The patients, sitting in the darkened room, waited for their turn to enter the “operating room.” The aides spoke in whispers as if they were in a temple. Sometimes one of them would leave the operating room, hiding a mysterious package in his hands. He would go into the bathroom, and through the door, left ajar, one could see the glare of fire consuming the object. An assistant advised in a whisper, “Do not go until the harm has been consumed. It is dangerous to approach it while it is active. You could catch it. ” What was this “harm,” really? The patients ignored it, but the mere fact of having to refrain from urinating while one of those immolations took place produced a strange impression: they were gradually leaving habitual reality to immerse themselves in a totally irrational parallel world.
Suddenly, four assistants emerged from the operating room carrying a lifeless body wrapped in a bloodied canvas, depositing it on the floor as if it were a corpse. Once the operation was finished and the bandages were in place, Pachita required the patient to be absolutely still for half an hour, under penalty of instant death. The surgical patients, afraid of being killed by magical forces, did not make the slightest move. Needless to say, this clever arrangement served as preparation for the next patient. When Pachita called them in her low voice, always using the same formula, “It’s your turn, child of my soul,” the patient would start trembling from head to toe and reverting to childhood. I remember that on this day she gave a caramel candy to a minister while asking him in her low and tender voice, “What hurts, little one?” The man replied in a child’s voice, “For weeks I have not slept. I have to get up to urinate every half hour.”
“Do not worry; I will change your bladder.”
Pachita, after turning into Brother and always with her eyes closed, called the men first, stating that since they were weaker than the women, their pains had to be soothed first. There was nothing but a narrow bed with a plastic-covered mattress in the operating room. Each patient had to bring a sheet, a liter of alcohol, a pack of six rolls of cotton, and bandages. The assistants would remove his shirt, and if necessary — for example, for an operation on the testicles — his pants. All manipulations took place in half-darkness, by the light of a single candle, because according to Pachita electric light could damage the internal organs. The patient would cover the bed with his sheet and then lie down. An assistant would ceremoniously hand the healer a long hunting knife. The handle was wrapped in black electrical tape, and the blunt blade bore an Indian engraving with a plume. At Brother’s indication of which place on the body was to be opened, an assistant surrounded the area with cotton and liberally poured on alcohol. The smell of the substance filled the room, creating a hospital-like environment.
The first patient was the minister. Brother asked, “Enrique, have you prepared the bladder?” Pachita’s son produced a flask containing something resembling organic tissue. The man lay trembling, frozen with fear. I took his hand. The healer made an incision in his belly about fifteen centimeters long. I struggled not to pass out as I saw the blood flow. The old woman palpated the abdomen, raised her hand, made a gesture, and a pair of scissors materialized. She cut something that produced an unbearable stench. She pulled out a mass of stinking flesh, which Enrique wrapped in black paper. Then she took the new bladder from the flask. She placed it next to the wound, and to my great surprise, I saw it absorbed, without anyone pushing it, into the interior of the body. She placed the alcohol-soaked cotton wool over the incision. She pressed down for a moment, then she cleaned away the blood, and the wound disappeared without leaving a scar. “My dear child, you are cured.” Her assistants blindfolded the man, wrapped him in his sheet, and carried him out to lay him down in the waiting room. Another assistant ran to the bathroom to burn the black packet.
Despite my disbelief, this act had seemed so real that my reason began to falter. Was she a brilliant prestidigitator or a saint who performed miracles? I was ashamed of myself. How could I not believe that this old woman was a trickster? By light of a single candle, one can hide a myriad of fraudulent manipulations. And if she could perform miracles, why did she need a knife? Did she want us to believe it was a magical instrument? To prove that there was no trickery, she had an assistant hand it to her — but — did she use the same knife that was handed to her? Perhaps, in the darkness, she switched it for another knife with a rubber handle, concealed by the electrical tape, full of dog or chicken blood. It was said that she took in stray dogs out of good will, but what if instead of being a saint she was an impostor who killed these animals in order to extract their vital fluid? And why did she put cotton around the wound? The knife was never disinfected. so what was the alcohol for? Pachita, although it was said that she never ate, looked fat, with a large paunch. She always wore an apron over her clothes. What if this belly were false? Was it full of plastic bags containing blood and objects that appeared “magically”? Was she a madwoman? A pathological liar? Like Ichazo, like Castaneda, she told of things that no person of average intelligence could believe. “I know who will die here, and when. I know how many days everyone who comes to visit me has left to live.” “Do not worry about the drought. Tomorrow I will make it rain.” “I just give a push and I leave my body. Sometimes I visit places, Siberia, Mont Blanc, Mars, the moon, Jupiter.” “A cyclone was approaching the Cora Indian Territory, so I went to ask the Father for protection for them, and I got it: the cyclone was blown off course.” “When I fall into a trance, I live in the astral world. If someone destroys my body, Brother reconstructs it.” Pachita also claimed to travel in time, predicting future events or going back into the past to retrieve some object or other.
Standing at her side, I saw her pour an egg white over the eye of a blind man, then stick her index finger, with its long red-painted nail, into the eye. I saw her change a patient’s heart, seeming to open the chest with a single blow, letting loose a stream of blood that stained my face. Pachita made me put my hand into the wound to feel the torn flesh. (When I told Guillermo that it felt cold like a raw steak, he said it was because Brother performed this work in an astral dimension, distinct from our own.) I felt the new heart arrive in the hole; it had allegedly been previously purchased by Enrique; I did not know where or from whom, perhaps from a corrupt morgue employee. The muscle mass was implanted in the patient in a magical manner. This phenomenon was repeated in each operation. Pachita took up a piece of intestine that, as soon as she placed it on the “surgical patient,” disappeared into his insides. I saw her open up a skull, remove cancerous pieces of brain, and put in new gray matter. These tactile and optical illusions, if that is what they were, were accompanied by olfactory effects — the smell of blood, the stench of cancers and wounds — as well as auditory effects: the aqueous sound of viscera, the clatter of bones being cut by a carpenter’s saw. By the third operation, everything began to seem natural to me. We were in another world, a world in which natural laws were abolished. If a transfusion was needed because the patient had lost too much blood, Brother put one end of a tube in her own mouth and the other end into a hole in the patient’s arm, and began to spit out liters of reddish liquid. On two occasions I saw the illness transformed into a kind of animal that seemed to snort and moved excrescences that were like limbs. I returned to my home at midnight, astounded and covered in blood. The world would never be the same to me. I had finally seen a superior being performing miracles, whether true or false.