OTAVALO MEDICINE MAN

Late in the afternoon I stumbled across a crowd gathered four layers deep around a reedy, melodramatic voice. The normally reserved Indian women were standing up on tiptoes, craning their necks to see. I wormed my way inside. A long-haired man in baggy pants was describing with great enthusiasm and realistic pantomime the local illnesses that his magic pills could cure.

"Do you have gas?" he asked an older Indian paying rapt attention from the front row. "Are your farts in Otavalo heard and – piueeew! – carried on the wind all the way to Quito?" The audience roared while the old man nodded solemnly. "Do you eat and eat," he guzzled like a pig at trough, "but have no energy to work?" His shoulders slumped forward and he shuffled half a step before falling to his knees. "Do you have trouble urinating? Diarrhea and vomiting?"

His list went on, each symptom more graphic than the last. When he had run through his list of human ailments he whipped out a notebook and passed around repulsively realistic photographs of diseased body parts. His coup de grace was a vivid drawing of an intestinal tract that looked like it had been dragged behind a truck.

The problem diagnosed ("Fear not, I won’t abandon you in your moment of need!"), he set about providing the cure. He mixed up fresh lemon juice, strained it through his teeth, and added honey ("not sugar, which dissolves the liver!") and a few drops of food coloring ("stand back!"). The lumpy mixture turned fire-engine red and brought a communal gasp to the audience’s lips. With great solemnity he reached into his sleeve and withdrew a thick piece of aloe. He peeled it slowly, offering a non-stop litany of health cures and tips. "Avoid calcium! It weakens bones and causes oh-stee-oh-poroh-size. Do you know what that is? Bone cancer!"

When he had a handful of the sticky aloe pulp he immediately slathered half of it into his filthy hair. "A wondrous shampoo! Overnight your baldness will disappear! And if you desire it, a heavy mustache will grow where there was the merest wisp before!"

He squeezed the rest of the aloe until it oozed through his fingers into the blood-red pitcher. And finally, the magical ingredient that gave his concoction its wondrous potency -- natural medicine pills from distant Quito. With exquisite care he opened up two capsules -- "Do NOT eat the wrappers! VERY poisonous!" – and tossed them over his shoulders in disgust. The gray powder cascaded into the brew. He stirred, then stood stock still. The silence was deafening.

"Who will be first?" he thundered, holding up the pitcher like an offering to the Gods. There was instant pandemonium as a hundred bodies strained forward, hands grasping at the air. He reached into the audience and drew out two squealing, squirming women, pulling them to the table like contestants in a game show. Each received a dirty glass of clotted liquid. They drank. The crowd waited breathlessly. They smiled, their lips stained blood red. Shouts and cheers. He doled out the drink in dribs and drabs, saying, "I am a poor man with but one set of clothes -- BUT it is my burden in life to cure the weak, the sick, the helpless…" The pitcher was almost empty. "A lemon, an aloe leaf, and THIS," he’d timed it perfectly. The magical pills appeared. His spiel accelerated. They cost two thousand Sucres – forty cents -- each in Quito. He was willing to part with a package of 8 pills AND the recipe for how to mix them AND a book on illnesses and their miraculous cures for the bargain price of ten thousand Sucres – about two dollars. An apparent loss of at least a dollar twenty per sale, but no one was doing the math. They surged forward to snatch up his packages. For a man who couldn’t calculate a profit he was lightning fast at making change. Over fifty customers shuffled off, carefully mouthing the recipe displayed on the front of the pamphlet.

The lemon sellers in the marketplace were in for a surprise.

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