his mother as well. Late one night when Elijio was fifteen, he lay awake, waiting for Nicanor to return home. His father kicked down the front door, crashing it against the wall. As Nicanor lunged for Gertrudes with ready fists, Elijio jumped out of bed and knocked his father to the floor. He forced a knee into Nicanor’s chest and pressed the blunt side of a machete blade against his neck. Nicanor looked up in terror, twisting and groaning on the floor. Elijio shrieked, “I will kill you if you ever lay a cruel hand on my mother again! Sin or not, father, I will kill you!”

  After that, Gertrudes was never beaten again.

  Elijio labored to become an expert farmer. His beans were prized, and he traveled to another village in the mountains, San Antonio, to trade for leather, seeds, and chocolate.

  One day he stopped to trade and talk with Damasio Tzib, a Mexican Maya from the Yucatán who had been one of the first settlers in San Antonio. Tzib’s family had fled Mexico during the Caste Wars, the last Indian uprising against the Spanish. When they had arrived in British Honduras in 1906, Tzib told them, they had had a run-in with a naked, untamed clan of Maya still roaming the jungle around San Antonio. The Tzibs were drawing water from an old Maya well when the wild bush-men jumped out of the forest, brandishing bows and arrows and threatening to kill them. They spoke—remarkably enough—in the same Mayan dialect that the Tzibs spoke.

  Elijio was fascinated by Tzib’s story, but he couldn’t keep his eyes off a young girl standing turning tortillas at the comal, a round clay disk fitted into hearths for cooking tortillas. She was Tzib’s fourteen-year-old daughter, Gomercinda, known as Chinda. Elijio was smitten, relishing her beauty, her fleshy arms, mirthful eyes, and shiny, copper face. She wore the white cotton embroidered dress of Yucatán, and her long black hair was woven into braided cords and wrapped around her head. She smiled back at him with a coyness that signaled her approval.

  As the young man walked back to Succotz that evening, he thought only of Chinda, muttering to himself in excitement, “She will be mine. She must be mine!”

  But Tzib was reluctant. Nicanor’s terrible reputation was widespread. After several months of courtship, Elijio’s uncle and the mayor of Succotz convinced Tzib to trust him, although Chinda’s mother warned she would reclaim her daughter if she was mistreated. He agreed, contrary to custom, to move to their village of San Antonio to protect Chinda from Nicanor’s infamy.

  There was never any need for her mother to worry, the old man told me. He felt only joy throughout his marriage to the woman he called the queen of his life. “We started out as children, but we lived together as lovebirds for sixty-five years,” he told me. “The best part of my life has been loving a woman.”

  He always made a special effort to grow her favorite vegetables: tomatoes, sweet potatoes, Cilantro, and Amaranth, which she loved with hot tortillas and spicy salsa. She waited for him to return from the fields with freshly picked chilies, roasting them before grinding them into a sauce in her clay bowl.

  He supported them by farming and trading. In the off-season, he worked in camps in the deep jungles of Mexico and Guatemala, where he collected Chicle sap, then used worldwide as the base of chewing gum. There he learned to drink too much, suffering bouts of alcoholism that would last throughout his life. Like all the men in his family before him, Panti fathered only one child, a girl named Emilia. For many years, Chinda and Emilia accompanied him to the Chicle camps, where Panti’s Lebanese boss, Wahib Habet, paid them to cook and clean for the crew.

  But when Emilia came to courting age, she and Chinda stayed behind in San Antonio. There Emilia married a man like her grandfather Nicanor. The man, Juan, was a brutal drunk who beat her regularly in front of the mournful eyes of their four small children and her horrified parents.

  Many times Panti tried to step in and protect Emilia, but she told him not to interfere. He and Chinda felt helpless, listening to Emilia cry out in pain night after night.

  When she was pregnant with her fifth child, they heard Juan beat her one night in a drunken rage. Panti broke his promise to Emilia. He lost his temper, grabbed an ax, and chopped down his daughter’s door. Juan escaped out the back window, leaving Emilia sprawled out on the floor, drenched in her own blood. Her children sobbed and clung in terror to their grandfather’s legs.

  Emilia died soon after giving birth to Angel.

  Panti scoured the bush for nearly two weeks, vowing to kill his daughter’s murderer. “Sin or not, if I would have found that accursed man I would have cho
pped him to bits and felt no remorse.”

