I reaffirmed my faith with a favorite prayer, “I believe, Lord, help Thou my unbelief,” and went on with my day.
That night I had a dream vision. I saw myself lying on the grass in a field, facing the cloudless blue sky. I felt a sense of uneasiness and I was afraid, very afraid, without knowing why.
Suddenly, a powerful male Angel towered above my head. He wore the black and silver garments of a medieval knight and held a warrior’s black shield and a menacing sword, which he seemed ready to brandish in my defense. Although his appearance was frightening, I knew he was there to protect me. I felt my fear drain away into the earth. He was the Spirit of Zorillo.
On my right was a magnificent, tall, female Angel, bedecked in a gown of sparkling golden hues. She arched her wings over me, enveloping me in her warm, amber luminescence. She was the Spirit of Copal.
To my left was a pure white female Angel, clothed in glowing crystalline garments that poured forth pearly white light. She stood serenely, emanating love and grace. She was the Spirit of Rue.
At my feet, another Angel stood. He was somewhat out of focus but I could feel his presence. He too was a powerful guardian. He was the Spirit of the stone of Esquipulas.
The Spirit of Zorillo was fiercely protective, reminding me of a samurai, ready to pounce. He was on guard, scanning the distance for any sign of evil or danger. The other Spirits—Copal, Rue, and the stone of Esquipulas—were equally powerful but not warriors. They emanated strength and warmth and a supreme confidence in their abilities to protect me.
I was engulfed by their protective shields and knew no harm could penetrate.
I woke up feeling loved, sheltered, and fearless, knowing I had a team of Angels by my side forevermore.
Two weeks later I saw Antonio and Helena in San Ignacio selling watermelons and okra off the back of their truck. They spotted me and rushed over to embrace me with exclamations of love and gratitude.
“I am completely back to my old self,” said Helena joyously.
“You have lifted us up,” added Antonio. “There is no one like you and God, Doña Rosita.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Cross Vine Cruxi Paullinia tomentosa
A common, weedy vine whose leaves make up part of the Nine Xiv formula of herbal baths to treat any illness.
I woke up early the next morning, my forty-seventh birthday. I hadn’t been to see Don Elijio since healing Helena, and I was anxious to tell him about what had happened.
Dawn was just breaking as I crossed the river and hiked to San Antonio in record time. This day my thoughts were of the last four years I had spent as Don Elijio’s apprentice. So much had happened. As I walked I was joyfully aware of being able to recognize dozens of medicinal plants and trees along the roadside.
When I arrived I found him sitting quietly alone in the doorway scraping the Bayal vines he used to weave the Escoba palm leaf brooms.
“I cured a case of envidia, maestro,” I told him excitedly, still amazed. “I did it just the way you taught me and it worked. The woman is completely recovered.”
He looked unimpressed and launched into his usual sermon about envy and greed. After all, he seemed to say, it wasn’t a miracle, just the fruits of his teachings and the expected benefits of the medicinal plants and prayers.
Then I told him about my dream. That impressed him, and he wanted to hear every detail. “I told you they were good friends,” he exclaimed. “Now you know you can do this kind of work with their help and protection. We are not alone.”
We finished the brooms together, piled them into a corner, and spread out the canvas cloths and plastic sacks we used for chopping. He sharpened our machetes and pointed to a gnarled pile of Man Vine. He seemed uncharacteristically quiet.
He settled down on his seat across from me on the floor and grabbed a twisted mass of sweet-smelling vines to pull them apart.
“There is nothing more I can teach you, daughter,” he announced. “You have learned everything I know and can do everything I can do.”
I stared at him. “Oh no, Don Elijio, that’s not true,” I exclaimed. “Every time I visit you I learn something new, something I feel I never could have put together on my own.”
He shook his head and continued, “I know it to be so. I’ve listened to you take care of my patients. You have even become my doctor. Never once have I felt that I had to correct you or that you gave bad advice. You have a pure heart. This is your calling in life, just as it is mine.”
