I considered what she was telling me to be a therapeutic story, completely untrue. But, seized by an irresistible curiosity, I decided to undergo the experience to see what it felt like to be in such unusual circumstances. I removed my shirt as if I were doing something funny. But once I was lying on the bed, with Pachita brandishing her knife before me dressed as an Aztec hero and surrounded by praying fanatics, I began to feel afraid. Maybe they were all crazy. Panicking, I exclaimed, “My pain is gone, Brother. It is not necessary to operate.” I tried to get up. The possessed woman, with irresistible authority, obliged me to remain lying down, placed the tip of the knife behind my left ear, and slowly lowering it said, “If you do not want me to operate on the liver, I’ll begin by opening you from here, I’ll take your heart out”—she continued lowering the knife—“then I’ll cut through your stomach, and finally, I’ll remove that bothersome devil from your liver!”
It was incredible psychological subtlety: she was forcing me to choose the less atrocious of two atrocious possibilities. Forgetting the third possibility, which was to jump up and run away, I said that she should only operate on the liver, please! A pair of scissors appeared in her hand; she pulled up a roll of my skin, and she made an incision. I heard the noise of the two steel blades. The horror began. This was not theater. I felt the pain of someone whose flesh is being cut with scissors! The blood flowed, and I thought I was going to die. Then she gave me a cut in the belly with the knife, and I had the sensation of my guts being exposed to the open air. It was horrible! I have never felt such pain. For minutes that seemed eternal, I suffered terribly and turned white. Pachita gave me a transfusion. As she spat the strange red liquid through the plastic tube that she had pushed into my wrist, I gradually felt a pleasant warmth come over me. Then she lifted my bleeding liver (mine or a calf ’s, what do I know?) and started pulling an excrescence from it. “We will pull it out at the roots,” Brother said. And I endured, in addition to the odor of the blood and the horrifying sight of my crimson viscera, the greatest pain I had ever felt in my life. I squealed shamelessly. She gave one final pull. She showed me a piece of matter that seemed to move like a toad, had her assistant wrap it in black paper, put my liver back in place, ran her hands over my belly closing the wound, and at that moment the pain disappeared. If it was an illusion, it was executed perfectly: not only I, but all who were present, among them the film producer Michel Seydoux, saw the blood flow and the belly being opened. I was blindfolded, wrapped in a sheet, carried to the waiting room, and laid down among the other surgical patients. I lay there perfectly still for half an hour, glad to be alive. Then Pachita, wiping off blood, knelt beside me, took my hands, and asked me what my name was. She embraced me in her arms, and I surrendered to my thirst for mothering. The more I asked for, the more she gave; I wanted infinite tenderness, I received infinite tenderness. This woman was a mountain, as impressive as a mythical Tibetan master. I never felt so much gratitude as at the moment when she told me I was cured and that I could and should leave. Indeed, Pachita knew the human soul and knew very well how to use a therapy that mixed love and terror. In this regard, I am reminded of the words of Maimonides at the beginning of the Treatise Berachot in the Talmud: “Gather, sages, and wait in your seats. I will give you a beautiful gift: I will teach you the fear of God.”
It is necessary to collaborate with the healer in order to free oneself from disease. Despite believing in the power of Brother, some people may very well not have wanted to recover their health. I remember a brilliant phytotherapist named Henriette, a patient of my doctor friend Jean Claude, who had been told she had no more than two years left to live. Henriette had cancer, and both her breasts had been removed. At the request of Jean Claude, who wanted to try everything, she traveled to Mexico. She stayed with us in our house. Although very depressed, she declared that she was ready to let Pachita operate on her. Pachita proposed replacing all her blood and injecting two liters of plasma from another dimension, materialized by Brother. The day came, and after the usual ceremony, Henriette lay on the bed. Brother cut her arm, and we heard her blood trickling into a brass bucket. It was a thick and foul-smelling stream. Then, as in other operations I had seen, Brother inserted the end of a plastic tube into the wound, this time raising the other end up in the air to connect it to the invisible. We heard the sound of a liquid slowly emanating from who knows where, and Brother said, “Receive the holy plasma, daughter; do not reject it.”
The day after the operation Henriette was sad, downhearted. We tried to bring her around, but to no avail. She was like a child, surly and selfish. She tried to make us feel guilty for wanting to save her from her ordeal. Two days later, a large purulent abscess appeared on her arm. Very scared, I called Enrique, who, after consulting with his mother, said, “Your friend has faith in medicine, but she rejects it. She wants to rid herself of the holy plasma. Tonight she should relieve herself in a basin and apply the excrement to her arm tomorrow morning.” I conveyed the message to Henriette, who shut herself in her room. I do not know if she followed the advice or not, but what I do know is that the abscess burst, leaving a huge hole, so deep that one could see the bone. We immediately brought her to the house of Pachita, who, as Brother, said in her masculine voice, “I have been waiting for you, my child, I will give you what you want. Come. ” The healer took her by the hand like a child, led her to the bed, and surprisingly, began to hum an old French song as she moved the knife back and forth before the patient’s wide eyes. It seemed to me that she had hypnotized her. Then she asked, “Tell me, my dear, why did you want them to cut off your breasts?”
To which Henriette, who spoke Spanish, answered in a childlike voice, “To not be a mother.”
“And then, my dear child, what do you want them to cut out?”
“The ganglia that swell up in my neck.”
“What for?”
“So that I won’t have to talk to people.”
“And what next, my child?”
“I would like them to cut out the ganglia that will swell under my arms.”
“What for?”
“So that I won’t have to work.”
“And what next?”
“I would like them to cut out the ganglia that swell around my crotch, so that I can be alone with myself.”
“And what next?”
“The ganglia in my legs, so that I won’t have to go anywhere.”
“And what do you want after that?”
“To die. ”
“Very well, my child, now I know the path of your illness. Choose: either you advance on this path, or you heal.”
Pachita put a plaster on her arm, and after three days the abscess had healed. Henriette decided to return to Paris and died two weeks later in the arms of Jean Claude. The last gesture she made was to put a wedding ring onto her doctor’s ring finger. When I told the sad news to Pachita, she told me, “Brother comes not only to heal. He also helps those who want to die. Cancer and other serious diseases present themselves like armies of warriors, following a precise plan of conquest. When you reveal to a patient who wishes to destroy herself the path that her illness is taking, she will quickly follow that path. This is why the Frenchwoman stopped fighting instead of suffering for two years. She surrendered to the disease and let it carry out its plan in two weeks.”
It was a great lesson: before this, I had believed that it was sufficient to make a person aware of their self-destructive urges to save them. Pachita made me understand that this discovery could also hasten death.