“Why do you burn?” I asked.
“To prepare the land and make it ready for corn. My father did that, his father did that, and his grandfather did that. That is our way.”
Belize still had over 50 percent of its old growth rainforest intact, more than any other country in Central or South America. But things were changing rapidly. The main culprits were land developers and commercial cattle and citrus companies, who were clearing thousands of acres at a time. Small farmers like Don Antonio only exacerbated the problem. They practiced “swidden” or “slash and burn” agriculture, a method used in Mesoamerica for more than five thousand years. Once efficient, the ritual burning had become a threat.
As I looked across the chopping block at Don Antonio’s wizened countenance, I found it hard to think of him as a rainforest plunderer. Over the last months, I had seen that Don Antonio was one of Don Elijio’s major herb gatherers. He routinely collected the medicinal plants on his land. Some he sold to Don Elijio, others he and his wife Doña Juana reserved for their own use. Like many elderly Maya, they were familiar with healing plants and respected their ability to cure. When they had raised their fifteen children, plants had been their only medicines.
As we talked, we saw Panti’s small frame walk toward the huts. Don Antonio jumped up before I could to remove the heavy sack of bush medicine.
Don Elijio peered over at the patients that were sitting on the bench outside the door and remarked casually, “Ah, Rosita, you come again.”
I was thrilled. At last he remembered me. I felt as though I had reached a mountaintop.
He and Don Antonio spoke in Mayan and I listened intently, but all I could understand were the occasional Spanish words mixed in. Despite the fame of the ancient Maya for numbers, mathematical concepts, and intricate calendars, the modern Maya use Mayan words for numbers one through five and Spanish for all others. Mayan speakers also use Spanish for the time, the days of the week, and the months.
Panti then went into his dark cement house to wait for his atole and to rest, leaving Don Antonio and me to keep each other company. I chopped with him. He told me that he used the Billy Webb bark to treat his wife’s diabetes. She drank a tea made from the bitter bark for three months until she recovered. I listened excitedly, hungry for any tales about special plants that cure. I was sad when he left me alone at the block and went home for lunch. Then, to my delight, Panti popped his head in the hut and invited me to eat lunch with him. We sat at a table that was made from a crate, and his great-grandchildren brought his food. I pulled out my homemade granola and a thermos of apple juice.
As I chewed up my granola, he looked at me oddly. “What are you eating, child, mash?” I burst out laughing. Mash was the local term for chicken feed. I told him about granola and my vegetarian diet of fifteen years.
He smiled approvingly. Factory food was ruining people’s diets, he scolded. People were being afflicted with what he called “modern food disease.” “Junk” or cuchinada (pigged) food was at the root of most of his patients’ ailments, which he noticed were worsening in recent decades. He said the intake of packaged foods—full of chemicals and preservatives—had made people more vulnerable to high blood pressure, heart disease, arthritis, diabetes, and cancer.
“For ‘modern food disease,’” he said, “I give Balsam bark tea to cleanse the kidney and the liver, and many of these problems go away.”
He also found grave harm in frozen popsicles, known locally as ideals.
“Since people starting sucking on those horrible things, they started with this ciro,” he said. Only since the advent of refrigeration had people been able to drink cold drinks. “Too much cold makes the stomach cramp. After a while it stays in a knot, and one bite of food fills it up. Then when I massage the stomach, it has a giant pulse, it feels like a rabbit, but it is only ciro. If you take ciro to a doctor, he will shout, ‘Hernia, hernia! Get the knife, we must operate!’ But what can they take out, when it is just pure wind?”
I said I thought it was a shame that medicinal plants such as Man Vine that he used to treat ciro were being forsaken. I found this especially sad since modern medicine had found no better way to treat gastritis.
As I spoke, Panti chewed with toothless gums on the ancient regional diet of corn tortillas, beans, and hot chocolate. He said he abhorred the Belizean favorite: rice and beans. And he didn’t eat much of the other staples his neighbors favored, such as lard and pig tails.
