Juanita didn’t buy it yet. Her lips had set into the famous Gonzalez woman line of suspicion. I had to come up with something else.
I looked down at my hands and traced the lines on my left palm so Juanita wouldn’t see my face. “I only want to know my mother a little better. It helped, seeing that photograph. I miss her so much, and I don’t know . . . it just helped. I felt connected to her. I know that sounds stupid.”
“Oh, Martha, don’t say that.”
I looked up. A string of emotions crossed her face: concern, pity and finally belief. I tried not to smile at my victory.
“Carlita and Rosa were best friends and Jorge and Rosa dated for a year or so. They were a crazy lot, always running around, giving Mamá headaches all the time.”
I laughed at that and Juanita did too, breaking the tension. This was as perfect a moment as it would get.
“So, do they still live here? In Laredo, I mean?”
“You know, I think they moved.” She stood up. “I’m going to go see if Mamá and Gloria need help in the kitchen.” And she walked away without another word.
I had my answer. They were still here.
After finding my cousin Carlos alone, I asked him if he had a phone book. Abuela sure didn’t—hell, we barely used the phone, usually only when someone called with an emergency. Thankfully, Carlos did, and what’s more it was in the drawer of his bedside table and not in the family room or in the kitchen where Abuela or Gloria might see me. He showed me where it was, then left me to join the rest of the family.
I turned to ‘J’ only to find a thousand Juárezes. It was the same for Valdez, although Valdez was shorter by a few names or so. There were four Carlita Juárezes and seven Jorge Valdezes. Some had addresses, while others only had numbers. A few had both. I wrote down each number and address with a pen and a piece of paper from a small notepad I found in a drawer. I wouldn’t be able to call any of these numbers soon; it might take weeks.
When I left the room, I stuffed the papers in the only place I could hide them: my bra. There were no pockets in the horrendously flowery Sunday dress Abuela had made me wear. As I left the bedroom, I bumped into Gloria, who was heading to the bathroom.
“What were you doing in there?”
I put my hands to my breast, feeling the paper beneath the fabric.
“Praying.”
I returned home on Monday after school to find my grandmother sitting in the kitchen, strumming her fingers on the table, staring at the entryway.
“What took so long?” she asked and then stood up.
“It’s the same time I usually get home.” I flung my backpack in the chair that she had just gotten up from and sat down myself.
“Don’t sit. Come. You learn today.”
“But I have a lot of homework.”
“After.” She waddled into the hallway.
“But, you know, I . . . ”
“¡Vámonos!”
When I entered the hallway, Abuela stood at the mystery door, the one she went into to do her healing work. She pulled out a key from her pants’ pocket and stuck it into the lock.
Abuela opened the door and walked in. I moved forward and stopped just before the door. I was reminded of the first day I had walked into Abuela’s canary yellow kitchen. That feeling of what would come, of change, of the unknown, of rejection, all of those feelings returned now. I pushed my hair from my face and felt a nervous sweat on the back of my neck.
When I crossed the threshold into my grandmother’s secret room, I would be crossing over into the world of curanderismo, and it would forever change my life. But I had to do this. I wanted to, maybe. I took a deep breath and stepped through. I had survived Laredo so far.
Drying herbs hung from the ceiling like the limbs of drooping trees. Some hung so low I had to be wary not to hit them with my head. I was taller than my grandmother, and she must have hung them so as to not hit her head. They made the room smell divine, like sweet, wet earth and lavender, so I couldn’t complain. With each breath, I felt calmer. My grandmother had walked across the room to what looked like a small altar on the far wall. She knelt down slowly as I walked to her.
In the center of the room was a long, wooden table standing two feet off the floor covered with a brightly stitched yellow and red zigzag pad. Woven blankets, like the ones I slept under, were folded at the end of the table, and a small stool sat next to it. Hanging on the walls were old, wooden shelves. Some shelves were filled with pans and pots, others with jars. I couldn’t tell what was in the jars, only that some looked like powder, while other jars held actual objects that I was unable to recognize from so far away. Small paintings of angels and Jesus printed on tiny cards stood between the items on the shelves.