  Panti and his wife raised Emilia’s children as their own. Soon afterward, Nicanor was killed by the father of a thirteen-year-old girl whom he had enchanted and seduced. Gertrudes buried Nicanor, then came to live with Panti in San Antonio. Chinda’s mother, Teresa, also came to their home after Damasio Tzib died. Gradually, the household grew from “roots of despair into vines of happiness,” Panti recalled.

  Panti had always longed to be a healer. He had prayed to find the right teacher, one who would reveal the white art of healing, so he could forgo the insidious black magic his father took to the grave.

  In 1935 a synthetic gum was developed that was cheaper than Chicle, and Panti’s employers told him that this would be their last season. That season, the camp was in the Guatemala rainforest near the still-untouched ruins of the Maya city of Tikal. There Panti found his teacher, a mysterious Carib named Jerónimo Requeña.

  One evening, after the moon had risen, the crewmen sat around the campfire drinking rum and telling boisterous stories. After a few drinks, Jerónimo bragged that he had the power to transform himself into a jaguar. The men grumbled and whispered to each other, goading him to prove his boasts and become a wild cat in front of many witnesses.

  Jerónimo grinned, then picked up his shotgun. “Do not move from this circle. I will now walk into the forest. I will fire one shot and then you will see a jaguar climb up that ceiba tree behind you. I will pause and look down upon you, then I will disappear back into the jungle and return with the morning light.”

  With that, he slipped away from the campfire and tramped into the forest until he was out of sight. The men flinched when a gunshot rang out. Within minutes a massive, male jaguar crept into their view. The wild beast dug his claws into the bark of the ceiba tree behind them and sprang up to a sturdy branch high above their heads. A few men cried out, others crossed themselves, and many more ran for cover. The jaguar’s eyes glowered, watching them scramble behind trees to hide themselves. He opened his cavernous mouth and roared ferociously, then crawled down the trunk and bounded back into the jungle.

  Panti was too excited to sleep that night, and he kept an eye on Jerónimo’s empty hammock. He knew from childhood stories that a true H’men could walk the night as a jaguar, totem of the H’men.

  As sunlight cracked through the trees, Jerónimo appeared, with the strong odor of wild cat about him. Jerónimo slept for the rest of the day with his shotgun tucked under his arm.

  A few weeks later, the rest of the crew left and Panti volunteered to stay behind with Jerónimo to guard the tools and equipment. They camped in a damp corner of one of Tikal’s ancient temples, shrouded now by tree roots and formidable vines. “Over our heads were carvings in a mysterious design done by my ancestors,” Panti said.

  One night they roasted a monkey over a fire and got to talking. Panti was afraid of Jerónimo, and it took him a while to gather up enough courage to ask, “Tell me, paisano [countryman], do you know some things?”

  Jerónimo looked over suspiciously and asked him to explain what he meant by “things.” Panti said he wanted to learn about the healing plants. He explained about his father—a curandero who had wasted his gifts on black magic and refused to teach him.

  He continued to press Jerónimo until the old Carib wearily answered, “Yes, yes, I know of these things, but I have no patience for healing people. They make me crazy. I don’t mind patching up the chicleros, but I hide in these camps to get away from sick people.”

  The reflection of the fire flickered in the Carib’s eyes as he turned and stared deeply into Panti’s. “Do you have patience, boy?” he growled.

  Without a moment’s hesitation, Panti promised he was indeed patient and dependable. “Healing is what my interest is. Always I wanted to know, papasito. Please, will you teach me?”

  Jerónimo turned his face back toward the yellow flames and remained silent for a moment more. He looked into the black of the bush and then spoke.

  “There is no rest for the healer. Night and day they will come to your hut with their sad stories, their sickness. Their troubles are plenty. People do not understand the healer and often mistrust us. When we heal what the doctors cannot, the doctors call us brujos, witches, and whisper lies about us. They say we work with the devil. It is a lonely life, I warn you.”

  Panti kept nodding that he understood full well, and he continued to prod Jerónimo until the recalcitrant old man was won over by the young chiclero’s persistence. “Then I will teach you. Right now. Right here in the forest, where all the plants grow and the Spirits live.”

  There, deep in the thick, steamy jungles of Petén, his birthplace, Panti began his training as a curandero. He and Jerónimo searched out herbs, trees, vines, and roots. Panti had never learned to read or write, so he put everything Jerónimo said into his head. Each night by the campfire, they reviewed the day’s lessons.

