After he explained how she was to combine the leaves of both plants for the hot tea bath, he launched into a complicated prescription for the fungus. He told her to take equal parts of the leaves of both plants, toast them over the hearth until very dry, and pass them through a sieve to make a fine powder. Then she was to cover the fungus with castor oil and sprinkle the powder over the area, using a feather to make sure it went deep into the holes. He told Doña Juana to be sure that her granddaughter kept her foot covered with a sock for the night. In the morning, she was to soak a sock in the hot tea and wear it all day long.
“That will do it for sure,” he assured them.
The women nodded in respectful agreement.
“Is that all, then?” Panti asked, stretching out and glancing over at his hammock.
“Well, with your permission, I would like you to examine the big girl here. She has too much gas and indigestion all the time. She is constipated too.”
Following them into the examining room with a lantern, I held it over Don Elijio’s head as he dug deeply into her abdomen, giving her the classic ciro massage. The teenager squirmed under the pressure, but Don Elijio held fast.
The fingers of both hands dove into the soft flesh around her belly button, disappearing up to his second knuckles. Then he twisted his hands clockwise, pressing as he prayed.
“You have dry ciro, my child,” he said as he turned her over on her stomach and massaged her back and legs with quick, squeezing movements.
“Rosita, go get her a mixture of Man Vine, Contribo, and Guaco. That will taste strong, child, but it will serve you well.”
When I returned with the three-part formula, he reached into the bag and took out the amount she was to boil in three cups of water and drink before meals.
“Take no cold drinks, no acid foods, no beef, and no chili,” he cautioned her. “Mark my words well, or you will be much worse off than you are now.”
“Is that it?” he asked Doña Juana. “Can an old man go to bed now?”
“Well,” she said, “one last question. This little boy is five and it is time for him to go to school, but he says he doesn’t want to go.
“When his mother gets him up in the morning, he says he can’t get up. He’s too tired. He’s even too tired to play sometimes. It isn’t natural. I purged him of worms last month, but he is still not active and happy like the rest.”
Don Elijio shrugged wearily and felt for the child’s pulse. I reached out for the opposite frail wrist.
“Weak, thready, and too rapid,” said my teacher. “Mark it well, for it is all too common.”
Don Elijio picked up the lad’s T-shirt and thumped his taut belly with his thumb and forefinger. Then he pulled down the boy’s eyelid and asked me to tell him what I saw.
“Is it red, pink, yellow, or white?” he asked me.
“It’s pale and on the edge of yellow,” I reported.
“Yes, just what I thought. The child is anemic and has a tapeworm, probably a large one.”
“Uh oh,” commented his mother. “Roberto is very stubborn about taking medicine. He cries and fights, even spits it out when you’re not looking. I’m afraid he won’t swallow anything bitter or strong tasting, nol.”
“Don’t worry about that, I know what to do,” said the old man. “You will take the roots I give you and boil them in sugar water for half a day until the brew is as thick as syrup. Give him this syrup six times daily by the spoonful, and on the third day he should fast. On the fourth day, give him a strong dose of castor oil. Soon, mamasita, your son will be strong and happy again, I promise. Have faith, God will help us all if we but ask.
“I know all these things to be true, because I have tried and tested them,” he continued. “I’ve been doing this work now for forty years, and I know a few things.”
The children were getting restless and starting to fuss. They started to get up to leave, when Josefina paused and timidly said, “Please tatito, I have one more question.
“It seems I don’t have enough breast milk to satisfy the baby,” she said.
“Doña Juana, you know the wild Poinsettia plant,” he said. “Doesn’t it grow right in front of your house?”
“Yes, yes. That one I know for sure, but my grandmother told me never to use it, because it is poison.”
“True, very true—smart woman,” he said approvingly. “You were wise to obey her counsel. But in this case, it is safe. I want you to pick nine of the little plants and braid the branches into a necklace for her to wear all day. For nine days you should make a fresh necklace every morning. Also boil a pot of the herb and wash the breasts with the warm water before each feeding. Dry the breasts before giving them to the baby. Then, ha, there will be quarts of milk.”
