“He’s always sick, Ezequiel,” I answer; “my medicines don’t seem to do him good!” Ezequiel agrees with me that they don’t. “Except for his stomach, which is swollen, he has been getting thinner and weaker for a long time. Have you any idea of the cause?” Ezequiel, staring fixedly at his toes, confesses that he has.
“What is it?”
“I am ashamed to tell you.”
“Don’t be ashamed; I shan’t speak of it, and if I know the cause I may be able to do some good.” Ezequiel, still intent upon his toes, suddenly looks up and blurts out:
“He’s a dirt eater.”
“Oh, well—that accounts for it. Why don’t you make him stop?” I ask, at which Candelario’s father shrugs hopelessly.
And well he may, for dirt eating seems to be a habit or a vice or a disease, impossible to cure. Many of them have it—grown persons as well as children—and in the interest of science, or morbid curiosity, perhaps, I have tried, but with little success, to get some definite information on the subject. Nobody here who drinks to excess objects to admitting he is a drunkard. He will refer to himself rather proudly as “hombre perdido” (a lost man), and expect to be patted on the back. But I have known a dirt eater to deny he was one even after a surgeon, to save his life, had operated on him and removed large quantities of dirt. As the habit is considered a shameful one, information at first hand is impossible to acquire. Candelario, for instance, is only seven, but although his father and mother know he is a dirt eater, they have never caught him in the act. “We have watched him all day sometimes,” Ezequiel declared, “every minute; and he would lie awake at night until we were both asleep and then crawl out of the house to get it.” Whether there is a particular kind of soil to which the victims are addicted or whether any sufficiently gritty substance will do, I don’t know; neither does Ezequiel. Among foreigners here the theory is that their stomachs have become apathetic to the assaults of chile and demand an even more brutal form of irritation. General emaciation and an abdominal toy balloon are the outward and visible signs of the habit which can be broken they say only by death. One woman on the place died of it last year, and her seventeen-year-old son, who must have begun at an early age as his physical development is that of a sickly child of ten, is not long for this world. There was nothing I could do for my unfortunate little godchild, and Ezequiel walked slowly away, looking as depressed as I felt. For Candelario is a handsome, intelligent little boy and deserves a better fate. But—“esterá mejor con Dios!” (He’ll be better off with God.)
From then until luncheon there is comparative peace. That is to say, when I am disturbed I am not disturbed for long at a time. A breathless woman comes to “get something” for her husband who has just been bitten in the foot by a snake. As she is scared, she omits the customary preludes and I get rid of her within ten minutes. I have a hypodermic injection for snake bites that comes from Belgium in little sealed bottles and seems to be efficacious, but as the snake that bit her husband was very small (a bravo amarillo, I think she named it), and as he had been bitten, unsuccessfully, four years ago by another member of the same family, I do not waste one on him. Instead, I send him several drinks of ammonia and water which may or may not have any effect on snake bites. To tell the truth, I don’t care. The house-boy on returning from the mountain with a mule-load of firewood declares that the occasion is auspicious for anointing one of the dogs who has the mange. As the application of the salve is painful to the dog who endeavors to bite the boy, it is necessary for me to pat the poor thing’s head and engage him in conversation while the boy craftily dabs and smears in the rear. When this precarious performance is taking place I notice a turkey, a magnificent and sedate bird, who seems completely to have lost his ordinarily fine mind. He is rushing about in a most agonized fashion, beating his head in the dust, at times pausing and—perhaps I imagine it—turning pale and looking as if he were about to faint.
“Manuel—what on earth is the matter with him? He has gone crazy,” I exclaim.
“Oh, no,” Manuel placidly answers, “he fought so much with the other turkeys and with some of the roosters as well, that I stuck a feather through his nostrils. I thought it might divert his attention.” And he smilingly waits for me to praise his thoughtful ingenuity.