Sastun: My Apprenticeship with a Maya Healer

He supported them by farming and trading. In the off-season, he worked
in camps in the deep jungles of Mexico and Guatemala, where he collected
Chicle sap, then used worldwide as the base of chewing gum. There he
learned to drink too much, suffering bouts of alcoholism that would last
throughout his life. Like all the men in his family before him, Panti fathered
only one child, a girl named Emilia. For many years, Chinda and Emilia
accompanied him to the Chicle camps, where Panti’s Lebanese boss, Wahib
Habet, paid them to cook and clean for the crew.
But when Emilia came to courting age, she and Chinda stayed behind in
San Antonio. There Emilia married a man like her grandfather Nicanor. The
man, Juan, was a brutal drunk who beat her regularly in front of the
mournful eyes of their four small children and her horrified parents.
Many times Panti tried to step in and protect Emilia, but she told him
not to interfere. He and Chinda felt helpless, listening to Emilia cry out in
pain night after night.
When she was pregnant with her fifth child, they heard Juan beat her
one night in a drunken rage. Panti broke his promise to Emilia. He lost his
temper, grabbed an ax, and chopped down his daughter’s door. Juan
escaped out the back window, leaving Emilia sprawled out on the floor,
drenched in her own blood. Her children sobbed and clung in terror to their
grandfather’s legs.
Emilia died soon after giving birth to Angel.
Panti scoured the bush for nearly two weeks, vowing to kill his
daughter’s murderer. “Sin or not, if I would have found that accursed man I
would have chopped him to bits and felt no remorse.”
Panti and his wife raised Emilia’s children as their own. Soon afterward,
Nicanor was killed by the father of a thirteen-year-old girl whom he had
enchanted and seduced. Gertrudes buried Nicanor, then came to live with
Panti in San Antonio. Chinda’s mother, Teresa, also came to their home
after Damasio Tzib died. Gradually, the household grew from “roots of
despair into vines of happiness,” Panti recalled.
Panti had always longed to be a healer. He had prayed to find the right
teacher, one who would reveal the white art of healing, so he could forgo
the insidious black magic his father took to the grave.
In 1935 a synthetic gum was developed that was cheaper than Chicle,
and Panti’s employers told him that this would be their last season. That
season, the camp was in the Guatemala rainforest near the still-untouched