Doña Juana looked at Josefina, who was now nursing the infant at her breast, and said authoritatively, “The old man has very sore and weak eyes. I think a little bit of mother’s milk dropped in them would be helpful. Are you willing, child, to give him some?”
Josefina giggled and shifted uncomfortably, turning to the wall to blush. She covered her mouth with her free hand and whispered, “Sí.”
Then there ensued a great debate on how best to squirt the milk into Panti’s eyes.
I have to see this, I thought.
Finally it was decided that he would remain in his seat and she would stand up and point her nipple at his eye. It was my job to hold his eyes open to allow each milky projectile to find its target.
Amidst a great babble of giggles and shifting of feet, Don Elijio gladly gave himself over to Doña Juana’s prescription. How easily and quickly they switched roles, I thought, each helping the other with their own brand of expertise. After fifteen children and eighty grandchildren, I guessed Doña Juana knew everything there was to know about the health benefits of mother’s milk.
He sat expectantly on his little wooden stool in the corner of his poorly lit cement hut, beneath his calendar sporting a half-naked woman in a bathing suit who was guzzling a bottle of Coca-Cola as an ocean wave broke over her.
Doña Juana held the lantern overhead. Josefina positioned herself directly in front of Don Elijio’s face. She blushed and giggled. He braced himself and said something in Mayan that made the women laugh, and then the streams of milk shot forth one by one into his waiting eyes. He blinked, giggled, and blinked again. The children squealed in delight.
“More,” demanded Doña Juana, and Josefina obeyed with two more squeezes that also found their mark. “Hmmmm, feels very warm and soothing,” commented Doña Juana’s patient.
Milk streamed down Don Elijio’s face as he turned to me with an impish smile. I wiped the droplets off his cheeks.
At last they all left with a hundred words of gratitude. Each woman paid him what she could and called on God to grant him a long life. Don Elijio had no set fee for his services, but most patients paid between five and fifty dollars. Some could only pay with a thank-you, which Don Elijio said was more valuable than money because it was a direct blessing from God.
Doña Juana and I made a date to go out and look for the Cancer Herb the next morning right after sunbreak.
Later, as we swung in our hammocks discussing the day through the cotton curtain, he warned me not to pick the Cancer Herb until sun had risen and the dew had dried off the leaves.
“The plant’s healing power is still down in the roots until the sun calls it up to the stem and leaves,” he explained.
“Then would you better collect roots in the early morning rather than in the full sun of the day?” I reasoned.
“Yes, girl, that is why we leave home so early to dig the roots and only collect the Xiv on the way home after the sun has risen high in the sky and dried off all the dew. To everything there is logic. All of this is in my head. I never went to school, can’t even sign my name, but still my head is full.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Chicoloro Strychnos panamensis
Considered one of the primary medici
nes in Maya healing.
The woody vine is chopped and boiled as a tea to be drunk for gastric conditions, uterine problems, poisoning, and constipation. The active principle, strychnine, is toxic when taken in excess. The cross pattern on the branches is considered a warning that the plant is medicinal but toxic and must be consumed with caution.
A beautiful Maya woman from Corozal District up north showed up at the clinic one day because she wished to stop a seemingly endless progression of children.
The woman, Berta, told us she was thirty-eight and the mother of fourteen children and the grandmother of six. “Too many,” she told us with a lovely, gold-toothed smile. Despite the work of bearing and raising such a brood, her dark skin radiated health and her ebony eyes glowed brightly beneath a forehead that sloped back into a thick, black braid.
She was one of those strong Central American women whom I so much admired: contented, conversant, in charge. She conjured up an image of the wise woman at her helm of the family ship. I could picture her hand-scrubbing clothes for twenty people, grinding corn, working in the fields, cooking over an open hearth, nursing babies, attending to her husband—all with grace and laughter.
What Berta wanted was a natural birth control method, she explained to Don Elijio. It was possible, at her age, that she could still bear five or six more children.
