Sastun: My Apprenticeship with a Maya Healer

One day he stopped to trade and talk with Damasio Tzib, a Mexican
Maya from the Yucatán who had been one of the first settlers in San
Antonio. Tzib’s family had fled Mexico during the Caste Wars, the last
Indian uprising against the Spanish. When they had arrived in British
Honduras in 1906, Tzib told them, they had had a run-in with a naked,
untamed clan of Maya still roaming the jungle around San Antonio. The
Tzibs were drawing water from an old Maya well when the wild bush-men
jumped out of the forest, brandishing bows and arrows and threatening to
kill them. They spoke—remarkably enough—in the same Mayan dialect
that the Tzibs spoke.
Elijio was fascinated by Tzib’s story, but he couldn’t keep his eyes off a
young girl standing turning tortillas at the comal, a round clay disk fitted
into hearths for cooking tortillas. She was Tzib’s fourteen-year-old
daughter, Gomercinda, known as Chinda. Elijio was smitten, relishing her
beauty, her fleshy arms, mirthful eyes, and shiny, copper face. She wore the
white cotton embroidered dress of Yucatán, and her long black hair was
woven into braided cords and wrapped around her head. She smiled back at
him with a coyness that signaled her approval.
As the young man walked back to Succotz that evening, he thought only
of Chinda, muttering to himself in excitement, “She will be mine. She must
be mine!”
But Tzib was reluctant. Nicanor’s terrible reputation was widespread.
After several months of courtship, Elijio’s uncle and the mayor of Succotz
convinced Tzib to trust him, although Chinda’s mother warned she would
reclaim her daughter if she was mistreated. He agreed, contrary to custom,
to move to their village of San Antonio to protect Chinda from Nicanor’s
infamy.
There was never any need for her mother to worry, the old man told me.
He felt only joy throughout his marriage to the woman he called the queen
of his life. “We started out as children, but we lived together as lovebirds
for sixty-five years,” he told me. “The best part of my life has been loving a
woman.”
He always made a special effort to grow her favorite vegetables:
tomatoes, sweet potatoes, Cilantro, and Amaranth, which she loved with hot
tortillas and spicy salsa. She waited for him to return from the fields with
freshly picked chilies, roasting them before grinding them into a sauce in
her clay bowl.