Until very recently, most villagers had backyard gardens where they grew Chaya, Chayote, Cilantro, and some wild greens including Amaranth. Like Chinda had, they used to make salsa from fresh tomatoes, chilies, and garlic, and they drank a refreshing liquid made from orange leaves, Lemon Grass, and Allspice berries, providing them with vitamin C and minerals. Now they preferred to drink Coca-Cola.
“Let your food be your medicine and your medicine be your food,” I quipped, quoting Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine. As a healer, I told him I encouraged the use of foods called “pot” herbs—plants we eat that also cure us, such as Rosemary, Amaranth, and Basil, which have medicinal power in their organic states.
I never wanted our conversation to end. We both looked out the window when we heard the afternoon transport rumble in, with Angel behind the wheel. His wife and several of their nine children were crowded next to him in the cab. Upwards of twenty people sat on wooden boards in the back of the canvas-covered truck amid farm supplies, chickens, and buckets.
That afternoon I was called into the cement house on several occasions to translate for patients who spoke only English. It was the first time I had ever been invited to help as Panti worked with his patients.
An eighteen-year-old San Ignacio woman, four months pregnant and paralyzed from the waist down, was one of the first patients. Two years before, she had had a very difficult delivery, and after the birth she had lost the use of her lower limbs. Panti said prayers into her wrists and forehead, prescribed herbal steam baths, and gave her a mixture of fresh green leaves.
She had tears in her eyes. “Have faith, my daughter, because God will help us all, if we but ask. Faith. That is what cures. I chop the medicine, I look for it in the jungle, I make the fires, roast the herbs, and apply them, but it is faith that heals.”
Later in the afternoon, the young San Antonio policeman wandered in asking if Panti could do something for his chronic migraine headaches.
“Yes, there’s a cure, but are you brave?” Panti asked. The policeman shifted uncomfortably and said, “Uhhh, yes, why do you ask?”
“Because the best thing for this is pinchar, he announced as he reached under his table, pulled out a dusty glass jar, and emptied a four-inch, bone-colored stingray spine into his palm. Recently archaeologists had uncovered a stingray spine in the tomb of a H’men. As Don Elijio washed the spine and the policeman’s forehead with alcohol, I wondered if the archaeologists had ever seen a stingray spine in action.
Don Elijio stood up tall and confidently, pinched the flesh of the man’s forehead between his fingers, and quickly pierced the flesh three times in three places, using the sharp end of the spine.
I heard “pop, pop, pop,” as the stingray punctured the taut skin. The policeman grimaced but held his seat stoically.
Then Panti forced the man’s head forward while streams of dark, frothy blood fell to the floor.
A foul odor filled the room.
“There you see your sickness on the floor,” Panti said, pointing with his finger. “I’ve taken out the congested old blood blocked in your head, causing headaches. Blood should run like a river—clear, clean, and free.”
The policeman looked relieved. “My pain is gone,” he announced as he left. “I feel like a weight has been lifted.”
After the patients left, Panti gave me an assignment: to toast a bushel of green leaves he had harvested that morning to treat a patient’s skin sores.
“This is Tres Puntas, child. A very blessed plant. Keep the fire burning
low under the comal and keep turning the leaves until they are toasted dry. I can’t do it myself because I get burned, these eyes, you know.”
After a few minutes of working with Tres Puntas I too could hardly see. Once the leaves began to heat up, they emitted a stinging smoke that burned my eyes and made my throat itch and my nose run.
Panti laughed and put another pile of fresh leaves on the comal. I moved the leaves about with a tree branch, trying to keep out of the shifting smoke, but finally gave up when he complained that I wasn’t turning them often enough. In order to do a good job, I had to keep my face right in the line of acrid steam until the leaves were parched dry.
It was an especially torrid, tropical afternoon, and I was close to passing out with the added heat from the fire. But I didn’t want to fail at my new task, so I blew on my upper lip and tried to cool my face; I had no hands free to wipe the sweat dripping down my neck.