“I love my husband and family very much,” she explained. “But fourteen children is enough, I tell him. He doesn’t want me to use any pills, so he told me to come to see you to seek your help for something natural.”
Don Elijio laughed and grinned his usual jolly, toothless grin. “I fix those who want and those who don’t want,” he said simply, repeating the line he said so often. He was very comfortable with discussing birth control, as women made up a large portion of his patient load and troubled and ailing women came from all over Central America to seek out his help and advice.
“Yes, mamasita, I know what you need,” said Don Elijio. “It’s the Ki Bix or Cow’s Hoof Vine.” He turned to me and said, “This plant will be very important for you to learn, Rosita. I use it for birth control and dysentery. It’s safe and sure.” I had long wondered what plants Don Elijio used for birth control. The birth control pill developed in the 1950s had been a gift of the Mexican Nahuatl women, who had long used the young Wild Yam root as an effective birth control agent. They had shared their knowledge with biochemist Russell Marker, who eventually brought it to the attention of research scientists. The Wild Yam root contains diosgenin, a steroid that mimics pregnancy hormones, tricking the body into believing it’s already pregnant. Wild Yam grew abundantly on Ix Chel Farm.
I was anxious to see the Ki Bix. In order to work it had to be freshly harvested, said Don Elijio. But since it was already late afternoon—too late to walk to our rainforest farmacia—Don Elijio told Berta she’d have to spend the night. He was obviously pleased at the prospect of enjoying her delightful company for the rest of the day. He showed her the bed that was really a wooden door and gave her a lantern he had made himself—a glass jar filled with kerosene and a little strip of rag.
The silver mists still hung over the village when Don Elijio and I left for the high forest at dawn. Ki Bix, or Cow’s Hoof, was on the top of our list for plants to collect as we climbed upward toward the Mountain Pine Ridge. Empty sacks, picks, and shovels in our hands, machetes in their leather scabbards hanging at our sides, we followed a new path toward the crest of a hill where he had last seen the woody vine.
It turned out to be more than a ninety-minute walk to that hill. Usually we skirted around the foothills of the Maya Mountain range and the Mountain Pine Ridge. Today we headed straight up, with the razorback hills below us.
As we climbed, the forest changed from graceful palms to stately pines. Alone in the quiet coolness, we didn’t talk so as not to disturb his silent search. He murmured a prayer. The only words I recognized were Ix Chel and the Mayan word for woman, Colay.
“Ahh, here you are,” sang out Don Elijio, as if greeting an old friend. I was impressed as always by the old man’s memory. His mind was a map of botanical treasures. It was as he said, all in his head. I thought, it was all in his heart.
He showed me how the female vine or Ix Ki Bix (Ix means “female” in Mayan) grew right beside the male plant. It was the female, he said, that he used for birth control. The male was used to stop hemorrhaging and dysentery.
The male was an enormous, if spindly, rough-barked dark vine that stretched precariously many hundreds of feet into the dappled sunlight of the rainforest canopy. It looped itself around branches of the towering trees. Three feet away from the large male trunk was the female. Her vine, smooth barked and bearing three-inch thorns, gracefully loped around the same branches as the male, as if in pursuit. Twenty feet in the air above us the male and female Ki Bix entwined in an embrace.
“Amantes de la eternidad,” giggled Don Elijio. Eternal lovers.
Don Elijio scratched the bark of the male vine and showed me the white inner bark. He told me to scratch the bark of the female with my machete. I did and uncovered a mahogany-colored inner bark. The vine was red and layered throughout, resembling the female uterine membrane.
I couldn’t take my eyes off the redness of the vine. I was always amazed by nature’s way of letting us know what a plant might be used for by matching the color or shape with the complaint. I had noticed that this relationship between color and use—the Doctrine of Signatures—seemed most evident when it came to plants connected to women’s needs.
Many Maya medicinal plants used for women’s ailments were reddish of tint, and often the female leaf was broader than its male counterpart, as was true of Ki Bix.