“But I still haven’t learned to read the sastun,” I reminded him. “I don’t think I have the don, the lamp to see what the bubbles mean.”
He reminded me that reading the sastun was not the only tool at my disposal. “You knew that the woman had envy from what she told you, and it will always be that way. These things are no great mystery.
“A healer must accept his strengths and weaknesses, Rosita,” he added. “The most important thing is that the Spirits are with you. They see you and that you are working, and they will look after your needs. Long after I am gone, they will be here. Have faith, my daughter, for with faith everything is possible.”
I didn’t know whether I couldn’t read the sastun out of fear or because I simply did not possess the psychic gift. I did know that my true love was plants and my don was that my hands could see through flesh and tissue. Of this I had no doubt.
I also had the gift of faith. I had grown to love and feel comfortable with the Maya Spirits and felt as if they loved me in return. I sensed their loneliness and their affection for me. I remembered that Don Elijio had been concerned that they might not communicate with a gringa. But they had—even speaking English, the language of my dreams.
Perhaps, it was possible that one day I would be able to read the sastun. “Poco a poco, paso a paso,” he always said.
A village woman came in with one of Don Elijio’s many goddaughters, asking for a belly massage. He climbed to his feet with a groan and led her into the examining room. The child stayed with me, and we played the Maya nine-stone game that always reminded me of jacks.
The woman and child left, and from the doorstep of the cement house Don Elijio called me.
“Come, Rosita,” he signaled.
I followed him in, and he sat down in his customary seat.
“This is for you,” he said, holding out his hand. The small shiny marble rolled along the crevices of his palm. It was his sastun.
“What?” I asked, taken aback. I was shocked. I waved his hand away.
“I am ninety-three now and I’m dying soon,” he continued, matter-of-factly.
“Don’t talk that way, papá,” I cried. “I hate it when you do that. Sometimes I think you could outlive me, you have so much energy and strength. What would you do without your sastun?”
He reached into his bag and pulled out another bundle swathed in cloth. “I’ve been given another,” he announced. He unwrapped it and showed me a stone that was larger and paler than the one that he had used for sixty years.
“Last week, Rosita, I had a dream vision,” he told me. The same old Maya Spirit in ancient ceremonial garb, who had heralded his first sastun, had returned.
“The old Maya said, ‘We see that you are working hard, that you are old and tired and need some help. It is time for you to have a new sastun. In the morning at the first light of dawn, open your door and look on your doorstep. There you will find a gift to help you.’
“When I woke and heard the rooster crow and saw the light through the crack of the window, I jumped up and opened the door,” recounted Don Elijio. “There on the doorstep sat this new sastun.
“I want you to have my old sastun because you need it,” he said. “Even though you can’t read it yet, you can use it to enchant protecciones and photographs.”
He dropped his old sastun into my hand. It felt cool and light. I accepted and told him that today was my birthday.
“Bién suave,” he said, grinning. How smooth.
Two m
ornings later, Don Elijio didn’t get up at his usual hour of dawn. At dinner the night before he had complained of stomach cramps. During the night I had heard the ropes of his hammock creak, as he shifted and sighed, unable to sleep.
Shortly after sunrise, I heard him gasp, a long painful breath. I parted the curtain, rushed over, and pulled his blanket back.
“Are you all right, papá?” I asked.
“Ahh, Rosita,” he said in between gulps for air. “I’m dying.”
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“I have had this terrible pain in my belly all night,” he whispered. “I feel like there is a tiger in my guts. The pain is unbearable.”
I took his pulse, said the prayers for ciro, and massaged his abdomen. Then I ran into the kitchen hut, started a fire, scooped out a gourd of Man Vine from a sack, and put it on to boil.
“I am on death’s doorstep now,” Don Elijio wailed as I spooned the tea between his dry, rubbery lips. “I can see Saint Peter beckoning to me, calling me home. Last week I saw Chinda in my dreams, Rosita, for the first time since she died. She looked so fat and well. She told me I looked pale and thin. She whispered, ‘I’ll come to get you soon, sweetheart. Not long to go now.’ I got up from the hammock to embrace her, but she said, ‘No, not yet,’ and disappeared.
