Sastun: My Apprenticeship with a Maya Healer

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.”
“But, Don Elijio, yours was a great life,” I said. “You helped so many
people even after they laughed at you and called you a witch doctor.”
The crow’s-feet around his eyes deepened into furrows as he pursed his
toothless mouth. “Yes, yes, but it’s all over now. I can’t even say prayers for
people anymore. What good am I?”
I held his scarred, knotted hands in mine and let my own tears fall. I
continued to read from the book of his life and work until he drifted off to
sleep again. I gazed at the dust mites dancing in the rays of the setting sun
that broke through the open window and lit up the gray cement room. I
knew his end was near. I am not sure he ever fully understood that a book
had been written about him, or even what that meant: as an unlettered
person rooted in oral tradition, the concept of a book held little meaning.