Many years ago in Northern Mexico I lived with a very old curandera, which is a Spanish word for a woman who cures with folk medicine, or pretends to, or who is just a witch, or even a con artist. It's a very loose, almost meaningless word. If your neighbor prayed to strange saints and used them to perform little miracles, you might say, "Well she's a curandera." But if you hated your neighbor, you'd call her a "bruja."
Blanquita, mother of two delinquent sons and a severe alcoholic, was somewhere in between. I was grateful she treated me like an adopted child because being her enemy might have gotten me killed. Instead, she maintains a room for me in her home to this day. In it is a bed and a single, blue, wooden chair, a framed picture of the Virgin on the seat illuminated by a single candle. I know this because I have gone back to visit from time to time.
It may be rude to judge people according to gossip but most of what they say about someone is true. It was said Blanquita helped her clients get rid of their problems by getting rid of people who caused them. Dozens of cops and prosecutors, among others, came to her for advice, and much like the New Orleans Voodoo queens of old, she was, people said, not beyond having someone's boss, cheating husband or enemy knocked off brutally. And of course, she charged a pretty peso for the service, which as far as her clients knew, was the result of black magic, bad karma or fate, which she manipulated through supernatural powers. That it was corrupt cops "fixing" the issues at hand was never revealed.
The cops had the wool pulled over their eyes, too, they said, and were an integral strand in Blanquita's strange web. She'd tell a narcotics officer, for example, that in order to resolve problem A, he had to kill person B as a sacrifice to La Santisima Muerte. The victim usually "needed" to be killed to resolve another client's problems. So it was a two birds kind of deal deal. One guy bites the dust and Blanquita gets paid twice. It must have been a complicated game but she played it well and got filthy rich.
How she manipulated people, but moreover, manipulated money and debt would have impressed Donald Trump. She never charged cash. She kept running tabs for people and ended every spiritual session saying, "You will pay me when you can. God bless you." And people kept coming back until they owed tens of thousands of dollars for everything from simple blessings and herb baths to offing stubborn ex-wives who refused to let fathers see their children.
Everything I mentioned about killings is hearsay. In other words, I heard people say it through the wall of my room. What I know is that everyone eventually had to pay. And Blanquita handled it with the finesse of a cobra.
The conversation normally went something like this:
"Mario. I've been helping you for almost eight years. I resolved the issue with that nasty slut that wanted to marry your son. I got you that job at the factory. I helped your wife get pregnant and now you have another wonderful child. I know you don't have anything close to the 20,000 dollars you owe me, and you know I don't do this for money. God has given me these powers. But I have to eat, too, and my spiritual work isn't making me rich. You've got that extra house down the street that's worth 10,000 dollars and maybe we could settle the debt by you signing it over to me. I could rent it out and maybe survive."
Out of sheer terror of Blanquita, a sense of honor regarding debt, or fear of the supernatural, dozens of people signed properties over to her. By the time I met her she owned nearly all of the houses in her mountaintop, desert slum and she had never held any other job.
Once she tried to recruit me into her business, reasoning that a blonde, blue-eyed foreigner would seem otherworldly in Mexico and absolutely convincing. She said everyone who walks through her front door is suffering for love or money. Those are the only two problems in the world, she said. And if the problem is more complicated, money can solve it. If the issue is love the client will be crying. If it's money the client will show physical signs of anxiety. You pick the right problem and you've got them hooked for life.
She gave me other tips. Look for a wedding band. If there's no wedding band, look for a tan line where a wedding band used to be. And I saw her use that trick on a recently separated man. He walked in, she asked him to sit down and took his hands in hers. She looked into his eyes and said, "So how long have you been having .... this issue ... with your wife." There was something absolutely nasty about it. And something artful and brilliant, too.
I brushed off the invitation to join the world of supernatural fraud and eventually moved out of my room at her house, for which she never, ever charged me rent.
I never had any bad feelings toward her. She was a woman who was born poor. Poverty had turned her into a predator as it usually does.
Those wide-eyed victim-kids on the Save the Children ads may look sweet and deserving of a big hug. But being poor often turns otherwise good people into vicious, suffering, salivating, bleeding animals. I have known many of them. I have cared deeply for some. But having them for friends is as dumb as collecting rattlesnakes. I understood Blanquita and how she'd become what she was.I also knew she had fangs, venom and bad intentions.
Lacking any of those, the world might have killed her before she ever reached adulthood.