  Jerónimo had him taste plants, make teas and powders out of them, and learn to recognize many of them while blindfolded. As Panti progressed, Jerónimo also taught him the Maya healing prayers that he had learned from his teacher and believed dated back to the ancient Maya H’men.

  Jerónimo instructed Panti to have no relations with his wife whenever he was to cure a gravely ill patient or he would lose his power and she would become seriously ill. This he accepted with faith that Chinda would understand their new path together.

  The weeks passed. The night before they were to leave, Jerónimo prepared for Panti’s final blessing. He set out nine gourd bowls for a Primicia ceremony to introduce Panti to the Maya Spirits. Together, Panti and Jerónimo made corn atole, burned resin of the Copal tree, and said the Primicia chant.

  As a final instruction, Jerónimo gave Panti the ancient and secret prayer that enabled him to stalk the night as a jaguar. But Panti didn’t use it. He had no desire to become a cat. He was afraid that if he did, he’d be shot by a hunter.

  Not long after, Jerónimo fell from a coconut tree and broke his neck. By the time Panti reached his side, Jerónimo was barely alive. He blessed Panti one last time and reminded him to always be kind and patient with sick people and to remember his maestro at future Primicias. The master then died in his student’s arms, whispering, “I die happy because I have left it all to you. What you know will be my living memory.”

  When he returned to San Antonio, Panti began searching for the medicines in the nearby mountains and forests. “They were all there—by now my old friends.” He gained experience in all manner of medical care, studying with midwives and Chinda’s uncle Manuel Tzib, who had been a village curandero in Mexico. “I started to heal my family, then the villagers came, then people traveled from all around to reach me.”

  Only one thing was missing in his early practice in San Antonio. Jerónimo had told him that he would need a sastun in order to communicate with the Maya Spirits. “He who owns the sastun communes with the Maya Spirits as if they were close friends,” Jerónimo had said. In the Maya world only a gossamer veil separates physical from spiritual; by peering into the sastun a Maya H’men could determine the source of an illness or divine answers to questions.

  Nine times a year for two years, Panti set up the Primicia altar in his cornfield and asked the Maya Spirits and God to send him a sastun to enable him to do their healing work better. One day his patience was rewarded. “I had just finished clearing up the nine gourd bowls from the altar, when I was overtaken by a great feeling of happiness. It made me skip and jump like a child all the way home.”

  When he reached Chinda, she was sitting under the lemon tree outside their kitchen. She put out her hand and said, “Look what I found on the floor today. A child must have left it behind. See, it’s a marble.”

  In Chinda’s hand, Panti saw the greenish, translucent stone that was his sastun.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Jackass Bitters Tres Puntas Kayabim

  Neurolaena lobata

  A common weed found grow
ing throughout Central America, much prized for its activity against parasites, including amoebas, fungus, giardia, candida, intestinal parasites, and malaria. Either fresh leaf juice or a boiled tea can be used for internal or external purposes. Leaves and flowering tops of the plant contain an active principle, sesquiterpene dialdehyde, an intensely bitter substance found in many antimalarial plants.

  A few months after my first visit, I arrived at Panti’s doorstep at seven o’clock in the morning, hoping to tag along and help him collect bush medicines, but he’d already been “andando en el monte” for two hours.

  The cement house was fairly new, built for Panti by his grandson Angel after Chinda died so he would be protected at night. The two thatch huts were only two feet apart: one a kitchen, where he chopped and stored medicine; the other where he sometimes gave his patients herbal baths and massages. Panti’s good friend, Antonio Cuc, was at the chopping block, cutting up a dark brown and yellow bark.

  I sat down beside him. “Buenos días, señor,” I said. Don Antonio seemed almost as old as Panti. He also had the classic square-jawed Maya face, but his serious expression was in contrast to Don Elijio’s twinkling humor. His strong, calloused hands, criss-crossed with scars, wielded the machete with practiced skill. He told me that he was Kekchi Maya and that Panti was Mopan Maya.

  There are an estimated four million Maya living in Central America today, speaking twenty-five different dialects. Although the ancient Maya had written glyphs, the dialects of the modern Maya are oral languages. Although he spoke Mayan, Don Antonio could no more read an inscription on a Maya temple than I could.

  “What are you chopping?”

  “Billy Webb bark,” he answered. “All this week I’ll be clearing the high bush from my land. Next week I will burn.”