Don Elijio continued his probe. Were they missing any personal items or photographs? They are often used in spells. Did they find any pachingos, voodoo dolls, buried in the house or hidden inside rooms? Panti instructed them to look through their mother’s belongings and dig around the doorstep for any pachingos. Then Panti’s sastun confirmed that the boyfriend’s angry mother had paid an obeha (black magic) person to cast an evil spell over Angelina.
With that news, the sons exploded, waving their arms about and pleading with Panti for revenge. “We want to see that disgraceful woman suffer herself for what she has done to our mother. We will pay you whatever you ask.”
Panti put his hands into the air with the palms up as if to stop an oncoming blow, warning, “I will cure your mother. That I can do because God has given me these powers. But you must go to another house to bring harm to someone.”
I helped Angelina limp back to her seat, wiping her face with a cloth I’d wrung out in cool water. A tear fell off her cheek and onto my hand, and with that lone tear, all my fright evaporated, absorbed by that single drop of emotion. I suddenly felt ashamed that I had ever been scared enough to think of running.
Panti continued to soothe her, telling her sons that she could go home after he treated her for another hour or so. He seemed satisfied by her improving condition, enough to relax a bit and sit down in his customary chair.
How did he know it was black magic? I asked. “The symptoms are in the story,” he explained. “The boy’s mother announced her intentions when she stepped off the doorstep with that curse. And evil things usually begin on Tuesday.” Also, that her pulse was fat, jumpy, rapid, and high up on the arm was clear evidence.
“There is no lack of people to do these evil things, but there is a lack of people to cure them,” he said to everyone as we gave the woman, much subdued, another draft of Zorillo, which she eagerly downed in just a few gulps. He showed the sons how to mix up the concoction and also instructed them how to place the Copal mixture under her seat so that she would get the full effects of the billowing, healing smoke.
“Close all your doors and windows this Thursday and carry the smoking incense around the rooms, saying nine times, ‘All evil leave this place as it is doing much harm. In the name of God the Father, God the Son, and the Holy Ghost.’”
Panti said it would take nine days to heal her. “It will take that long to fully cleanse this malignant spirit and its effects from her body,” he said. “It is a very bad one and may be the devil himself. Sometimes he likes to do the work himself, especially if the victim has led a very good and religious life. That person is a special prize for the Prince of Darkness. But have no worry, my sons, God is on my side.”
“Don Elijio, are you not in danger in this work? How do you protect yourself from being killed or harmed by these bad spirits?” asked Roberto.
“I was curado by my maestro. No one can harm me because I am protected by his spirit.” Jerónimo had said the sacred special prayers for him and had given him protective teas to drink for nine Fridays.
“No, try as they may, they cannot touch me. They get very angry, I know, because I undo their evil nets of filth and greed every day. And, sadly, there is only me left to fight against many who know how to do this evil.”
He believed the use of maldad had increased greatly over the years, especially after a how-to book was brought back from the United States. He had first seen the book in the 1950s, with its pages full of evil spells and incantations.
“Right there it tells you how to do all manner of evil against your neighbors. Prayers to the devil using frogs and other animals. I can’t catch my breath, I’m working so hard to dig up the Zorillo. Thirty years ago, I might have used a few pounds in a year. Now, I need a hundred pounds a month. How long can it last if I keep digging up so many roots every year? What will we do if the Zorillo runs out?
“Men have become selfish and greedy,” he scolded. “They have forgotten the Maya Spirits and stopped doing their Primicias, which used to protect them.”
Angelina continued to vomit from time to time, and the dark, steamy cement house, cooking under the tropical sun, reeked. All Panti said was, “Good. You need to cleanse yourself of this filthy being. He is inside you right now and frightened, looking for a way to escape. Soon it will leave and you will be yourself again,” he said.
“How much do we owe you for our mother’s life, papá?” asked Roberto with tears in his eyes.
Panti sat down in his chair, shiny from years of use, and whispered, “Whatever you would like to give me.” They handed him the equivalent of one hundred dollars.
Ten days later, Roberto and José brought their mother back to Panti for a checkup. I couldn’t believe the transformation. She was clean and neat and well dressed. She smiled sweetly and seemed entirely normal.
Her sons stood in the doorway, washed in sunlight, and humbly said to Panti, “Tatito, we have returned with our mother to kiss your hand and to give thanks to you and to God.”
Angelina stood just a pace behind them, then came forward to reach for Panti’s hand, which she kissed according to the old Latin custom.
“Thank you, señor, for my life,” she said graciously.
“It is just as I said, these evil spirits have no real power,” Panti affirmed as he felt her wrist, whispering nine prayers into her pulse for her continued well-being.
Her sons said that once they got her home and she began to recover, she couldn’t recall her behavior.
“But still she slipped away from us at times, drooling and talking incoherently. Then my sister spent the night with her one Friday to pray. She burned Copal all night, and for the first time since she took ill, we didn’t have to tie our mother down on the bed.”
