“And then?”
“The glands in my legs, so that they cannot force me to go
anywhere.”
“And then what do you want?”
“To die. .”
“Very well, my little daughter, now you know the path your illness will take. Choose: follow this path or heal yourself.”
Pachita put a dressing on her arm, and three days later the wound had healed. Henriette decided to go back to Paris, and she died two weeks later. When I told Pachita the sad news, she replied, “El Hermanito does not come only to heal. He also helps those who desire it, to die. Cancer and other grave illnesses present themselves like warriors, following a plan of precise conquest. When you show an ill patient, who seeks to wipe himself out, the path the illness takes, he will hurry to follow it. For this reason, the French woman, instead of spending two years suffering, quit fighting. She yielded to the illness and helped it realize its plan in two weeks.” Before this I had believed that it was enough to make someone conscious of self-destructive impulses in order to save them. From this case, I learned the lesson that such knowledge could also accelerate the person’s death.
Valérie’s testimony is indeed really interesting in that it concerns the relationship between healing and faith, as well as the importance of the desire to live. For your part, what do you think, Alejandro? To heal, is faith necessary?
Not necessarily. Everything Valérie recounts is rigorously exact, but one cannot draw a generalization from it. Without a doubt, it would be preferable to have faith, but this is not a requirement. Moreover, Pachita appears to know exactly how to shake the skeptics who come to her, as she did by putting the symbol of my film in her hand. One day, I brought her the French stuntman Jean-Pierre Vignau. He was a giant karate champion who did not believe in these things and did not intend to be tricked by an old Mexican woman. He had hurt his leg, and I urged him to go with my wife to Pachita’s house. He was very hesitant, but as I accused him of being afraid, he finally consented while swearing he would not be duped.
And what was the result of this confrontation between the old sorceress and this stuntman no one messes with?
It happens that Vignau himself, very touched by the episode, tells of it in Corps d’acier, his memoirs published through éditions Robert Laffont in 1984. So I am going to read the related passage. This testimony of a skeptic cannot but add weight to what I have already told you about Pachita:
During that visit to Mexico, to the home of Alejandro, I was to meet the strangest person I had ever met. The strangest and the truest of beings. I had lived with a muscle tear in my thigh for months. Not a little tear either. A huge thing like two closed fists with a hole in the middle. I had searched for weeks in Paris, going from quack doctor to specialist, trying to find someone who could repair this. No luck. They advised me simply to completely quit karate because it was irreparable. One evening, Jodorowsky asked his wife Valérie if she would take me to see Pachita, an old-style Mexican healer. Here, one would call her a sorceress. And like that, one early morning, I left for Pachita’s house with Valérie carrying a raw egg in her hand, something that had to do with the treatment.
We come to a narrow little lane. A big, wooden carriage entrance. Valérie knocks. The door half opens on an old chap to whom Valérie explains the nature of our visit. He lets us in. The courtyard is full of people. Men, women, children, from all social classes but mostly the poor, Indians, mestizos, very typical Mexicans with baskets, snacks, babies strapped to their backs — all that, that discussion, that debate, endless talking. At the heart of the courtyard, on a heap of wood, a little eagle stares at it all with his sharply serene eye.
We wait. After about twenty minutes, a door opens to the house at the end of the courtyard. A little old woman comes out, an old lady. She looks like a lot of the women in the courtyard. Except that she is very small, fat, round, with a white eye, which seems to see better than the other one: to see what the good one can’t see anymore. Impossible to guess her age. She could be one hundred or fifty. She is there, in the courtyard; she looks at everyone and chooses a chap, extending a hand to him.
“You. .” The guy gets up and follows her into the house. A long moment later, he comes out. She again looks about the people gathered there, and she points her finger at me. “You. .” It is me. I realize that I’m adopting a mental attitude of openness in front of this strange person. I tell myself, “I do not know anyone or anything. So, I open myself. Anyway, she cannot damage my leg anymore than it already is.”
A bit surprised anyway to pass by everyone — but Alejandro explained to me that she thinks men should go ahead of women because men deal less well with suffering; women can wait — so I enter behind her, accompanied by Valérie who explains my case in Spanish.
Suddenly, this little old lady turns toward me and does two or three very quick karate moves while looking at me with her white eye. Right then, I would have said she was twenty years old if someone had asked her age. So she takes the raw egg Valérie brought, breaks it and rubs it all over me, on my face, on my sleeves, on my shirt, on my pants. Then she takes a kind of white liquid in a big bottle behind her and does the same as with the egg. Voilà! Completely whitewashed. She touches my leg on the knots left from the tear. Then she goes back to an altar, like a little nativity scene with figurines and candles, and she begins to pray, to mumble. I listen. I don’t understand anything, but I listen. The room is shadowy, only lit by three or four candles; there is an operating table, two or three assistants who are here to learn or to whom she relays the gift, and Pachita, who prays. Then she stops, she moves toward her assistants and dictates a list of products, herbs, plants. They give the list to Valérie for me. I turn toward her.
“What do I have to give her for all that?”
“You give what you want, a peso, two pesos. .”
I took out by chance the first bill in my pocket, which was I don’t know how many pesos, I forget, and we again crossed the courtyard. Then we went out to the big, colorful Mexican market, filled with shouts and agitation, where people bustle about in such a way, one could say, like in Africa, as the heat did not affect them. In this mad market we bought everything we had to. Upon returning to their home, Valérie made a stew with everything, which she put on my thigh as a poultice. I kept it there for three weeks. I lived normally; I trained with it. And at the end of three weeks, she took it off. It was gone! The only pain I felt was when taking off the poultice; it pulled out hairs. My tear had disappeared, completely. And I never had another problem with it. Of course, those who have never lived through something like this could question the veracity of the minority who have. But Pachita really cured me.
There you have it. The testimony of Jean-Pierre. Interesting, no?
True. According to you, what must one conclude?
I will never confirm that Pachita’s manipulations were true operations; but I will never confirm the contrary. . And I concluded that it was not important. It is our belief in an “objective” world, our modern, self-stylized rational mentality that makes this kind of question torment us. We always allege to place ourselves as detached observers of a supposed exterior phenomenon, and so the mechanisms should be clearly defined. In the “shamanic” mentality, to contrast, this kind of problem is not even posed. There is not a subject-observer and an object-observed; there is the world as a dream swarming with signs and symbols, a field of interaction where multiple forces and influences meet. In this context, to know if Pachita’s operations are “real” or not proves illogical. What is real? From the time you move into the energetic field of the sorcerer, you incorporate yourself into his reality and he enters into yours; you both move inside the real where the practices of healing are revealed operative. And the fact is that a number of people have been made well and truly healed! In addition, if I return to the said “objective” point of view, I could never describe the “thing” even if I stayed with her week after week, for hours. . Whatever the case may be, one cannot but recognize Pachita’s genius. If it were theater, what an actress! If it has to do with conjuring, this good woman was the greatest illusionist of all time! And what a psychologist. .