“See how this leaf is split and looks just like a pair of trousers,” said Don Elijio.
I couldn’t resist a joke and said, “The sign here is clear. Keep your pants on.”
We laughed until our eyes teared. Then we got back to work. We cut a twelve-foot length of the female vine, chopped it into one-foot sections, and stuffed them into my sack. We then cut some of the male vine and, as was our wont, went on to collect the leaves of the Ki Bix as the first of the day’s Nine Xiv.
Many hours later, we returned to the clinic, laden with our usual cargo. Immediately after lunch, Don Elijio had me chop the Ki Bix vine for Berta.
He instructed her to boil a handful of the vine in three cups of water for ten minutes and to drink one cup three times daily during menstruation for nine months consecutively. This would prevent pregnancy for the rest of her life, he assured her.
“You could sleep with your man six times a day in the bed, in the bath, in the car, anywhere you like, and as many times as you like, and nothing will take. Only groans of pleasure. Nothing else. Don’t worry. These things are no mystery to me. It’s all up here in my head. Right here.”
Berta laughed vigorously, paid Don Elijio five dollars, and, clasping her bag of Ki Bix against her breast, found a ride going toward town in a truck overloaded with mahogany logs.
That evening, after all the patients had left, I asked him how the Ki Bix worked. “Se secca el cuajo,” he explained. “It dries the membrane.” This prevents implantation of the fertilized egg.
Treatment for one month would last for five months; two months of use provided ten months of protection, he said. Women who took it for nine months would become permanently sterile.
“No woman has ever come back to say she was pregnant,” Don Elijio told me.
I asked him if he was sure. He answered, with his usual flippant humor, “Hmmmm, Rosita, no babies named after me!”
I saw over time, however, that the Ki Bix or Cow’s Hoof didn’t, in practice, seem to be 100 percent effective; implantations did occur. For instance, the woman who lived in Cristo Rey Village two miles down river from our farm requested the vine, then became pregnant in the third month of the five-month protection period. An American woman from Wisconsin, who had heard about Don Elijio through friends and was t
hrilled to have some form of natural birth control, wrote me that she also got pregnant in the third month. Still, many women reported that they didn’t conceive and swore by the thorny vine.
When I mentioned that to Don Elijio, he said, “Sometimes they don’t take it the way I tell them to. And sometimes, she secretly wants to be pregnant.”
Ki Bix was only one of the many plants that Don Elijio favored in the treatment of women’s ailments. Contribo vine was excellent for menstrual complaints, especially if complicated by gastric problems. The bark of the Copalchi Tree was used for diverse symptoms such as painful periods, infertility, menstrual migraines, and hormonal imbalances. Most often he made a mixture containing Contribo, Copalchi, Man Vine, and Zorillo. He called this Sacca Todo, pull out everything, in reference to its marvelous eliminative powers and ability to cleanse the uterine membrane of incompletely flushed menstrual fluids. Incompletely flushed fluids, with consequent hardening of the membrane, was one of the main causes of painful periods, he said.
While plants were an essential part of his treatment of women’s problems, his philosophy of women’s health centered on the proper position of the uterus. Don Elijio believed that displacement of the uterus was what caused the multitude of women’s complaints. He said that 90 percent of modern women have a prolapsed uterus that lies askew to one side or the other, tipped backward or forward, or too close to the pelvic floor.
“The womb is the woman’s center,” he said. “Her very being and essence are in this organ. If the uterus is not sitting where it should be, nothing is right for her; she will have late periods, early periods, clotted blood, dark blood, painful periods, no babies, weakness, headaches, backaches, nervousness, and all manners of ailments.”
He treated uterine displacement with vigorous external massage, which sometimes made the women cry out in pain. This was followed by Sacca Todo taken as a tea—three times daily, ten days before menstruation—as well as vaginal steam baths with Xiv.
I watched him one day in action. Lola, a mother of three young children, was complaining of extremely painful periods that made her go to bed for three days at a time. She had had three hospital births in four years, and each one had been difficult.
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