Sastun: My Apprenticeship with a Maya Healer

myself to sleep in the dust. I had no room in my heart for sick people. I just
wanted to die.”
His cousin from the village of San Andreas and her husband came to
stay with him for those difficult years, caring for him and trying to console
his heartache. Sick people looking for the curandero found him drunk,
sitting in the mud, or snoring in his hammock. “I’ll never know how I
survived those years. I knew nothing could be done; God gave Chinda to
me and then he took her away. She was beautiful and fat—beautiful to me
on the day I married her and beautiful on the day she died.”
Silence fell on the room and filled in the gaps between the noise of our
tools. I felt a great wave of tenderness for the warm-hearted old man as I
watched him straddle a wobbly stool in his wife’s crumbling kitchen.
A young village mother and her baby slipped quietly into the hut. Panti
quickly regained his composure. He spoke to the woman in Mayan, then
muttered a chant, holding her baby’s wrists and ankles. The woman’s two
other children had come inside and were on the floor playing an old Maya
game with nine stones that reminded me of jacks.
After the mother sat down on a stool and put the baby to her breast,
Panti continued. “Life without a good woman at my side is like food
without salt, coffee without sugar.”
The young mother told him she felt sorry for him. He quickly rejected
her pity. “I am still strong as a young man and blood runs in my veins,” he
boasted, jerking and pulling his arms to his side, shaking them to
exaggerate his muscles.
“But no one here wants me. I’ve tried in my own village with three
women, but they shamed me when they laughed at my courtship. They said
I was too old. Yes, I am old, but my money is not old!”
With that, we all began giggling. He looked at me with his mischievous
smile, and I saw again how much he loved to make people laugh. It was a
sweet dose of the only medicine he could manufacture to treat his own
illnesses—old age and loneliness.
The young woman left and as she did she said, “In ca tato.” That was
the fifth time I’d heard someone say that as they left. I knew it was Mayan.
I asked Panti and he told me it meant, “I’m going now, old revered one.”
I glanced at my watch. It was late, and I told him I would need to leave
soon since I had promised Crystal and Greg I would be home early to get
ready for a party.