Despite everything, the room was organized and clean. The rest of the house was cluttered and chaotic compared to this. When I got to the altar, I knelt down beside my grandmother and sat back on my calves as she did. I wasn’t sure what else to do. Do as the curanderas do, right?
The altar was a small wooden table covered in a white cloth that had different colored embroidery with looping, flowery designs on the edges. The fabric looked old, slightly yellowed. A larger ceramic statue of the Virgin Mary holding a baby Jesus stood in the center. A cross made of dried, yellowish leaves leaned against it. Surrounding Mary and Jesus were the holy troops, saints and angels, hands folded in prayer looking up at Mother and Son in holy reverence. Next to the statues was a bundle of sage that gave off a strong yet soothing odor.
Small picture frames littered the table. Photos of my mother when she was younger, Juanita and her family, even a sepia picture of my grandfather in his army uniform. He looked to be in his twenties. Small knickknacks of pouches, rocks and dried flowers also decorated the altar, but I wasn’t aware of their significance, and they didn’t seem to be placed in any particular order.
I felt nervous, like I was going to accidentally hit something and then ruin the entire ambience of the room. Keeping my elbows close to my body, I turned to Abuela. She waited impatiently. Not that she said anything, but I had become accustomed to noticing the pursing of the lips, the tight way in which she held herself.
“Okay, we pray first.” Abuela closed her eyes and interlaced her hands in her lap.
“Why?” I whispered. There was an essence about the room that didn’t want to be disturbed. It felt wrong to speak normally, so I whispered.
She took a deep breath of patience. Maybe she was nervous too. “We must ask Dios to forgive us of our sins so that He may give us strength and guidance. A curandera is nothing without Dios. Dios gives us our gift to heal.”
“Oh. So do we say it aloud or to ourselves . . . ?”
“Have you ever prayed?”
I averted my eyes. If I wasn’t godly enough, could I still be a curandera?
“What do you do at church?” she asked.
I shrugged. “I don’t know . . . at first I just looked at everything, you know, the paintings, the statues, the candles and all . . . Or keep up with all the sitting and kneeling. Now I just try to translate all the words the priest says.”
“That’s not bad, exactly. But church is more than statues and words. It is Dios y Cristo y María. You must believe if you are to maintain your don.”
Believe? A little easier said than done. “What’s a don?”
“I will explain later. Here. We will pray together.”
She grabbed my hands and held them between us. This was a different side of my grandmother: a dedicated woman who put aside her toughness for focus and serenity. I closed my eyes before she began.
She said the prayer aloud: “Dios, forgive us of our sins. You have given us the gift to heal and we are humble to this gift. Open up the soul of my granddaughter to you, her ears to my learning and her body to the power of healing,” she paused. “And please give me the strength and knowledge to teach the daughter of my daughter. Amen.”
I followed with an “Amen” of my own and opened my eyes.
Abuela sighed. She let go of my hands, pushed herself to a standing position and went near the door. I followed and stood next to her so that we faced the room.
“Now we start,” she said.
“Start how?”
She motioned with her hand to the room. “You will learn everything in this room. Everything has a purpose in here, and you will learn it. You will learn the material and the spiritual.”
“What does that mean?”
“May I have a chance to explain without you interrupting?”
She waited for a sarcastic response, but I refused to ruin this. I didn’t want us arguing when she could be telling me things.
“Material, nieta, is what Señor Díaz and Señora Flores do. They make teas and pastes, use herbs, give massages, sweat cleanses—physical healings. They heal with the earth and with physical labor. But spiritual is more than that. It’s healing on a different plane. And there’s mental healing.”
“And?”
“And what?”
“And I still don’t really understand what you mean about spiritual and now mental. You didn’t really tell me anything.”
