The Healer
She owed her life to the scientific or Western medicine she studied at the Central University of Ecuador, but her grandmother, NN, a peasant healer, taught her the use of medicinal plants.
NN, who was born at the beginning of the 20th century in Cuenca, lived in the mountains of the Azuay province, managing a huge hacienda called Virgen Corral, which was located where the Paute dam and hydroelectric plant now stand. To reach it, one had to cross the violent and noisy Mazar River on a suspension bridge built by the Incas and their main allies, the Cañari Indians, who owned those mountains and valleys where Tupac Yupanqui founded a city called Tomebanba, today called Santa Ana de los Ríos de Cuenca, because the city has four rivers. Here was born Huayna Capac, the father of the last Inca emperors, Atahualpa and Huascar, the brothers who fought for control of the empire in a civil war that facilitated Francisco Pizarro's conquest of the largest empire on the American continent, stretching from what is now part of Argentina to what is now southern Colombia.
Those Cañari Indians, who speak Quechua, taught the young white lady of the Creole nobility of Cuenca, from childhood, when she accompanied her father to the hacienda, how to heal people and animals with plants, how to combat potato and corn blights, how to cure fright, the evil eye, or bad air. Bad air, the respiratory illnesses brought by the Spanish, killed her young husband in a plague they called the Spanish flu. Malaria killed her older brother, and a heart attack brought on by smoking killed her father. Thus, the family was left without men and the hacienda without a master.
The young widow, almost 30 years old, left her two children, who were studying at a Catholic school in Cuenca, in the care of her mother. As the eldest sister in a family of only women, she became the mistress of the enormous hacienda, which encompassed thousands of hectares and employed thousands of indigenous laborers who worked under a system called "tarja." This system involved recording the days worked on a tally mark or piece of sugarcane, and the workers were later paid with salt, flour, sugar, tools, alcohol, etc., and were treated by an unknown individual.
At 19, she married a young man from the neighboring province of Loja to escape an elderly widower of noble lineage whom they wanted to force her to marry. The young couple went to the Yungulla Valley on the road to the coast, where the young husband's family owned land and cultivated sugarcane to make alcohol and panela (unrefined cane sugar). She learned to plant sugarcane, operate the stills, and deal with farmhands and the government guards.
At that time, the United States had prohibited the production and consumption of alcohol. In Ecuador, the government revived the Spanish-era alcohol monopoly, but now those who owned stills had to sell all their alcohol to the government, which held the monopoly on its sale.
The guides from the state-run liquor monopoly were like vultures, arriving armed and hungry at the plantations to seize the alcohol, while simultaneously attempting to rape the indigenous women who worked there and extorting the peasants. This gave rise to armed gangs of alcohol traffickers who clashed with the government, its starving soldiers, or the corrupt guards of the monopoly. Entire towns were born, such as Yungulla in the province of Azuay, Baños de Ambato, and Calderón and Alluriquin in the province of Pichincha, where the police and army could not enter—towns of bandits and smugglers. NN learned to live in these towns as a widow and later in the high-altitude grasslands above 4,000 meters that separate the Andes from the Amazon rainforest of Ecuador, in Virgen Corral.
But the family decided to sell that property. When she returned to Cuenca, her mother and sisters had divided the entire inheritance, leaving her destitute. She was forced to work 14 hours a day in a textile factory while her children attended school. Eventually, her eldest son, who had always been by her side, graduated as a lawyer from the Central University of Quito and married a wealthy woman, bringing her to the capital.
Her son had her in a country house in Conocoto. Later, she returned to the highlands to care for a property in Tambillo, at an altitude of 3,000 meters, and finally lived on a large estate in Tandapi, at 1,800 meters in the subtropical forest. In all these places, her grandson, who studied medicine, was her companion almost every weekend, and she taught him how to use medicinal plants. Her grandson became a general practitioner and naturopath who used medicine and medicinal plants that abounded on the properties where his grandmother lived. He even found a plant that had uses as a spice, aromatic tea, and medicine. He took this plant to universities in Ecuador, Russia, and Germany to study it, but the unpunished murder of his grandmother on that Tandapi estate distanced him from the plants and the countryside.