“I begged her to return but she didn’t,” he said as he clutched his belly.
Now that I had done what I learned from him, I decided to try an additional therapy that I had found worked well in cases of stomach cramps. I heated castor oil in a small clay pot over the fire and soaked a cotton cloth in the warm oil. Then I put the cloth on his abdomen and placed a hot water bottle that I had once given him over it.
The castor oil pack was to be on for an hour, so I sat on a stool next to the hammock.
He was very depressed. “What’s wrong with me is old age and loneliness,” he moaned pitifully. “Where I find the cure for this is six feet underground. Has Saint Peter forgotten to call my name? What is an old man to do? I am ready to die.”
He told me he wasn’t afraid of dying but he was worried about his sins. Had he done enough goodness to make up for his transgressions?
“What do you mean, papá?” I asked, stroking his forehead.
“I was a drunk and I know that made Chinda suffer,” he cried. “My horse would come home alone, and she had to ride out to find me sleeping in a ditch. All alone she would pick me up, put me on the horse, carry me home, put me to bed, and make teas for my hangover.”
“But you stopped drinking,” I said.
“Not until after poor Chinda died,” he said.
“We are all capable of sinning, papá,” I said. “I know that God sees the good you have done. Just think of the thousands you have lifted up.”
I saw that he was crying and bent over him. He seemed so frail and small that the hammock nearly swallowed him up.
“I slept with many women,” he whispered softly. “Chinda never knew. But I never sinned with a patient. And I never used my sastun to enchant a woman for myself. I swear on the souls of my great-grandchildren.”
I was a little surprised but not really disappointed. He was a Latin male who had been taught to live the machismo code, and women of Chinda’s generation had accepted their husbands’ indiscretions so long as they were loved. Chinda had been loved and cared for as few others, of that I was sure.
I believed him when he said that he had never used his sacred powers to enchant a woman for himself, knowing that a H’men is forbidden to use his own powers for personal gain. He hadn’t enchanted any widows or even La Cobanera, preferring instead to suffer in loneliness. And he had never enchanted me. He was an incurable flirt, but he had always respected the boundary between friendship and romance.
“Papá, loving women is not the worst sin,” I told him. He was sobbing openly and clutching my hands. I held him and tried to soothe him.
“Always it is only me in the hammock with no one to warm my old bones or whisper secrets in my ear. It is painful but I deserve it.”
I couldn’t bear to watch him mourn his life as if it were a charred slate of sin and deprivation.
“But, papá, you forget the thousands of people you’ve lifted up,” I cried. “Surely God knows you’re a human man. He knows what you’ve done on this Earth.”
Now I was crying, desperate to ease his pain. He had often told me: get patients to laugh and half their troubles disappear. It was still some of his best advice.
I searched my mind for a joke to tell him. The only one I could think of was a little dirty but seemed appropriate.
“I have a chiste for you,” I told him. Despite his misery, I noticed a flicker of interest.
“There were once two twin brothers who were very close,” I told him. “One was very good and pious, and the other was a drinker and a womanizer. They died together in a car accident. One went to heaven and one went to hell. The good brother spent his days sitting on a cloud listening to heavenly music. One day he got permission to go visit his brother in hell. There he found his brother in a saloon with a bottle of beer in his hand and a woman on his lap, having a grand time.
“The good brother went back to Saint Peter and complained. ‘He’s having a great time in hell while my life is boring, sitting on a cloud and doing nothing,’ he said.
“‘Ahhhhhh, don’t worry about that,’ Saint Peter said. ‘The bottle has a hole in it and the woman doesn’t.’”
Don Elijio roared. The hammock shook. Over and over he kept repeating the last line of the joke and giggling.
I noticed some color creeping back into his cheeks. It was time to get my loquacious friend talking again.
“Greg and I have decided to do a Primicia every month,” I told him.
