Sastun: My Apprenticeship with a Maya Healer

Hours later, he reappeared—showing no sign of fatigue—after having
tended to all the patients. I was the only person left in the waiting room, and
he now repeated his speech to me. “So what is your problem?” he asked.
“I’m not sick, Don Elijio. I’m Rosita. I’ve come to visit you. I am the
woman you met last week in San Ignacio. Do you remember we talked
about herbs and healing and I asked if I could visit you?”
He tapped his forehead. “Ah, it’s these eyes, you know. Your face looks
like a smoky mask to me. I am strong and stiff enough,” he said, “to marry
a fifteen-year-old.” Except for his eyes, he lamented. “Now I wouldn’t
know if I was kissing a woman or a tree. Soon I won’t be able to collect
medicine for the patients.”
“I would be happy to be your eyes in the forest,” I offered. “I too am a
healer and I need to learn about these plants.”
“Oh, so you want to learn, child? It is good that you are interested in the
plants, but I cannot teach you.”
“I wouldn’t be a bother to you, Don Elijio, I can see you’re a busy man.
I’ll do whatever I can to be of service.” He asked again if I was a Mexicana,
and I repeated that I was an American from Chicago.
“It would do no good to teach a gringa,” he said sadly. “You must go
home one day, it is only natural, and what I taught you would be lost up
there. I am eighty-seven now and nobody here wants to learn. They come
for healing, yes. But, where is the one who will open his heart to this hard
work?”
Some of the villagers laughed at him, he said, calling him a zampope, or
leaf-cutter ant, known for its ability to cut bits of leaves and carry them
through the jungle to their underground lairs, rarely if ever stopping to rest.
“They say I have a pact with the devil. But they are wrong. I am lifting
people up, not dragging them down. Never has a person walked in here and
had to be carried out, but many were carried in and walked out after I
healed them.” He was arguing with unseen enemies.
There was another reason why he couldn’t teach me, he said. His
medicine came from the Maya Spirits. “Prayer is very important to my
work, and our Spirits speak Mayan and you don’t. Besides, my daughter,
you have no sastun.”
“What’s a sastun?” I asked.
“It is the plaything of the Maya Spirits, and the blessed tool of the Maya
healer,” he declared, apparently expecting that would clear up any