After the seventh day Angelina had fully recovered but her family had continued the treatments for two more days as Panti had ordered.
Panti told me to feel her pulse. I felt a slow, steady beat characteristic of a person in physical balance and health.
It was fortunate, I thought, that her sons had brought her here. If she’d been delivered to a more conventional clinic, she probably would have been drugged and restrained, languishing the rest of her life in a mental institution where no one would have considered the possibility of demonic possession.
I asked him later how he discerned the difference between possession and madness, which he acknowledged was rooted in natural causes and psychological dementia. “Had she been mad,” he answered, “I probably wouldn’t have been able to help her as easily. Madness takes much more time to heal and sometimes is incurable.”
As Angelina and her sons left, Panti remarked that madness was caused by thinking too much. People go mad fretting over circumstances for which they have no control—an unhappy past or a doomsday future. No psychology book could say it much better than that.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Duck Flower Contribo Aristolochia trilobata
A major medicine of traditional healers throughout Central America. Taken as a boiled tea or soaked in water it has a wonderful effect on gastritis, fever, colds, flu, constipation, and sinus congestion and is often drunk in rum to alleviate hangovers. Now disappearing, it is a medicinal plant much in need of protection.
My first warning of trouble was on a Saturday morning shopping trip to San Ignacio Town.
Crystal and I were in the Venus Store buying school supplies, when another shopper casually remarked, “Oh, I was going to see Don Elijio about my crippled daughter, but the evangelist healers are coming tomorrow so I’ll bring her to them to be cured instead.”
I didn’t think much about it. Many Central Americans had converted to Protestant Evangelism in the great waves of revivals that swept through the region in the 1950s. Every so often a group came to Belize for a few weeks, fanning across the country, sending out preachers to towns and villages with promises to heal body and spirit. They brought with them generator-operated loudspeakers to broadcast their meetings.
I found Don Elijio sitting alone inside his cement hut. It was unusual for him to be alone this time of the morning. If he wasn’t out in the forest, I’d find him visiting with an old friend, neighbor, local patient, or a patient who had moved in for treatments. On rare occasions I had found him chopping alone, or fidgeting and lonely. But today was different. I could tell by his face that something was amiss.
“No one has been here to consult with me all week,” he spilled out with anguish as I put down my bag.
He hadn’t had any patients yesterday or the day before. On Monday only a Guatemalan woman had come. Tuesday, a man from Belmopan had brought his feverish son. This was in contrast to his regular weekly schedule of around a hundred patients.
By the time I met Don Elijio in 1983, he had built up a thriving practice all based on word of mouth. Some days he had thirty patients, but there were days when only a few patients came and some when no one arrived at all. Those were sad and lonely days for Don Elijio, and boring for me. He’d sit at his crate consumed with uncontrollable thoughts of rejection. At every sound, he’d start, hoping a patient would appear at the door. In the hopes of distracting him, I’d read aloud her-bology books in Spanish.
“My patients have abandoned me,” he cried. “It’s those cultists. They’ve thrown me over in a flash for those cultists.”
He was talking about the evangelists. They had arrived on Sunday and were conducting a week-long revival meeting down the road in a community building in the village of Cristo Rey. As their evangelism was revived, the people discarded their Catholic customs, fiestas, saints, and beliefs in exchange for a simpler doctrine: Jesus is the only way, worldly ways lead to the devil.
It wasn’t just the Catholic saints and the Virgin of Guadalupe who were discarded. Ix Chel and the Maya Spirits were doubly condemned: Evangelism required a complete rejection of the old Maya ways and beliefs.
So when the evangelists conducted a week of soul saving for eternal life with Jesus in paradise, Don Elijio was a very lonely man. He was, sadly, an anachronism twice over since his healing was based on his friendly combination of Maya and Catholic lore. His old brand of Catholicism was accepting and had co-opted many Maya beliefs in order to survive in the people’s hearts. And Maya religion had also coopted Catholic beliefs in order to survive. There was no intolerance in Don Elijio’s heart.
“Every night I can hear the loudspeaker going in Cristo Rey—the shouting and the screaming,” he wailed. “No, they don’t even want to hear my name now. Only hallelujah, hallelujah, brother, and pass the donation basket.
“Those healings that they do don’t last,” he added. “I’ve seen it with my own eyes. They flail their arms about, they faint, they holler and get up walking or cured, but in a few days after the screaming and shouting is over, the sickness returns. Then, yes, they want to look for Don Elijio again.
“They don’t understand,” he said. “It is their own faith that heals them, not the evangelist preacher.”
It didn’t take much to become an evangelist preacher. This was part of the appeal of the movement. After a few months, any man or woman could become a preacher. By contrast, it required years of training, as well as a vow of celibacy, to be a Catholic priest. And as I was learning firsthand, it wasn’t any easier to study to become a H’men.
The evangelical movement was one of the major reasons why so few of the younger generation learned the old Maya ways. Many members of Don Elijio’s family had converted to Evangelism over the years, and those who had could barely tolerate their family patriarch.