He sat on a low stool in the breezy doorway, passing the crispy, almost burned leaves through a sieve into a gourd bowl. I watched as the leaves turned to blackish green powder, which he gathered into an old Tasters Choice jar with the label nearly rubbed off.
After I had finished, I went back to my post chopping the Billy Webb bark. Panti looked over at me with a proud smile. “I like the way you handle that machete, Rosita, but let me sharpen it for you. It will serve you better.” We established a ritual. Every hour or so during our afternoon chopping sessions, he would stop his work to skillfully sharpen my blade with his file. It was a small bit of gallantry, his way of doing something for me.
We told stories to each other as we chopped. He loved to talk about his Chinda. She had been so trusting, never questioning him about treating women patients alone in their bedroom. “Even if I had to look at their private parts, never once did she pull back the curtain and say, ‘What goes on in here?’ No. Never would I put an evil hand on a woman patient. It’s a sin. And I do not sin.”
He told me the sad tale of Chinda’s death.
“They killed her,” he snapped, with enough fresh anger to convince me this was a wound that would forever fester. “Chinda had a hernia that I could not cure. In spite of my plants and prayers, it would not go away. I had to take her to the hospital in Belize City and let a doctor care for her. Imagine me at the age of eighty-one, making my first trip to Belize City.”
Accepting that Chinda’s illness was beyond his abilities, he returned to his village to continue harvesting his Christmas beans, planning to collect her within a few days.
“But I was in my cornfield when suddenly my heart began to flutter and pound in my chest. I dropped my tools and went home. People were gathering around my doorstep, waiting to tell me that Chinda’s death had just been announced on the radio. Mamasita, with those words, I fell to the earth on my knees and fainted.”
When he got to the hospital, he found Chinda’s doctor upset and angry. He explained to Panti that the operation had gone well and Chinda would have recuperated without complications within a few days. But his instructions to give only water for the first forty-eight hours and broth on the third day were disobeyed. Instead of spoon-feeding broth to Chinda a little bit at a time, a nurse left the broth and a plate of heavy food unattended on the tray. When a hungry Chinda woke up, she gulped down the soup and the meal and died a few hours later.
“She didn’t have to die. I shouldn’t have left her. Had I been there, she would be here at my side today. I would never have let her eat that plate of heavy food. I would have taken better care of my patient.”
Panti choked on the memory, finding little consolation in knowing the doctor had fired the nurse responsible that same afternoon. “For three years I was like a crazy person. I drank until I fell down in a stupor and cried myself to sleep in the dust. I had no room in my heart for sick people. I just wanted to die.”
His cousin from the village of San Andreas and her husband came to stay with him for those difficult years, caring for him and trying to console his heartache. Sick people looking for the curandero found him drunk, sitting in the mud, or snoring in his hammock. “I’ll never know how I survived those years. I knew nothing could be done; God gave Chinda to me and then he took her away. She was beautiful and fat—beautiful to me on the day I married her and beautiful on the day she died.”
Silence fell on the room and filled in the gaps between the noise of our tools. I felt a great wave of tenderness for the warm-hearted old man as I watched him straddle a wobbly stool in his wife’s crumbling kitchen.
A young village mother and her baby slipped quietly into the hut. Panti quickly regained his composure. He spoke to the woman in Mayan, then muttered a chant, holding her baby’s wrists and ankles. The woman’s two other children had come inside and were on the floor playing an old Maya game with nine stones that reminded me of jacks.
After the mother sat down on a stool and put the baby to her breast, Panti continued. “Life without a good woman at my side is like food without salt, coffee without sugar.”
The young mother told him she felt sorry for him. He quickly rejected her pity. “I am still strong as a young man and blood runs in my veins,” he boasted, jerking and pulling his arms to his side, shaking them to exaggerate his muscles.
“But no one here wants me. I’ve tried in my own village with three women, but they shamed me when they laughed at my courtship. They said I was too old. Yes, I am old, but my money is not old!”
With that, we all began giggling. He looked at me with his mischievous smile, and I saw again how much he loved to make people laugh. It was a sweet dose of the only medicine he could manufacture to treat his own illnesses—old age and loneliness.
