Not a Panacea

Today dawned cold but sunny: a great improvement over yesterday. Sarah and I had breakfast on the rooftop, where we watched workmen building a brick wall for a second-story room on a neighboring house. As I was commenting on the dubious wisdom of building with brick in an earthquake zone, I was drowned out by a deafening crash. The entire wall had collapsed spontaneously, shattering on the tile roof below. Luckily, no one was underneath, or they would be ex-people now. I can say with a large measure of certainty that I possess the last known picture of that wall before it fell.

The streets here in San Cristóbal de las Casas are one-car-wide and one-way, so the traffic is much more navigable than in Oaxaca. The streets are also clean and most of the buildings date from Colonial times, so it’s  pretty. Water trucks crawl by regularly, making their presence known with the Hawaii Five-O theme song followed a recorded megaphone message about the virtues of agua pura. The gas trucks advertise their passage by dragging links of chain behind them across the shiny cobblestone.

Sarah is a good companion: easy-going, cheerful and smart. She’s also young. This morning, as she filled out a bus reservation online, she asked, “What does “˜Ms.’ mean? How’s it different from “˜Miss’?” Her Spanish fluency serves us well in getting us where we want to go. Frustratingly, it also makes me realize how much I suck at Spanish.

We walked for miles today: through the artisans’ market at Santo Domingo and the town’s big Mercado Municipal (we saw no tourists there) that’s near the stinky river (we saw no tourists there either).

Indigenous people’s attire here is fascinating. They wear this hairy stuff that looks like unruly faux fur (skirts for women, tunics for men) but which is probably unsheared black sheepskin. The skirts are longer in the front, possibly so women can sit on the ground with their knees up. When walking, some women tuck up the skirts at the waist like a reverse bustle. Even the tiniest girls sport them.

A bit further on, past the anatomically correct dummies, is the Museo de la Medicina Maya. I learned some cool things. To begin with, there are five areas of Tzotzil Tzeltal medicine:

• I’lol: pulse reader
• K’oponejwitz: mountaintop prayer healer
• Jve’t’ome: midwife
• Tzac’bak: bone healer (for “sickness of the bones”)
• Ac’vomol: herbalist

Here is the hut of the curandero. I decided to go see him since I always do that kind of thing when I travel.

A piece of advice: don’t bother consulting the on-call I’lol. He’ll only take your pulse and your ten pesos and tell you you’re healthy.

Anyway, for traditional healing ceremonies, Tzotzils use candles, crosses, prayers, incense, flowers, posh (sugar cane liquor) and soft drinks like Coke. Medicinal ingredients are original:

• For rheumatism: hummingbird flesh, black vulture bones, snake fat or skunk urine
• For the evil eye: a black chicken
• For whooping cough: armadillo shell
• For fright: squirrel meat
• For inflammation of the testicles: black spider fangs

I wonder if anyone knows how those cures came into being — how did someone think to grind up spider bits and how did they make the fang-ball connection? I’ve already been told a couple times here that my questions and my desire for detail are very Western. Undeniably true. Also true is that I’m glad I ain’t got no balls.

In addition to remedies derived from animals, there are herbal ones too, for everything from pesadillas (nightmares) to herpes (herpes). Other cures come from the nearby ground: soot, limestone, obsidian and black mud. It’s all fascinating.

Next we hiked a million stairs up Cerro [hill] de Guadalupe [our virginal friend] and got a nice view of the city, passing a dog, a moth and some pre-teen con artists asking for autographs along the way.

Here are some more skinny, stray Chiapan dogs. We also see them every several hundred feet along the highway, but those ones are dead: La Calle de los Muertitos, I call it. It’s heartbreaking.

Here’s another church. I thought it was called Iglesia Santa Lucia but I can see no evidence of such a place on my map. It was cerca del Arco. Inside the church is a baby doctor: that is, a doctor who’s a baby, complete with medical kit, white coat and stethoscope.

Nearby is yet another mercado. Sarah and I are overwhelmed with crafts, many original and beautiful, but many mass-produced, and sometimes it was hard to tell the difference. I got to wondering if the locals like the process of buying stuff here: being aggressed upon by eager vendors to the point of distraction from looking at their goods. I’d wanted to get a couple regalos for people, but it got to be too much work to peruse, to negotiate and to extricate — and all in Spanish.

Finally we rested a while near the town’s most noted landmark, the huge cathedral on the Plaza 31 de Marzo, and strolled along the andador [pedestrian street] looking at Chiapas amber and other things.