He was inconsolable. “They’ve forgotten me,” he wailed again and again. I gave him the gift that I had brought with me—a bottle of wintergreen oil. I told him I loved him and would always be at his side. I gave him a treatment, rubbing the oil into his sore muscles.
After the treatment he cheered up a bit, but I was still concerned. He needed his patients—as much, surely, as they needed him. His patients were his family, his companions, his audience, and his reason for being. Without them, he was devoid of purpose and direction and mourned for Chinda more than usual. The energy they gave him explained why he could treat as many as thirty patients in a day and at the end of the arduous administrations feel better than before.
It was the same for me. In my healing work, I too noticed that if ever I began a treatment or consultation feeling tired or drained, I was always renewed and strengthened afterward. I knew this was God’s gift to the healer—that your patients strengthen and heal you as well as the reverse.
We sat alone chopping plants in the late morning. To cheer him up I told him that I’d been approached by the producers of Belize All Over, a new local television program. They wanted to make a documentary about him and his work, which would be the first in a series about life in Belize.
Now, at ninety-two, Don Elijio had never seen television and had no idea what a documentary was. I explained as best I could. Television had only come to Belize in the late 1970s, and since San Antonio still didn’t have electricity, television was not a part of daily life. I told him I thought the documentary was important so that future generations of Belizeans would know him, what he looked like, and how one man who never went to school had become more sought after than a government minister.
“Yes, yes, that is true,” he nodded. “Bring them when you like,” he said and went back to his gloom and chopping.
After lunch, the afternoon transport came in, Angel at the wheel, with Isabel and four of the younger children all squeezed into the front cab.
I was thankful when I saw a familiar face appear at the door. It was Doña Rosa, laden with her bags of wares.
Doña Rosa had been one of Don Elijio’s first patients when he was just starting out, back in the days when Chinda was still alive. She was a gregarious woman, short of stature, square framed, and full of laughter and stories much like Don Elijio. She was a trader, as Don Elijio had once been, and they had developed a deep friendship over the years. Whenever Doña Rosa, who lived in Benque—a town near the Guatemalan border—came to town to San Antonio to sell dresses, pots, pans, towels, and cosmetics, she stayed with her old friend, Don Elijio.
The two of them were wonderful company for each other. Doña Rosa was four decades younger than Don Elijio, but she was part of the old world too. They loved to tell each other stories of the old days, and I had come to love her as much as he did. She doted on him. She cooked his favorite dishes on the open hearth and brought him vitamins, eye drops, and dried herbs from Melchor, the border town on the Guatemalan side.
Doña Rosa lived in Benque with her husband Poncho and two teenaged daughters. When on rare occasion Don Elijio left San Antonio, he could be found at Rosa and Poncho’s home in Benque, where word would spread of his presence and patients would line up outside the door holding sick babies and propping up infirm grandparents to receive his prayers and herbs.
Recently, Rosa had begun to learn about the plants and prayers so that she could do a little bit of healing in Benque. She learned fast, but she didn’t like to deal with evil spirits, nor would she, take on chronic or severely ill patients. She wanted to become a granny healer and refer all serious cases to Don Elijio.
Don Elijio’s face lit up the moment he saw Doña Rosa at the door. He immediately went into the routine he always said when both Rosa and I were in San Antonio at the same time.
“Ahh, I have a rose garden today,” he said.
We joked about him being a thorn between two roses, and he shamelessly responded, “Get closer, both of you, and see if you can make me bleed. I have lots of blood.”
Doña Rosa spent the night and we had a
cheery time, despite the distorted drone of preaching, blaring through scratchy speakers five miles away.
But in the morning, I could see Don Elijio was suffering again. He didn’t want to go out in the rainforest, he was well stocked. What he needed, he said, was patients. To add insult to injury, some village men, fresh from the revival meeting, came by and asked Don Elijio to give up his practice.
“This is the devil’s work,” they told him.
That got his attention. Don Elijio bolted upright in his seat and said, with great force and indignation, “You are wrong. I have no pact with the devil. I work only with God and the Nine Maya Spirits. Devil’s work is evil. My work is healing. Never has anyone walked in here and had to be carried out. But many were those who were carried in and walked out.”
The three men shifted uncomfortably in their seats. I recognized at least two of them as former patients.
“But I tell you what, let’s make a deal,” continued Don Elijio, sounding strong and in control.
“Just give me twenty-five dollars a day of your daily collections to live on. Some days I make up to two hundred dollars. But I’m not greedy. I wouldn’t ask you for that much. Don’t ask me to sing or read the Bible, because I can’t read. Don’t ask me to clap my hands and stamp my feet, because I have rheumatism. If you agree to this, then yes, I will give up my work.”
They left indignant and never bothered him again.
Fortunately, right after they left, Doña Maria, the wife of Manuel Tzib, stopped by. At fifty-seven, she had delicate features with sparkling eyes and long eyelashes. A slim woman with a youthfully thick gray braid down her back, she wore a homemade, faded, cotton dress under a brightly colored apron.
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