Doña Felicia also went to curar La Loquita, as she affectionately called her, alternating with Dr. Tolentino’s visitas. We say curar when a woman has an abortion or gives birth, which is to say, she is “alleviated.” In this case, too, doña Felicia knew and Sofi knew and, above all, La Loca knew that there was no cure forthcoming—not just for her AIDS but for the utter loneliness she felt, for her sisters who had been, along with Sofia and the animals, the meaning of her life.

Doctor Tolentino came about as near modern medical treatment as Sofi got for La Loca’s AIDS. The atrocities that Loca saw Fe suffer in her last days on the Acme International Medical Group Plan were enough to keep her far away from anyone wearing anything that even looked like a smock as long as she lived.

Anyway, Loca would never have agreed to go to a hospital, no matter what. If she had ever been pregnant, she certainly would have been capable of delivering her own baby, probably in the stalls on soft hay, where she had delivered the colts, or down by the acequia, squatting, arms tight around the cottonwood, with no one around. And she surely did not want to die in a hospital which was what she figured hospitals were really for.

But Sofi was relieved that in Loca’s final months, she did permit some outside treatment for herself—not by just anybody of course, but like by Dr. Tolentino the Filipino Psychic Surgeon and his wrinkly-white-smiling-face la Mrs. Doctor, and la doña Felicia, whom she liked and had never minded near her so that she had even had a sobaso or two from her back when Caridad first went to live with her.

Although Loca was not going to let every curandera in the region of Rio Abajo come to see her, she occasionally agreed to make exceptions for a few besides doña Felicia who, hearing about La Loca Santa’s terrible enfermedad, came on their own to give her a sobaso or a limpia, the results of such tratamientos, as we know, depending as much on the power of the hands that issued them as on the treatments themselves.

It had been over twenty years since the child had become famous for her resurrection at the church at Tome. Although she had never wanted to see no one after her mother brought her back home so the stories of her miracles could not be verified by no one (La Loca was no Niño Fidencio, that’s for sure), many still believed in her. A great wave of sadness, like a dry ocean tide, went over the whole region when the news spread that La Loquita Santa was dying again. ¡A-yyy!