Pachita had told me, “I’ll visit you in your dreams.” It happened that, probably because of an intestinal infection, I had abdominal pains that went on for several days because I wanted to heal myself with herbs and not antibiotics. I slept badly for three nights, but on the fourth night I had a dream: I was in my bed, suffering the same pain that I was having when awake. Pachita came, lay down next to me, and sucked on the right side of my neck, saying, “I will heal you, my boy.” With some effort, she slid her left hand between our bodies and put it on my belly. Then she rose in the air without separating from me. We levitated horizontally for a moment, then returned down to the bed. She slowly faded away. I woke up healed, feeling no pain.
When Pachita died, Guillermo Lauder told me that the doctor could not immediately sign the death certificate because the corpse’s chest was warm. This warmth lasted for three days. Only then could he declare her dead. Some time later her gift passed to her son Enrique, who, possessed by Brother, began to operate as his mother had done. Claudia, an assistant to the film director François Reichenbach, had been in a car crash during a filming in Belize (known as British Honduras at that time) in which several nerves in her back were severed and nine vertebrae were broken. She spent three months in a coma. When she regained consciousness, she was told that she was paralyzed and would not be able to walk again. As a last resort, she traveled to Mexico and was operated on by Pachita, who, according to Claudia’s account, opened her up from the neck to the tailbone and replaced the damaged vertebrae with others that she had bought from the morgue. The following week, she was walking. This “miracle” changed her life and led her to become interested in Mexican magic. She had a strong desire to help her friends in France, for which purpose she invited Enrique to come to Paris to operate. He agreed to come.
At that time, my daughter Eugenia was suffering from an almost exclusively French disease: spasmophilia, involving very painful involuntary stomach muscle contractions. She had lost her appetite and was skin and bones. No doctor could cure her. Despite her having a university degree and a rigidly rational education — she had been raised until age sixteen by her German mother in Düsseldorf — I proposed that Brother should try to heal her. Although she did not believe in these “frauds,” she agreed out of sheer desperation. When we arrived at the apartment a Mexican assistant who had come with Enrique opened the door. Placing his finger on his lips, he indicated that we should enter in silence. The rooms were dark, the windows covered with blankets. We groped our way into the living room and sat down. Our eyes adjusted to the darkness. The silence was impressive. Suddenly, the assistant rushed to the bathroom door and opened it. A burning object glowed there, and the man murmured, “It’s an evil. Don’t go in until it is consumed. Otherwise, it can fall upon you.” And he left. Eugenia, with a contemptuous smile on her lips, grumbled, “Stories for mental retards.”
After a while the back door opened and two people came out carrying a third person who was quite pale, wrapped in a bloody sheet, apparently asleep or dead. They laid her down on the floor next to us. Horrified, my daughter asked that we leave immediately, and trembling from head to toe, she stood up to flee. A strange figure appeared, a man who had stayed hidden in the shadows, and asked Eugenia to come closer. All at once, she calmed down and followed him meekly.
I witnessed the operation. There was only one bed, as before, and the room was barely lit by a candle. A woman was lying on the floor, covered in blood, with a cheerful expression on her face. Brother, wearing an Aztec emperor’s robe, was a terrifying site. Although he wielded the hunting knife, the healer never stood up. He remained seated in the shadows. All we saw of him was his hands. The “flesh” had become impersonal. He listened to my daughter’s belly, told her that a great anger against her father had accumulated there, and that he was going to cure her of a disease that was not an injury. The knife sank into her flesh, the blood flowed, and he placed his hands in the wound, seeming to put the organs in place. Then he removed his hands, kneaded the skin, and left no trace of a cut. Eugenia never complained. Brother spoke sweetly this time and did not cause pain. As we were leaving, I remarked on this to the assistant, who told me that Brother was progressing from one incarnation to the next and that he had finally learned not to make his patients suffer. Eugenia never had spasms again, returned to her normal weight, and soon after, met the man who would be the love of her life.
After inventing psychomagic and psychoshamanism I went back to Mexico City several times to study the methods of so-called charlatans and curanderos. They are very abundant. At the heart of the capital there is a large market for witchcraft. All manner of magical products are sold there: veils, devil fish, pictures of saints, herbs, blessed soaps, Tarot cards, amulets. There are some women in gloomy back rooms with a triangle painted on their foreheads who will “clean” your body and aura. Every neighborhood has its own witch or wizard. Thanks to the faith of their patients, they often achieve a cure. Doctors trained at the universities despise these practices. For sure, this medicine is not scientific, but it is an art. And for the human subconscious, it is easier to understand the language of dreams — from a certain point of view diseases are dreams, messages revealing unresolved problems — than to understand rational language. The charlatans develop very personal techniques with great creativity, I compare them to painters: anyone can paint a landscape, but the style in which an individual does it is inimitable. Some have more imagination or talent than others, but all are useful if faith is placed in them. They speak to the primitive human that still lies inside each and every one of us.
Don Arnulfo Martinez is a soccer player turned sorcerer. I had a hard time finding him. He lives in a poor, chaotic neighborhood. The houses have numbers out of order: eight is next to sixty-two, then thirty-four, and so on. I found him by asking among his neighbors. Don Arnulfo waited for me at the end of a narrow passageway, the walls of which were covered by canary cages. I had to go through a room where his wife, his mother, and his numerous offspring were. Behind plastic curtains shone a little sacred space with shelves full of statuettes representing Christ and the Virgin of Guadalupe, many lighted candles, colored liquids in various types of bottles, and photographs from his soccer-playing days. At the center of the altar reigned a soccer ball, with its black and white pentagons. Rather than hiding the passion of his youth, the healer used it in his magical practices. To diagnose my ailments he first rubbed me all over my body with a bouquet of red and white carnations, then did the same with the soccer ball. He predicted economic problems. He carved my name on a candle with his long fingernails and told me to burn it in my room until it was consumed. By chance, because he wanted it to happen, or by means of some trick, the canaries began to sing when he placed one of his hands on my forehead and the other on my heart to release me from my preoccupations. Nothing is better than a chorus of canaries for calming the soul. Don Arnulfo tells us, “Everyone should be healed with what he loves most, without worrying about what others think. Objects are receptacles for energy, positive or negative. They are not evil or sacred. It is the hatred or love you place in them that transforms them. A soccer ball can become holy.”