Sastun: My Apprenticeship with a Maya Healer

that once belonged to a child’s exercise book and was covered with the
repetitive strokes of alphabet letters. He rummaged around in another cloth
bag and removed a slice of stark white, sticky Copal resin from a ball the
size of a man’s fist. He added the resin to the powder, then shook in dried
Rosemary leaves.
I smiled. Panti was always sifting through gunnysacks. Sometimes he
looked like a tropical version of Santa Claus, with his bag of roots, vines,
barks, and leaves. They were his treasured presents from the Maya Spirits
and he was jolly old St. Nick, right down to his boisterous chuckling.
He wrapped up the mixture and tied it up with a single strand of plastic
he had ripped off an old flour sack. “Burn this incense on coals in your
house every Thursday for nine weeks and outside your house on nine
Fridays. Say this prayer: All evil and envy should leave this place now
because it is causing much harm. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the
Holy Ghost. Amen.”
With this part of his work completed, Panti proceeded with the comic
entertainment. Several times he made her giggle, despite the traces of tears
on her cheeks.
Eventually she clutched her bag of herbs and started toward the door,
muttering to herself, “Praise God. Praise God. God bless you, old man, with
a long life to help us who have nowhere else to go. There’s no one like God
and Don Elijio.”
He shrugged modestly and smiled at her. “Have no worry, child. Soon
you will be well again. God will help us all.”
After Carla left, Panti turned to look at me with his eyebrows bent
across his brow in warning. “You see, mamasita, that is why the people in
these parts always sleep with their doors and windows closed tightly. The
Winds favor no one.”
The comment was intended to convince me once and for all not to
complain about him closing up the windows and doors at night so not a
whiff of fresh air seeped in. With the tropical heat lingering into the night,
though, the cement house was often unbearable for sleeping. But he
especially feared the Night Wind. “It is pure Spirit and can harm the people
it touches.”
Although he’d told me before about the Winds, Carla was the first case
of physical symptoms that I’d heard blamed on them. The Winds are
intelligent entities to many Latin American cultures, known as Ik in Mayan