Silvestre Pantaleón

The story of an elderly man from the Nahuatl-speaking village of San Agustin Oapan, Guerrero, Mexico. Told with a lyrical combination of lingering imagery and ethnographic detail, 'Silvestre Pantaleon' follows the protagonist as he struggles to pay for a curing ceremony and provide for his family. He dedicates himself to the only remunerative activities he knows: handcrafting rope for religious ceremonies and building seldom-used household objects that he alone still has the skills to produce. 'Silvestre Pantaleon' is a simple though universal tale of aging. It suggests both triumph (the household provided for and health recovered--through offerings to the hearth, the earth, the river, and the deceased) and reversal (the recognition that healing is but an ephemeral hiatus in the inexorable advance of time).