The young woman left and as she did she said, “In ca tato.” That was the fifth time I’d heard someone say that as they left. I knew it was Mayan. I asked Panti and he told me it meant, “I’m going now, old revered one.”
I glanced at my watch. It was late, and I told him I would need to leave soon since I had promised Crystal and Greg I would be home early to get ready for a party.
“How about one of your good treatments before you go?” he asked, placing his hand on the small of his back. He climbed on the bed and stripped down to the muslin shorts that Chinda had made for him.
I rubbed his back and neck with Wintergreen oil until his tired, overworked muscles began to relax under my kneading fingers. Panti moaned, “Que rico,” how exquisite, as I stretched and pulled his flesh. He had been suffering from rheumatism since the days when he had lived outside in the chiclero camps.
“You can do this to me anytime,” he chirped. “Are you coming back next week?”
“I’ll be here neither more nor less than you see now,” I joked, giving him back one of his favorite lines.
In the fading daylight, he stood by his hut door, waving good-bye with a broad smile on his face. His cheeks had a pink glow that they hadn’t had earlier.
But as I tromped past the sign for San Antonio on my way home, I knew he was sitting alone in his slanted-back chair, looking at the hen roosting in the cold stove where Chinda had once made her fresh tortillas and cheerfully listened to his stories.
CHAPTER SIX
Corn Maize Im Che Zea mays
A sacred food to all cultures of Mesoamerica since preconquest times. The grain is prepared primarily as a flat cake or “tortilla” cooked on a clay disk called a comal and is made into a variety of dishes. Corn Silk Tea is an ancient remedy for ailments of the urinary tract, such as bladder infections or kidney troubles. A hot, thick corn cereal called atole is a popular drink; mixed with orange leaf tea, it is a household remedy for hangovers. The four colors of corn—white, red, yellow, and black—are believed to reflect the races of people, signifying the four corners of the universe.
After a year of visiting Panti’s clinic once a week, I arrived early enough one morning to catch him before he set out for the bush. Past the flurry of parakeets escaping the Sour Orange Tree in his yard, I saw him standing i
n the doorway of his cement house, adjusting his old plastic flour sack around his shoulders and bending over to pick up his hoe. He wore little black plastic boots and old plant-stained homemade pants. He muttered incoherently to himself as he readied for the day ahead.
He was surprised to see me, but I was crestfallen when he said, “I have no time for you today, child. The season is late, my corn is past harvest time, and I’ve had too many patients to get to my own work.” I had always wondered about those sacks of yellow, white, and red corn filling up his storage hut, still in their husks. I couldn’t imagine that such abundant and healthy ears of Indian corn were the fruits of his own labor—not at his age and with his patient load.
“I’ll help you harvest your corn, Don Elijio,” I volunteered.
He looked incredulously at me, and as if to humor my enthusiasm asked what I could possibly know about harvesting corn.
“Come on, tato, old revered one, I’ll show you,” I rebutted with conviction. After all those years in Mexico, I knew how to harvest corn like a veteran field hand.
He shrugged and agreed to let me tag along.
An iridescent orange sun had just broken over the horizon, yet the village was already bustling with activity. Women carried heavy loads of soiled clothes on their heads to be washed in the creek, schoolchildren in blue uniforms scampered around the yards, chickens squawked, and customers mingled in his grandson’s store.
We walked along an old logging road in silence. I was perfectly content to quietly traipse behind him, following his little black boots as they keenly sidestepped the rocks and divots complicating the careworn, dirt road. Peanut fields spread out as far as I could see, while corn sprouted on the other side. Sprinkled here and there were patches of pumpkins and beans.
He eyed the herds of cattle chewing on barren fields, only recently converted from jungle bush, then shook his arm in the air and shouted over his shoulder, “Nowadays one has to go farther and farther to find medicine because they’re chopping away so much of the forest. The fools don’t know they’re destroying life-giving medicine.”
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