“Ahhh, that’s good, daughter. The Maya Spirits are almost as lonely as I am,” he chirped as I adjusted the castor oil pack. I rubbed his feet, which always soothed him tremendously.
“I remember when you first came around to see me,” he told me. “My relatives told me not to trust you. They said that your interest in me was not good. They were wrong. Through all these years you have been my friend. Friendship is what counts. Now there is only you to carry on my ways. You have given me as much as I have given you.”
Tears welled up in my eyes as I leaned forward and vowed, “Papasito, I will be with you until the last step. I will never leave you.”
I sent a message home with Angel and stayed with Don Elijio for three more days, monitoring his condition and taking care of all his patients. I continued to treat him with prayer, massage, and the castor oil packs.
On the afternoon of the third day he was sleeping in his hammock while I sat on his customary stool talking to a heavy-set, middle-aged East Indian woman who had come to consult with him.
“I am sorry,” I told her. “Don Elijio can’t see patients today. He has been very ill and is resting now. Either I can help you or you’ll have to come back another time.”
But the woman was insistent and kept peering behind the curtain to where he slept.
Just as she was about to reluctantly resign herself to my services Don Elijio came staggering out in his underwear.
“Mamasita! Mamasita! I nearly died!” he shouted, gesturing wildly. “I was as close to dying as I ever came in my life. I got right up to the gates and met Saint Peter. He looked at me and said, ‘Where have you been, old man, get in here. Someone must have forgotten you.’
“‘Now just a minute,’ I told him, ‘let me ask you something before I go in. Is there beer? Are there women? Is there dancing?’ Saint Peter said, ‘Beer, women, and dancing? Are you crazy? There’s none of that up here.’ I answered, ‘Forget it, I’m not going in.’”
Panti threw up his arms and chanted, “I’m back!”
“You better go back to bed,” I told him.
“No, no, let’s work. What does this lady want? Wait till I put my pants on.”
He scampered back into the bedroom and reappeare
d moments later.
It was clear he knew exactly why he was put here on Earth.
The woman gave me a dirty look.
I got up. Panti sat down in his chair and launched into a new routine.
“What is your problem, mamasita? I’m 101 years old, and whatever ails you I can cure with my prayers and my herbs and God at my side.”
I shot him a look of surprise, wondering how he had managed to age eight years in a matter of minutes. He ignored me.
“I cure diabetes, high blood pressure, arthritis, broken hearts,” he continued. “I’ve been doing this work for forty years and I know a few things.”
I smiled, remembering that I had once asked him why he always used that number, since by my calculations he’d been practicing bush medicine for far more than sixty years. He’d just shrugged and said, “Because, child, that’s as high as I can count.”
After that day Don Elijio continued to practice for many more years, and he is still there today. On days when he feels good, he sees the patients who always seem to find their way to his door. Other days, when his body aches too much, he puts up a cardboard sign that Angel made for him. “Cerrado,” it says. Closed.
Don Elijio is now 97, still looking for a wife and telling his patients that he is 101. God willing, he will live far beyond that.
EPILOGUE
I. NEW EPILOGUE FOR SASTUN
By the time Sastun: My Apprenticeship with a Maya Healer was published in 1994, Don Eligio was blind and drifting in and out of reality; he spent most of his time in his small house in San Antonio asleep in the hammock in his six-by-six-foot room. I remember the day I brought the book to him.
He was sleeping in the hammock, wearing a plastic geriatric diaper, when I arrived. A bright pink curtain fluttered in the breeze. I swept the floor, tidied up, and waited. When he finally opened his milky eyes, I said what I always said, “Buenos días, maestro.” He knew my voice and reached for my hand. I placed the book in his hands and pointed to the picture of him and me on the cover, but of course, he couldn’t see it. He fell asleep again and when he woke up, I read him a chapter. As I read the last words, he cried. I wiped the tears from his weathered, leathery face, and asked, “Maestro, why are you crying?” He turned his head away, covered his face with his hand, and wept. “It’s all over. I’m not that man anymore. All the sweetness of my life is gone.”
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