“Impatience will not help you to be a curandera. Besides, you must learn the physical before the spiritual and the mental.”
She stepped forward to one of the shelves on the right side of the room.
“Wait,” I said.
She stopped and looked back at me.
“I don’t know if I can do this. I’ve never done magic or anything. Maybe you are wrong about my gift.”
“Like I told you yesterday, I’ve known you’ve had the gift since the first day you arrived. And I’m never wrong.” She smiled. Then suddenly, her voice was hard and serious, “And we don’t do magic, only brujas do. Magic. Bah!”
Abuela grabbed a stool next to one of the shelves, climbed up and handed me a few jars. I placed them on the counter beneath the shelves.
The first one I recognized before she even opened the jar. “Garlic,” I said.
“Yes, para bowel pains, toothaches and stomach troubles.” She grabbed a second jar. “And this one?”
I shrugged. It looked like a bunch of leaves to me.
“Éste es alcanfor, camphor.”
I took a step forward and peered into the jar. The jar smelled like moth balls. The leaves were glossy, yet waxy-looking, and a few black-colored berries were sprinkled among the leaves.
“It helps with pain. Like headaches and rheumatism, even with faintness. Now this next one . . . ”
“How?” I said.
“How what?”
“Well, how does camphor help with pain? Do you drink it or touch it? How does it cure those things?”
“It depends. Right now you only need to know what they treat.”
“Shouldn’t I learn how to treat something at the same time?”
Abuela jammed the lid back on the jar, even though it was one of those lids that needed to be twisted on. “Forgive me, almighty curandera. I forgot you know best.”
“No. Sorry. Okay, just go ahead. I’ll listen.”
She pursed her lips and grabbed another jar. “Aster, for coughs and congestion of the chest.” Then another one, “Amaranth, para el corazón, for heart trouble.”
An idea hit me. Crap, she wasn’t going to like me interrupting, but this was a good reason.
“Hold on, before you continue.”
Abuela threw her hands in the air, “Ay, m’ija, ¿ahora qué?”
“This is only the third jar and it’s a lot of new words I’ve never heard of. Can I get a notepad or something to write it all down, maybe make a few sketches of the plants, to study?” I smiled.
“¿Pluma y papel? ¡Ay! My grandmother handed down this information from her mother before her and her mother before her and not with any fancy pen and paper.”
“But it will take me weeks to memorize all this . . . without paper!”
“That’s how you will learn. No more questions.”
“Pen and paper isn’t even fancy. They have computers these days.”
“¡Bah! ¡Tecnología!” she said and climbed on the stool to bring down more jars. Even though I was a bit annoyed that Abuela wouldn’t let me write everything down, I smiled to myself. She had called me “mi’ja.”
For the next few hours, my grandmother pulled out many jars filled with spices, oils, dried fruit, dried leaves, stems from plants and even jars filled with dead animals or animal parts that smelt so bad that I gagged a few times. She opened each jar and let me smell and even touch its contents. I was repulsed touching the dead animals. A lot of the leaves looked so similar. How would I be able to tell them apart?
So much information! It felt like thousands of hands pushed on my brain, but there just wasn’t enough room. How could there be all this knowledge? And if these things did what she said they could, then why were there even doctors? But now I understood a little of why Marcela wanted to be an apprentice. If I learned all this stuff that my grandmother was showing me, I would have some power. I would be special, more so than the average person, and I supposed that was the appeal of curanderismo.
It was impossible to remember everything she told me that day, and it would take a while to remember how everything was used, thanks to Abuela’s “traditional ways.” Although, I won’t lie, that night I found some empty pages in a spiral and tried to write down as much information as I could remember, with a few drawings of the plants here and there. It was pretty difficult to do, since there was so much to fit into my mind: ingredients with weird names, leaves and stems with funny, little details.
