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He hadn’t had any patients yesterday or the day before. On Monday<br />
only a Guatemalan woman had come. Tuesday, a man from Belmopan had<br />
brought his feverish son. This was in contrast to his regular weekly<br />
schedule of around a hundred patients.<br />
By the time I met Don Elijio in 1983, he had built up a thriving practice<br />
all based on word of mouth. Some days he had thirty patients, but there<br />
were days when only a few patients came and some when no one arrived at<br />
all. Those were sad and lonely days for Don Elijio, and boring for me. He’d<br />
sit at his crate consumed <strong>with</strong> uncontrollable thoughts of rejection. At every<br />
sound, he’d start, hoping a patient would appear at the door. In the hopes of<br />
distracting him, I’d read aloud her-bology books in Spanish.<br />
“<strong>My</strong> patients have abandoned me,” he cried. “It’s those cultists. They’ve<br />
thrown me over in a flash for those cultists.”<br />
He was talking about the evangelists. They had arrived on Sunday and<br />
were conducting a week-long revival meeting down the road in a<br />
community building in the village of Cristo Rey. As their evangelism was<br />
revived, the people discarded their Catholic customs, fiestas, saints, and<br />
beliefs in exchange for a simpler doctrine: Jesus is the only way, worldly<br />
ways lead to the devil.<br />
It wasn’t just the Catholic saints and the Virgin of Guadalupe who were<br />
discarded. Ix Chel and the <strong>Maya</strong> Spirits were doubly condemned:<br />
Evangelism required a complete rejection of the old <strong>Maya</strong> ways and beliefs.<br />
So when the evangelists conducted a week of soul saving for eternal life<br />
<strong>with</strong> Jesus in paradise, Don Elijio was a very lonely man. He was, sadly, an<br />
anachronism twice over since his healing was based on his friendly<br />
combination of <strong>Maya</strong> and Catholic lore. His old brand of Catholicism was<br />
accepting and had co-opted many <strong>Maya</strong> beliefs in order to survive in the<br />
people’s hearts. And <strong>Maya</strong> religion had also coopted Catholic beliefs in<br />
order to survive. There was no intolerance in Don Elijio’s heart.<br />
“Every night I can hear the loudspeaker going in Cristo Rey—the<br />
shouting and the screaming,” he wailed. “No, they don’t even want to hear<br />
my name now. Only hallelujah, hallelujah, brother, and pass the donation<br />
basket.<br />
“Those healings that they do don’t last,” he added. “I’ve seen it <strong>with</strong> my<br />
own eyes. They flail their arms about, they faint, they holler and get up<br />
walking or cured, but in a few days after the screaming and shouting is<br />
over, the sickness returns. Then, yes, they want to look for Don Elijio again.
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