“Here we don’t forgive, Mom,” La Loca told her. And there was no question at that point in Sofi’s mind that La Loca had no sense of humor. La Loca’s voice empathized. “Only in hell do we learn to forgive and you got to die first,” La Loca said. “That’s when we get to pluck out all the devils from our hearts that were put there when we were here. That’s where we get rid of all the lies told to us. That’s where we go and cry like rain. Mom, hell is where you go to see yourself. This dad, out there, sitting watching T.V., he was in hell a long time. He’s like an onion, we will never know all of him—but he ain’t afraid no more.”

2

On Caridad’s Holy Restoration and Her Subsequent Clairvoyance: Both Phenomena Questioned by the Doubting Tomases of Tome

After Caridad’s “Holy Restoration”—as her mother referred to her phenomenal recovery—she moved out with her Corazón. It was all very sudden and no one could really explain it, not even Caridad, but she was beginning to say and do a lot of things that could not be explained since her Holy Restoration, so Sofia did not protest the move too much.

Caridad insisted on finding her own place without asking no one, so it was no surprise to anyone neither that she took the first place she found without considering that there was no stall to keep her mare. Her new home was in a trailer complex which lay in the heart of the South Valley in Albuquerque. Some neighbors had horses and other assorted farm animals, so Caridad’s Corazón in and of itself did not stand out. Except when it got loose it pretty much wandered about on its own. There was no corral for her and at night, she simply came close to Caridad’s kitchen window and stuck her head in through an open window.

Caridad’s landlady, doña Felicia, looked like she was at least ninety years old. Sofia suspected that the old woman was much older than that—as hard as that was to believe, she was so agile and self-sufficient—but her vivid memories of fighting in the Mexican Civil War with her first husband, Juan, meant that she must be over a hundred! Sofia finally decided that doña Felicia must have picked up the memories of her own mother and incorporated them into her storytelling.