We only got through half the jars that night and, when we returned to the kitchen, Gloria was already there cooking a meal of huevos con nopales. I didn’t realize I was starving until I smelled the food.
I didn’t fully believe the magical mumbo jumbo, but something about it was enjoyable. Abuela and I were connecting, sort of, and I was learning something that other people didn’t learn. I smiled throughout the meal, shrugging off all of Gloria’s sarcastic remarks.
I wasn’t even reprimanded for it.
The rest of the week transformed into a new routine that I would maintain for many months: enter the healing room, pray and then learn about Abuela’s tools, objects, herbs and plants. I learned how to use incense and candles, that certain colors healed certain things. I memorized plant abilities, which herbs cured what and how to squeeze precious juice from the roots of a plant. I practiced with different tools, using certain knives to cut leaves and other knives that made slicing and dicing dead animals easier. I learned that religious objects were for more than decoration, and even discovered that a pouch that hung on the wall was protection against evil spirits, that a broom swept away malo and other forms of evil.
The most important thing I learned was basically meditation, although my grandmother didn’t call it that. She called it reflexión, but the process was much the same, except for one particular thing.
“Why are we doing this?” I said as I opened one of my eyes to peek at Abuela.
We sat with our legs crossed in front of the altar, facing one another, our hands turned down flat on our knees. My lower back ached after five minutes of sitting, and I kept squirming to get comfortable. Abuela sat straight-backed and did not appear to be in any state of discomfort.
She kept her eyes closed. “You have an extra healing gift that others do not. Your don, the place within you where your gift comes from, is spiritual and mental. When you learn your body, you will find your gift.”
“So this don will do all the healing for me?”
“No, you heal through your don,” she said.
“So, how would I know if I’m using my don or not?”
Abuela laughed. “Oh, trust me, you will know. It’s like nothing you’ve ever felt before.”
“How am I learning my body by sitting here with my eyes closed?”
“¡Ay, muchacha! Can you ever be quiet? Stop talking and breathe in and o
ut. Allow yourself to leave your body. Only then will you be able to see your don.”
I stuck out my tongue in annoyance.
“I saw that.”
I opened my right eye, but Abuela’s eyes were shut. I closed my eye.
“Saw what?”
“I saw what you did. With my don.”
I opened my right eye again and stuck my tongue out once more.
“I saw that, too.” Her eyes were closed the entire time.
I closed my eyes, maybe a little more of a believer in this whole don thing.
That Saturday, Abuela resumed her rounds helping the sick in the neighborhood. Instead of sitting in the kitchens of the homes she visited, I now went into the rooms with her and her patients. I assumed what Abuela did was like a typical doctor’s visit, but I didn’t remember myself ever being sick or visiting a doctor. I asked Abuela if that was normal.
She nodded. “Your don and your age protected you from most illnesses. Besides that, you just got lucky.”
When Abuela entered the room where the sick person was, her entire mood changed: a load was lifted, she smiled more, laughed at times, and her voice did not hold the toughness it usually did. Her mood was infectious, so that I found myself smiling goofily as I watched her interact with the sick.
Usually, my grandmother swept the room with sage that she pulled out of her bag and then proceeded to hold the patient’s hand and pray with him or her. After that, she would immediately begin her healing by telling the patient what needed to be done to cure the sickness. At first, I believed she had been previously told the person’s sickness, until once an old woman said, “How did you know that I had migraines? I never told you, did I?”
My grandmother only smiled and repeated the instructions for the tea that would help relieve the pain. As soon as we left a house, I began with the same question.
“How did you know? Have any of these people that we’ve seen told you what was wrong with them?”
“Yes, some have told me.”
I walked faster in front of her to be able to see her face. “But did they need to tell you? Or did you already know?”
Abuela’s face had lost the light-heartedness that it had held minutes earlier, so that now she looked annoyed at me. “Of course, I already knew. With my don I saw what was wrong.”
Secrets of the Casa Rosada Page 10